That standard should still deal with plenty of the fascists, if consistently applied. Only the decent, honest, law-abiding fascists will slip through.

But measles carries a significant risk serious long-term illness or death, unlike the vaccine. And when everyone has the vaccine, very few people get the disease due to herd immunity, which worked fine for decades. Why can these people not hold two facts in their mind at the same time?

Even so, endless fascism is still even worse. They won't go willingly, and they won't respect election results. Leave it too long and it will be as difficult as overthrowing Hitler or the USSR. Actually more difficult, because those regimes faced actual opposition from abroad, whereas now it feels like the whole world is going fascist.

There's not really anything wrong with being incompetent, so long as you have the humility to admit it and learn from people who know better, and try not to cause harm. That's not Musk's minions though.

The only question is whether he knows he's a Russian asset. Trump may be working for them without realizing it. All Putin would have to do is convince him he was just giving him advice, one wise ruler to another, because Trump is special and brilliant, and provide a few incentives. Trump would believe that taking the advice was all his own brilliant idea.

They are evidently trying to destroy the USA's traditional alliances and weaken its historical allies. The most immediate benefit is to Russia, but China also benefits while North America and Europe lose out. Their motivation seems to be that turmoil offers billionaires new opportunities to make more money, and they may also hope to strengthen their dealings with Russian oligarchs.

I have never seen this happen, and I don't know what tools would confuse the strings "null" or "Null" with NULL. From the comments in this thread, there are evidently more terribly programmed systems than I imagined.

Asking the big questions: why doesn't he walk around barefoot or in flip flops?

In response to an emailed series of questions, a spokesperson for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said the agency still deems the risk to human health for the general public to be low.

For how much longer can we trust their pronouncements? All the US government departments are under the control of compulsively lying anti-science Nazis.

I think that one is referring to Trump. Musk won't be punished for his Nazi salute, just as Trump isn't punished for raping women.

Ah, American trains. Outside of the USA and Canada, trains are fast.

If I saw serious attempts anywhere from right-wingers to advocate for their views as an actual political philosophy I'd be more concerned by this. But we need spaces where people actually discuss how to build a better society, and simply because of that concern these spaces lean left. It's rare to find right-wingers who are even seriously interested in that question, except as a pretext to vent their unexamined prejudices and personality issues.

If, on internet forums, you push for everyone to have equal say even when their views are not well considered, everyone's energy gets used up arguing with the most offensive right-wing posters. I think it's a good thing to have spaces where that isn't how it goes. As for centrists, I think there's a place for engaging with them because there's more of a chance that they just haven't examined their views but can be brought to. But I'm not going to miss them if they're so put off by a left-leaning space that they won't participate, and I don't think every left space needs to spend its time arguing with liberals.

Frankly, my view of the right wing these days is that there's no particular need to treat a mishmash of selfishness, greed, lust for power, deceit, gullibility, ignorance, insecurity and hatred as if it's a political philosophy at all. Left versus right isn't a helpful picture. Serious vs unserious would be a better one. If someone has serious arguments for a right-wing position made in good faith, then they're not just wasting people's time. But that's not usually what you see, and I suspect it's because there's a lack of serious arguments to be made for it.

I don't miss the right-wing voices. For the most part they just dominate, disrupt and obstruct serious discussion. That said, it's important we don't forget how unrepresentative our online discussions are of society as a whole, and how little impact merely talking about them here has.