Is that a perfect counterbalance? Of course not. But it helps.

For instance, Dems in the states have reacted to Trump’s exploitation of a Senate Dem failure in the last trifecta — mods’ rejection of appeals to nuke the filibuster and restrict partisan gerrymandering — and entirely blunted it.

What is Communism without equal political representation? It's nothing. It's why Bakunin disagreed with Marx on the use of the State to enact Communism in the first place. For him, destruction of the State was step 1.

That may not work well in practice, but he saw the problems correctly.

Ultimately, it was Lenin's flexibility in doing what he felt was realistically needed over pure ideals that had the most to do with their victory -- but it sucks that what he identified as realistically needed was a single party oligarchy. It "worked", but was power alone the goal of the Revolution?

It's unfortunate because there were numerous other Communist factions that the Party picked off one by one, and most of them were significantly more committed to the, y'know, point of the Revolution.

(as in the gundam lol)

What I'm saying is it's time for 00 Bond.

I do love them! They also likely broke the franchise going forward. That is not uncommon, really, but they're probably not going to solve it by Continuity-ing their way out of it.

Either audiences accept that, or the franchise probably needs to take a long enough rest to where they will.

If you’ve been reading @edzitron.com, he’s been saying all year that it’s unlikely that SoftBank had the cash on hand to cover their OpenAI commitments. And we’re now at the end of the year.

The article says they’re doing it to invest more in AI but that they have to sell their only real AI asset to cover other commitments and raise cash is exactly as bad as it sounds.