So you’re saying Iran has yet to master 16th century technology?

You are more optimistic than I am, but I hope you’re right. At this point, my hope is that at least Democrats will retain the congressional power to do something about a Trump regime I am seeing as an increasing inevitability.

Thank you for giving more info, I appreciate it!

I definitely wouldn’t extrapolate anything about the rest of the world from this. I just remember “Le Pen is going to be the next president of France” being said more than once in my lifetime.

I feel like “the right gets a big showing early on but ends up losing” is a regular feature of modern French elections. It seems like it’s happened multiple times in my lifetime.

Yes. I feel that if someone has done good work, even if they are a horrible person, acknowledging the good work is the right thing to do. Even if they wrong you personally. That makes it much more difficult, but I still think it’s something that needs to be done.

My former best friend ripped my mom off for drug money by lying about what he needed it for and is now in prison for possessing meth lab equipment. He’s a horrible person in a lot of ways. But I will still acknowledge the good things he did as good things (he was always willing to give someone a place to stay if they needed it and for as long as they needed it, for example) even if he has done things I can’t forgive him for.

I guess in my view, the bad has to far outweigh the good if you’re going to ignore the good and I think that, while I also have a lot of criticisms about what he has done with Wikileaks, especially around the 2016 election, I also think that Wikileaks- at least when it began- did a lot of good. And credit does go to him for that despite anything else. His victim in the article seems to agree.

Love her books, fine, but she is a horrible, horrible person

I am literally talking about separating someone from her work. I don’t know how I could have been clearer on that point. But that doesn’t mean what she says is in any way excusable or defensible. Bigotry is bigotry.

I wouldn’t substitute any word in that case because there is absolutely no excusing her at this point. Her actions are indefensible. Love her books, fine, but she is a horrible, horrible person and her bigotry does not deserve to be excused by calling it misguided or anything else but bigotry. If she said about black people what she says about trans people, that wouldn’t even be a consideration in terms of talking about her.

I was with you until you called her misguided. She is way beyond misguided at this point. She’s gotten so hateful that even Elon Musk told her to tone down the anti-trans bigotry.

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/elon-musk-jk-rowling-trans-obsession-rcna151323

Ready to step up and help Russia with the fight in Ukraine!

I dealt with that as a kid with Roald Dahl because he was super antisemitic, but he also wrote amazing children’s books. I guess for me it depends on how much they put such ugliness into their work. Lovecraft, creative as he was, had no problem being racist in his writings and I just can’t read them even though I love the mythos. Dahl didn’t do that.

Card and Rowling are somewhat different cases because they didn’t start by writing terrible things, but they got to the point that their ugly beliefs began to seep into their books.

This, to me, is less important than the fact that this woman is publicly talking about how someone can do a bad thing but still be a public good, something not talked about enough in a world where when someone does something bad, it makes people ignore everything else they’re doing.

How dare she not view the world in stark black-and-white terms!

Fun facts time!

Brazil enslaved more people from Africa than any other country; nearly 5 million kidnapped Africans disembarked in Brazil, more than 12 times the number taken to mainland North America, according to estimates from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade database. Brazil was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, in 1888.

Discrimination remains, and Black and biracial Brazilians are more likely to be poor, imprisoned and die violently. Fewer than a third of managerial positions are held by those groups, and they comprise one quarter of representatives in Brazil’s Lower House of Congress.

https://apnews.com/article/brazil-slavery-reparations-legacy-bank-2aa8e0b0635cf1969a017500f6a623f3

I’m sure Netanyahu considers that a success.

I don’t get it.

I guess it’s more in the way you tell bar jokes than the punchline…

Nope, I literally did not assume she was Muslim. That is a lie. One of many lies you have told about me.

I have given you many opportunities and have been very lenient, but you are done here for the next week.

I used to tell people that John McAfee always exited a room by jumping through a window while yelling, “MCAFEE RULES!” Which he didn’t, but maybe he did? Anyway, I miss that crazy motherfucker. Sometimes nuts make the world more fun.

You’re asking Germans to do something before getting official permission from the bureaucracy.

You might as well ask a rooster not to crow in the morning.

Yes, I understand that you assumed you knew what I thought rather than just asked me. I already said that.