Yes, I'm still leaving ;-)

I'm having issues removing my other squiggleslash accounts which I want to deal with first. This was the first squiggleslash account so it should be the last to be closed. Well, technically the Yahoo mail account won't be closed, but that's about it.

Twitter went last year, as far as I'm aware there's no trace of me left there. So that's OK.

Not tried LiveJournal yet, but at least I can log in there so deleting shouldn't be an issue.

Blogspot: I haven't been able to log in since the f---ers broke everything with Google+, basically breaking everything linked to an external email with no full name on record. They have a form, I've asked four times now for them to delete it. They've sent me one, and only one, reply, claiming my blog can't be deleted either because "We were not able to confirm sole authorship of the blog" (they most certainly can, it's easy for them to tell what accounts are associated with a blog, and if the issue was they couldn't tell it was me or not, they never tried, the only thing I received from them was this email), "There has been recent activity on the blog" (which there hasn't been!), and "The blog contained public interest content." (No, no, I can safely say no public interest content. I'm not a politician.)

And because they're cowards the email is sent from noreply@google.com. I guess at some point I'll need to up the ante and email sundar@google.com but I'd really like to avoid it. Any suggestions on someone to contact about removing a blog without revealing all my personal information at the same time? It's literally linked to my Yahoo account, all they have to do is email me at it, and I'll confirm I want it deleted. Or, you know, they can let me log into the Google account associated with squiggleslash(at)yahoo.com and I'll delete it.

I don't know who's in charge there of that form, but they have no fucking idea how frustrating it is to spend years locked out of an account, and for them to put up a "form" like the one they have that seems specifically designed to prevent it from being used. I cannot think of a polite term to describe people who would do that.

Reddit. Oh My. Fucking Hell. Almost as shitty as Google here. If you want to delete a Reddit account, there's no automated tool to do it. There's something that looks like an automated way, but what it does is leave everything you ever wrote up, but removes the username associated with it. What you have to do is make a GDPR request for All Your Data (NOT a GDPR right-to-be-forgotten request, because that's a bureaucratic way of pressing the delete account button yourself, and will leave all your data up on the website.) No, you make the request for All Your Data, and then have a script overwrite and delete everything in the file that you'll get... one month later.

Technically if you've made less than 2,000 comments, you might be able to delete it all without needing that. But even the account I made at the beginning of the year to replace squiggleslash (I've been wanting to remove it for a long time... I associate squiggleslash with a few very bad times in my life) has more than 2,000 now and I stopped posting on the 1st July.

I _think_ those are all the squiggleslash accounts but I'm going to have to go through my Yahoo stuff.

And what did we learn from all this kids?

I'm not sure. But it's part of what's killing me about the Internet right now. We need enforcement behind the right to own our data. And you explain that to people and they get upset with you. Which is part of why I want to just end my link to society completely. I fucking hate what we've become.

And if someone from Google is reading this? I can't put into words the degree of blind seething hatred I have for Google(edit) right now. You lie to me about something this important, and send me it from a noreply@google.com address? After years of locking me out of my account due to a failed social media experiment that came up suddenly with nobody thinking there was any reason to close their Google accounts properly?

Google is the worst of the worst.

Minor update: Yes, I'm leaving, but I'm waiting on something else to finish before closing this account. Sorry for any confusion! Also I mentioned this to smittyone, but this applies to you all too: squiggleslash (at) yahoo.com if you want to stay in touch.

It's my intention to delete this account soon. Apparently that's a thing you can do now, so yay.

Why? Part of me wants to kill squiggleslash, because it's the next best thing to killing squiggleslash. And if you don't know what that means, well, be glad you haven't been following my Mastodon. But you'll figure it out by the end of this post.

Here's the thing: this Internet isn't for me. This world isn't for me either but at least the Internet once posed as an escape route for it. It doesn't feel like it any more. I'm sure a part of it is I've "changed" in some senses. There are things about me that I've learned over the last few years that have made many of the comments that I used to oppose as a matter of principle on Slashdot before now apply to me personally. So it's gone from "At least I can tell these little shits to fuck off" to "Those shits actually want me dead."

