Oh, no, let me assure you, I totally get the nuance you are trying to show. I’ve only been hearing it from naive people about Bill Gates for about 30 years now, and he just keeps doing more things to make it more ridiculous every year.

I’m sorry dude. I’ve had a passion my whole life for technology most of my 50+ year life and this asshole has been doing his best to fuck it up since day one. Every dollar he made was by ripping people off and by leading the charge in ruining the software industry.

Sure, he peeled off a miniscule fraction of his ill gotten gains for some charitable causes, but who’s to say that we wouldn’t have been better off if he never took it out of the economy in the first place? Do you have any idea how much of a drain the Microsoft tax is on the world economy? Without companies like Microsoft, we probably never would have deteriorated to the point where we would elect a fascist like Trump.

Then he decided he was hot shit and knew better than professional educators how to teach and forced his opinions on the rest of us by buying influence, ultimately fucking up education for well over a decade.

Then of course there is the Epstein scandal. But who really cares about child sex trafficking anyways.

Not at all. It’s absolutely true that Hitler had some good points to his personality. It’s silly as fuck to bother defending him by pointing them out, but they existed.

The same is true of Gates, and it’s nothing like the silly tomato analogy.

It should be classified as a sign of mental illness.

It is. They call it hoarding disorder.

It’s quite literally like the Good Place

LOL, just no.

Just hear me out guys, Hitler was a nature lover! You can’t be judging people by just their worst acts!

Trump didn’t want the deal. He wanted to end the filibuster then use domination tactics to essentially cancel the midterms. He’s only talking about caving on the subsidies now as damage control for Republicans.

including a plethora of unions

If there iwas anything that pissed me off more than the Democrats abandoning support for workers it was union leadership doing so.

I solved that for most of them by going AMD with my last upgrade. No more binary drivers solved most of my issues. All that’s left is really the anti-cheat kernel garbage. For that I just decided fuck it. I found it easier to stomach changing some gaming preferences than the Microsoft ecosystem.

I finally went 100% Linux and I’m never going back.

Least bad perhaps. There are no good ones.

Maybe treat it like a business instead of a “quick cash grab” like instapot did? They should have used those early profits to diversify into other product areas. When demand for home cooking equipment predictably fell after COVID, they weren’t prepared.

It also doesn’t make sense to call for Schumer to step down without a plan for who is to replace him. Not a lot of Senate Democrats would be any better, and there is no reason to believe any of those are interested.

That’s a short sighted answer. It’s like saying we only got shot because we didn’t dodge that last bullet. The real answer is that dodging bullets is not an effective long term strategy for not getting shot. We won’t keep fascists out of power by winning every election.

Well, I’m waiting. You made quite the charge there. How did I betray my values? How did help bring Trump to power?

You don’t get to call yourself “left” when you help bring Trump to power.

And how did I do that exactly?

More like a last minute concession. There is no point to an endorsement when it’s clear the die has been cast.

Nope. First of all, the Trumper tactic is always to overturn the game-board. They don’t give a shit about goalposts. Second, the goalpost was “line up and support Mamdani” which you actually moved to “endorsed Mamdani” which is not the same. Their endorsements were nothing more than concessions. It was last-minute realignment to position themselves to benefit from the win, or at least not suffer as much embarrassment. It was never support.

Seems way too arbitrary to set it so high, then have a flat cutoff. I much prefer the idea of starting lower and adjusting the rate up on a curve.

I agree completely. I also won’t say there isn’t a worst case scenario where we end up looking a whole lot like Russia does right now for a good long time. I think it looks like we are dodging that path, but I don’t think we’ve made it yet.

Right or not, I don’t think anything is written in stone yet. I don’t think anybody has a reason to feel comfortable right now. Not the fascists, not the Democratic establishment, and certainly not progressives.

In the case of the Democratic establishment, this is exactly the meaning they intend to project. They just want to be able to deny it at the same time while getting well meaning normies to unthinkingly repeat the disparaging rhetoric against progressives.

Here’s a great primer to some of their other vocabulary of choice.