I mean the alternative is literally fascism.

Fascism or Fascism Lite. Take your pick.

He was radicalized against the Soviets because they did not support the socialist revolution

Was this before or after he served as a British intelligence officer in colonial-era Burma?

Spellcheck hates me.

Wasn’t Orwell a British spy under Churchill and a professional anti-communist agitator?

IBM and Standard Oil

Candidate: Konrad Adenauer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Adenauer#Years_under_the_Nazi_government

When the Nazi Party won several municipal, state and national elections in between 1930 and 1932, Adenauer, a strong opponent of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, still believed that improvements in the national economy would make his strategy work: ignore the Nazis and concentrate on the Communist threat. He thought that based on election returns, the Nazis should become part of the Prussian and Reich governments, even when he was already the target of intense personal attacks. Political maneuverings around the ageing President Hindenburg then brought the Nazis to power on 30 January 1933.

By early February, Adenauer finally realized the futility of all discussions and any attempts at compromise with the Nazis. Cologne’s city council and the Prussian parliament had been dissolved; on 4 April 1933, he was officially dismissed as mayor and his bank accounts were frozen. “He had no money, no home and no job.” After arranging for the safety of his family, he appealed to the abbot of the Benedictine monastery at Maria Laach for a stay of several months. According to Albert Speer in his book Spandau: The Secret Diaries, Hitler expressed admiration for Adenauer, noting his civic projects, the building of a road circling the city as a bypass, and a “green belt” of parks. However, both Hitler and Speer concluded that Adenauer’s political views and principles made it impossible for him to play any role in Nazi Germany.

Adenauer was imprisoned for two days after the Night of the Long Knives on 30 June 1934; however, on 10 August 1934, maneuvering for his pension, he wrote a ten-page letter to Hermann Göring, the Prussian interior minister. He stated that as Mayor he had violated Prussian laws in order to allow Nazi events in public buildings and Nazi flags to be flown from city flagpoles, and that in 1932 he had declared publicly that the Nazis should join the Reich government in a leading role.[24][25] At the end of 1932, Adenauer had indeed demanded a joint government by his Zentrum party and the Nazis for Prussia

What a cool dude. Glad this guy was able to get back in charge of the German government in 1949, because his views were so incredibly normal and good and definitely not what might enable fascism to take root a second time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Adenauer#Ending_denazification

In a speech on 20 September 1949, Adenauer denounced the entire denazification process pursued by the Allied military governments, announcing in the same speech that he was planning to bring in an amnesty law for the Nazi war criminals and he planned to apply to “the High Commissioners for a corresponding amnesty for punishments imposed by the Allied military courts”

Incredible leadership. Fantastic. Awesome. Love it.

Even setting aside the bit of history where the SDP party rallied around Hindenburg because of their deep and abiding fear of the Evil Russian Backed KDP party (god damn, everything old really is new again), there were three different elections from July of '32 to March of '33. The Nazis took 37% of the seats in July, dipped down to 32% in November, and then jumped to 43% the following March.

And then, what really kicked off martial law was the Reichstagg fire, which was blamed on Tankie Antifa Far-Left Communists and used to justify a Nazi-lead state of martial law. Liberals, Conservatives, and Fascists all united under a single banner in their staunch hatred of German Communism.

This was decades after German military police and Freikorps paramilitary groups under Hindenburg crushed the Spartacus League during the 1919 strike wave. The leaders of the movement - Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and Franz Mehring - were executed by the police and the organizations disbanded under threat of further imprisonment/execution.

This, in comparison to the Beer Hall Pustch four years later, in which Hitler’s band of low-ranking military officers were tossed in the drunk tank for nine months, before returning to politics and rapidly climbing the ranks on the basis that he’d been martyred by (((bad Germans))) who secretly controlled the government.

Gotta wonder how this compares to the 2014 BLM protests, the subsequent police crackdown, and then the string of BLM leadership “suicides” where members of the movement shot themselves in the head right before being incinerated in their cars. Or the widespread bipartisan/corporate efforts to suppress labor activism in the rail, shipping, and Amazon distribution centers, the automotive industry, and the Starbucks-centric food service sectors.

Or the feeble efforts by US government officials to arrest/convict J6ers, the hand-slap sentencing of Alex Jones and Steve Bannon, and the stubborn refusal to federally prosecute Donald Trump.

Oh well, anyways!

not before the state spent $400,000 in taxpayer money with the drug testing company

Honestly, given Rick Scott’s reputation for bilking Medicare into the billions, this is one of the smallest tier scams I’ve heard of in Florida. They didn’t even take the state for a full seven figures (unless, of course, the number is being drastically under-reported which is always a possibility).

Frustrating, because moderate recreational drug use is fine and occasionally even beneficial as a social lubricant or creative spur. Have a beer, smoke a joint, do a bit of LCD, it won’t ruin your life.

But also, people do have real material health care needs - both physical and psychological. They need secure homes and nutritious foods and freedom from a certain degree of anxiety. A big driver of the opioid crisis wasn’t simply evil pharma companies (although they certainly played their role). It was amateur athletics, construction work, factory work, and other physically strenuous jobs responsible for chronic physical pain.

Rather than providing people reasonable work schedules, protective equipment, and physical therapy for their broken bodies, we just doped them up and sent them back on the jobs. And it work! Productivity surged! For a little while! And then these people became reliant on opioids to the point where they weren’t efficient workers. So they were fired and replaced with younger people who were given a new prescription of opioids to treat the next generation of chronic pain. And we did this for three generations. And now here we fucking are.

Now we’ve got folks in the tech sector telling their staff to start micro-dosing with LCD. We’ve got online hustlers who are told to stay up for days at a time continuously churning out new work product by leveraging the benefits of amphetamines. We’re got sales bros and bar service workers who are expected to drink their clients under the table night after night. We’ve got sex workers who are expected to endure physical and psychological abuse for a paycheck. We’ve got IT guys jacked up on whatever the fuck is in modern energy drinks who come off it by smoking a bunch of the most potent weed on the planet.

That’s modern drug use for you. Its not a means of lubricating social interactions or spurring personal creativity or taking the edge off pain. Its just a tool to get people to work past their natural limits.

Rookie mistake. You always include “Grocery list” on your grocery list, so you don’t forget.

So arguably, the easier it is to change your legal gender, the less of a problem gender-based affirmative action is.

Gender-based public sector affirmative action exists to counterbalance discrimination in the private sector. I would argue that becoming trans to undermine gender-AA is penny wise and pound foolish, unless you were already tending towards that inclination.

But what I’m seeing here is “I’m changing my gender but only for the purposes of gaming the system, then I expect you to recognize me as my original gender again”. And that’s on par with carrying a pair of crutches in your trunk so you can park in handicapped spaces.

You don’t really want to take on the burden of being recognized as a woman. You just want to pocket a benefit in the public sector and then go back to your privileged position in the private sector.

Something of a joke that Soros made his fortune speculating against the economic fallout of the post-Soviet Eastern Bloc’s collapsing currencies. His fortune was effectively harvested from the skyrocketing inflation that plagued countries like Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, and Hungary as they lost access to cheap publicly produced consumer goods and real estate.

Then he turned his fortune towards philanthropy in those same failing countries and that made him “woke”. So he became an icon of right-wing hate, as a result.

Am I denying the existence of a branch of international foreign intelligence dedicated specifically to Lemmy.world?

Yes. 100%. Absolutely.

It’s pure paranoia.

I was planning to blame Russian Internet robots

Wheat is the most successful lifeform on the planet.

MR PRESIDENT GET DOWN!

Surely there’s one better young person in the USA ?

None of them ran. Biden’s admin and his fund raising base held enormous sway over the party at-large. As soon as he corralled the support of this tiny monied elite, everyone else had to either get in line or get marked as party pariahs and ousted for their disloyalty.

The pastiche of democracy is predicated on a primary system that can produce and sustain rival candidates. But when leadership in the party are terrified of “Russian bots” and “Leftist Antifa Agitators” undermining the general election, they circle the wagons around their incumbents and bow down to their mega-donors out of cowardice.

No rival candidates means no real primary means no one actually challenges Biden on his merits.

The fanaticism and fatalism produce some interesting parallels

Animated webps have been a thing this whole time.

Reading this in Sam Reich’s voice.

Even if it wasn’t, you could just convert it to .jpg if you felt strongly about it. Not as though there’s a compatibility issue.

The complaint people are having is with resizing/manipulation after download. They want these enormous uncompressed files floating around on every website, in the off chance they plan to download it and manipulate it. 99.9% of the web needs to be full of megabyte sized image files for the 0.1% y’all want to play with.