And to an extent, while I was once interested in the news about our industry, and complained simply because it got boring or complex (another Java framework I'm supposed to keep up to date with?), tech is also now depressing me. We've moved from computers to mobile phones, and those phones have both become a problem (always connected, always harassed), and, as devices, worse (no keyboards, no off-screen navigation buttons, no headset jacks, no expandibility, more fragile, notches, I mean, what the fuck people? What. The. Fuck?) Most of the innovations we see now are either frauds (cryptocurrencies, LLMs), or attempts to steal your lives from you (new tracking technologies, new "apps" designed to track you, new devices designed to track you.)

The world has gone to shit. The Internet has gone with it. The utopia us Internet advocates expected in the 1990s has become a dystopia, and while some of that can be blamed on, say, bad actors after 9/11, the reality is it's mostly some bad technical choices: always on via phones, and centralized social media with sociopathic owners, are probably the worst examples.

I don't really want to be reminded of what things are now. I will ultimately move to the fediverse as much as possible. I have open Discord accounts, and an account on one obscure social network which allows me an escape, but Mastodon and KBin are probably where I'll end up, largely because I'm expecting a culture similar to the 1990s, and because I get to have some control over my own data.

But I can't tell you how much I hate the world we live in. If I wasn't married, with a kid, I would have killed myself by now. I mean that literally. My sole reason for not right now is that my wife and daughter are wonderful people who don't deserve that.

Farewell Slashdot. It was fun when it was fun.

It's kind of bizarre still reading conservatives here claiming they feel the changes Musk is doing show he's committed to freedom of speech. The latest updates are:

1. Twitter today banned people from mentioning their own Mastodon, Facebook, Post.news, Trivel, Nostr (which is amusing because @Jack links to his), or Instagram accounts. It had unofficially banned known Mastodon links for the last few days.
2. Twitter is now banning journalists for asking tough questions. https://mastodon.social/@drewharwell/109534872337733352 Musk has openly stated he sees nothing wrong with banning journalists who "disagree with him".
3. Musk is continuing to lie and claim that journalists were posting "real time doxxing" because they covered the story of the @Elonjet fiasco. ElonJet was an account that tracked the path of Musk's personal jet. Musk lied and claimed a stalker had used it to locate car owned by Musk despite the fact it hadn't even provided a recent update of Elon's jet (let alone his car) within 24 hours of the stalker supposedly using this information. There's nothing Elonjet's information could be used for in any case that'd be useful to a stalker unless they had their own F16. As some wag on Mastodon said, the only thing the information from Elonjet is useful for, aside from the stated aim of pointing out CO2 emissions by celebrities (Elonjet is one of many accounts run by the same person that tracks different jets) is to help provide targeted advertising...
4. Meanwhile, even before the latest bullshit, Musk has banned a collection of left wing groups with no explanation, including groups that protect vulnerable communities from right wing extremists such as those that have been responsible for recent massacres at drag shows, etc.

What a shit show.

Come to Mastodon people, we have cookies! That aren't used for tracking. Or targeted ads.

Seriously, if you're whining about Facebook and Twitter and your problem with them is that they're owned by people who just want to abuse the data you give them, then why the fuck are you still there, and why aren't you using Mastodon instead? A few months ago you could have complained that none of the big names you knew where there, but pretty much everyone from @Popehat to @SwiftOnSecurity, and most journalists worth following, are there now and posting their primary content on the system.

Become a "Friend of John" at joinmastodon.org

So an update on the Twitter takeover.

Mastodon (I'll use Mastodon throughout this post, though technically we're talking about the microblogging part of the fediverse, not any specific server package or node) is currently, for the third time since the Twitter takeover was announced, getting a massive increase in users. The first time was generally "harmless" if you're Twitter, it was people setting up accounts unsure what the ramifications of the Twitter takeover would be.

