If Ukraine wants a breather they can agree to it knowing they need to stay alert for the Russians to break it.

If Ukraine doesn't want to play that game, they can just say "we'll agree to a ceasefire when you leave Ukraine permanently" and carry on.

I typed my comment above on my mobile keyboard. I'm just using the standard Google keyboard on my Pixel, nothing fancy. Em and en dash are available by holding on the hyphen, and the ellipsis is available by holding on the period (annoyingly, only when on the numbers/symbols page).

Hold on — why can't you do proper ellipses and dashes on your phone? I don't understand…

This message brought to you by Android.

This would be great if my busy times were actually respected when scheduling meetings. They are not.

Good for you, but still wrong. The party fucked up. It's their job to win elections, and they had loads of opportunities over the last 10 years to act differently and chose not to every time.

It's not the voters' fault that a heavily corporate-friendly party doesn't represent them well enough to reliably get votes. That's some victim blaming thinking right there.

Uh, you missed a few steps. Like the people voicing concerns over Biden's mental health and being told to shove it while the party hid him from public view as much as possible. And then when they couldn't hide it anymore they still tried to gaslight us that we didn't see what we just saw.

And then finally they succumbed to that public pressure when it was far too late to have an actual primary and rally as a party, instead being told to vote for someone who was candidate-by-default.

The Dems constantly try to pander to the right which only fuels their real enemy in elections: voter apathy. If they actually governed and gave more than lip service, they'd never lose another election.

That's why I snatched up a Bolt before Chevy (temporarily, they say) discontinued the line. I even did upgrade it a little to get heated/cooling front seats and a heated steering wheel plus the extra safety features. $32.5k with a $7.5k rebate from the federal Clean Vehicle Credit. So $25k for a car with a 175-280 mile range. (175ish in winter when the battery is less efficient, 280 in summer).

Of course the IRS fucked up the point of sale rebate when I was purchasing, but it's finally incoming with my taxes this year.

I think Jerboa was being pitched as the best RiF alternative super early on in the exodus. I also found myself on it but it never clicked for me.

I was on Connect for a while but there were some things that were a bit harder than they needed to be with different account/instance/filter management. Moved to Voyager and I'm quite happy with it, very smooth experience.

This is very true. ALSO, if you think the Democratic party gives two shits about the economy for working class people, then I have a bridge to sell you.

Allow me to ask again: who did you vote for in the last 3 presidential primaries?

Who did you vote for in the 2016, 2020, and 2024 primaries?

And what exactly makes you think that? I'm royally pissed because I've done everything to stop this and yet centrists can't stop blaming everyone but themselves for the problems they caused. Take some goddamn responsibility.

Gotcha, so complete dismissal. You know that just proves my point, right? Stop blaming a hypothetical nonvoter for the sins of the Democratic party. If you need to blame voters, blame the ones who backed the wrong horse.

Look, I'm not a protest nonvoter but this line does a lot more harm than good. You get to feel smug but all you're doing is alienating the people who voted against this despite having to vote against their conscience to do so.

I feel ideologically aligned with people who couldn't stomach voting for either party, because despite all the stupid mockery both sides are bad. The Republicans are actively evil and the Democrats are knowingly complicit. It's not equally bad, but it's all bad. Every smug comment like yours chips away at my desire to hold my nose and vote for centrist neoliberals against my own interests.

How about instead, for a change, we blame the people who voted in loser candidates like Hillary and Biden? 1/3 is a failing grade, and we're all paying for it because of Hillary's pied piper. Yet people like you continue to blame the people who didn't like a bad candidate.

For those that don't know what the French above said:

Vive le roi = long live the king

Vive la révolution = long live the revolution

Yes, but it's under inflation every year so real wages are still going down. Yet somehow the C-suite can afford to give themselves raises above inflation, even while grumbling about funding and cutting positions left and right. Weird how that works.

Oh good, I'm sure this will be covered in my annual "merit increase" that's not called a Cost of Living Adjustment because it doesn't actually adjust for cost of living.

Did you name your cat Jelly just so their toes would be Jelly Beans?

I tried to point it out in the reply you ignored, but you need to look up what "rigged" means. It doesn't necessarily mean a guaranteed outcome, it means conducting something fraudulently to give one particular outcome or person an advantage. That's quite literally what the DNC does, by their own admission, and from your own comments it doesn't sound like you disagree. You just can't accept that those actions equate to "rigged."

The courts didn't say the DNC hadn't rigged it. The courts said the DNC hadn't broken the law, based on the DNC's argument that it was within their rights to – you guessed it – rig the whole thing.

Obama was cheated, but he caught the DNC off guard. They learned their lesson from that and prepared more for Hillary's coronation that Obama disrupted.

Obama was also an insider, so they didn't fight back quite as hard. But they used a lot of the same dirty tricks, stoking racism against him and accusing the opposition of sexism.

You're arguing on a very narrow definition of "cheated." If you agree that the Democratic primaries were not democratic, then it's just a matter of semantics. The DNC had rules on their charter to conduct primaries impartially. They did not abide by those rules, and flat out said they didn't have to. That's conducting a supposedly impartial primary fraudulently in order to give advantage to their preferred candidate. It's not criminal fraud, but it is the definition of rigging. They did do it to Obama and he overcame it, they did it to Bernie learning from their mistakes and Bernie couldn't overcome it.