WatDabney

Mmm...

I thought that The Peripheral was the best book Gibson's written since at least Idoru, and I was very impressed and pleased.

But I think that Agency is quite possibly the worst book he's ever written.

Probably the one that grabbed me the most was Made Things by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I read Children of Time years ago, but bounced off of Children of Ruin and hadn't read anything else by him. But reading Made Things on a whim this past year set me off on a Tchaikovsky binge that took up much of the rest of the year. I especially liked The Final Architecture books.

The book that I enjoyed the most just in and of itself though was probably Early Riser by Jasper Fforde. It's a fascinating concept, and more straightforwardly written than most of Fforde's books (I like his writing, but he has a regrettable tendency toward style over substance that was refreshingly absent from this one).

The DNC needs the far right. Without it, their candidates would have to run on actual positions, rather than just "Vote for us because we're not Republicans."

Of course, by "restore balance" he actually means "silence leftists and promote nazis," just like he did with Vichy Twitter.

How is anyone caught off guard by this?

The Republican strategy for at least the 50 or so years that I've been aware enough to pay attention has exactly and explicitly been to get the base all riled up with brazenly racist anti-immigrant rhetoric, make lots noise and spends lots of money intercepting/deporting some number of people, but ensure that enough still get/stay in, and are desperate enough, to meet the business demand for cheap and exploitable labor.

Trump and his cultists have been extra hateful and extra loud, but aside from that, this is all just business as usual.

It's like they have an asshole purity test, and Musk is too much of an opportunistic asshole and not enough of a racist asshole to meet their standards.

Are there actually people who didn't already know rhat Trump doesn't pay bills?

Yeeeeaah... but see, your analogy not coincidentally fails, since the kitten is just ignorant.

It would be more accurate if the kitten ran into the burning house because some fat, smelly old tom told it that if it did, the tom and his buddies would destroy the lives of everyone the kitten hates.

So yeah - there's a lot of ignorance there, but the foundation that makes that ignorance relevant and effective is bigotry and hatred and an utter and complete lack of empathy or integrity. If the kitten wasn't so blinded by its hatred and cruelty, "run into this burning house to destroy someone else's life" wouldn't have been an effective appeal.

Yes.

At this point, copyright doesn't exist to benefit creators, but to benefit rent-seeking corporate parasites.

That's why I'm both for and against copyright - I'm for it as an ideal - as a tool to help ensure that creators can profit when others derive value from the fruits of their labors - but I'm very much against the current implementation of it, which exists solely to ensure that overpaid corporate fuckwads can profit off of the fruits of somebody else's labor.

I've been looking forward to this actually.

As far as I'm concerned, automatically avoiding Reddit just by avoiding Google (which I already do) is a welcome bonus.

Imagine how ethically and intellectually bankrupt you have to be to note that publicizing something you do undermines public trust in your office, then conclude not that you're wrong to do it, but that other people are wrong to publicize it.

Government of the working class by the ruling class for the ruling class.