Second time however saw over 100,000 accounts being added every hour, causing several Mastodon servers to shut down new user registrations. It was prompted by the chaos in the first week of Musk's takeover, culminating in such horrors as the entire FTC privacy compliance team quitting because they couldn't do their job. And recent news about Twitter suggests the fears were entirely justified.

This third time is prompted by... basic nuttery on Space Karen's part. Here's how it started.

So there's a Twitter account that posts real time updates of the flights of private jets owned by certain billionaires, including Musk's. It's probably discomforting to a degree, but it's also pretty difficult to abuse real time flight data. It's not as if someone's going to fly up to 30,000 feet and try to intercept them to get an autograph, or alternatively even if you try to meet them at the airport you'd have difficulty as you'd need to get to the tarmac which, last I saw, has quite a bit of security.

Musk, nonetheless, doesn't like the idea. He did, however, announce he wouldn't ban the account a few weeks ago.

Yesterday he changed his mind. He claims that he changed his mind because a "stalker" climbed onto the hood of the car his son was in. The account under discussion does not track cars, only private jets. The stalker claim also appears to be dubious: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-12-15/elon-musks-stalker-incident-no-police-report-lapd-says

Well, whatever. As it was a break from what he'd claimed, and as the privacy consequences of following the flight paths of private jets is not really as big a deal as it might sound, several journalists saw a story here, and posted Tweets about it.

Musk then banned the journalists. Because they mentioned the account, and mentioned the owner of the account had switched to Mastodon. He, falsely, claimed the journalists had posted "doxxed my exact location in real-time."

There was an uproar. There are politicians involved. Some, such as those in the EU, are threatening financial sanctions.

A sizable number of people at this point announced they were switching to Mastodon. Which started the wave. But wait, we're not done.

In a fit of pique, Twitter has now marked the domain names of the largest Mastodon instances as "Unsafe". As an example, click on Paul Krugman's mastodon.online link linked to from here: https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1603456900632395776

When the second wave started, a sizable number of people said Mastodon wasn't a real threat and that people claiming to switch to it would be back. There were several problems with that, not the least of which is "back to what?" given Twitter's interest payments makes its future very uncertain. The site is collapsing, 2FA issues are getting worse with entire countries having problems due to blocks on 2FA phone numbers, most of the people who knew how the site worked are gone, it's a mess. Plus there's an underlying assumption people wouldn't like Mastodon or the other Twitter alternatives people are flocking to, which isn't happening with the majority of users.

But the third wave seems to be cementing Mastodon as the heir apparent to Twitter. Journalists are migrating to it en-masse. The network effects by these influxes of new users is having an impact.

To be sure, I don't think the current switching numbers will continue to be stable. Mastodon itself needs to grow in capacity. Many large instances, including mastodon.social itself, are currently not signing up new users. There's the risk that proprietary sites like post.news will steal enough of the migration for it to not pass the viability barrier. But... at the same time... Mastodon is where the "too serious for TikTok, too smart for Facebook" conversations seem to be migrating to. For the open source community, this is great. For those of us who liked Twitter... it's something we have mixed feelings about. But Mastodon is a worthy successor.

UPDATE: Musk apparently had a Twitter Spaces chat with a bunch of journalists last night to discuss the issue. It did not go well. Twitter Spaces was removed from Twitter a few hours later. Yes, he removed a Twitter function because he got criticized on it.

So a quick journal update. Twitter is collapsing. While apparently they actually increased the number of subscribers recently, it's mostly people watching the trainwreck. Lots of good people have left. Some are saying they'll stay but it's not clear for how long. My circle of friends has gone from active to virtually gone in the space of two weeks, leaving only a few big names I follow - and then not all of them - tweeting.

And I left on Thursday. Deleted my account. The issue was fairly straightforward: the entire privacy team had quit. That included the lawyers that ensured compliance with FTC mandates about privacy. And frankly, I don't want my history sold to the highest bidder. Nobody does. Even if the company doesn't violate the FTC mandates day after day over the next few months, you and I will have our data sold as an asset when Twitter inevitably goes bust.

