Good to hear! Thanks!

Good riddance. I hope they succeed.

Does this extend to not discussing plans, posting information about which states may be taking measures to protect their citizens or how effective those measures might be, or discussing things like resistance or mutual aid? Those seem like pretty important topics to be able to discuss.

I literally changed my discord profile to a Tank Girl theme hours before Trump was elected when I was still pretty sure it’d be Harris. Yeesh.

Imagine straddling the Gen X/Millennial line. We doubly don’t exist.

What did we get out of it, though? Kind of a lot, actually.

We legalized marijuana in a lot of places, got marriage equality in a lot of places, and did actually push some positive changes in general. How long they’ll last? How many survive even now? Eh… Well, that depends on how well we manage to get out from under the shadow of the boomers and bring our ideals to the next generations.

I’ve been watching a lot of old 80s and 90s movies recently, and I noticed something starkly different from most of the movies I’ve seen coming out in the past decade or so, particularly the glut of superhero movies we had for a while there. With very few exceptions, all the protagonists were anti-establishment.

Star Wars, Ghostbusters, the Mario Movie, the Breakfast Club, the Princess Bride, it goes on and on and on. The heroes were all rebelling against some ignorant authority that either didn’t understand the damage it was able to do or didn’t care about hurting those who had no power. As a result, when I was coming up my generation felt very much against the established status quo. Even the kid-targeted stuff in the early 90s, it was all gross-out humor and struggling against adult authority in favor of personal autonomy. Nickelodeon takes over your school. As a teenager it was grunge and punk and everything being ‘extreme’.

The impression I get from a lot of the late 00s and 2010s fictional media, though, and much of what I’ve seen in the 20s so far, has been stories that are on-side with some big establishment. Even Peter Parker was turned into a suck-up for some billionaire. There are still instances of anti-authoritarianism, but it doesn’t seem to be the prevailing narrative the way it was. Instead it largely seems to be about going along with society and not bucking the system.

Maybe what we need, if we want to change things, is to instill that pushing against the establishment in the next generation again. That 70s and 80s era Muppets vibe. Turtles that live in the sewers because if they lived on the surface, the powers that be wouldn’t understand them. Otters living in poverty and being exploited by hoity-toity customers who decide not to pay them for their laundry services on Christmas in the first five minutes of the movie.

Did Chris Pratt Mario get into a chase with Koopa cops while fighting a corrupt authoritarian government? No he did not. He was on the side of a social order that was being disrupted by an evil musician.

Artists need to change the narrative and be intentional about it.

I’m looking at moving to the Netherlands! I have somewhere to stay, I’ve been starting to learn Dutch, and I’m in the process of getting all my plans sorted out! I do have some friends in Germany that I want to come visit at some point once I’m settled in, though, so maybe we could meet up at some point! It definitely would be good to sort of build some community in Europe!

I spent this morning getting the paperwork ready to get my passport and learning what I need to do to get out. I’m going to need to figure out some financial stuff and either sell or ship my vehicle, but the more I look the more appealing it seems. This has been a wakeup call for me. Things in the US are really screwed up, even before a second Trump term, and I absolutely can go live a better life somewhere else.

I mean it seems like you’re just kind of asserting that it will be there. Just repeating it doesn’t make it more true.

I guess everyone needs a hobby.

I’ve honestly just been trying to keep my head up and hope for the best. I talk to the people in my life, encourage them to vote, share my political opinions where I can, but I’m ready for this election cycle to end already. I’m sick of worrying if I’m going to have to flee the country some time in the next year to avoid ending up in some sort of camp or just lose access to medications and legal protections. I’m ready to have a solid Democrat that I’m maybe mildly annoyed with for the next 4-8 years and try to drag them further to the left rather than this danger mode existential horror shit.

I feel like enough Americans are in the same boat or similar boats that we’ve got this, but it sure is tense waiting to find out.

You’re shifting the goalposts, and that still doesn’t work.

An infinite number of monkeys typing for an infinite length of time doesn’t necessitate that they stop once they reach 191,726 characters and then start over again. It also doesn’t necessitate that they never repeat a pattern of characters. In fact, it’s incredibly likely that they repeat more or less the same patterns more often than not. They’re probably going to repeatedly press keys that are in proximity to one another while moving around the keyboard. Things like: “;ml9o fklibhuasdfbuklghaol;jios9 fdlhnikuasdf”.

