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.

For the most part, it’s probably better for me. I never really got into the big subreddits that make the front page anyway. It was mostly a place for me to nerd out on small, more academic or hobby subreddits anyway. (I’m a Linux user and software developer so that all pretty much transferred over here fine.)

I find the quality of posts/replies here to be better in terms of quality but, obviously, sometimes there’s fewer (or, worse, zero). I like Voyager as an app (or web interface if your instance supports it). And I’ll pretty much always accept the less and the more to support open standards/communities/software.

I switched over when I read an interview with the CEO — I think with The Verge — and figured it was over. It was obvious he was juicing numbers to go public and there was no point investing time on a platform that would only get worse for users.

JD Vance went to Yale Law; of course he won’t choose something over power. I mean, Thomas and Alito both went there. Their alumni page on Wikipedia has a “Law and Government” section and includes several people we know went to Epstein Island. Anyone who comes out of Yale Law with a single principle got it somewhere else.

Assassin bugs only kill for money. Mosquitos do it because they’re out for blood.

I’m sorry that guy was at a shooting but a visor with Trump 202~~0~~4 might be the most loser-coded thing I’ve ever seen. If you hold that visor up to your ear like a seashell, you can hear someone complaining about a family court judge ruling against him after he represented himself.

The guy who shot Reagan was trying to impress Jodie Foster. It wouldn’t be unprecedented if it was motivated by something bizarre.

The new policy is that you need to have a minimum of 15 pieces of flair. It’s up to you if you want to do the bare minimum but Brian, for example, has 37 pieces of flair, okay? And a great smile.

I feel like this conversation is basically:

Against Biden: “He’s old as fuck and you’re in denial.”

For Biden: “I’m aware he’s old as fuck and I think you haven’t fully considered the legal, financial, and political ramifications of him dropping out at this stage in the race.”

Ad nauseam, forever. None of us know what’s going on. The reporting has been awful and full of motivated framing and anonymous sources. Half of it is the typical “Democrats in disarray,” which is such a beloved media topic that there’s been memes about it since before the internet. It’s ok to just not know when you aren’t privy to solid information.

Louisiana uses “Parishes” and they’re functionally equivalent. It’s based on French and Spanish rule where Catholic Church boundaries were drawn.

DC doesn’t have counties (or congressional representation) because it’s geographically small and also a territory, not a state. (Though it’s got more people than Wyoming or Vermont, everyone pays federal taxes, etc. so it really should have Representatives and Senators if “no taxation without representation” means anything.)

As I understand it, Alaska has “boroughs” near cities that sort of serve a similar function but much of the state is (or was) largely unpopulated so there will be a borough in the core settlement that acts like a county. Then, there’s lots of private, federal, and state lands that aren’t really inhabited and aren’t governed by the borough anyway.

On one level, I respect the sacrifice but on another level, I’d probably make James Dolan pay me my money right now and have Charles Oakley come watch me deposit the check.