Will Twitter go bust? Available evidence is yes. The Twitter experience was ad-free when I left. I thought my ad blocker was the main cause, but no, apparently nobody substantial is advertising. It's crypto-scams and, well, that's about it. The only other source of income is Twitter Blue, and Twitter has suspended Twitter Blue signups due to rampant abuse of the verified mark. Meanwhile, thanks to Musk's leveraged buy-out, Twitter has to come up with $1B extra in revenues every year just to pay the interest on the loans that have been assigned to it to fund the buy-out. It was barely scraping by as it was.

Where are we all going?

I've been saying for a while that Discord is the hot new social network, and it is. It's immensely popular for social networking reasons, despite originally being the gamer's answer to Microsoft Teams/Slack.

For a more Twitter like model though, many are going to a network often referred to as "Mastodon" though that's a little ambiguous. It's also known as the Fediverse, though that term often encompasses nodes and even protocols (such as Matrix) that aren't really what we're talking about. Anyway, whatever you want to call it, it's a decentralized Twitter. You can join an existing server, or create your own, and you can follow anyone on the network regardless of what server they're on. There are some key things to understand:

1. From a Twitter user's point of view, it really doesn't matter what you join as you're probably going to find the people you know and follow them anyway. Insofar as it does, it affects which hashtags trend on your server (the hashtags of other users on the same server in general) and the rules you'll obey. If you just want to follow people you're interested in, converse with friends, and rant at the world occasionally, most are probably fine. Be aware that most Fediverse servers take a dim view of racism, sexism, and transphobia, and even block servers that cater specifically to people who are like that, so that's one area you might want to be careful, but only if you're a fascist dick. Where picking a specific server might help is in finding topics you're interested in trending a lot. But that's about it. Trending topics is overrated anyway.

2. ActivityPub, the underlying protocol, allows you to attach subject lines to your posts. These are, in Mastodon, called Content Warnings (CWs) and if you specify one it hides the body of your post. The idea is that most people don't want to be subjected all day to political rants, discussions about awful things that happen to people like them, etc. Complaining about your racist uncle? Stick it under a CW "Racism", as most people who are subject to racism don't actually want to hear about it day in and day out. The entire point of Mastodon is to not be Twitter. That means creating an environment that's actually nice to be in.

3. You can change server moderately easily. It does mean refollowing the people you were following, but the good news is everyone who was following you still does.

4. There's a lot of office politics and petty squabbling going on in the background between the people who run the network. This is because it's open source. But a fair number would also tell me they consider my depiction of it as "petty squabbling" to be wrong because the issues are fundamental. Well, maybe, maybe not. There's a server out there, counter.social, that uses Mastodon's software that refuses to federate because its founder and the core dev behind the Mastodon software had a big disagreement about whether geographic blocking was a good or bad thing. While I'm sure both made good points, neither really justified the mutual blocking that went on afterwards, which just damaged interoperability for no good reason. Talking of the Mastodon software, there's an alternative called Pleroma which is more efficient, but I've read a bunch of people say they're wary of it because one person involved in development at one point was a full on bigot. He's now no longer part of the project, and there's no evidence the other devs feel the same way, so... (also he left because in addition to being a bigot, from what I can tell he's an entitled jerk who throws tantrums and blames criticism of his politics when others don't agree with his commits. So, yeah...) Anywho, this is all sort of fun to watch, just know that in the end none of it matters. You get your code. You get your own server if you don't like the people running any of the servers you find, it's not going to affect you.

Do I recommend Mastodon? Sure! I would strongly advise though that if you want to join *right now*, you take a load off things and create your own server if you have the resources. If not, try not to join mastodon.social as it's overloaded right now, but there are plenty of others you can join at https://joinmastodon.org/

Finally, a reminder that Tumblr allows you to post nekkid pictures again. So that option is available once more.

(I posted a version of this to my vanity Reddit, but not everyone can post there.)

