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I do rather like science.

Facebook is capitalist spyware and a social engineering tool. You have to remember that capitalism is not a normal power relationship, even though they have been working tirelessly to make the world believe they are -- capitalism is at the bleeding edge of techno-fascist authoritarianism.

OK you get the idea, and I'm not trying to defend China, but they're just one of many powers - most private - that are using tools like this. I'd favor legislation to break them all up, to say any social network over a certain size has to federate, to say no one company or government can own more than one social network, lots of possibilities I would favor, but cherry-picking TikTok seems like Congress is working for Zuck. Taking out one of the big players just consolidates the incredibly dangerous power of the others.

And truthfully, in my time scrolling TikTok, I've generally found the content to be a lot less manipulative, more liberal, and more democratic-leaning than on capitalist social networks, so if the CCP is actively using it for social engineering, they're doing a terrible job of it.

So many people consider any kind of nuance to be weakness and failure.

No, you absolutely transparent troll, the people talking about the impact of the primaries and the steps the Democratic leadership need to take before the general to win and stop Republicans are not Republicans. Just stop. We all know what you are doing.

Party leadership on both sides play all kinds of games to keep the balance of power, to keep voters scared of the other guys, in order to maintain control of their own parties, but that system isn't infallible. Bernie almost won the primary, twice, and Trump actually did. If he weren't so abysmally bad at placating centrists liberals, he'd still be in the Whitehouse. I think that's a terrifying prospect, but also, both hopeful, and instructive. A true left-populist candidate, who respects the rule of law and democratic consent of the governed, once in office, would be almost impossible to remove.

Overall, your assessment of the current system isn't bad, but you are very wrong to describe that as fascist. It just isn't, definitionally, what "fascism" means. Not yet. Certainly, significant aspects of fascism have been put into place, or have been there since the beginning, but our current system is not, overall, at the bar of fascism, and saying it is cheapens the critique of, and warnings against, actual fascism. In the big picture, our current system is actually much more democratic, and further from fascism, than it was not that long ago, even though there have been some specific, and worrying, steps backwards.

Being vigilant against fascism is good. Being defeatist about it is not.

I think Vim is more popular with sysadmins because, historically, you could count on Vi or Vim being available on just about any server you had to do some work on, while Emacs might not be. That's still probably somewhat true, although in the world of clouds, containers, and source-controlled, reproducible configuration, it's probably less common to edit files in place on a server.

However, with Emacs tramp, you can edit files just about anywhere you can access, by any means, even if there is no editor installed there at all, using your local Emacs, with all your accustomed configuration. Like popping open a file inside a container running on a remote server by ssh, something I've done a lot of lately, debugging services running on AWS ECS.

Just use a single instance of Emacs to edit everything everywhere all at once. You can even use vim keybindings if you have no taste.

Yes, you are correct, our democracy is severely flawed and limited, and we should fix that. I haven't seen anybody say otherwise. Becoming fascist isn't going to help fix it.

I am being realistic. Are you? Putting forward bills and forcing the corrupt and right-wing legislators to vote against them on the record is literally one of the biggest things that leftists have been calling for, for decades, that capitalist Democratic leaders have been suppressing, because it hurts their control of the party. Not doing this is exactly what right-wing Democrats want. Doing nothing is not a realistic solution to anything.

Oh, hah, woosh right over my head, thank you for explaining.

Honestly? Pretty well, relative to the "cry about it and do nothing" strategy.

The article describes it as

a visit that is believed to be the first stop by a president or vice president to an abortion clinic.

Can you name a prior instance? I'd really be surprised, to be honest. And hey, I am no Harris fan, but this is still a striking action.