“The Democratic Party needs to be the party of ‘fuck you.'"
Yes to this. No compromise with MAGA.
Tonight’s movie:
You called down the thunder, well now you’ve got it! … The cowboys are finished, you understand me? I see a red sash, I kill the man wearing it! So run, you cur! Run! Tell all the other curs the law’s coming. You tell ‘em I’m coming, and hell’s coming with me, you hear? Hell’s coming with me!
“When you regulate the internet as if it’s all just Facebook, all that will be left is Facebook."
The UK Online Safety Act is killing communities. Small, locally run communities cannot afford to comply. Only billion-dollar tech monopolies will survive.
Mike Masnick at Techdirt:
Policymakers have repeatedly brushed off warnings about these consequences, insisting that concerns are overblown or merely fear-mongering from big tech companies looking to avoid regulation. But it’s not. And we’re seeing the impact already.
The promise of the internet was supposed to be that it allowed anyone to set up whatever they wanted online, whether it’s a blog or a small forum. The UK has decided that the only forums that should remain online are those run by the largest companies in the world.
This trend is coming to the US too.
Elon Musk Boosting German Fascists, What Could Possibly Go Wrong
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: a bigoted industrialist who owns a giant car company has endorsed a far-right German political party full of Nazis that aims to purify Europe by casting out groups of people it considers to be its lessers, if not downright subhuman. Ha ha, no, it’s not Henry Ford, but we sure fooled you….
He’s a right-winger who grew up in apartheid-era South Africa, and one of his first actions when he bought Twitter two years ago was to let tons of racists and bigots the previous ownership had banned back onto the platform, such that it now resembles a Munich beer hall in 1933 or a meeting of the White Citizens Council in Alabama in the late 1950s….
So, we hate to engage in hyperbole or cause a scene, but we think it is maybe bad that Musk on Friday endorsed a far-right party full of neo-Nazis to take over Germany. Not to be too alarmist, but historically such takeovers have gone poorly not only for Germany and all of Europe, but also for the rest of the planet….
…
The endorsement falls neatly in line with the support the AfD has received from other people in Donald Trump’s orbit, who share the party’s virulent anti-immigrant views.
Trump’s first-term ambassador to Germany “famously pissed off the German government by cozying up to the Afd.” Steve Bannon “tried to recruit the party into his plan to unite all the far-right national populist parties in Europe to form a sort of supergroup” in the European Union Parliament a few years ago."
Imagine if Henry Ford had been Herbert Hoover’s closest advisor in 1931, at the same time the Nazis were on the rise. That would have been bad, right? Well, somehow that’s what America is getting. First time as tragedy, second time as farce, etc.
Here’s something else I saw walking the dog today: This tiny dog wearing a coat and shoes.
I love a dog wearing shoes.
Something I saw while walking the dog
We watched the first episode of the new Dexter prequel series: “Dexter: Original Sin.” Dexter’s back and he’s got lots of plastic wrap.
Quit more books to read more books
Many readers feel compelled to finish any book they started. I am one of those readers. But that’s a bad compulsion. It makes you cautious about trying new things. You read more books, and greater variety, if you quit reading any book you’re not enjoying.
I’ve been reading an acclaimed science fiction trilogy that totals 1,100 pages. I liked the first book, but did not love it. I liked the second book less. Tonight I got within 100 pages of the end of the third book and said, “I’m done.”
I went to the Wikipedia page for the book and read the plot summary, which is something I do when I’m considering abandoning a book, and confirmed I was not interested in finishing.
The trilogy could have been a single good novel. Say, 250 pages.
Though the series is hard science fiction, the structure is fantasy. A band of characters, led by a hero, travel through a series of lands populated by strange aliens to defeat an antagonist that’s essentially a powerful evil wizard. This is not a genre I enjoy.
I’m intentionally not saying the name of the series or author. The author is aging, and I hear they’re having a hard time. I don’t want the karma of saying anything bad.
“My name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Conjure by it at your own risk. I’m a wizard. I work out of an office in midtown Chicago. As far as I know, I’m the only openly practicing professional wizard in the country. You can find me in the yellow pages, under ‘Wizards.’”
Currently reading: Storm Front by Jim Butcher 📚