The AWB is still shit however. I don't for a moment believe that mass shooters become mass shooters because guns look bad ass. What's needed is an entirely different approach, based upon lethality and the number of kills possible.

1. Guns need to be whitelisted, not blacklisted, in terms of those available to own freely and without restriction. The right to self defense, and the needs of recreational shooters, can be catered for without everyone having access to semi-automatics with "lethal" ammunition. As a start, I'd suggest 6 shooter revolvers, long guns with non-detachable magazines with capacities of 5+1 or less, semi-automatic guns that use "less lethal" ammunition (22LR etc) with slightly larger magazines, and double barrelled shotguns, should be whitelisted.

2. All other types of firearm would require: background check, psych evaluation, three references from respected members of the local community (examples would include licensed professionals, judges, elected politicians, etc), training, and a commitment to keeping the weapons secured (and proof that they're able to.) The firearms themselves would become NFA - that is, they'd require a stamp from the ATF. The government would have the right to examine them at any time.

3. All firearms to require mandatory insurance, to cover injuries and deaths caused by both proper and improper handling.

4. Most forms of ammunition to be strictly controlled, with the exception of "less lethal". Most sales to take place only in areas where shooting recreationally is expressly permitted, such as ranges and parks that permit hunting. All unused ammunition to be sold back to the seller upon leaving those areas.

Now, is this constitutional? I have no idea. If not, then we need to reconsider the second amendment. But I'd hope that, given it still permits people to own firearms freely, just not certain models that cause problems with public safety, it would be.

Your thoughts?

I completely condemn the death of George Michael yesterday morning, which was senseless, a needless tragedy, and caused great pain to hundreds of millions of fans and those who enjoy music.

This utterly despicable death comes on the heels of the pointless loss of David Bowie, and combined with Brexit and the election of Trump, is more evidence of cruel and malignant mentality amongst those responsible for the guidance of the universe at this present time.

I call upon those responsible to stop it, and to end their monstrous campaign against humanity.

1. No, Liberals were not "in a bubble". Our reaction isn't because we were surprised by the Trump victory, we knew there was a chance of one, pretty much every liberal I knew in a swing state voted for Clinton because we knew how close it was. Our reaction post election is horror, not surprise. Insofar as we expected a Clinton win, it was because the opinion polls seemed to suggest that. Those of us who trusted Nate Silver knew there was a one third chance of Trump winning.

2. No, Trump did not win because his supporters were called idiots, or racists, or fascists, or both. Nobody has ever said "That man called me a fascist! Well, that does it, I'm going to vote for a fascist who'll most likely destroy the country I live in and love! That'll show them!" Besides, we didn't, for the most part, call Trump supporters any of those things, we called TRUMP a fascist, and we also observed that actual self-described NEO-NAZIs ("Deplorables") were voting for Trump - as in David Duke was voting for him, and any analysis of what neo-nazis were doing showed they were enthusiastic about Trump.

(On that note: are you a fascist for voting Trump? You might be, you might not, but what is clear is that you don't consider fascism to be such a terrible thing that you'd refuse to vote for someone who runs as a fascist. That is not a good thing, and whether you're one or not, you should feel bad if you voted for him.)

2.1 No she didn't. She said half of Trump's supporters were "deplorables", an entirely reasonable statement to make. She never said that half of voters, or that all Trump supporters, were racists, you just made that up.

3. You may think he made it all up just to get elected. But you have no real evidence of that. We will be fearful that Trump intends to continue as a fascist until he proves otherwise. Thus far, he's been all over the map, we have to wait until he's in office before we can judge.

4. No, we will not "Hope for Trump's success". We'll hope for America's success, but to our eyes, that appears to be in conflict with the success of Trump. We'll hope that Trump somehow redeems himself, and turns into something completely unlike what we've seen so far.

Addressing a different crowd...

5. No, she didn't win the popular vote. She did great, and has a plurality, but she's not even near the 50% mark. The EC would have absolutely no mandate - moral or otherwise - to substitute Clinton for Trump. Both candidates lost the popular vote.

6. She was a shitty choice of candidate, get over it. No, she's not Nixon, she's the victim of a 25 year long smear campaign, but she's also a neo-con who doesn't represent liberal values on certain key issues like war and civil liberties, and she's spent so much time cosying up to the various establishments that she appears aloof of ordinary American's problems. She's rightly or wrongly associated with her husband who may or may not have been popular but is infamous for regressive anti-progressive positions during his time in office. In the primaries we may have had two shitty candidates to choose from, we may or may not have picked the best of the two, but she was still shitty.

6.1 Sanders? You really think a country brainwashed for more than a century to think Socialist is a bad word would have voted for Sanders? Really? Even Trump had the good sense to not explicitly use the word that described the ideology he was campaigning on. He wasn't even a great campaigner - he might have beaten Ron Paul if the latter had been the Republicans choice, but nobody else.

7. No, we're probably not going to win back either house in 2018. We're not Republicans, we're obsessed with looking reasonable and getting the blessing of the media, and the media is going to normalize Trump and the Democrats will end up compromising themselves and fucking themselves over. When Obama won, the Republicans went Scorched Earth despite there being no reason to think he was particularly offensive. Democrats need to go Scorched Earth now, but won't, because they're pathetic.

8. No, we shouldn't abandon our principles to win the next election. Supporting minorities didn't kill us, failing to address issues that affect everyone might have done, but the two are not in conflict. We need to abandon people suffering real hardship and discrimination so we can focus on the "White Working Class"? Bullshit. We need policies that lift up the whole of the working classes, not just whites. And while we do so, nothing prevents us from reforming chronically discriminatory institutions, or dealing with hate crimes at the same time.

We have precious little we can do at this stage, but we can resist in our own small ways, and make it politically possible for others with more power to resist too. That's what we must, at minimum, do right now.

Trump has been all over the map about the Affordable Care Act since he "won" the election, stating he'd like to keep the "popular" bits after meeting with Obama, then stating he'd organize a special session of Congress the day after he's inaugurated to repeal the whole thing. (He's apparently unaware Congress will already be in session, but, whatever.) If he chooses to keep the "popular" bits, the health insurance industry will crumble, for what it's worth, because they'll be forced to provide coverage for pre-existing conditions to people who refuse to pay a penny in premiums until they fall ill.

My view is nuanced on Obamacare, so I expect 99% of the replies to this post to miss the point completely, probably just focusing on the headline, but...

...this was entirely predictable. Obamacare was a really bad idea. I said so at the time. I stand by my comments. It was never feasible in the long term and it was politically the most inept attempt to introduce universal health care ever devised.

That it's going... is not to be celebrated, because it means suddenly a huge number of people will be unable to afford health care. That's bad. But simply blaming Republicans and Fascists for its removal is missing the greater picture: it was insanely unpopular. It was something Republicans were able to rally around to defeat Democrats. Think about that for a second: UH should be popular. It should have been a real concern by most of the country that they were going to lose it. When in 2012 Democrats wanted the Senior vote, they pointed out Paul Ryan planned to replace Medicare - UH for seniors - and were rewarded by a shift towards them. Nobody was able to stand up in 2016 and say "Hey guys, Trump will kill Obamacare, you don't want to lose that!" In fact, the opposite happened, Trump used Obamacare against Clinton.

Why did it fail? Because it sucked. It didn't control prices significantly enough that people noticed - in fact, most believed Obamacare was to blame for rising insurance costs. Most had insurance before, they had insurance afterwards, and the insurance afterwards was still going up in price way above inflation. It was the same system as they had before, but it was more expensive.

And those who didn't have insurance before, well, they resented it. Suddenly they were forced to pay for something they hadn't been required to have before, and most people don't have cancer or require an MRI, so they never saw any value in what they were forced to buy, despite the subsidies and so on.

