The comment above which started this discussion was complementary, and you admitted as much in your reply to it.

Others have also said and provided examples of the phrase sometimes being complementary.

You yourself moved from saying:

It is always cynical to describe someone as a “political operator,” because that phrase is inherently negative.

To:

It usually is, as in, more often than not.

Ie. sometimes it is positive.

You were wrong about a phrase sometimes having a different connotation, it happens, who gives a shit?

You’re right about the smooth bit. Don’t know how that happened.

In any case, operator isn’t necessarily negative, neither is political operator. It can be and often is, but not necessarily. I often see it being used as a compliment.

I did a google, here’s an example from NPR, which is clearly complimentary:

Street — who calls Obama “one of the biggest celebrities on the planet at the moment” — notes that he is “always able to put a distance between himself and whatever performance he’s giving. He knows he’s playing a game. He knows this is a bit of light relief, a bit of entertainment, but he keeps his dignity … and that seems to me a very clever trick. It speaks to him as a very sharp political operator.”

https://www.nhpr.org/politics/2012-05-10/obama-heads-to-hollywood-conservative-group-mocks-celebrity-president

It describes someone who is manipulative in a selfishly power-seeking way.

Not necessarily:

It describes how you achieve your aims, not necessarily what your aims are. Of course, given this is politics we’re talking about, it’s understandable you took it to be necessarily negative.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Mamdani is a relatively left-wing Muslim and non-white politician in America. It’s not cynical to say that he needs to be a smooth political operator, because if he isn’t he won’t survive.

And if he does fail, he’ll be replaced with a candidate who is almost certainly worse, and leave left-wing politics and colleagues in a worse position.

It’s not fair that the president is a rapist, while Mamdani can’t make even the slightest misstep (or something that can be portrayed as such), but that’s American politics. The deck is stacked.

Great for vegetables, IME.

Same here.

Meanwhile a reliable full size oven can easily cost 1000$/€ and consumes much more energy. Not always cheap/easy to install either.

For people on a budget, who often live in a small/rented place, an air fryer’s a life saver. Plug it in, cook something, pop it away if you need some more space. Don’t even need a kitchen. Just use it next to an open window or vent.

A rice cooker is similarly useful. Cheap, but you can use it to cook far more than rice, keep stuff warm, and largely replace a stove top. Once again, often without the need for space or installation.

Meh.

I have an old NEFF microwave. Fixing that involved popping in some new mica paper for a few bucks.

A more efficient and quicker small convection oven you can easily buy for 30 bucks and pop in a cupboard when you’re not using it.

And breathing in fly ash from the coal, which contains increased concentrations of uranium and thorium.

Compared to that an airfryer is a god send.

Don’t connect your tv to the internet and pay for streaming.

Connect it to a pc and pirate whatever you want, in higher quality, and for free.

I heard a story of someone who was about to be conscripted into the dutch army back in the day.

Before his intake interview he stuffed a load of peanut butter between his butt cheeks.

When they had him come in for the interview, he told them he looked forward to serving, but then proceeded to take a big scoop of peanut butter from out of his pants and eat it.

I assume that wouldn’t work in Russia, because you’d run the risk of becoming a general.

Sorry grandpa. All your friends are dead.

Oh, yeah.

But I mean piracy filesharing. That was already popular on dial-in BBSes in the 80s.

Filesharing pre-dates the web.

Sorry to tell you this, but my father is not a medical doctor.

Almost 50 years ago…

When’s your next prostate check?

C64?

It was also called piracy back then too. It was incredibly common on the Commodore 64 starting in the 80s . They’d often call themselves crackers, because you needed to crack the piracy protection to be able to copy disks.

Those disks and even cassettes would then be shared from person to person or sold in shops or on second hand markets. AFAIK this is also when 1337/leet became popularised, to avoid censorship on BBSes, where file sharing was also possible.

For example, a magazine from 1991:

Note the group is called Elite productions and they call themselves pirates. There’s also mention of crackers, specific events, and I especially enjoy that a piracy/cracking group felt it necessary to add a copyright logo next to the name of their piracy group which was called Elite Productions.

The meme is about never compromising with fascists.

You can argue that both Stalin/Molotov and Chamberlain had good reasons to sign a (temporary) compromise with fascist Germany. Which means you believe you should sometimes compromise with fascists.

Or you can argue that Stalin and Chamberlain were wrong to compromise with fascists. Which means you agree with the meme that you should never compromise with fascists.

But this meme was originally posted on lemmy.ml, where a lot of users will reflexively defend Stalin for compromising with fascist Germany (they’re also here) but then post memes which say it’s never ok to compromise with fascists. Which is double think. You either think it’s sometimes acceptable, or you think it’s never acceptable to compromise with fascists.

Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort people feel when their beliefs conflict with each other. People often react in weird ways when they’re suffering from it. You can witness plenty of it in this comment section.

Pure whataboutism.

Meme: Don’t compromise with fascists!

Me: Remember that time Stalin compromised with fascists?

You: That’s a distraction!