WatDabney

In a 2021 speech titled “The Universities Are the Enemy,” then–Senate candidate J. D. Vance declared that universities, as left-wing gatekeepers of truth and knowledge, “make it impossible for conservative ideas to ultimately carry the day.”

Yes - universities are by their very nature in opposition to irrational positions borne of ignorance, hatred, greed and fear.

That is as it should be.

I still… maybe it’s my years working construction, but when I look at RFK Jr. - his mannerisms and gestures and speech patterns and connection (or lack thereof) to reality - I see a tweaker, clear as a bell.

I’m getting tired of Pelosi’s transparent attempts, by offering up insipid advice and critiques to the younger generations of neolibs, to distract from the fact that her main accomplishment in her own career was using inside information to build up her stock portfolio.

You had your chance bitch, and you sold us out for your own privilege. Just go crawl off into a hole somewhere and rot and leave the rest of us the fuck alone - we’re busy dealing with the crapsack world you helped build.

All the billionaires are lining up to swear their fealty and get a slice of the oligarch pie.

He’s cosplaying a father.

That was the plan all along.

All of the Christian Nationalist jazz was just a cover for the dual purpose of winning the support of the religious right and distracting from their real goal, which, from the start, has been to fully institutionalize a government that serves the interests of the wealthiest few at the expense of everyone else.

Yes - to some notable degree, that’s the system we already have, but with some important distinctions. Under the current system, there are still policies and agencies and programs to nominally limit the abuses of the wealthy and/or protect the interests of the common people. The wealthy can generally manage to get around them, but that requires exploiting loopholes and jumping through complex legal hoops and greasing palms and, if all else fails, paying fines.

The goal is to eliminate all of that so that the wealthy few are entirely unconstrained - so that they won’t even have to pretend to do anything other than expand and protect their own privilege, and there will be no legal recourse at all for all of the people they will exploit along the way.

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.

Well, like, to me, my thing is… a video image is much more powerful and useful than an actual event.

Like back when I used to go out, when I was last out, I was walking down the street and this guy came barrelling out of a bar - fell right in front of me and he had a knife right in his back - landed right on the ground.

And I have no reference to it now. I can’t refer back to it. I can’t press rewind. I can’t put it on pause. I can’t put it on slo-mo and see all the little details.

And the blood, it was all wrong. It didn’t look like blood. The hue was off and I couldn’t adjust the hue. I was seeing it for real, but it just wasn’t right.

• Slacker (1991)