The Democrats, if they ever get back into power, have to decide where they want to go with Universal Healthcare. But next time - if there is a next time - there's really only one option, and that's an income tax funded single payer system. If that's not politically possible thanks to Blue Dogs or whatever, then don't address the issue - it's a waste of time, and it'll result in Democrats being unable to address any other aspects of their agenda. But Single Payer is virtually the only healthcare system you can create that people would be frightened of losing. Which makes it politically the only choice worth pursuing. And in practical terms, it's also the only way to deliver truly universal healthcare.

RIP Obamacare. I'm sorry for the people who'll lose coverage, but I'm not going to blame the Republicans for getting rid of it.

Assuming we don't elect the fascist, both Democrats and Republicans are going to have to do some desperate soul searching this election.

Democrats are going to have to acknowledge that the race was, at one point, extremely close (at the time of writing, it isn't, but what's to say it won't again in the next three weeks.) They're going to have to recognize that this was, in large part, because whatever Clinton's professionalism and qualifications, and however unfair it might be that she's suffered a decades long smear campaign, even without the smears she was never a great candidate. She represents a centrism and a failure to push for substantive change that is anathema to a significant number of people in the US.

How bad is she? Trump's obvious fascism was not enough to make people vote for her. The entire election has just fallen because he's shown himself to be an unpresidential thug towards women. Not because he advocates violence against his opponents. Not because he has promised to abuse the power of the Presidency to punish and imprison political enemies and journalists. Not because he has promised to make it easier to punish those who criticize the rich and powerful. Not because he has scapegoated immigrants for the problems of Americans. Not because he has smeared as rapists, murderers, and terrorists, immigrants and members of minority religions. Not because he has enlisted and cultivated the support of foreign anti-American despots to his presidential campaign. And not because he's been blatant about it, proposing simplistic solutions to complex problems without details or fact based arguments to back them up.

No Presidential candidate in recent history has been so obviously opposed to the values America fought in WW-II to defend, and yet that candidate got close enough to the Democratic candidate to seriously threaten her chances of winning. The Democrats, by any reasonable measure, put up a terrible candidate.

Republicans are going to have to acknowledge that the experiment started in the early nineties (perhaps earlier) to discredit and illegitimatize Democratic Party Presidents has caused unbelievable damage to the country, and destroyed both parties in the process. From Rush Limbaugh's early beginnings as describing the Clinton Regime as an "occupation", to the scorched Earth treatment of the Obama Presidency by Republican legislators, the end result wasn't a stronger Republican party, but a party that lost control of itself enough to find itself under the control of the first Fascist major party presidential candidate in living memory.

That means Republicans will have to bite the bullet and work with Clinton if and when she gets into office. Both parties will need to find points of agreement, areas where ordinary people will benefit from action, from infrastructure to improvements in healthcare, That's not to suggest they should hide their differences, but the last eight years in particular have been completely ridiculous, with Republicans failing to support stimulus and infrastructure improvements they clearly have no problems with, simply because Obama might get credit.

If you want to get good, honest, respected people to stand for leadership of government, it's a good idea to make that government good, honest, and respected to begin with. It isn't.

Whether either side will do any of this is.... I'll be happy if they do, but it really requires both parties to understand what just happened, and to change direction. I'm not sure they can.

(0. You don't have the vote. Sit down, relax, and watch the fireworks I guess.)
1. You're voting for Trump because you agree with him or hate Clinton that much: You're probably a horrible person. You should definitely feel bad.
2. You're voting for Trump because you want to upend the establishment: I don't think you're very bright. Hey, I don't want to live in suburbia any more, but I'm not going to get out of it by committing a Federal felony and letting the FBI know. I'd rather bite my lip until an opportunity arises to move to somewhere better. There are worse things than "the establishment" (like a fascist government), just like there are worse things than "Suburbia".
3. You're voting for Clinton: Probably the best choice given the circumstances. Don't blame you.
4. You're voting for Johnson or Stein in a swing state: OK. Well, I respectfully disagree with your decision, I feel Trump really is that bad, but at least you're letting the politicians know you're not happy with them and what direction to go in.
5. You're voting for J or S in a solidly red or blue state: Cool.
6. You're not voting: what the f--- is wrong with you? Write yourself in if you have to, but vote.

