Yup. That is the problem.
Fascism is on the rise around the world. And the countries that have stood firm in the face of it? They are juicy targets for strongman leaders needing an easy win.
At the risk of showing my indoctrinated "american excellence" ass... the US is really a big factor in global security. Because (unless you are on our side) we have a ridiculously large and over funded military and love proxy wars.
The heroic military that are totally going to stand up for what is right regardless of their orders... sat with their thumbs up their asses waiting to see how Jan 6 would shake out when it was painfully obvious that the outgoing POTUS had declared war on the US Government and was attempting to lynch Congress and the VPOTUS
The Army is gonna follow orders faster than the pioneers of NASA did in the 1940s.
Agreed
If only the scotus had just approved a ridiculously over reaching stance that could solve this
First and foremost: The New York Times has a very well known anti-Biden bias https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/04/25/new-york-times-biden-white-house-00154219
Second: While it is very important to understand that not all sources can go "on the record" this... is purely a rumor from an unattributed source "close to the president".
So can we please stop cheering on russian/ccp/trump propaganda?
And now I understand why that weirdo was so hellbent on the corporations of the world supporting this
It is not exclusively Firefox but Mozilla corp has 750 staff and 593 million in revenue according to Wikipedia.
One million is maybe ten part time developers for a year.
While mozilla/firefox is indeed a giant mess of legacy code: Why would a company instead support a hobbyist project with almost zero resources?
At that point we are in the mythical "What if the small business of the world united and made their own product" territory
I mean... considering that firefox is still kind of a clusterfuck for a surprising number of websites...
I am glad this exists but I see no practical use for it for... anyone. And the cynic in me thinks this will be even more ammunition for "just use chromium, it actually works" akin to the crowd who insist on telling every single person who is considering trying out linux to use arch or gentoo.
Yes and no.
You can bet that there would have been 8 years of propaganda against her. And we would have lost even more house/senate seats because people on the left historically decide to not bother to vote in midterms unless there is an active threat on CNN.
And... I am pretty sure we would have lost in 2020 because of COVID. Which would basically put us back to where we were in 2020 in terms of having a deranged fascist who nobody realized was too dumb to accomplish anything (not a problem this time. See Project 2025).
The main difference would be the Supreme Court. Yes, republicans did everythiing they could to protevent Obama from appointing anyone and I would not put it past them to have stretched that out for a full four years. But Scalia (Rest in Piss) would still be dead and so would Ginsburg (fuck her for putting us in this mess). Which would have made the math a lot tighter. 7 justices but the math would have been tight enough that Hilary likely would have gotten to appoint at least one moderate.
I think Hilary would have bought us the better part of a decade because, like her or not, she is an incredibly effective politician... when nobody thinks she is running for POTUS. She is/was even more generally liked by both sides of the aisle than Biden and would never have had to make concessions to sanders and The Squad for the 2020 ticket (Biden is an asshole but his platform is shockingly Left leaning by US standards...)..
And I think trump would have faded into nothing. But there are plenty of other people who were just looking for an excuse to become a magat on the republican side. And people like cruz and romney and even liz cheney would not be complete laughing stocks without trump. So, at best, we were looking at a ticking clock to the next "reagan republican" as it were.
Like, there are a lot of people who consider the day Ginsburg died to be the day the US collapsed. And we are seeing exactly the repercussions of that with shit like today.
The CCP are actively engaging in genocide (remember the Uyghurs? Probably shouldn't if you don't want to piss off the CCP) and have a long history of "reeducation" camps.
While I have very serious problems with how the majority of western nations handle immigration and human rights violations, that is more along the lines of "oh, please stop isreal. By the way, here are all those bombs you asked for. Don't use them all on one mosque!" or actively turning people back to be executed in the horror they are running from (although, the US is doing a great job of having some stuff that looks a lot like concentration camps on the Southern border...).
But it is still night and day in terms of horror. The day is pretty shitty but the night... holy fuck.
But also? That doesn't change anything. It is a nation's responsibility to engage in basic espionage if only to protect its people's interests. And governments all have the power to basically shit on a visitor's human rights so long as they can keep the embassies from finding out. So why take any risks you don't need to?
Oh yeah. I DEFINITELY have some horror stories over needing to access GUI apps remotely (my favorite involved a secure tunnel to one facility to then tunnel back to a machine that was literally three doors down from my office...)
But stuff like the web interfaces to ms/google office make the vast majority of this trivial. Since SSH always worked in Windows via (god awful) putty. And increasingly other applications are understanding they need to support server/client setups so you are just connecting over a tunnel rather than using a remote desktop protocol.
We have decades of examples of people standing up for what is right or true.
Journalists get shit on because "fake news" or "they are just writing clickbait" and people actively shit on their livelihood. Activists get the shit beat out of them, are maimed for life, and often go to prison. And people post pictures on facebook where they have a background in solidarity before they take a new duck-face picture and overwrite it.
The purpose of journalists are to seek and speak truth on behalf of The People. When The People have made it clear they don't give a shit and can't be bothered to even read the article someone had to go into hiding for?
So why stand up and make yourself a target?