If you’re measuring whether or not eventually you’ll produce Hamlet by typing out every single possible permutation of 191,726 characters on a keyboard, well… yeah, of course you will. But infinite monkeys aren’t a grid search system for combinations of keystrokes, they’re monkeys mashing the keys without knowing what they mean or in all likelihood what a typewriter or computer is.

You want monkeys on keyboards? You’re mostly going to get gibberish.

If you put a bunch of yarn in a room with some high-powered rotating fans, are they eventually going to produce a sweater? Probably not. You’re just going to have a bunch of tangled yarn. Sweaters require a consistent repetition of a non-random pattern of movement. Alter that pattern only a handful of times and you won’t have a sweater even if you do manage to stumble across some version of that pattern accidentally.

Is there a non-zero chance? Eh… maybe? But there’s no reason to assume that it’ll actually happen given any amount of time unless someone comes along who knows how to make a sweater and does so.

With monkeys and keyboards you’d be lucky to get a few lines of anything resembling English in iambic pentameter.

Ah, fair.

So, what? Just report on it with no further commentary than “Yeesh.”?

Considering that there are an infinite number of potential arrangements of keystrokes that aren’t Hamlet? I’m honestly not fully convinced that you’d necessarily get Hamlet to begin with, let alone in a finite amount of time. Could you? Sure. But an infinite set minus an infinite number of possibilities still leaves an infinite number of possibilities. Any or all of which could not be Hamlet.

There are an infinite number of values between 1 and 2, but none of them are 3.

Do I think tiptoeing around the issue and maintaining the status quo is a tactic to retain the votes and donations of Zionists? Absolutely. It’s 100% par for the course of political game-playing. Do I wish they’d speak out against it and completely cut off all support for Israel? Also absolutely.

Do you not think the DNC is making a calculated political move to keep people who care more about supporting Israel than doing what’s right on-side?

Whether or not the DNC has their heads up their asses on their political strategy doesn’t lessen the reality that Harris has the potential to be pushed against Israel and has already signaled her disapproval of Netanyahu or that Trump has come out and told the genocidal monster to ‘finish the job’.

Israel’s treatment of Palestine has certainly been unacceptable for much longer than Biden’s presidency, but their current bout of genocide is much more recent. The DNC has been faced with a political decision about whether it’s a greater risk to alienate centrist Israel supporters or leftist Palestine supporters in an election year when the literal collapse of any semblance of American democracy is on the table. The stakes, domestically, literally could not be higher. If we lose, it’s likely to end in either a generation of extreme fascist authoritarianism or outright civil war to prevent it. We’re very likely to have two supreme court seats coming up in this next term, which would give Trump five appointments to the supreme court, as well as the opportunity to dismantle any semblance of anything good the US has achieved in the past generation.

Biden was faced with an impossible choice, and so is Harris. But that danger will literally evaporate on November 6th. At that point, a narrow margin of support isn’t a matter of life or death for the preservation of some semblance of American democracy.

The US has overwhelming military dominance and an incredible potential for force projection. That power falling into the hands of a fascist who cozies up to the world’s worst dictators would be an absolute disaster for the entire world. Unimaginable as it may be with the current atrocities being committed by Israel, it would be worse for Palestine. It would be worse for everyone.

Trump was bad enough the first time around, but he didn’t have the agenda he does now. He didn’t have a Republican party ready to burn down any chance of the US having legitimate governance in the next half-century without a civil war.

Trump winning at this point would be a global catastrophe.

When the storm has passed, we can at least try to pressure Harris. Is it guaranteed? No. But Trump is guaranteed to make it much much worse.

Harris at least snubbed Netanyahu. That’s a better sign than we’re seeing from anyone else in the running for office.

Do you think we’d have had more success pushing Trump left in 2020?

Harris may be able to be pressured to take a morally justifiable position on Israeli war crimes after the election is over. Trump most certainly will not, and will cheer on the genocide.

Jill Stein will do nothing, because she will not win.

I’m not old, I’m Millie. Hormones keep me fresh. :3