This presupposes he believes in anything. I haven’t read it because everyone said it was garbage but I’m pretty sure he wrote his memoir about “Appalachia” when he grew up near Dayton, OH.

In so many ways, Kagame is one of the rare “benevolent dictators” but one of the reasons that concept is often used sarcastically is because no matter how benevolent, any autocratic leader makes it nearly impossible to build up civil society and institutions — including opposition parties — that need to be in place for who (or, potentially, what chaos) follows.

If you told the world that Rwanda would be stable, safe, and relatively prosperous after arguably the most brutal modern genocide, everyone would have taken that deal. Maybe this is the only way it would have happened. But autocratic leaders have a tendency to stay on too long at the expense of long term stability.

That isn’t really what the rest of article you linked to says. The next two paragraphs are about video evidence that partially (and maybe wholly) contradicts the IDF statement you quoted:

Video filmed at the scene of the strike appeared to corroborate parts of the military’s statement but not others.

Filmed by Mustafa Abutaha, a professor of English, the footage showed a large crater in a tree-lined plot of land close to a four-story residential building. A high wall separated part of the plot from the road, suggesting that it was an enclosed compound. But as he filmed the video, Mr. Abutaha said the plot had housed displaced people. Shortly afterward, a second man passed in front of the camera, holding a motionless child.

The NY Times isn’t reporting from the ground. They have a statement from the IDF and video footage contradicting at least part of the IDF’s story.

Don’t kink shame me.

I was required to stop eating pangolin after I was Patient Zero for a global coronavirus pandemic but I’m glad they’re being bred and domesticated. I do miss pangolin soup so and this gives me hope that I’ll get another ladle someday without all the repurcussions.

And if anyone wants to argue with me that it was bats or a lab leak, I want to be very clear: bat soup sucks — the texture bothers me more than the flavor — and I stopped cheating on my wives with virologists after my new therapist helped me understand I was really cheating on my own immune system.

Russia is behind all the ░P░U░S░S░Y░ I░N░B░I░O░ accounts because they need to make at least $8/month to finance their political influence bot accounts.

I guess the mighty Iranian NAVY is no longer a threat to commandeer merchant vessels before they enter the port of Baltimore. (That collapsed bridge is but we’ll move that as soon as we find our magnet fishing set.)

I live in a tourism-dependent city and the main problem isn’t tourists as much as AirBnB and similar services fucking up residential neighborhoods, raising rents, etc. And even then, it’s not the original AirBnB concept (of renting your place or spare bedroom out) as much as investors (often institutional investors) buying up dozens of properties and acting as unlicensed, less regulated hoteliers.

I’d be fine with AirBnB if they voluntarily limited that sort of shit or were forced to do it via strong regulations or punitive taxes. We have some OKish regulations. There’s permits and restrictions on density — one per block in residential areas, basically — but lobbyists got involved so half the regulations are about protecting the hotel industry instead of protecting the limited housing stock. And it all relies on AirBnB enforcing the rules when they have the opposite incentive.

Putin is the opposite of left wing. He literally crushed opposition from socialists and communists and ushered in an era of revanchist fascism and oligarchy. He might be the purest example of a far right leader on Earth. Being pro-Putin almost by definition means you’re a reactionary and not far-left.

I mean, he’s not actually a contender, is he? His party is on the fringe of the left wing coalition. The other parties said they wouldn’t make him PM and he said he wouldn’t demand it. Macronists certainly aren’t going to accept him.

To me, the only 2 outcomes are gridlock or someone non-controversial from the left. Laurent Berger is a name I saw come up but I’m not the world’s foremost French politics knower.

It probably means the prime minister will be a more moderate figure from the left that can work with centrists. They’ll horsetrade with the centrists over cabinet positions and policy priorities. You could imagine a deal where Macronists get foreign affairs posts (like Minister for Armed Forces and Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs) and the left gets domestic ones (like Minister of Labor, Minister for Health, etc.)

In reality, that’s way simpler than it likely will be. Realistically, given France’s history, it probably means some gridlock and grandstanding. Every Prime Minister wants to be president next so there’s probably going to be some positioning for the next presidential election (in 2027) involved. Maybe they’ll get along for a year and then have new elections.

We don’t host the Olympics in an election year until 2028. We have plenty of time to prepare. Plus, fascists famously suck at using the Olympics for propaganda. Hitler’s 1936 Berlin games was supposed to be a showcase of German superiority and then Jesse Owens dominated the marquee event.

BONUS FUN FACT: Until the 1936 Olympics, somehow no one had realized that Haiti and Liechtenstein had the same flag. So, Liechtenstein added a crown to theirs and then made that their new national flag.

Well, it didn’t seem to work for the election.

I’ve been to Paris several times now and I found it way better after I did all the touristy stuff. Just walking around old neighborhoods and doing less iconic activities. I kind of had to run out of “must do” tourist checklist things before I really appreciated Paris.

In 2017, under Corbyn, Labour got over 40% of the vote compared to about 34% yesterday. Even in 2019 under Corybyn, Labour got like 32%. The narrative in Britain might be that Corbyn was too divisive and Starmer is a unifier but the real issue is that the right wing was split this time in ways it wasn’t under Boris Johnson.

I mean, say what you want about Corbyn — lord knows the garbage UK media will — but his Labour Party did very well once and about average the next time. The main issue is that using a “first past the post” system in a country with more than 2 parties is silly and undemocratic.

chown changes the file owner. chmod changes permissions. So, if a file or directory is owned by root but a user should have access, you could make them the owner or you could keep root the owner and just allow read/write access.

They come up more on servers where you often have multiple users with different access levels. Some users might not have sudo permission but do have full control over their home directory and whatever else they need. And web servers, for instance, will usually have a user called www-data or similar and it’s shared by all the users in the “developer” group.

chmod is the command to change user permissions. The numbers mean user, group, and others and the value allows read, write, execute. So, 000 means no one has permissions to get rid of the mount point. 777 means everyone has all permissions. (4 is read, 2 is write, and 1 is execute and the numbers are added. So, 644 would mean you can read/write, the group and other users have read only access.)

You don’t have to use the numbers but eventually, almost every Linux admin does because it’s faster, a bit like a keyboard shortcut. But, for instance, you can add Execute permission with chmod +x /some/file/location.

Here’s more details on the how to chmod and the historic reasons for the 0-7 system (spoiler: it’s 8 bits): https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/linux-file-permissions-explained

Your move, Monaco.

At least it didn’t break in the middle of fighting a Lynel.

Molto bene.