Mike Billips

I’m bald because I’m old and I shave my head. What’s your excuse for being a dick about it?

Wat? I was just objecting to somebody calling me callow and dumb because I supposedly only experienced things after George HW Bush and thought Lenin = Vladimir Putin. I seem to have stumbled on an entirely different discussion, which is why reply-guying > starting a new thread mid-discourse.

No, it’s worse. And it’s the worst of many bad things. Lack of elections and elected representation is bad in and of itself. Rule by unresponsive bureaucracy is bad. It exists in non-totalitarian states, but its purist essence was in the USSR.

It’s not communism per se that results in a Pol Pot, Stalin, or Mao. It’s authoritarianism, and when your political system allows only one party, you inevitably wind up there. Happens to democracies, too, but it doesn’t ALWAYS happen, and it tends to be more reversible.

Yes, that is my actual name and face. Terrific research on your part, well done.

Lovely anecdote, ignoring the context of Vietnam’s human rights record. www.hrw.org/asia/vietnam

Communism as a Marxist theory and societal utopia has been successfully implemented on the small scale. Totalitarian states run by communist parties like the USSR and China have also existed. Chernobyl, the Cultural Revolution, and the killing fields resulted from the latter.

Pol Pot was overthrown in 1979. He farted around in the jungle after that fighting the North Vietnamese and the succeeding Cambodian government but he never stoped claiming to be a Communist. He was a Chinese client; the CIA backed the Cambodian government that he overthrew.

Actual communism has never been implemented at the state scale. Attempts at it following violent revolutions have created totalitarian police states with dysfunctional economies when they haven’t resulted in genocide.

No, it isn’t. I remember Chernobyl and Pol Pot.

WSJ commenters on Facebook warn New Yorkers that Mamdani is going to turn New York into another London, England. Enjoy the improved subway and even lower crime rates, Gotham!

State-level Republicans may pause in their wrecking because of last night, but you know Trump and his goons are going to try to double and triple down on all their bullshit to try to get it in before there’s a Democratic Congress. I expect an even bigger anti-Trump voter backlash in 2026.

This and the Georgia Public Service Commission electing two Democrats (first time in the 21st century) by 25(!) points. We’re going to get a black, female, Democratic governor next year if this keeps up.

"The day NYC elects a Muslim Mayor will be the day I die."

--Dick Cheney probably

Mississippi flips two state Senate seats and ends the Republican super majority. Georgia flips two statewide utility-regulatory board seats by TWENTY-TWO POINTS. There hasn’t been a Democrat on the 5-member Public Service Commission since 2003! Next year, Texas’s gerrymander may backfire.

Full patriot activation in New Jersey consists of six guys named Vinny, Joey, Carmine, Louie and Vinny renting a Hertz box truck and rolling up on an elementary school to mean-mug people waiting in line to vote.

Why is there a basketball? Like are they pretending Trump can hoop it up or something?

He would have KILLED if he’d gone, though.

Too bad he’s a fucking liar.

This is how much people hate the GOP right now. Two Democrats beat incumbent Republicans on the utility-regulating Georgia Public Service Commission by more than 20 points. The commissioners are appointed by the governor and then run for reelection. No Dem on the 5-person board since 2003.

Cheney and all his merry neo-con dipshits thought they could get a more stable and US-friendly Iraq (and thus more and cheaper oil) by removing the klepto-fascist Baath party. But they couldn’t sell those reasons anywhere near as easily as scaring people about WMDs.

Cheney. But he did it BEFORE he started lying about it. The actual reason was a) Bush had a family feud to settle with Saddam, and Iraq’s violation of the UN resolutions that ended the Gulf War was sufficient casus belli. And b) 1/2

Well, the country was going to war regardless. All the lying did was give them a fig leaf of Congressional approval they didn’t have to have. I was in the Navy Reserve and heard on good authority in June 2002 that we were going to invade. The WMD story didn’t begin getting pitched until September.

The cheap beef and pink slime that fast-food taco joints use is less expensive than TVP, so probably not.

The cat’s all like, “Look at me, I’m a people, I worry about debt and stand in lines all day!”

Guy basically engineered a soft coup when W asked him to pick his vice president. Cheney was basically president until 2005 or so when Iraq had clearly become a hopeless shitshow because of Rumsfeld’s and Paul Bremer’s incompetence.

It’s just voice-activated voice jail. Instead of listening to a menu and punching in a number, you burn down a few trees and a bot pretends to understand what you’re saying.

I’ve NEVER seen as many people talk about voting in the Georgia Public Service Commission race as this year. I think it’s because people in my social circle are THIRSTING to vote against Trumpism and this was the first chance. Two Republican incumbents who would normally be safe have to be nervous.

They also took credit for a bunch of Weimar-created projects like the Autobahn. What the social-dems needed was a PR guy with Goebbels’ skills.

Ditto, only it was a fancy new three-story elementary school I’d never seen before, because my local elementary school is getting a big expansion.