President Trump has ordered the White House host a UFC match.

If Trump wasn’t Mr. America before, he is now.

It’s the dream that we all share. It’s the hope for tomorrow. (Fuck yeah!)

This goes really well with the news that Shigeru Ishiba’s wife, Yoshiko spent two hours with Trump pretending not to comprehend English so as to not have to engage him.

A lot of vengeance is due Leonard Leo.

The whole Federalist Society is due a third-act housecleaning montage.

Or a third-season pre-season finalé season-climax montage, if you prefer.

The thing is what I wish for immigrants and refugees, I wish for absolutely everyone.

But I see fascism, autocratic tyranny and the hoarding of wealth and power as sickness rather than character flaws.

Well, the signs are ideological, in that they conflict with the state-enforced ideology. Curiously, churches are getting in trouble discussing the beatitudes, since they (yes, Jesus’ own words) are in conflict with the state-enforced ideology.

What is scary is when there’s insufficient resistance to the state-enforced ideology that runs contrary to classic virtues / traditions of compassion, hospitality, mercy, etc. This is the banal evil that lets abductions, renderings, concentration camps and eventually genocide happen.

If you don’t fight with banners today, you’ll have to fight with guns tomorrow.

New parties are useless at the federal level so long as elections are First-Past-The-Post. Even the Ross Perot’s Reform Party in 1992 and 1996 only served as a spoiler for the Republican party, and his was an immensely strong attempt at forming a new party, featuring a reasoned platform which Perot showcased with charts every night on television.

This is why Musk’s America party is laughable, even if he really, really meant it, and offered a platform of sound governance.

While Sanders caucuses with the Democratic party, and they make him sit at the kids’ table with AOC and the other Socialist Democrats, he has been able to get a lot of legislation in or blocked with skilled use of Senate procedure.

But the current situation is well beyond even his powers of procedural mischief. We can’t rely on officials or left-wing news media to save the US from oligarchy and eventually monarchy.

Violent or non-violent, we’ll have to do it ourselves, and it’s almost certain that if we pressure them nonviolently (say with massive demonstrations or with a general strike), then Trump will try to do January 6th once again, probably with more guns and explosives. He’ll certainly bring out his ICE Stormtroopers (now in fancy armor) and try to invoke the military.

So we need to expect a fight, and preferably do what the lords did with John of England, make it super clear that he is out-manned and out-armed and will be given no quarter, if it comes down to violence. (Even the Magna Carta took a few tries)

27+ dead little girls at Camp Mystic has shown us it’s ugly already, but non-violence makes it more difficult for bystanders to dismiss the resistance as terrorists. (FOX News, etc. will paint us as terrorists anyway.)

I don’t know how we get to an organized general strike at speed (usually it takes years, and we don’t have years), and there are groups like indivisible that are trying. I don’t know if it’s enough, especially once ICE gets its massive infusion of equipment, manpower and fancy trenchcoats.

Remember the meme about everyone could have a 32 hour work week and three-day weekends (and a productivity boost) but the billionaires are opposed?

Well everyone could have post-scarcity communism but the billionaires are opposed.

When assessing the degree and quality of liberty in a country, one of the factors considered in academic political science is the requirement of personal identification by law enforcement. It [used] to be a trope of Hollywood cinema that takes place in the Eastern Bloc (Warsaw Pact countries) that ordinary citizens and obvious tourists were routinely harassed by law enforcement for their papers, a stark reminder that here in the states you can even cross state lines without identifying yourself.

It’s getting more interesting as law enforcement is pre-emptively collecting biometric data on school kids and other vulnerable demographics.

Currently wending through state courts is the controversy of using biometric data to identify suspects, which may be regarded as an [unreasonable] search from which we (all, citizens or otherwise) are supposed to be protected, according to the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

In this specific incident, the NYPD is notoriously racist and aggressive, so this may be contempt of cop while black As the adage goes, you can beat the rap but you can’t beat the ride. This assures these young men will have a bad week regardless of their guilt of any wrongdoing.

Not really. Our as I use it implies I, personally, am from the US and that I feel I have some responsibility as a participant in US society (at least, in my case, northern California society).

Contrast using it’s to refer to the US state or their indicating I’m on the exterior.

Just as your can mean possessed by you personally or possessed by you, collectively our pronouns can be versitile and ambiguous.

I was writing in good faith, but it is always up to you whether you can trust that.

ETA: I don’t know the injury rates or the school-to-professional pipeline of association football, which is highly celebrated in throughout the rest of the world. I do know FIFA experiences high levels of corruption and labor exploitation as NFL or AFL, so there are still reasons for society to regard its sports leagues less. Hominids be hominids, I guess.

