It’ll make the christian evangelicals in his base happy. They want a dominant Israel so that Jesus will come back.

That might even be a tough sell to this SCOTUS. It’s going to be awfully hard to argue that people physically present in the United States aren’t subject to its laws.

Bite me. I’m no fucking centrist. And maybe if you’d actually read my comment, you’d understand why trans issues are important enough for me to mention.

Edit: In light of this instant and predictable attack on my kids, I cordially invite anyone who is okay with Trump in office to “teach Democrats a lesson” to fuck themselves sideways with a pineapple.

If the electorate doesn’t know a party’s platform, that’s the party’s problem. It’s literally their job to scream it from the rooftops.

They did. Harris campaigned constantly, and contrary to the constant and incessant media narrative, she went into plenty of specifics.

It was all drowned out by Trump noise, and the media was 100% complicit.

And all I saw was democrats, like motherfucking Henry Cuellar, throwing the LGBTQ under the bus. Especially trans people.

Yes, Cuellar is an asshole, no argument there. But he was by no means the only Democrat on the campaign trail. Again, the media wouldn’t fucking give Democrats the time of day, because the 24-hour Trump clown show got the ratings.

We also shouldn’t dismiss the problem of sexism, some of it internalized. Back in 2008, I had the misfortune of meeting a woman who wasn’t sure who to vote for. She wanted to vote for McCain at the time, but was hesitant because she didn’t want a woman to be vice-president. (The fact that Sarah Palin was immensely unqualified didn’t matter, but the fact she had a vagina did.) That attitude is still a lot more common than people who live in largely progressive areas realize.

See, this is where you’re wrong. By every measure, the Democratic party platform was objectively better for humans living on planet Earth. Its problems were in degree (not being nearly progressive enough), not in focus (such as screaming incoherently about trans people).

But people didn’t know, because of the aforementioned misinformation and disinformation. Seriously, did you know that the party platform contains an entire section on protecting LGBTQI+ people and rights? Most progressive voters who sat this one out never read it. Here, see for yourself.

But because the Democratic party wasn’t progressive enough (in some people’s eyes), they sat out the election, and someone who is a thousand times worse in every respect is going to be president tomorrow.

I take that personally. I have a trans son and a gay daughter, and their lives will be so much worse, starting tomorrow. And to protect them, I’m actively trying to figure out how to leave this country, because a lot of people didn’t care enough to protect my kids.

In 1930’s Germany, the Jewish people (and Gypsies, and - again - gay and trans people, and so on) who survived when that country descended into fascism are the ones who got the fuck out first. That is the reality that this purity bullshit has created for people like my kids.

While that’s true, choosing to vote for Trump, a third-party, or not at all is like saying, “I don’t like this ham sandwich and I don’t like my sandwich choices… so I’m going to eat this dog-turds-and-radioactive-glass-shards sandwich instead!”

This country is fucked.

Edit: Rather than respond below to every comment, thought I’d clarify a few things here.

1. I never said Democrats didn’t fuck up. They certainly did.
2. But - and this is important - we can’t ignore the roles that racism, sexism, and above all misinformation played. To pretend there was none, and that vast swaths of the electorate didn’t fall for it, would be disingenuous.

Democrats have moved to the right, and hurt themselves doing so. That is true. But they are still objectively superior to Republicans in every conceivable way. People who voted Republican voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces party because they were angry about Democrats being imperfect, and their faces will be eaten.

Oh, neat! I didn’t know about that.

Thanks!

Headline in six months: Salesforce Hires Software Engineers After Realizing Middle Managers Don’t Know How To Turn AI-Generated Code Into Actual Applications

Being a software engineer is a hell of a lot more than just the actual act of writing code.

That’s a different story from 2014, not about the 2005 broadcast.

Why doesn’t radio free asia let us verify their claims with the evidence they must have gathered to make the report? Y’know, like a reputable news agency would?

You might as well ask why journalists don’t put targets on the backs of their anonymous sources by publicly identifying them. ALL reputable outlets sometimes use anonymous sources to protect the lives of people living in precarious situations. North Korea is not exactly known for treating citizens who talk negatively about how the government operates there well.

I’m not sure why you linked that video. The haircut thing wasn’t strictly compulsory, but North Korean state television did, in fact, broadcast a show called Let’s trim our hair in accordance with the socialist lifestyle, along with another show that used hidden cameras to find and shame people whose haircuts didn’t meet their standards.

The fact that non-credible sites like “barstoolsports” picked up the story says nothing about the credibility of the New Zealand Herald or other, credible sources with good reputations for fact-checking.

Also, your comment looks like it was written by ChatGPT. Was it?

Nope, it’s the 20th.

I don’t give a shit what it was supposed to stand for, it now stands for that.

