It shouldn’t be, but I bet being a billionaire and being able to do whatever you want leads to them thinking “hey, I can do this taboo thing”. Like the Most Dangerous Game stuff

You mean, my taxes are paying people in India for this shit

Seriously, it feels like people think Dems should be building an oubliette right now. The process of rooting out and punishing corruption/incompetence starts with investigations (if you don’t have absolute power) - so they’d better be damn ready to hit the ground running

Hell, I try not to even visit places where too many tourists visit

Extreme nationalism is generally bad for tourism and tourism is generally good for economies. Sad to see Japan slip this way, of course, but they’re not alone.

I don’t actually think it’ll go to anyone who needs it - probably mostly another trump family grift. The thought experiment goes that he doesn’t actually pay any stochastic terrorists, he just convinces a whole lot of them that they’ll be taken care of if they pop off and cause enough chaos for the election to be cancelled. Used that way, 1.8B can go much further than it would for an organized / funded militia

Ice doesn’t have enough people to meaningfully oppress the whole nation

Japan, for all it’s beauty, precision, and art, is extremely nationalistic - if not wholly racist. The sanae gov is as right wing as they’ve had in a while and it’s predictable that they’d want to drive foreigners out, but it is a bit sad

Let’s offload a whole country’s cognitive load and see what happens! