“Figured it was a bad idea” actually means that some people were against it because they believed semantic class names were the solution, I was one of them. This was purely ideological, it wasn’t based on practical experience because everyone knew maintaining CSS was a bitch. Heck, starting a new project with the semantic CSS approach was a bitch because if you didn’t spend 2 months planning ahead you’d end up with soup that was turning sour before it ever left the stove.

Bootstrap and the likes were born out of the issues the semantic approach had, and their success and numbers are a testimony to how real the issue was, and I say this as someone who never used and despised bootstrap. Maintaining semantic CSS was hard, starting was hard, the only thing that approach had going for it was this idea that you were using CSS the way it was meant to be used, it had nothing to do with the practicality. Sure, your html becomes prettier to look at, but what good is that when your clean html is just hiding the monstrosity of your CSS file? Your clean html was supposed to be beneficial to the developer experience, but it never succeeded in doing that.

I’m speaking in general terms because I’m not familiar with French politics, I just live in a neighboring country. But are we really surprised that it’s moving in that direction? In a general sense, the right will always blossom in climates like these, migrants pouring in from decades of war, prices skyrocketing, the Russia affair further polarizing and instilling fear, a general lack of progress. But more importantly, while the right does its best to cultivate the most basic of emotional responses, the left seems unable to come up with anything attractive let alone exciting. And we can argue that progress and good choices can be utterly dull and unappealing, at some point we will have to realize that good ideas still need to be marketed to the people and that it’s not enough to equate anything right-wing with fascism and hope that it will do the heavy lifting. We have become preoccupied with complaining about the right in such a way that we can no longer allow critique of what the left is failing to do. If they can do no good then we can do no wrong.

Oh look, you’re smart enough to understand that reasoning about your ridiculous statement would undermine it. Maybe there is hope.

Sorry what exactly is it that you don’t get? That people would show empathy and help this guy out?

Crap I’ll never be able to slide that into a casual conversation.

What is silly is the idea that that is in any way relevant to what we were discussing here. And I use the word discussing lightly. There’s a big difference between the insinuation that a foreigner is at risk for tunneling into the Russia and the Russian government eavesdropping on its population.

Nothing is going to happen when your traffic moves through Russia. In fact, you have more chance that something will happen to you if you don’t.

Please do tell what could go wrong. Is the internet sheriff going to turn up?