All the things you can critique him for, as well as the church in general, and you choose the thing that children were basically forced to participate in under a fascist regime? The dude clearly wasn’t a Nazi and he was a kid.

Where did you read I was criticizing B16 for being a Hitler youth? All I said was that his - definitely forced - stint there gave him the experience to deal with fascist authoritarian figures.

B16 should be at the receiving end of many criticisms - not least of which choosing to be part of, and ultimately lead a disgusting religious cult. But being forced to join the Hitler Youth is not one of them.

They should unmothball Benedict XVI: he’s uniquely qualified to deal with Donald Trump, being a former Hitler Youth.

I am not sure where to draw the line for free-will or even if it exists.

You know a moron who shouldn’t vote when you see one. It doesn’t matter if they’re victims of bad genes or bad upbringing: some people just aren’t fit to decide important things. In fact, I’d argue a majority of the population isn’t.

But you hit the nail on the head: where do you draw the line?

In this case, where is that hypothetical line that decides those who are “good enough” to votes and those who aren’t?

Of course, it’s impossible to make the distinction because the decision is almost completely arbitrary. There is no well-established, proven set of scientific criteria to decide whether a human being is worthy of the right to vote.

So we do the next best thing: we let everyone vote. That’s democracy. We let everyone vote because not letting everyone vote is always worse. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t make me retch when I see a cretin in a MAGA hat who doesn’t even know basic history, geography or civics proudly tell you on TV that he voted Trump because Trump’ll fix it.

Trump’s loss in support among Hispanic and young adults has been especially steep.

I have no respect for Trump voters, and I especially have no respect for hispanic Trump voters, who should have known better.

What you’re saying is that to beat the populists, you have to pretend to take the voting morons as seriously as the populists do. And yeah, I get it, it’s the least terrible stragegy really. But beyond the facade, those with an education and a working brain really dislike having to fake respect for those who don’t deserve any.

Maybe. But in a democracy the voters choose what they want, whether you like their choice or not.

Yes I know. As Churchill said, democ­ra­cy is the worst form of gov­ern­ment, except for all the oth­ers. But really, when you see how dumb the voting public is, has been and always will be, repeating the same terrible mistake over and over again, it’s fucking depressing.

Brexit was a lesson on how a critical mass of gullible voters swallowed a bunch of outrageous lies peddled by anti-Europe politicians.

MAGA was a lesson on how a critical mass of gullible voters swallowed a bunch of outrageous lies peddled by Trump.

The lessons here being:

• Voters are hopelessly gullible.
• It doesn’t take a genius to convince them to do any stupid thing - neither Farrage nor Trump are particularly well furbished in the IQ department.
• Gullible voters never learn any lesson from history or from other countries. They’re just… gullible. At any given moment.

It’s a major blow for forgetful frequent flyers too: giant Toblerones are famously what you can always find in any airport to buy someone you completely forgot to buy something for and pretend you didn’t forget.

Also, hurting your mouth with hard triangular bits of chocolate has gone out of fashion.

Make America Vulnerable Again

The 3rd Reich lasted 12 years and Trump’s regime is mirroring the Nazis pretty closely. I expect it will last a few years too until it’s overthrown, sadly.

Don’t create evidence for the GestapoICE to come get you and send you to a Salvadorian concentration camp some day. It’s not smart to post what you think on the internet these days.

I am indeed lucky because the company I work for cares about its employees. It’s literally written in the company statutes: the company exists to make money of course, but first and foremost to serve its workforce and the community, and takes decisions to maximize the well-being and the personal growth of the employees and the community.

We took an honest look at including AI in our workflow, but we decided it wasn’t worth the social destruction. Only a few employees use it - mostly the marketdroids to generate illustrations on the sales literature.

I am aware that this is a rare type of company and I cherish that job.

Well, a human being talking random shit won the last presidential election. So why not an AI at this point?

Unsurprisingly, it’s necessary to understand a problem to solve it - just like the proverbial infinite monkey would in theory produce the entire body of work of Shakespeare given enough time, in reality, only Shakespeare managed to write proper Shakespeare the first time out.

AI is the infinite monkey of coding. I, as a senior developer, have spend entirely too many hours of my working life fixing code written by monkeys, and I have already had to correct AI code (thankfully small and generated by a colleague who promptly apologized and decided to do his homework and study the problem at hand instead of winging it with Crapilot).

Trump is 80 and fat. Don’t count on it.

how about they leave the fluoride in it for starters?

They don’t say anything because getting on Trump’s bad side is bad for business. Duh.

Same reason why the tech industry players are frantically trying to out-sycophant one another to please His Cheeto Highness.

It must be really depressing to be fired by a fucking weekend TV show host. Almost as depressing as being fired by a professional wrestler…

Yes of course, an article is subjective to a large degree. What I meant was that the site tries to itemize all the issues so as to minimize the subjectivity.