I agree with you. I think property is theft; in an ideal world everyone would have the right to shelter and no one would own land privately. And I also think fear of housing insecurity - including the fear of a landlord extorting or evicting you - is the biggest reason America is obsessed with home ownership and I can’t criticize anybody for pursuing it. The only way to have secure housing in the US today is to own your home, and everyone has a right to secure housing.

You spelled “pay bribes and walk free” wrong. Tate set up shop in one of the most corrupt countries in the world for a reason.

I think the center right is more like “Don’t say it out loud yet, we don’t have enough public support.”

When it comes to Republicans, I don’t think there’s actually a divide between moderates and radicals. There are the people who want to impose a Handmaid’s Tale authoritarian theocracy right away. Then there are the people who also want a Handmaid’s Tale authoritarian theocracy but think they don’t have enough public support for revolution and want to gradually move America further to the right by taking over school boards and sabotaging liberal public institutions and so on. The destination is the same, only the strategy differs.

Yes. In Republican eyes what you said is literally correct.

The long-term goal of Republican leadership is to ban all abortion from the moment of conception, ban all hormonal birth control (because it can prevent implantation of a fertilized embryo and therefore cause abortion), and return the question of whether to ban condoms and other barrier methods to the states.

Republican leadership realizes the American people don’t support a complete abortion ban.

Republican leadership believes the American people are wrong and it’s their responsibility, as Christian leaders, to protect the innocent children of America and impose a complete abortion ban anyway.

And Republican leaders know if they go hood off and call for a complete abortion ban they’ll lose power in the backlash and abortion will become even more normalized.

So they’re gradually restricting abortion rights while heavily pushing right-wing propaganda to children and teenagers - fucking PragerU is partnering with the Florida and Oklahoma Departments of Education to produce videos for school children, did you know that? - in order to shift the cultural consensus away from abortion is a right and towards abortion is a sin so that future generations of Republican leaders can complete their work and impose a total abortion ban.

So, yes, the Republican leadership is very much aware that what they need is marketing. They know abortion bans are unpopular. They’re walking a fine line, trying to work towards a highly unpopular policy goal while still protecting their legislative control of Congress and the states, knowing their control of government would be at risk if the American people realized their actual policy goal.

And so you have Republicans talking about “pro-baby policies” now. Because who doesn’t love babies? That sounds like WIC and infant nutrition programs and daycare and better neonatal care and all those good things that Democrats support. Hard to tell that the Republican is actually talking about forcing women to give birth to babies dead in the womb and babies with fetal defects incompatible with life, but that’s the state of the national dialogue in the year of our Lord 2023.

Selective enforcement is the core of conservative law making.

What I’m getting from that is:

(1) Wikipedias editors don’t want to use racists as sources for articles.

(2) The author thinks refusing to give equal time to fringe arguments that link genetics and intelligence is a surrender to “woke ideology” that will kill Wikipedia in the long run.

Yawn.

Really emphasizes how vital “right to repair” is. If a Tesla didn’t have proprietary software and centralized control over its cars it wouldn’t matter how irrational Musk was. But Tesla owners have to trust Tesla to maintain both the hardware and software in their cars, which means buying a Tesla is a long-term commited relationship with that company. And same with Ford, GMC, every car company whose software is a black box - if you can’t repair your own vehicle, you have to trust the management of the car company won’t screw you over for fun and profit.

iOS devs on the other hand often only support the newest version of iOS, so if your device doesn’t get new OS updates any more, you can toss it.

And the newest versions of iOS only run smoothly on the newest iPhone hardware, so if you want your phone to keep running quickly and smoothly you have to keep updating to the newest hardware. Planned obsolescence in action.

There’s a Sea Shepherd ship captain facing twenty years in an Italian prison because she rescued drowning migrants. Because, in government terms, she smuggled aliens into Italy.

And she’s just one of the most well known cases in the West. A fisherman in Greece got 280 years in prison for piloting a single ship of migrants to shore.

Saying the governments of Italy, Greece, Turkey, etc, don’t care about migrant lives understates the situation. They want migrants to die at sea, and they punish people who bring them to land.

Remember the old saying: if a company is giving you something for free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.

Subreddits are Reddit’s product. Reddit makes money by selling subreddits to advertisers. If moderators damage that product, Reddit takes action. End of story.

It’s almost as if making a site dedicated to people too racist, sexist, antisocial, etc, for even Reddit’s lax moderation policies, was a bad idea.

And that’s before it became a central hub for literal treason.