Yes, I also hope he doesn’t drive.

I just re-read it as a (middle age :S) adult – and while it’s hardly an underrated book, it’s fucking amazing and not sufficiently appreciated beyond being a fantastically fun book for a teenage brain to read. Whoever hasn’t read it since they were in high school or hasn’t read it, really should pick it up.

For sure! Where I live the last election was between a neo-liberal coalition or a neo-liberal coalition fueled by fascism. Both options were a vote for an erosion of civil liberties, under the banner of combating a mix of real gang violence and made up evils of evil, but one of the factions also offered the catharsis of blaming everything wrong on immigrants. Not that the not non-fascist faction has been slow to underwrite the fascist narrative, whenever that’s appeared beneficial to public support. The “lesser evil” lost the election, and at no point have they stopped to consider that the “evil” part of their strategy was a part of it, they think it was a failure in selling themselves as superior administrators of the same policies the current government is championing.

Yeah, this keeping voters accountable to politicians nonsense needs to end. Make it the other way around or GTFO.

Trump is a really dark post-political blank slate for maniacs to project their frustrated base instincts and worst fantasies on. That’s not a unique thing, seemingly all European democracies have some populist equivalent. Those laying claim to leadership over opposing these forces need to do fucking better.

At this point it’s a hard chicken and the egg proposition to say what came first:

– the frustrations of large swaths of populations through centrist politics sucking up to a nimbyist “middle class” that always favor tax breaks and benefits for car driving homeowners over public investments in anything/anyone else or

– the calls for those frustrated to either vote centrist or have fascism imposed on them.

I’m not American and do in fact think it is important that Biden wins (if even just to avoid destabilizing the world’s largest military power in a time of global tensions). And as such I have no other choice but to encourage Americans to vote for him, regardless of conviction. But it’s galling to hear or read – whether in the context of the Biden, Macron or any similar choice between a turd sandwich or fascism – that people should shut up and be happy and enthused about it.

I applaud airlines for providing additional incentive not to engage in air travel.

Any and all issues calling out wokeness as part of any problem immediately loses all credibility to me.

Agree.

If wanting to include other ethnicities in something, even if it’s just to make the people with the money look better, I’m all for it.

Disagree, it’s reasonable to criticize green, pink, whathaveyou washing even if there are many other worse things a company can do (discrimination, etc). I also think it’s reasonable to find it offensive to depict Nazi Germany as a beacon of inclusivity.

To be fair, the aggrieved images generated by the AI included people of various ethnicity pictured as Nazi soldiers.

I don’t know though… to me, it seems weird that the criticism is focused on “wokeness” and misguided inclusivity. Shouldn’t people be more concerned about these images being the result of demoing a technology for falsifying historic records in a hitherto unthinkable scale?