At least they’re very transparent with who they don’t think have rights

Who uses an adblocking testing site rather than just the sites they want to block ads on?

That’s how you get new checks and balances, once the dictator falls.

But you’re right the US is rapidly burning its power and alliances. That would take decades to repair, and they might never reach the same position again.

The US can’t sign a peace treaty on behalf of Ukraine. They’re not mandated to negotiate by Ukraine.

The US can stop supporting Ukraine but that doesn’t force the Ukrainians to stop fighting, or Europe to stop supporting Ukraine

It’s never over.

Even the worst dictatorship can collapse. They get internally couped until the dictator learns to purge anyone capable of challenging them, then human mortality fixes that dictator and the government collapses

It’s not good though. The best time to fix it was ages ago before Reagan. The second best time is right now before the police state is firmly in place

Arguably, the nearby sun scale fusion reactor has been fairly useful for us. Nowadays we can convert its output directly into electricity using solar cells

It’s not a proxy war. It’s an invasion with international support for the defence of the invaded nation.

A defence alliance

4 years

that’s very optimistic

“we’re all gonna die one day, why delay the inevitable”

Very true, just look at Hitler and Mussolini, famously defeated by strongly worded letters and no bloodshed

Captain Hindsight, but wrong

Yes, blocking them is a good start.

It doesn’t have to. Biden and Harris being significantly less bad is enough to make them a better choice

Trolley problem etc

I just keep buying phones with headphone jacks. I use bluetooth headphones too, but have a wired set for fallback, especially when travelling.

Also, if you’re on a call or vc, a good wired set wth a well placed mike on the wire (e.g. marshall mode) gives you better sound quality and better exclusion of environment noise than any bluetooth headphones, and you don’t have to worry about earbud batteries running out mid call.

It limits phone selection a lot, but so far there has been good phones with headphone jacks every time

It’s easier

Still an improvement

The insecure bit is that they don’t e2e-encrypt by default, so they have access to the data. In theory someone could hack telegram’s servers and steal it. In theory someone might have done that already.

Signal in contrast couldn’t really give your data away, without hiding a backdoor in the client or encryption, which someone could then find.

I thought telegram were now also sharing message content with law enforcement, but it seems they claim to only share IP address and phone numbers. We have no way of verifying that, but it’s still better than I remembered.

It might or might not matter for you of course.

You have a point in that, in the general case, accuracy and evidence is good.

In this specific case, I think it’s obviously a nazi salute and whether that is “just to trigger the libs” or not in the heart of Musk simply does not matter.

Making a nazi salute several times while on scene for an extreme right party isn’t regular stupidity. We don’t need different boxes for “consistent supporter in word and action of extreme right wing white power etc things who likes using nazi imagery and dogwhistles, but who possibly wouldn’t really call themselves a nazi” and “actually technically subscribes to the entirety legacy nazi party’s old agenda”. They both fit in the nazi box

There are people who realised musk is awful many years ago, and there are people who will keep cheering even if there are tesla branded concentration camps, and people all along the gradient between.

The reason it’s useful to call out the apparent nazi salute is that some additional people might now notice that perhaps that musk guy isn’t great. They didn’t notice the twitter stuff, or the trump support or all the other things, but this is pretty obvious.

The idea that we should just go “well, we already knew he was a nazi supporter, no need to comment when he does an apparent nazi salute on the inauguration of the president he bought” is pretty silly