It time we stop tolerating and enabling an evil totalitarian state. China is one of the most evil oppressive regimes in existence. We tried the "oh trade will liberalize them" theory. It has not worked, they put on lipstick for us but nothing really changed.

I'll say one thing for it. This whole Hong Kong/China uproar has done something that I no longer thought was even possible in the U.S. It's actually managed to unite both Republicans and Democrats on an issue.

I hate apple but they get no choice as to whether they follow the law.

If I understand correctly, they banned these apps EVERYWHERE, not just in China (where they were compelled by the law to do so). And even if they only banned them in China, it would still raise moral and ethical issues regarding the company's values and its place in modern Western, democratic markets. If Saudi Arabia passed a law saying that cell phone companies were no longer allowed to sell to phones to women, then Apple and numerous other companies who do business there might well comply. But I damned sure wouldn't want to ever do business with them again afterwards here in America.

Happens all the time. If someone calls me an asshole, I can get pissed at them, I can call them an asshole right back, I can try to convince them I'm not an asshole, etc. What I can't do is force them to call me a sweetheart. Nor would I even want to do that, even if I had the power. It's creepy--in a "1984" way that's just going to end up making them resent me even more.

You can't force people to be nice. And if you try, it will more likley have the exact opposite effect. If you ask people to use a certain pronoun, most people will do it just to be polite. But try to force them, and you'll more often just piss them off.

Because no one has the right to force others to think the way that they do. It's okay to ask. It's okay to persuade. It's okay to criticize. But you absolutely don't have the right to demand that other people to parrot your views in their own speech.

And before you go defending such policies, you might want to think long and hard about how the precedent you set today could be turned against you tomorrow. When the cultural tide turns one day, and you're being forced to only use traditional pronouns, you might feel differently. Just ask Robespierre what it's like when popular opinion turns on a dime and you find your own oppressive laws turned back against you.

It's just pining for the fjords.

As opposed to iOS, whose users will only shag a sheep after a bunch of their friends tell them it's the hip new thing to do.

The problem is that he won't just admit that it was a joke. He's trying to pretend that he simply didn't realize that people considered blackface offensive JUST 20 YEARS AGO. Yeah, uh huh. I hate political correctness with a passion, but even I knew this was a no-no back even in the 80's.

Honestly, 20 years ago, I probably wouldn't have realized that blackface was so offensive either

Oh bullshit. I'm older than Trudeau and even back when I was in high school, everyone knew damned well that blackface was offensive. People who did it back then were either doing it as an intentionally offensive joke or to just to show that they didn't give a shit. But the old Al Jolson routine has been widely known to be offensive at least since the 70's, and anyone claiming to not know that has either been secluded on a desert island for the last 50 years or is full of shit. I would have more respect if Trudeau just admitted it was a bad joke instead of trying to plead ignorance.

at least they are all for the most part sane.

If you can manage to keep them out of costumes and blackface for five minutes, yeah.

None of these claims have been tested in court, and we don't know exactly what happened.

Wait, are we talking about Clinton or Kavanaugh here?

And they had worked so hard on their "One small making this step for man, one making of the big leaps for all the mankind" speech.

Unfortunately, no other city in Tennessee can get it because the whore legislators there got bribed by the scared cabelcos to pass a law to make it illegal for other cities to follow suite.

Computers just aren't built to handle the complex mental gymnastics that humans have to do to negotiate the often quite bizarre and nonsensical world of social interaction in a modern western world where the wrong phrase or subtle sentiment, no matter how innocently expressed, can ruin your life. It's very hard for most humans to even understand the "rules."

If Trump were serious about that, he would have went to Congress and asked for a massive budget increase. NASA's budget was gutted under Nixon and has declined and declined over the years (this chart says it all).

Every President makes some bullshit pie-in-the-sky promises about what NASA is going to do someday long after they're out of office. But not one has asked Congress to give NASA the money they would need to actually fulfill those promises. The end result is an agency that can't even put a man into low earth orbit anymore, but still promises bullshit like a "man on Mars by 2035," and now a "man on the moon by 2024." It's a joke. They couldn't put a man on the moon in 2034, much less 2024. Shit, they probably won't even be able to put a man in *orbit* in 2024.

If they could get away with fucking up Luke Skywalker, you can bet they won't hesitate to fuck up Picard too.

Keep in mind that Kurtzman and J.J. Abrams are long-timer producing partners. So if it happened in Star Wars, you can bet it will happen in Star Trek too.