@dnkboston @HeavenlyPossum @roblosricos @the5thColumnist @ShredderFeeder

A system that requires winning every single election in order to avoid fascism (and then still does a bunch of fascism anyway in the name of "unity" and "bipartisanship" and "winning the middle") is a fascist system. These are not "the imperfections of Democratic candidates", these are the built-in conclusions of a governmental system built by wealthy white supremacist patriarchs to maintain their own power against increasing popular calls for actual liberty and equality. And, historically, liberalism (including conservatism, obviously) has always preferred throwing in with fascism rather than actually embracing positive progress, because liberalism is more ideologically compatible with fascism than it is with anticapitalist progressivism, and because the people targeted for extermination by fascism are already the people who liberal capitalism treated like shit anyway (see: French poilce and politicians during the Nazi occupation who turned over their own citizens to the Nazi extermination machine)

Maybe those "meaningful recommendations" are more worth considering than you seem to think. It would genuinely be easier to completely start over than to try to reform the system into something resembling a land of liberty and justice for all. There is vanishingly little left of value in the current system thanks to the people who've run it for the past few decades.

The framers were less worried about, and planned less for, a member of their own elite class seizing power entirely for himself rather than sharing and rotating power among the members of that elite class.

And so now we have Trump, and Trumpism, and I want to make this as clear as absolutely possible: the US constitution has utterly failed and is no longer particularly operational. Trump routinely and openly violates the constitution and most elites don’t seem particularly concerned about it, in a way that reflects its failure. Even if Trump is no longer in power, it seems unlikely that anyone who took his place would simply undo all of the precedents he has established.

More importantly, the US constitution and the political system that it established *produced Trump* by its normal operation, even taking into account all of the changes made to the constitution and that political system in the wake of the US civil war, the New Deal and civil rights movement and Great Society, and the post-Watergate kludges.

It failed. It’s done.

@tombzz I agree. The general conspiracy theory rabbit hole tends to spiral into pretty wild claims that read like satirical comedy.
The unknown civilizations theory, on the other hand, provides a great starting point for exploring the types of beings that could have evolved from Earth’s older epochs.

It could also be a nice way to address why some space-faring level beings would have any invested interest in Earth, let alone resemble Earth creatures beyond the point of convergent evolution.

It's been 3 days since I put in these numbers and just to make sure I am super angry as I go to bed, I checked again.

There area now 8,093 Starlink satellites in orbit, out of 12,308 total active satellites. 1,243 Starlink satellites have burned up.

As with almost everything else happening, this is so fucking stupid, and I'm going to keep yelling about it. To calm myself down, I'd go outside and look up, but guess what I'd see?

Who needs post-apocalyptic scifi books?