Meanwhile 77 million Americans really let the Djinni out of the bottle in November.

Maybe every story is Pandora’s jar.

And yet mainstream media has been hesitant to point out dog whistles at least since the George W. Bush administration (circa 2001).

In 2008 some folks noticed Sarah Palin spoke exclusively in dog whistles.

I was going to say, a TBL stripe would fit right in.

I do understand there are some mores (or taboos) that we commonly will find a rationality for, even when there isn’t a logical reason for it. A big one is the emphasis of high-contact sports programs in our education system. A lot of lives get ruined (and a few ended) every year to gridiron football injuries in the US, and yet it is difficult to imagine ending football programs in our high-schools and colleges (even if to switch to sports that involve less risk).

There was a study about instinctive mores, featuring the story of Julie and Mark (an adult sister and brother who go camping, have sex, decide not to do it again, but are not harmed by the encounter), and not only did subjects assert such a coupling was morally wrong, but would seek out reasons to justify their belief, even if it didn’t fit the specific circumstances. Similarly, it’s a common assumption that gay sexual relations between relatives is taboo, even though the commonly understood purpose of the proscription (to avoid conceiving children with birth defects) is not actually possible in the relationship.

For this reason, some social problems that exist (such as the social isolation of boys and young men that puts them at risk of turning to the alt-right) that we are disinclined to address (I’ve heard the sentiment before: sure, they’re suffering, but fuck those guys ) because we have a collective drive to see those issues in a specific way, such as holding contempt for teenage boys as a demographic, even when we know it will drive them into organized hate groups.

I can be that way, especially when I feel I have the moral or logical upper hand.

I remember once being threatened by fellow passengers on a train to be thrown off. I was in a conversation about religion with someone, and it started when I asserted that Protestants (of any given denomination) have no greater moral standing than Catholics. Evidently at the time, I was in a car full of protestants.

I had already asserted my lack of belief. So what happened next was unexpected, and I still can’t explain it. My rival asserted Catholics are deceived by Satan. I countered that Satan, or any other anthropomorphized evil is even less likely than God, or any philosophical notion of an intelligent creator of the cosmos, and that was the point several passengers threatened to physically throw me off the train.

The conversation ceased. I didn’t recant and they didn’t throw me off the train. And I still don’t understand either the logic or the paradigm that defined that as the bar, when my fellow felt driven to threaten violence.

It wasn’t very Christian of them, but in the age of white Evangelist Christian nationalism, I don’t expect self-identifying Christians to actually seek to be christ-like.

Am I missing something? I assume anyone who isn’t direly opposed to the regime and on board with the resistance, is, in fact, 100% good with the gutting of government programs, the loss of benefits and the massive purges, including eventually themselves.

I just assumed that a trillion-dollar far right propaganda machine is more than enough to convince most of the US public they want fascist autocracy, and eventually monarchy. They’re on board with Joffrey Baratheon just killing whoever he feels like.

I was answering the where was I question.

The Right Honorable Ms. Thatcher is the one lacking brainpower.

I do care, in that I feel we should pursue a future with fewer Thatcher-like officials.

We need to be thinking about how 77 million Americans voted for Trump and thought that was a good idea.

And we need to work out how to prevent it from happening again.

One thing is clear, billionaires and politicians are unwilling to relinquish power or wealth, even when their holdings are obscene or they are incapable of governing.

We will have to threaten either their lives or the structures on which their holdings depend, and can’t bluff. And they will likely choose death over surrender.

Nonexistent. Having not even the brain power for an infinitesimal fraction of a fuck to give.

Ultimately, where we all will end up, compressed dust in the geological layer.

The missing just desserts and the resulting dissatisfied feelings are an impetus for us survivors to work towards a society in which Maggie Thatchers (and Adolph Hitlers and Donald Trumps) do not find their way into leadership positions where they can cause great harm.

Ever since the 21st century, voting Democrat (voting against Republicans) has been compulsory to stop the degradation of our institutions to corruption and towards autocratic rule.

But a lot of people didn’t get the memo.

And to be fair a lot of Democrat candidates didn’t offer anything themselves, but to not be the destructive Republican guy.

The memo part has a lot to do with the massive far-right propaganda machine that is literally controlling minds (just not instantly or with a wavy beam)

The latter part has to do with the mass precarity that neoliberalism allows to persist. If you’re going to be in danger under King Log, why not vote for King Heron. And this is an issue across many nations with principle parties being neoliberal and far-right.

Yet, they have huge followings. There are plenty of dudes who happen to be men who serve better examples, but they just happen to identify as men or are assumed to be by default. The models they offer have little to do with their manhood.