I am a ghost.

I'm extremely introverted and non-confrontational, so if a situation is too unpleasant or stressful, I vanish. It's what I've pretty much always done. I have no idea how many times I've had someone say to me, " Hey - what happened to you? I just looked around and you were gone."

It's sort of a trap. A lot of it is that, in addition to being introverted and generally non-confrontational, I'm hyper aware of people's emotions, so if I expect that they're going to be angry or hurt, I especially don't want to deal with it. But of course, then I introduce the chance that they're going to be angry or hurt because I "ghosted" them (or as it was most commonly known before the social media era, I "blew them off"). And yes - I feel bad about that.

All in all though, it's still generally less unpleasant than the alternatives.

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

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.

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...

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.

Broadly, for the same reason that tankies larp as communists - because they're some combination of dishonest, deluded and blind.

Some are simply liars and schemers, and there's no real analysis needed there. But that's a minority - most appear to essentially mean well, but they just can't or don't grasp all of the necessities of the position they claim.

I think most of them start out as relatively sincere libertarians, which is to say, they're relatively sincere about opposing government overreach and advocating for individual liberty, at least speculatively.

But then they run up against the fact that other people don't share their views - that some don't even share their basic views and many more don't share all the specifics. And for whatever reason, they can't tolerate that - they're invested in their position and they can't abide the thought that another position not only exists, but could be valid.

That's exactly the point at which their opposition to institutionalized authority and purported advocacy for individual liberty should take over and lead them to simply accept the fact that other people have other views, and should be entirely free to do so, but they're just not psychologically equipped to do that. So they instead jump to the position that those other views need to be stamped out and/or that people should not be allowed to hold them.

And since those other people are rarely willing to relinquish their views, they then tend to jump to the position that they should have the authority to force them to do so.

And that's pretty much the end of libertarianism (or communism as the case might be) right there. It ends up with people who claim to be opposed to hierarchy and institutionalized authority not only proactively stipulating the institutionalization of authority, but treating it as rightfully theirs.

Sadly, I even see the same thing in anarchism - in fact, I see some variation on that dynamic far more often than I see people who actually hold to the ideal of eliminating hierarchy. It's simply that so many people think nothing of presuming the right to decree that other people should not be allowed to [X], apparently completely oblivious to the plain fact that the moment they do that, they're presuming that their opinion on what people should or should not be allowed to do supersedes the opinions of those who hold different views, and since those other people likely aren't going to voluntarily submit, they more often than not then jump to the position that they are rightfully forced to submit. And boom - right there, we already have hierarchy and authority.

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

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?

Does that matter?

I'm toying with the idea that we're all wrong, and it was actually widespread fraud that "won" the election for Trump.

And that's the entire point really.

Behind all of the sturm und drang and all of the Christian nationalist noise and all of the hate and all of the furor is, and has been from the start, a handful of fabulously wealthy psychopathic fuckwads who recignized in Trump an opportunity to protect and even expand their entirely undeserved and grotesquely destructive privilege.

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.

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

Actually, that's been the case for just about exactly 16 years. I watched it happen in real time.

I went through a libertarian phase in the 80s and 90s, mostly because I couldn't reconcile my anarchist sensibilities with the fact that humanity just isn't ready to do entirely without authority. I eventually just gave in and shifted to anarchism, since it's really the only position that's consistent with my principles, and I just treat it as more of an ideal toward which to strive than an actual immediate goal.

In any event, I knew the libertarian movement of the era. It was more right- than left-wing even then, but it was primarily libertarian, exactly as the term implies - primarily focused just on minimizing political authority.

Then came the Tea Party.

The first Tea Party protests were organized by actual libertarians and were specifically against the Wall Street bailouts in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis that Wall Street had essentially single-handedly caused. And notably, they were against the Bush administration.

But then, shortly after Obama's victory, with a suspiciously well-timed and widespread boost fron the legacy media reporting on an even more suspiciously well-timed on-air comment by Jim Cramer, the Tea Party was recast into a Republican protest against the left. And it almost immediately transformed from a series of protests against the Wall Street bailouts to a traveling right-wing carnival of hate. (And conveniently enough, the focus on the Wall Street bailouts completely vanished).

While I saw that happen I didn't recognize the near-immediate Overton Window shift it triggered until I noticed a sudden influx of libertarians on anarchist forums. And they all had the same story - they had abandoned their libertarian forums because they had been taken over by angry, stupid Republicans.

And that became the status quo. The former libertarians mostly settled into their own sub-community of "anarcho-capitalists" and the libertarian movement is now pretty much just angry, stupid Republicans who are only marked out by the fact that they lean more into corporatocracy and militarism than religious fundamentalism and social war.

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.

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.

See - this is why I don't give a shit about copyright.

It doesn't protect creators - it just enriches rent-seeking corporate fuckwads.