I’m sure some of them will still blame Obama too out of habit

Oh I mean you can replace them, but when nothing of the original system remains you’re not so much optimizing the idea as throwing it out to use trains instead

What about those giant quadcopter type things they keep wanting to build to fly from building rooftops in cities for some reason?

Because these same people I know act pretty normal, even reasonable, whenever Trump isn’t the matter at hand. It’s like Trump comes up and suddenly a switch comes on in their brain and they’re cheering for him like a football team. It’s bizarre and surreal and infuriating to see them act that way about a man that makes me fear for my life and that of people I care about.

“Not slaughtering the Jews” does not require letting Isreal slaughter the Palestinians instead.

Because having a revolver or a rifle or something is going to really do anything if the government comes after you personally.

Any actual resistance movement capable of achieving much is going to find a way to arm itself regardless of if the country theyre from allowed guns during peacetime or not, they seem to in other countries that such things have formed in after all. Could be through illicit purchases from elsewhere, or homemade weapons, or theft, or whatever else, it always seems to happen.

Not to mention, these are people that have proven that they’ll try to attack the government if made angry enough. Now, it was Trump that got them angry on his behalf last time, sure, and few if any are likely to eventually change their minds and turn on him, but if you’re about to be the government and dont need these people anymore, is having such people publicly pardoned really the precedent you’re going to want so set?

hypothetically, if they do stop water fluoridation, is it possible/practical to add the proper amount to one’s own water? or would getting the dose right and the required ingredients be dangerous? Or would just using a bit more toothpaste give enough of the effect to make such a thing not worth it anyway?

Morality is easy in some sense, it just requires thinking to figure it out, and in practice being the moral choice when the other side is this bad requires doing basically nothing at all. Retooling the economy to increase the wealth of average people, directly against the forces of the already wealthy seeking to suck up all the available wealth for themselves, is both much harder and requires being given an amount of power that’s rarely won these days.

I dont know that that is even what his supporters want. Like half my co-workers vocally support him, and they seem to legitimately believe that he will just wave his magic wand or whatever and make gas and electricity and groceries cheaper, and make crime go away, and that then all the democrats will admit he wasnt so bad after all. Im not even sure what is worse, disillusioned anger being directed in completely counterproductive places, or whatever sheer delusion believing every promise in his word salad is

assuming they dont get rid of the filibuster, and then put it back on their way out if they manage to lose power again

to be fair, he had more checks on his power then, had less motive for revenge against the justice and electoral systems, and is now even more crazy. Im hoping it will be just some incompetence and international embarrassment, but Im worried that it might be more.

How does the saying go, “if conservatives think that they cannot win democratically, the will not abandon conservatism, they will abandon democracy”? I guess now we get to see if it works in reverse, and winning democratically makes them lose their appetite for changing the election system. Probably not, but one cant mentally concede future elections before they even get cancelled, that just lets them get away with it without so much as an outrage.

In an election with stakes like this one though, doesnt maximizing their chances for a win also serve that? Like, being rich offers you some protection from the law, especially in a corrupt regime, but when the other side is an actual authoritarian, half-assing it so that they win while also being publicly against them is dangerous to one’s personal safety. Even rich people dont tend to get away with being against authoritarians, when they are in charge. If all you care about is power and influence, and you dont actually have any values beyond that, and one side is an authoritarian, then being on their side serves your interest, and being put in power to stop them serves your interest, but publicly failing to stop them puts a target on your back and gives you no power and influence by which to ward it off.

I mean his military. If it gets ground down badly enough, him ordering them to keep fighting would be of little consequence, because armies fight with weapons and ammunition and manpower, not just on pure will.

of course not, but if things get bad enough for him, he may not have a choice

Russia actually can’t go on forever. There’s a reason they’re having to buy bottom of the barrel artillery shells from North Korea of all places. They’ve had gigantic reserves from the cold war to burn through, but they have been burning through it.

I mean, we’ve seen plenty of authoritarianism and facism before plastic was invented, so that seems like a dubious notion

Well, we don’t actually know that the next administration won’t support them any. We assume they won’t because of Trump’s attitude to Ukraine, but the republicans have been somewhat divided over the issue, and Trump just does whatever he randomly feels like, and sending more military aid does benefit the MIC that can pay politicians, so it possible, if unlikely, that they’d get some support from them. There’s also the possibility of support from Europe or elsewhere in the world. Finally, while a Ukrainian loss without foreign support seems quite likely, the pace of Russia’s advances and resource expendature are such that a win for them is no longer likely to be “annex Ukraine or make it a puppet rump state”, but more “take a strip of land close to the current occupation line”, in which case a stronger Ukraine has a better negotiating position and so may be able to give up less.

I mean, I feel like it is quite fair to blame the people who voted for Trump for Harris’s loss tbh. I don’t really buy the "the dems would win if they didn’t just refuse to try to win over conservatives and instead promised to go all-in on progressive policy that I’ve seen lately. I wish we got more progressive policy too, but it’s not like they don’t have any idea what people want, they have whole teams of people whose job it is to figure out that kind of thing. If promising some more progressive policy was a clear winner, why wouldn’t they do it? The answer I generally see implied or stated is that the dem establishment doesn’t want that policy, but that isn’t really an adequate explanation, because politicians are perfectly familiar with dishonesty. If supporting some progressive policy they didn’t like would win them power, they’d just promise it and then just not do that thing upon getting elected. It’s happened for state and congressional races before, so it’s not like that’s never been thought of.

I don’t think Harris’s loss is down to refusing to say the right words to inspire her base or anything like that, it’s down to the fact that, somehow, Trump is very good at inspiring his. She gave it a decent shot, but it’s very hard to win an election against a massive cult of personality. He, and the people that support him, are the problem here.