I am deeply offended by that. I worked in a municipal government for several years and I can assure you that there are plenty of Republican civil servants who take their jobs just as seriously and act with as much impartiality as their Democratic counterparts.

Like I said, to dismiss someone as “biased” only because they have the opposite political orientation is Trump-level reasoning.

I don’t consider mere membership in a political party as very strong evidence of bias. There are only two viable political parties in America and “membership” is nothing more than ticking a box on a form. Even I’m technically a Republican despite being a “woke lefty” because I just wanted to vote against Trump in the 2024 primary election and because it causes the Republican Party to waste money mailing me “get out the vote” campaign material which I immediately throw in the recycle bin.

Civil servants are allowed to have political leanings. This doesn’t make them automatically biased. That is Donald Trump-level reasoning. Just like he was wrong to attack the New York prosecutor who happens to be a Democrat, I’m not going to attack this guy just because he happens to be a Republican.

I don’t think this is at all a valid counter-argument as all of these powers can equally be given to civil unions, if they aren’t already. In my eyes, if you propose to someone and “get married” and want to give your spouse the legal powers associated with what was previously marriage, you would register a civil union.

No civil marriage doesn’t mean that people can’t connect themselves legally; it just means that you have to register a civil union to do so. All of the points you raise are easily defeated by just defining civil unions to replace marriage in all respects. The system is already very close to how I describe. You can “get married” at a church or wherever else and in most countries that does not mean anything until you have registered it with a local registrar. I’m just saying that the thing that happens in a church is “marriage”, and the thing that happens with the legal paperwork at the registrar’s office is called “civil union” regardless of the genders or sexualities of the parties involved.

Am I reading this wrong? The article seems to indicate that he’s just a civil servant prosecutor? Is there any indication of bias?

Honestly I don’t know why the state is still in the business of giving out marriages. Who gives a shit what other people want to call marriage. The state should not even have the authority to perform marriages at all. It should be left as a cultural or religious institution. It has no right to legislate what is and is not marriage. The only thing that should be available is civil unions, being defined as a financial and legal union of two or more consenting adults.

That way, anyone can “get married” at their local church, at a secular ceremony, or piss-drunk in a pub by a barmaid. It would be legally vacuous and has only the meaning that the parties ascribe to it, or that is given to it by the religious authority they choose to follow. But if they want to be legally joined together then they would go register a civil union at the local registrar’s office.

If you’re a bigot and don’t consider two men in civil union to be married, cool, whatever, the law should not care about your opinion. You can privately think “those two are not married” all day, and be right in your mind. The only people whose opinions matter are those who want to call themselves married. There is no institution of “marriage” to defend, because you’ve already won. You can consider marriage to be anything you want and be right. Now you can leave other people alone.

These are not the same thing. At least in America, these terms are only superficially similar in the sense that they are “people who say they love their country”.

When someone points out a country’s shortcomings and how it could be fixed, a patriot listens and makes plans, while a nationalist denies those shortcomings exist or blames them on external factors.

When someone says we should learn from our history and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, a patriot pulls out the history books, while a nationalist instead goes through them with a black highlighter.

When someone burns the country’s flag as a protest, a patriot asks why, while a nationalist will say they should be thrown in prison.

When abuses of power happen by the police or government agents, a patriot will demand an investigation and accountability, while a nationalist will say that actually, they deserved it.

I did hear an NPR interview with Ro Khanna (member of Congress representing California 17, discharge petition signatory) today, where whether he had concerns about the authenticity of the files to be released, and he did say that he did. When asked further how he could be sure that the files so released are complete and accurate, he said that it would be dumb to attempt a cover-up or incomplete release, because many of the victims’ lawyers have already seen the files and thus would know if the released files are incomplete, inaccurate, or inauthentic.

That being said, I do not expect Trump and his crack(pot) team of advisers to have the metal acuity to judge the probability of a successful cover-up correctly.

Linux Mint is great for my 80-year-old grandfather. No Microsoft account BS, and the interface is simple enough for him to learn. He only uses the computer to look at his investments online using Microsoft Edge and play Minesweeper (GNOME Mines seems to be an acceptable replacement for him), and look at old family photos. It runs great on his 6-year-old computer.

It’s hard to argue that Windows 10 isn’t way better than Windows 7 in terms of user interface, workflow patterns, security, and feature support. Despite the fact that Windows 10 comes with a lot of useless junk. Hell, even the junk it came with (Microsoft Edge, Cortana, OneDrive) is more useful than the junk Windows 7 also came with.

And similarly, while people have a lot of nostalgia for Windows XP, from an absolute standpoint, Windows XP is complete ass as an operating system. It was only good in comparison to Windows 2000, ME, and 98/95.

I think it’s more likely that they’ll just release all the files except for those which mention Trump and his allies, or edit out such references and pass it off as the genuine article.

Ah yes, the Trump starvation agenda.

A strictly logical clock for a 24-hour day would have 0 at the top with 1 on the right and 23 on the left. And it would be only ever set to UTC.

According to the article, they’re selling it for ¥97 billion but will lease it back, so they will post a ¥73.9 billion gain from the sale. But in the first half of 2025, they posted a loss of ¥221.9 billion. So selling their HQ will offset about two months’ worth of losses.

I do not claim that. The Chinese government absolutely lies when they need to. I am just saying that they have a track record of not lying in this manner, because they don’t need to.

You are half right and half wrong.

The Government controls all media. There are no major independent news organisations in China. Therefore, they won’t allow negative press about it to spread.

Because the news and social media only ever have good or at worst neutral news about the Government, never critical news, the result is that people think the Government does a good job governing.

At the same time, the poverty alleviation and anti-corruption efforts of the CCP have indeed brought millions out of poverty (even though that poverty is largely a result of bad leadership decisions by the same CCP in the past) and eliminated most forms of petty corruption. That is something that the Government makes sure everyone knows about and is always talking about. And to their credit, it isn’t wrong.

I do not and will not suggest that popular support for the Government would be anywhere near what it is now if it weren’t for the Government’s propaganda efforts and the suppression of speech, dissent, and criticism.

In China, the level of trust people have in the Government is very high compared to the US and Europe. That is the reason why this policy would work and would have reasonable public support.

In the US or Europe, a policy that seems reasonable but could be exploited by the Government for political control is a bad policy. In China, people have already sort of accepted that the Government is pretty secure in its position so it really doesn’t need to suppress speech in roundabout ways; if the intention is to suppress speech then they will be explicit about it by using the words “this threatens state security” or “this is offensive to public morals”. The thing about being a secure authoritarian regime with reasonable popular support is that you don’t need to come up with pretexts to suppress speech or dissent. You can just say “this threatens our power” and put a stop to it. If the policy states the goal is to stop uninformed people from spewing nonsense on the Internet then people will accept that to be true, and the reality is that it probably is what the goal is.

This is fantastic news for the Mamdani campaign.

If this had been a right-wing politician’s rally instead, every conservative in the country would be calling for all members of the Democratic Party to be hanged for this heinous crime, regardless of the identity or motive of the perpetrator.

The fact that one side is a piece of shit doesn’t mean the other side isn’t also a piece of shit

The more I hear from this woman, the more I feel like there might actually be a decent heart deep down inside who wants to better her country, but is being hindered by an incredibly stupid brain that is calling the shots.