Ah, American trains. Outside of the USA and Canada, trains are fast.

This is definitely his getting-blown-by-an-ostrich face.

If I saw serious attempts anywhere from right-wingers to advocate for their views as an actual political philosophy I’d be more concerned by this. But we need spaces where people actually discuss how to build a better society, and simply because of that concern these spaces lean left. It’s rare to find right-wingers who are even seriously interested in that question, except as a pretext to vent their unexamined prejudices and personality issues.

If, on internet forums, you push for everyone to have equal say even when their views are not well considered, everyone’s energy gets used up arguing with the most offensive right-wing posters. I think it’s a good thing to have spaces where that isn’t how it goes. As for centrists, I think there’s a place for engaging with them because there’s more of a chance that they just haven’t examined their views but can be brought to. But I’m not going to miss them if they’re so put off by a left-leaning space that they won’t participate, and I don’t think every left space needs to spend its time arguing with liberals.

Frankly, my view of the right wing these days is that there’s no particular need to treat a mishmash of selfishness, greed, lust for power, deceit, gullibility, ignorance, insecurity and hatred as if it’s a political philosophy at all. Left versus right isn’t a helpful picture. Serious vs unserious would be a better one. If someone has serious arguments for a right-wing position made in good faith, then they’re not just wasting people’s time. But that’s not usually what you see, and I suspect it’s because there’s a lack of serious arguments to be made for it.

I don’t miss the right-wing voices. For the most part they just dominate, disrupt and obstruct serious discussion. That said, it’s important we don’t forget how unrepresentative our online discussions are of society as a whole, and how little impact merely talking about them here has.

Yep. Hexcells Infinite hasn’t overtaxed my RTX 3080 yet. That may have been a slight waste of money.

You just prefix “turbo” to whatever it would have been without.

The 13th Amendment to the US constitution makes slavery illegal except for prisoners.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_States

Which is why Trump will also be working hard to undermine NATO in any way he can.

He has rallied the Christofascists around him with four years to reorganize, has escaped all punishment for his first insurrection, has the support of Putin once again, has the world’s richest Nazi on side and funding him, and is emboldened.

Is this the whole “Nazis were socialists because it’s in the name” thing again? The far right love to pull this point out, ignoring the fact that as soon as he had power, Hitler had anyone remotely socialist in the Nazi party murdered so he could get on with the fascism. The name “National Socialist” was a trick to get people on board. Anyway, it figures that Musk thinks Hitler was too left wing, since Musk thinks the whole universe is too left wing. And it’s characteristic of Musk that being to the right of Hitler doesn’t even give him pause.