WatDabney

Junkies'll do some crazy shit for some o' that sweet, sweet righteous indignation...

Civilizations are born, then they live, then they die.

The US is critically ill, and at this point, it looks terminal. It might not be, but the odds are that it is.

And that, as they say, is that.

I presume as an alternative to paying him...

Lots of monochrome in this thread.

If you took pretty much all of the finger-pointing positions to which individuals are stubbornly clinging to the exclusion of any and all other positions and strung them together with "and"s, you'd have the closest approximation yet to the reality.

Entirely typical.

Republicans have already dicked veterans over so hard that private charities have to try to make up for all of the broken promises.

And it's still not enough for them.

Hey c'mon - it's either save the world for our descendants or make sure a handful of corporate executives, stockholders and bankers are able to afford more houses and bigger yachts. The choice is obvious, right?

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard." - H.L. Mencken

There is zero chance that there is not going to be fairly significant violence from Trump's supporters between November and January.

It will happen, absolutely no matter what.

Either he's going to lose, in which case they're going to engage in retaliatory and/or insurrectionary violence, or he's going to win (or be handed the win by the Supreme Court Rubber-stamping Service), in which case they're going to engage in celebratory, very enthusiastic and likely officially sanctioned violence.

That's it. At this point, there is no third option. Trump, in his pathological narcissism and complete lack of empathy or sound reason, has fostered an atmosphere of anger and hatred, and it's not a question of if it will result in violence and murder, but simply of when and of what specifically will touch it off.

Amongst all of the Republican insanity of recent years, the thing that definitely stands out to me the most, as the weirdest, is their slavish subservience to Putin.

I understand it from an extremely cynical point of view, but still, it's just so weird snd so directly contrary to everything they've ever claimed to stand for. It's hypocrisy and malfeasance and amorality and pathetic subservience all rolled into one and cranked up to 11.

Israel is a rogue state.

While there are strategic advantages to that - if he wins, it'll feel more like a mandate that will justify whatever horrifying shit his administration intends to do and if he loses, it's an instant objection - I tend to think that the real foundation of this whole attitude is just Trump's delusional narcissism.

Trump's reality isn't rooted in actual objective reality. It's based on himself and himself alone - if he believes it, then, to him, it is and can only be true, and he believes whatever serves to assuage the squalling demands of his titanic ego and his childish greed and need for attention.

I have no doubt that in the fantasy universe in which he actually lives, he really can't possibly lose. It's just in the real universe - the one the rest of us live in but he does not - that he can (and hopefully will) lose.

Rather obviously, there's one and only one real reason why they would try to bar federal monitors - because they don't want any witnesses to whatever they're planning.

I'm with him 100% on the first bit - at this point, the single most important thing the Dems have to do is stop bickering.

As for the rest, at this point I don't even much care. I can see arguments both for and against in both directions - either choice is going to involve some risk but either choice can be made to succeed.

So the important thing, and really the ONLY important thing, is to pick one and run with it. Stop with the dilly-dallying and the second-guessing and the bitching and moaning and hand-wringing and make a choice and stick with it, so we can focus ALL of our attention on pounding those fucking fascist traitors' dicks into the dirt.

rogue state

noun

1. A state or nation acting outside of the accepted international norms and policies.

Well, like, to me, my thing is... a video image is much more powerful and useful than an actual event.

Like back when I used to go out, when I was last out, I was walking down the street and this guy came barrelling out of a bar - fell right in front of me and he had a knife right in his back - landed right on the ground.

And I have no reference to it now. I can't refer back to it. I can't press rewind. I can't put it on pause. I can't put it on slo-mo and see all the little details.

And the blood, it was all wrong. It didn't look like blood. The hue was off and I couldn't adjust the hue. I was seeing it for real, but it just wasn't right.

• Slacker (1991)

Unfortunately, there's likely some truth to that. In spite of the SC fairly consistently destroying the rule of law to rule on Trump's behalf, if even one time they rule against him, even on just one ruling that's so vividly obvious that the otherwise wholly corrupt and compromised SC can't possibly cobble together an excuse to rule in Trump's favor, that really is likely to touch off more violence quicker than just about anything else.

Which neatly sums up why I do not and will not even have a Steam account, but buy many games from GOG.