Man. The writers for this timeline really are lazy pieces of shit. How can they just reuse the same stale plot line and continue to collect paychecks? This show has really gone downhill.

That’s super sweet of the little girl to reassure the demon like that.

When there were three TV stations, did any of them highlight police brutality? Overincarceration? The military industrial complex?

This is a very fair point. True, having very limited news options didn’t allow for a lot of deviation in agreement on observable reality, but to your point, it could also easily paper over a lot of very ugly parts of the actual reality. Chomsky writes quite a lot about this in his book “Manufacturing Consent”, which basically is a dive into how media organizations can be used as the propaganda arm of the government. Everything from choosing what you show to choosing how you talk about things goes towards bolstering an underlying narrative that you want to project.

I’m not sure what a solution would look like, if one is even possible. But solution or no, the narrative divergence in this country has primed us to detest each other, which is the first crucial step towards mass violence.

I’m less worried about that, not because there aren’t evil people among the Democrats, but because the Democrats are positioning themselves as the anti-fascist party at the moment. Starting up a fascist movement of their own at the moment would be bad business.

Long term, though? 100% agree. Can’t trust none of these fucks. Hopefully, the Interstate Popular Vote Compact kicks off before that happens, and we can do away with the EC. Won’t completely solve the problem, but it will help.

True, but have you looked at the “intelligentsia” of the Republican party? They’ve got nobody. Just grifters and sycophants. It’s one more small mercy. Obviously, this situation can’t be counted on to continue indefinitely, but once Trump is gone, the only thing ready to take his place is Trump-based nostalgia, and people looking to profit off same.

I think that the US is primed to have a civil war. Ever since Reagan fucked the fairness doctrine in 1987, we’ve been getting more and more divided. Gonna sound like an old fogey here, but it used to be that everybody tuned into the same news, and watched the same anchors deliver the same updates about the same world events. We had differing opinions on world events, but we all agreed on what was and what was not reality.

We don’t have that now. It’s like two completely separate universes occupy the same physical space. In one universe, climate change is fueled by anthropogenic forces and is causing more and more catastrophic damage, viruses are real and vaccines are effective tools to combat them, and thousands of traitors tried to overthrow the government because their cult leader lost an election. In the other? Climate change isn’t real, and also the Democrats have secret hurricane machines that they are using to punish Florida for being a red state, COVID isn’t real, and also it’s a super virus concocted in a lab in Wuhan at the request of Hillary Clinton, vaccines don’t work, and also vaccines are secretly a government tool to kill people, and Jan 6th was a peaceful protest of patriots, and also it was a violent insurrection by Antifa.

We don’t share the same reality with each other. In one reality, Democrats are basically similar to milquetoast conservatives from any other first world nation, and they care much more about maintaining the status quo than they do about making progress. In the other reality? Democrats are evil incarnate, and they’re waging an active campaign to round up all of the patriots and send them to concentration camps, and they’re also pedophiles and Marxists. In that reality, it’s far more preferable to vote for a dead pimp than it is to vote for a standard, run-of-the-mill Democrat.

And it’s not just the whole two-realities thing. Ever since Obama became president, the brains of a huge chunk of people in this country just broke. Some of the nicest-seeming people you’d ever met instantly turned into vile, hate-spewing racists, and started mass subscribing to every single conspiracy theory feed out there. That was 16 years ago. Their rhetoric has been getting more violent every year since. That’s to say nothing of the huge increase in terrorist incidents since then - according to the CSIS:

The number of domestic terrorist attacks and plots against government targets motivated by partisan political beliefs in the past five years is nearly triple the number of such incidents in the previous 25 years combined

So yeah. I think that this country is primed for organized, mass violence. At this point, all that it’s lacking is the organization. Thankfully, Donald Trump is an incredibly stupid man. I don’t think he’d be capable of organizing people to that level. He can stoke their hatred, for sure. He can inspire the craziest among them to firebomb a mosque or shoot up a Democrat’s office… but he ain’t built to lead people. If someone who had even 1/10th of his prowess as a cult leader, but who was actually intelligent and had a tactical mind came along… hoo boy.

Well that’s the thing: nobody’s disparaging them for growing. It’s great that they finally saw trans people as people. Wonderful for them. But they’re LIFE-LONG Republicans. They sat through Nixon, Reagan, both Bushes, and Trump as president. All the while, their party just got shittier and more full of bigoted people. They watched the rise of right-wing talk radio, with horrendous humans like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck spewing their vitriol in the name of the party, and they remained. They watched the Tea Party hold up signs decrying Obama as a monkey, or a muslim, signs calling for the hanging of Obama, and they remained. They watched Trump try to overthrow democracy as hundreds of terrorists committed violence at his bidding, and they remained.

Now, they’re finally deciding to leave the party because the bigotry they supported all along suddenly became turned their way. Fuck them. I’m not disparaging them for growing. I’m disparaging them for being pieces of shit.

My guess is that they’d rather those grandparents not have been hateful pieces of shit in the first place. But better late than never!

It’d be wasted breath, really. Trump will never step down, because he’s trying to remain out of prison. If he loses, then there goes any chance he had at pardoning himself for his numerous crimes. So he’s not only the far and away favorite Republican candidate, but he’s also highly motivated to stay in the race for personal reasons. No appeal to his sense of patriotism will work to get him to step down because he has no patriotism. He’s in it for himself and himself only.

Biden, on the other hand, is just the default Democrat guy because he’s the incumbent, and the party figured that’d be enough to win, and so haven’t been trying very hard. And that has everybody terrified, because if he loses, then we get another 4 years of Trump, and probably never get to vote again. Basically, people are calling for Biden to step down because the stakes are way too high to fuck around.

I think you’re severely overestimating the average intelligence of the population.

I occasionally forget mine, too, but I was fortunate in that I was born in 1970, so it’s really easy to calculate it on the fly.

People think they’re cute and cuddly, but that’s just how they reel you in. Sneaky little fuckers. Here’s a selfie one of its victims snapped in the moment before his brutally painful demise:

It took me way too long to realize that “AU” was short for “Alternate Universe”, and not Australia. Though, I suppose “Australia” works, too. Everything there is actively trying to kill you, after all.

Pipe in an endless loop of “Baby Shark” and Justin Bieber?

Oof. Been there, done that, 0 stars; would not recommend.