I literally put several caveats in the text saying it wasn’t representative of Afghanistan as a whole.

The latter. I mean, America was founded by a tobacco company and people so weird in their religiosity, they were kicked out of 17th century Europe.

I do think we can solve the oligarch problem. So, part of me was like, “We’ve met this challenge before, motherfuckers.” It wasn’t meant to dismissive but I’m pretty sure I could open hand slap Elon Musk and 24 of his 38 kids would feel it.

Just a reminder of what Kabul was like in 1972 before…well, it’s complicated. The Soviet and American wars didn’t help but there was a trend towards religious nationalism before either. And those were probably wealthy, urban women. But they didn’t get arrested for having books and wearing skirts. Human rights can backslide faster than you’d think, given the right conditions.

Oh no, what will we do if billionaires control the U.S. government.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1893 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1907

And those are just J.P. Morgan.

I think this whole concept speaks to how differently we all use social networks. For some, it’s a passive news source. For others, it’s entertainment. For others, it’s a place to be social.

Ideological balance is the least important feature for me in picking a social network. I’m there to joke around and talk to interesting people. In real life, my friends and I don’t go “You know what bar we should go to? That new ideologically balanced one down on 2nd St.” (and then my horny friend says we should go to the bar where he met a hot girl once and we end up at TikTok^1^, AGAIN).

^1^ That’s a joke. I’m 40 and my friends pick bars based on proximity, beer selection, and how long they have the baby sitter for.

I’m not a liberal — I’m a leftist — and I consider a Tankie to be someone who gets so wrapped up in hating the U.S. or West in general that they start defending the likes of Stalin and others who used a facade of Marx/Lenin to consolidate power and do horrible things. Like, you do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to Stalin.

Incidentally, here’s Thomas the Tankie Engine:

I made that for a shitpost in 5 minutes using Midjourney so don’t judge all the obvious A.I. flaws or that I used machine learning. I’d pay a real artist if it wasn’t a throwaway bit.

Thousands of years before someone invented licking toads. Pretty impressive.

Maybe his politics are complicated. Did y’all consider that? That a white South African industrialist who dabbles in eugenics, treats employees like shit, and thinks catturd2 is funny might be a complex enigma?

Having a separate, open source JavaScript engine is in everyone’s interests even if they don’t know what they’d lose without the Mozilla Foundation and Firefox. I’m a web developer and Mozilla has protected the open web for all of us and if people understood what they’ve done, they’d all donate.

Google and Microsoft cannot and should not control standards. Mozilla is the conscience of the industry. Support it or you won’t know what you lost.

This story should be on every newspaper front page right below war correspondents.

The fact that Harvard bent over for a “donation” is just pathetic. They have a $50bn endowment. What is even the point of having that much money if not to be uncompromising on academic freedom?

The comments on that article are really missing the point that leveling a city block to kill a few terrorists almost invariably means you created more terrorists than you killed.