To be perfectly blunt I would rather deal with machines than the US border Gestapo. Anywhere else my Dutch passport and white skin gets me through in a blink.

I hated the automated border check at CDG airport into Paris - you walk into a glass box that closes behind you until the machine can verify your identity. It felt so much more hostile than walking up to a counter, even if legally and practically i can’t go anywhere else

As if motor cyclists are known for their decency.

As soon as the first nice weather comes on in spring they start driving around in their loud death machines swerving through traffic.

Are you just taking the opportunity to complain about motorcycles or are you responding to the article by saying coal rolling is okay because motorcyclists are also bad (in your mind)?

Death machines, but generally fatal to their riders, rather than others?

> Loud

Those are Harley enthusiasts, not motorcyclists. (Or, increasingly, just "work trucks")

Signed, someone who commutes on a rather quiet motorcycle.

I guess in that case cars are bad because some of them are big and loud as well

Its a lot easier to "bootstrap" yourself in a country with a functional government.

The ultra rich don't want to pay the taxes that keeps civilization running. People like Elon Musk would not be on top in a Mad Max world.

Ask one of these famed Catholics how they feel about democracy or gender equality and they are just like all the other Christians. After all they get their orders from the same book.

> Ask one of these famed Catholics how they feel about democracy

"Other nations need to reform certain unjust structures, and in particular their political institutions, in order to replace corrupt, dictatorial and authoritarian forms of government by democratic and participatory ones." Encyclical Sollicitudo rei socialis, Pope St. John Paul II (1987)

"The Church values the democratic system inasmuch as it ensures the participation of citizens in making political choices, guarantees to the governed the possibility both of electing and holding accountable those who govern them, and of replacing them through peaceful means when appropriate. Thus she cannot encourage the formation of narrow ruling groups which usurp the power of the State for individual interests or for ideological ends." Encyclical Centesimus annus, Pope St. John Paul II (1991)

"People sometimes complain of the slowness with which an authentic democracy progresses, yet it continues, if used well, to be the most effective historical instrument for ensuring its own future in a way befitting to human beings. [...] Democracy will attain its full actualization only when every person and each people have access to the primary goods (life, food, water, health care, education, work and the certainty of their rights) through an ordering of internal and international relations that assures each person of the possibility of participating in them." Address to members of the "Centesimus Annus" Foundation, Pope Benedict XVI (2006)

"[...] we can think about the crisis of democracy as a wounded heart. That which limits participation is right before our eyes. If corruption and illegality reveal a 'heart attack', then different forms of social exclusion must also be a concern. Every time someone is marginalized, the whole social body suffers." Address at the pastoral visit to Trieste on the occasion of the 50th Social Week of Italian Catholics, Pope Francis (2024)

All of Europe celebrated May day. All of Europe? No one village stood against the lazy commie legions!

I recall Apple's commercial slogan "There's an app for that"

Apple did not write those apps themselves.

People remember those days because the Republicans hadn't destroyed trade unions and the pension system yet.

We can agree unions should be stronger, but union jobs in America cannot compete with nonunion much cheaper labor in other countries. If you have free trade and zero Republicans the same thing happens. If the jobs go away the union doesn’t matter. That’s why the unions consistently lobbied against NAFTA, the WTO, etc.

I’m actually not even sure what specific labor law changes you could blame that on. Clinton was running the show in the 90s, and I don’t recall any big union busting under Bush, whatever else might be said of him.

> We can agree unions should be stronger, but union jobs in America cannot compete with nonunion much cheaper labor in other countries.

I mean, they can, if you put up trade barriers or introduce capital controls. It's not a coincidence that after capital controls were removed, basically any manufacturing that could, fled America. And I (and my family) in Ireland were massive, massive beneficiaries of this!

Like, you can definitely make the argument that globalisation has benefited the world overall, while being bad for a bunch of people in the developed countries. And it's not a bad argument.

But unfortunately for all of the people who think globalisation is great, the votes of all the people who disagree count just as much as yours, and it looks like they're willing to vote for anyone who even hints at promising to fix this.

> Clinton was running the show in the 90s,

He introduced NAFTA, which made it profitable for much US manufacturing to move to Canada/Mexico. Bush let China into the WTO (or was that Clinton too?).

Giving up your economy for a future war with China that may or may not happen is frankly idiotic. The US already has thousands of nuclear warheads in storage so what are you afraid of? This is basically how the USSR collapsed.

Nobody in Beijing or Brussels was surprised they had plans. Observe how neither of them is kissing his ass at the moment.