When will people marry his declarations and musings with the fact that he's marching Federally-controlled troops into cities to "fight crime". What the hell does everyone think is going to happen in next year's mid-terms when armed forces loyal specifically to Trump with little or no objection from Congress or the Supreme Court starting "guarantee" a "fair vote".

Everything he and the Republicans have been working towards since the claims of Obama's ineligibility has been preparing for the moment when they move in to seize control of state voting apparatus. He'll do what he's done with everything else and claim it's a "national emergency."

And MAGA will cheer while the Democrats put on their sackcloths and roll around in the dust crying about how they were impotent. The American people have chosen, they want tyrants who rule by fiat, engineer and weaponize crises to entrench their power.

The political system the Framers came up with was always a steaming pile of crap. Bagehot pulled apart deftly in the 1860s, explaining that the only thing that made it work was the "American genius for politics". Well, that's done. The Democrats are frozen in place, the Republicans, ruled by oil barons and sociopathic billionaires, intend on building a dictatorship with the shape of the American republic, but where checks and balances once existed, will be impotent paper tigers.

It's too much money and too much privilege. The billionaires really do think they're superior lifeforms that should receive automatic deference, and when they collide with reality, they show their true nature; emotionally stunted children.

It's a dating safety app for women. I think we can guess who used the hacked data to dox women, and the kind of people that justify that.

The first stage of the revolution is to keep a cordial relationship with the Mensheviks. We're all on the same team. We're hear to overthrow that rotting edifice of the old order and create a stronger, better society, with a government truly representative of the people. We're all a big tent, and can accommodate differences of opinion.

The second stage of the revolution requires the sidelining of the Mensheviks. Yes, they have their objections, but those objections are mainly spurious, perhaps a little too influenced by moderate opinions. It's understandable, revolutions have casualties, and not everyone has the stomach for the hard fight. Objections will be duly noted and recorded.

The third stage of the revolution requires the expulsion of the Mensheviks. They've become too influenced by counterrevolutionary ideas. The middle ground they try to occupy is the path back to the old order. The revolution cannot afford these divisions, the people must see unity lest they question the revolution. Show the counterrevolutionaries the door, we no longer recognize their standing.

The fourth stage requires the destruction of the Mensheviks. It is not enough that they have been rendered impotent, they are traitors to the revolution, and like the moderates, in the hands of the old order. Some, maybe, can be rehabilitated, others must face more severe punishments. We owe to the people to destroy those who would undo our accomplishments.

The fifth stage has no memory of the Mensheviks at all.

I think you need to provide your operating definitions for "socialism" and "communism".

Rather ironic that the real Communists are the Republicans.

I've been busily installing Debian on our Windows 10 machines. A few little hiccups here and there, but all in all, it's working like a dream.

The only Windows I use is the Server 2016 RDP managed service my company pays for, so updates are invisible to me. My two MacBooks and my Ubuntu laptop all have sane update policies which remind me of updates, without endlessly clogging up the works by downloading the updates. Every time I use an actual Windows machine I'm reminded of what an appallingly bothersome workflow-interrupting OS it has become.

Yup. I remember going to an IBM seminar around 1994 or 1995 where they demonstrated a new IDE environment that was going to end traditional programming. They gave a demo of writing some sort of simple application with input, with a library of GUI windows connected via some sort of flow chart. At the time I thought "Fuck me, I'm out of a job", but I never really saw the product again (for some reason I think it used Smalltalk, but it has been thirty years) and when I started using visual tools, it definitely wasn't the connect-a-dot that everyone claimed.

Worse, the stuff that was connect-a-dot, like all those horrible MS-Access applications written with Visual Basic, or the insane Excel sheets using lookups to make spreadsheets behave like RDBMSs, if RDBMSs had been written by victims of errant brain surgery, my career quickly morphed into a series of contracts in the vein of "Please fix the awful system we built in-house and we run all our Accounts Receivable through, but the guy who maintained it got hit by a bus."

(Which isn't actually much of an exaggeration, I had to take over a PHP project that had been half written by a guy who got some sort of serious illness, was taken over by some other guy who had no idea what he was doing, and the company had already sunk $40k into).

I guess I would be more excited if I hadn't abandoned Windows on my own personal devices (still have to use it via RDP at work). I think the Wine project has done an incredible thing, I just don't have any particular use for it anymore.

Almost as bad as a non-existent succession plan is a succession plan even the successor knows nothing about. If Linus has a successor, that successor should be well aware, and already be a contributor to that succession plan. This isn't a will where you're pleasantly surprised your rich great-uncle left you his house on the French Riviera, this is a major project that is an integral component of thousands of technologies and workflows.

We don't have generations, and if you think government is a bigger threat than climate change, then you demonstrate ever more the utter idiocy of humanity. You want a free pass for being a greedy idiot, but the universe doesn't care about ideology either. It's rather pathetic to watch someone try desperately to convince themselves they are immune from the physical forces of nature. Well, amusing and depressing, because people keep doing it.

The minute you assert that somehow young men have some sort of right to sexual experience, even within the context that they need to "man up" so women will have sex with them, dehumanizes women and creates this sense that there is the entitlement that can be unlocked.

Women are human beings, not sex toys for good little boys. Toxic masculinity stems in part from a sense of privilege, that men have inalienable rights to sex and affection from women. While I'm sure you care about the plight of young men, you're simply repeating the same dehumanizing language that typifies toxic masculinity. You just think that you can say it if you preface it with "I'm from the Left".

Do you think I'm a fucking idiot? Do you not know how transparent you are?

And here we go with the whole "we can't change, we just gotta keep going". You're precisely the example of the sheer unimaginable idiocy of humanity that I am talking about.

You're going to find out, like all of us, that the laws of physics don't give a flying fuck about your comforts, and will strip them from you without mind, thought or feeling. They are undeniable, unavoidable and they are our master.

Alberta wants to increase extraction and use of fossil fuels, and its politicians strongly imply that if anything is done to reign in emissions, they'll try to secede from the country. Alberta is one of the problems, not some sort of saintly jurisdiction. Its government is precisely the kind of institution which makes moronic arguments like "we need more pipelines to pay for the green economy."