Sorry - I edited that because I could just see some tight-assed mod getting all twisted up over it, and I wanted the underlying message to not get deleted, and only saw your response after the fact.

But now that you mention it…

Lindsey Graham can always be counted on to suck up to whichever Republican is currently getting the most headlines.

I sincerely have no idea.

The narrative that a leftist couldn’t win is repeated so predictably and so often and by so many people that the whole idea has become sort of detached from reality, and there’s no telling what would happen if it was actually a possibility.

And particularly since the one thing I’d pretty much guarantee is that the concerted efforts on the part of the ruling class to prevent a leftist from running would be as nothing compared to what they’d do and say in order to prevent one from winning.

Not “now” - I have been for years. Ever since I figured out that the US has no future - that the ruling class is already preparing to put down any opposition (that’s why we have a militarized police force and the largest prison system in the world, and that already, before Trump’s proposed detainment camps that are supposedly going to be built to hold undocumented immigrants, except that the undocumented immigrants are going to be deported, so self-evidently they’re going to hold someone else).

There is no way to make any lasting change in the US. The ruling class is too firmly entrenched and too out of touch, and frankly too fucking insane. They will, and already intend to, go to war to protect their grotesquely destructive privilege, and the nation will not survive that.

So the only hope is that our descendants will build something better out of the rubble we’re going to leave behind.

And again - that was already the case. Trump is just accelerating the process.

We’re in a timeline now in which truth is entirely irrelevant.

Trump supporters are necessarily one of two things - deluded or dishonest. Either they’ve been manipulated into not seeing the plain fact that he’s a corrupt and self-serving autocrat and an existential threat to the US, or they know exactly what he is and just don’t admit it publicly.

In either case, truth and reality count for nothing.

That’s the deal.

Literally.

So as is generally the case with this sort of story, I find myself wondering if he’s such a monster that they can’t sweep it under the rug or if he just happened to piss off the wrong people.

Sexual assault in the military - like church pedophilia, police brutality and political corruption - is one of those crimes that is deplorably common and almost always ignored. So when they do prosecute someone for it, there has to be something else to it. It can’t just be that he’s thought to be guilty of the crime, since hundreds or even thousands of others are at least as likely guilty of the same crime, and are not even under threat and quite likely never will be. So what’s special about him?

It’s not really relevant to anything, and it’s certainly not as if he should be spared just because so many others are allowed to get away with it (exactly the opposite in fact - each and every single one of them, without exception, should face the full force of the law, and the fact that so many don’t is a prime example of why and how this country is going to shit).

Still though, I find myself wondering, as I often do.

Because people are miserable and desperate and they want to blame someone or something, and bigotry is simple and superficially satisfying.

And because some number of those who actually are to blame for their misery and desperation have self-servingly encouraged them.

The next year or two is just going to be an orgy of face-eating leopards eating faces.

There was a time when I would’ve sympathized with and supported the Israelis.

But that was 40,000 murders ago.

While the decision to stop publishing the six books was made by Dr. Seuss Enterprises, right-wing outlets like Fox News mischaracterized it as a book ban.

Unsurprisingly, it has actually been Republican-backed laws like Tennessee’s that have resulted in the banning of Dr. Seuss books from schools.

And that’s the way it works pretty much without exception - private individuals and businesses and such make independent decisions and the Republicans scream that they’re being oppressed, then they pass laws in the name of freedom.

Even with as insane as the Republican agenda is, and as deluded as their supporters necessarily must be, that particular aspect of it really stands out to me. It’s just so perfectly Orwellian.

I’ll never stop being cynically amused by the fact that the self-styled American patriots are letting the Russian government tell them how to vote.

Setting aside the anti-health and anti-sanity aspects of this, the thing that gets me is that Republicans somehow continue to believe that they’re the party of freedom when everything they do involves ever more regulation.

They frame things as if the Democrats are oppressing people and the Republicans are fighting for their freedom, but the exact opposite is actually true - the way that things actually work, consistently, is that Democrats want to give people the freedom to do things and Republicans are fighting to destroy those freedoms. Their reaction to every single thing they encounter is to pass a law against it, which is literally the exact opposite of freedom.

Now granted - most of their positions are insane, so it’s not as if rationality should be expected, but this just seems to be something so simple and so obvious that they can’t possibly miss it. Yet somehow they do.

Do people just not know who and what Chris Roberts is?

This is what he’s done throughout his career - the only thing that’s notable about Star Citizen really is the scale of it and thus the opportunities he has to find ever more things to obsessively tinker with.

It’s entirely possible that if Microsoft hadn’t bought out Digital Anvil and given him the boot, this wouldn’t even be Star Citizen - it would be Freelancer, coming into its 25th year of delays.

Sort of, but not quite. I get where you’re going with that though, and it’s the right idea.

The explicit goal of Project 2025 is simply to make it easier for greedy and power-hungry privileged right-wing assholes to bring harm to people and to the nation as a whole for their own imnediate benefit. So yes - it actually serves as a sort of backhanded guide to what is of value in government.

It’s just that doing the opposite of what Project 2025 calls for would mean expanding agencies and regulations rather than reducing or eliminating them, and that’s likely not the best option, since it could just lead to governments run rampant instead of corporations run rampant.

As with most things, the optimum lies between the two extremes.

But yeah - at the very least, it can be taken as a rule of thumb that there’s a direct correspondence between the value a thing provides to the people and the nation as a whole and the degree to which Project 2025 opposes it and intends to destroy it.

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Any ideology that bans books is self-evidently intellectually and philosophically bankrupt.

That word “overt” isn’t there by accident.

There’s a significant difference between an oligarchic kleptocracy that has to pretend to be a representative democracy and an oligarchic kleptocracy that doesn’t have to bother pretending to be anything else.

I assume it’s going to go until World War III, and until the US is an overt kleptocratic police state.

Really.