WatDabney

I assume they're not sucking up to Bibi, but to AIPAC.

100% cotton in layers.

I like loose clothes - baggy chinos or cargo pants (or shorts made out of old pants that have started ripping out at the knees) and t-shirts, henleys, chamois work shirts, zippered (never pullover) hooded sweatshirts and down vests. I add layers in the fall (I generally max out at six in the dead of winter) and subtract them in the spring.

We instinctively make ourselves the hero of our own story, concocting tales to convert our vices into virtue.

Holy shit. This is the most delicious unintentional irony I've seen in years.

To be fairish, it's not entirely that Congress is too corrupt and beholden to the very corporations that are abusing online privacy - it's also that the government itself shares the corporations' preference for a lack of privacy rights.

The federal government is also disincentivized from passing a nationwide privacy law for the internet era because they’ve found that buying consumer data from data brokers is a wonderful way to avoid having to get a traditional warrant.

Exactly.

For what it's worth, my own view is that the root problem is that the entire issue is framed backwards.

The question we're posed is whether or not people should have a right to privacy. Since privacy is the default state, the actual question should be whether or not people have the right to violate other people's privacy.

But of course that's not the question that's asked, since the obvious answer to that one is "No."

And that's exactly why it's the question that should be asked.

Yep - I figured this was just anon hoping for a different answer from a different audience.

Again, your intent doesn't matter and there was no social cue that you missed. The girl clearly expressed her view and you didn't do her even the simple courtesy of believing her. That's not what friends do. That's what stalkers do.

Autism as an excuse can only go so far. When you go past the point at which you simply fail to pick up on non-verbal cues to the point at which you dispute and disregard other people's clearly stated preferences, it no longer applies. That's not autism - it's antisocial personality disorder. You're not just failing to understand what other people expect, but refusing to treat them as beings with rights. You're treating them as mere objects rightly subject to your will and your preferences.

"Anon's" opinion on whether it's creepy or not counts for absolutely nothing.

Again, it wasn't a social cue and "anon" didn't miss it - girl directly expressed her opinion and instead of accepting it, "anon" argued against it, then ignored it That's not only creepy, but borderline abusive.

Creepy.

she calls me creepy and to stop stalking her

That's not a social cue - it's a direct expression of a preference. And anon didn't miss it - he ignored it.

And by imposing the partition plan instead of holding a plebiscite, the UN overtly violated its own charter.

It strikes me that what we have here is basically the plot of Frankenstein, played out over 80 years of world history...

Amusingly ironic that the UN is the entire reason that Israel exists in the first place...

The Cicero Institute also advocates legislation allowing new private prisons to enter the market and empowering governors to circumvent elected attorneys general by appointing ​“special prosecutors” to combat ​“public lawlessness.”

And there we have the actual key to all of this.

The goal is to reinstitute Victorian workhouses, updated for the modern age of private prisons and officially-sanctioned slave labor.

That's it - nothing more. It's not even an attempt at anything like an actual solution to the growing problem of homelessness - it's only and entirely that wealthy psychopaths like Lonsdale see homeless people as a resource that's not currently being exploited and that they want to exploit. Entirely in order to further their own wealth and privilege, they want to imprison these human beings and make them into slaves.

Probably an odd take, but this is actually something I sort of like about this timeline.

I keep getting this amusing visual image of actual people tiptoing away and giggling and shushing each other, as somewhere in the background, the site they used to be on is nothing but corporations showing ads to bots posting to bots.

I'm entirely unsurprised.

D and D got a lot of heat for the last season of Game of Thrones, but I've never thought they were entirely, or even chiefly, to blame. Most of the problem really is that GRRM obviously desperately needed an editor to rein him in as the series went along, but for whatever reason, that didn't happen. So now he has this huge, sprawling mess of a story that's going in eighteen different directions at once, and just as D and D couldn't manage to tie it all together, neither can he.