It’s the day a bloated orange fascist takes over the federal government of the United States.

I’m going down a rabbithole? You’ve entirely bought into North Korean propaganda and believe a city they literally use as a showcase for foreigners to lie about life in the country is somehow representative of the country, and I’m the one going down a rabbithole?

Surely at some point you’d realize, “Wait I’ve been fed lies.” Nobody can seriously believe that Pyongyang isn’t a propaganda piece.

Foreign visitors are given strict routines and routes they must follow, with government minders at all times to prevent them from photographing anything they don’t want seen or talking to people who they aren’t approved to talk to. Of course it looks good in the photos and videos that are allowed out, because it’s a carefully constructed and orchestrated falsehood.

But even in that, it fails, because of what’s so obviously missing from Pyongyang that you find in pretty much any other major city.

Ever been to an actual large and well-off city that isn’t in a despotic dictatorship? Paris? Tokyo? London? New York? Mexico City? Toronto? If you’ve ever been to any city like those, you’ll find you don’t have government handlers, can take photos of anything you want, there is traffic on the streets of all sorts, there is music, there is entertainment, parts of the city will be dirty while others are beautiful, and no one is putting on a performance for you.

This is a photo of downtown Pyongyang:

Do you see what’s missing? That’s the largest city in the country, in the middle of the day. A four-lane street cutting right through the heart of the city - and it’s nearly empty of traffic. The street next to it clearly has more people in it, but most are on foot.

The image of the city as presented to people like your friends that have been there really is a lie. Not everything, of course… I mean, people do live, work, and go about their lives there, too. Obviously. There’s a great uncut video of a drive through Pyongyang here that highlights that fact - just people, living their lives. It matches pretty well with the video you shared, too. Real people, walking the streets of Pyongyang. No dispute there.

But both videos also highlight how weird the city is, with the regular propaganda street-signs, the fact that the streets are far over-built for the traffic that they carry, the sparseness of all forms of traffic (seriously, the parts of the videos that are most densely packed with people still look less active than cities 1/10th Pyongyang’s size), the weirdly identical brutalist apartment buildings everywhere… And then, once the driving video leaves downtown Pyongyang, cars basically vanish from the street (which becomes much more poorly maintained). It becomes apparent that people are walking - likely for hours - to get to and from their places of work.

Other things I looked for and didn’t find in either video:

• Cafes. There are no cafes visible in either one, anywhere. There are a couple street food vendors, and that’s basically it.
• Windows. There are no businesses or organizations of any sort with windows that would let anyone see in or out. Watch a bike tour of Paris to see what an incredible difference windows make.
• Shopfronts. I don’t doubt there are businesses in Pyongyang, but you will not be able to identify any of them from either your bike ride video or my drive through video. You’ll see very few signs (except for propaganda posters of Kim Il Sung), lots of faceless, nondescript buildings, and tons of brutalist apartments.
• Teenagers. I didn’t see a single person who looked like a teenager in either video. That’s not to say I don’t think they exist there, of course, but usually in a vibrant city you’ll see people of all ages.
• Architectural variety. Every building looks like it basically follows the same design pattern.
• Clothing variety. Most people in both videos were wearing basically similar outfits. I noticed in the bike video several women wearing identical coats.
• Shopping bags. In any other large city, you would expect to see people coming or going from shopping expeditions. Not one person that I could find in either video looked like they were going shopping. Maybe the woman at 4:45 in the pink coat in the bicycling video, though those didn’t really look like shopping bags. She was also one of only a small number of people I saw wearing anything colorful at all. (Another was right at the beginning of the bike video).
• Art. As far as I could tell, there is no street art anywhere in Pyongyang with the exception of things like monuments to Kim Il Sung. No sculptures, no murals, not even any flower gardens. Maybe they exist in other parts of the city, but they were certainly not visible in either video.
• Music. At about 50 seconds in, there is music briefly audible in this Paris bike ride. There is never any music audible at any point in the Pyongyang bike ride. (I happen to like this particular Paris ride video because it shows the city, good parts and bad.)

Seriously, watch any video of a driving or bicycling tour through nearly any major city in any other country, and you’ll see astonishing differences. It’s impossible to watch your friend’s video or the driving video I shared and conclude that’s a thriving city when compared to cities like Tokyo or Paris.

January 20th, 2025.

I try to take heart in the fact that the majority didn’t actually vote for him, but it’s cold comfort, considering so many couldn’t be bothered to vote at all.

We’re kinda fucked.

Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked.

Pyongyang is not North Korea. It’s a Potemkin village designed to present a false image to the rest of the world.

And it’s hilarious to accuse me of jumping to conclusions when all I’ve been saying is that RFA is credible and we don’t have a reason to believe they’re lying about this.

If we end up with evidence that they’re lying, I’ll happily remove the post.