Regardless of my feelings towards your decision, I love you all. I just think those of you who actively support Trump probably deserve a good kick in the sensitive places.

The framing of the 2016 election is that this is the establishment vs the anti-establishment. Clinton represents Washington DC. Trump represents the masses.

This is bullshit.

There are two establishments at war here. One is the obvious one, the party elites. Clinton is more or less part of that, though not as much as people suppose. She's actually an outsider who's fought her way in. If you doubt this for a second, examine the first Clinton's presidential period of 1991 to 2001 (I'm counting the initial campaigns as much as the being in office), and notice the entire period was a war between the Clintons, a Republican establishment who despised them, and a Democratic establishment who didn't trust them and only rallied around the cause when the Republicans went over the top.

The second is the general group that's had power and had the government direct power in their favor for as long as the US has been in existence, primarily the rich, but with a white, male, protestant secondary base as a group to keep happy.

These are, to some extent, the same groups, but the second group no longer believes that the party elites can be trusted to keep bowing to their whims.

Hence the fact a third rate reality TV star whose business successes are built upon fraud and deceit is suddenly able to reach this level of electoral success. Trump is a prime example of someone government has always worked for, yet he's untainted by DC itself. His character doesn't matter. He's part of the underlying establishment, and not part of the elite, so he's the person they pick.

The fact you have to bend over backwards to disassociate yourself with Gawker before pointing out that Thiel's assault on it was a dangerous attack on free speech is a dangerous sign that we've already drifted a fairly long distance towards fascism.

And, FWIW, if Thiel had bankrolled Elton John's (far more legitimate) lawsuits against The Sun newspaper in the 1980s, and bankrupted Rupert Murdoch as a result, there'd have been a public outcry in Britain.

As the CEO of the American Baby Mulching Corporation, I usually avoid taking sides when it comes to National Politics. Privately, I would generally consider myself a Republican, but a corporation such as ours must be seen to be above the fray. In 2001, for example, we donated equally to the campaigns of both Mr George W Bush, and Mr Joseph Lieberman.

But it has become abundantly clear that this country is now facing a very real threat in the form of Donald Trump. Mr Trump has made a number of statements we at American Baby Mulching consider to be seriously worrying. Mr Trump has made many statements alienating our allies. Mr Trump has made it clear he considers the use of Nuclear Weapons a viable form of warfare. He has pitted Americans against one another with his extremist anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant positions, slandering hard working Mexicans and creating a climate of fear.

As a Republican, I would not normally be comfortable endorsing the Democratic candidate for President, but in this case I feel I must, and I believe it would be the right thing for our country. Sure, Mrs Clinton and I have our differences. I personally oppose her positions on taxation, and as the CEO of a major company that requires a steady supply of disposable babies, we obviously abhor her position on abortion.

But in my dealings with Mrs Clinton, I have always found her fair and reasonable. She understands the need for corporations such as ours to mulch babies, harvesting their essential nutrients for eventual supply to ammunition manufacturers. She understands that businesses like my own require flexibility when it comes to environmental regulation, that we would be unable to employ so many workers without a low minimum wage, and she understands the need for regulators to overlook the use of undocumented immigrants and prisoners to solve staffing shortfalls.

For these reasons, I will be casting my vote for Mrs Clinton this year and I urge you to do likewise.

Updated: I'm just going to ignore the discussion at this point. It was supposed to be a comment about how things like that former CIA directory's "endorsement" of Clinton, and Bloomberg's, etc, wasn't necessarily helping those of us who are having to hold our noses and vote for a giant leap right-ward by the "left wing" party in the US this November. You know, humor. As far as the comments section goes, I've never seen such bare faced idiocy in my entire life. No wonder Trump is, current slump aside, doing so well. He might even win.