Lindsey Graham can always be counted on to suck up to whichever Republican is currently getting the most headlines.

If this was actually a just world, the jackals selling real estate stolen from the rightful owners wouldn’t be facing protests - they’d be in prison or in front of a firing squad, where war criminals and profiteers belong.

I sincerely have no idea.

The narrative that a leftist couldn’t win is repeated so predictably and so often and by so many people that the whole idea has become sort of detached from reality, and there’s no telling what would happen if it was actually a possibility.

And particularly since the one thing I’d pretty much guarantee is that the concerted efforts on the part of the ruling class to prevent a leftist from running would be as nothing compared to what they’d do and say in order to prevent one from winning.

Not “now” - I have been for years. Ever since I figured out that the US has no future - that the ruling class is already preparing to put down any opposition (that’s why we have a militarized police force and the largest prison system in the world, and that already, before Trump’s proposed detainment camps that are supposedly going to be built to hold undocumented immigrants, except that the undocumented immigrants are going to be deported, so self-evidently they’re going to hold someone else).

There is no way to make any lasting change in the US. The ruling class is too firmly entrenched and too out of touch, and frankly too fucking insane. They will, and already intend to, go to war to protect their grotesquely destructive privilege, and the nation will not survive that.

So the only hope is that our descendants will build something better out of the rubble we’re going to leave behind.

And again - that was already the case. Trump is just accelerating the process.

In a sense, none of them know what they’re doing.

Many of them just don’t know at all. They’ve believed the lies and don’t realize that they’ve just elected a psychopath who is going to at the very least do considerable harm.

Some of them think they do know. They’re self-serving sacks of shit who look forward to tyranny and the destruction of democratic institutions because they think they’re going to benefit and they dont give a shit about all of the people who are going to suffer. But they don’t realize that in the end, they’re going to suffer too.

We’re in a timeline now in which truth is entirely irrelevant.

Trump supporters are necessarily one of two things - deluded or dishonest. Either they’ve been manipulated into not seeing the plain fact that he’s a corrupt and self-serving autocrat and an existential threat to the US, or they know exactly what he is and just don’t admit it publicly.

In either case, truth and reality count for nothing.

That’s the deal.

Literally.

So as is generally the case with this sort of story, I find myself wondering if he’s such a monster that they can’t sweep it under the rug or if he just happened to piss off the wrong people.

Sexual assault in the military - like church pedophilia, police brutality and political corruption - is one of those crimes that is deplorably common and almost always ignored. So when they do prosecute someone for it, there has to be something else to it. It can’t just be that he’s thought to be guilty of the crime, since hundreds or even thousands of others are at least as likely guilty of the same crime, and are not even under threat and quite likely never will be. So what’s special about him?

It’s not really relevant to anything, and it’s certainly not as if he should be spared just because so many others are allowed to get away with it (exactly the opposite in fact - each and every single one of them, without exception, should face the full force of the law, and the fact that so many don’t is a prime example of why and how this country is going to shit).

Still though, I find myself wondering, as I often do.

Because people are miserable and desperate and they want to blame someone or something, and bigotry is simple and superficially satisfying.

And because some number of those who actually are to blame for their misery and desperation have self-servingly encouraged them.

I’ll never stop being cynically amused by the fact that the self-styled American patriots are letting the Russian government tell them how to vote.

Setting aside the anti-health and anti-sanity aspects of this, the thing that gets me is that Republicans somehow continue to believe that they’re the party of freedom when everything they do involves ever more regulation.

They frame things as if the Democrats are oppressing people and the Republicans are fighting for their freedom, but the exact opposite is actually true - the way that things actually work, consistently, is that Democrats want to give people the freedom to do things and Republicans are fighting to destroy those freedoms. Their reaction to every single thing they encounter is to pass a law against it, which is literally the exact opposite of freedom.

Now granted - most of their positions are insane, so it’s not as if rationality should be expected, but this just seems to be something so simple and so obvious that they can’t possibly miss it. Yet somehow they do.

There’s undoubtedly at least a bit of projection there, but I think more what it is is just that tankies are driven almost entirely by righteous indignation, and they’ll take pretty much any chance they get to indulge in it. They don’t really stop and think about things - they just see something that could serve as a basis for a nice, satisfying righteously indignant screed and off they go.

And that leaves them susceptible to, among other things, hypocrisy.

Sort of, but not quite. I get where you’re going with that though, and it’s the right idea.

The explicit goal of Project 2025 is simply to make it easier for greedy and power-hungry privileged right-wing assholes to bring harm to people and to the nation as a whole for their own imnediate benefit. So yes - it actually serves as a sort of backhanded guide to what is of value in government.

It’s just that doing the opposite of what Project 2025 calls for would mean expanding agencies and regulations rather than reducing or eliminating them, and that’s likely not the best option, since it could just lead to governments run rampant instead of corporations run rampant.

As with most things, the optimum lies between the two extremes.

But yeah - at the very least, it can be taken as a rule of thumb that there’s a direct correspondence between the value a thing provides to the people and the nation as a whole and the degree to which Project 2025 opposes it and intends to destroy it.

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Any ideology that bans books is self-evidently intellectually and philosophically bankrupt.

Gee whiz - who’d’ve thought that the woman who married a rich guy who looks (and notoriously smells) like a gigantic ambulatory drain clog would be so mercenary.

About three minutes ago.

I had actually written a few paragraphs in response to another thread, but it wasn’t coming together right and would’ve had to have been rewritten almost entirely to get it to my standards, and I just didnt care that much, so I closed it instead, then went to the main page and saw this.

Overall, I would guess that I post less than half of what I write, either because I’m struggling to get it to my standards and don’t care enough to keep going, or because I stop and realize that if I go ahead and post it, it’s likely that if it gets a response at all it’s just going to be some tunnel-visioned ideologue hurling disinformation, fallacies and/or tired emotive rhetoric.

Both, I’d say.

Money doesn’t create corruption out of thin air - anyone who’s corrupted by it already had to have the potential. But money does undoubtedly lead people who otherwise would have resisted their baser nature to indulge it instead.

And it very definitely provides the means for people who are already psychologically and/or morally inclined to corruption, and so is very attractive to them.

There actually is a statistical correlation between conservative, anti-trans political affiliation and a preference for transgender porn, and Texas leads the nation in searches for transgender porn.

Source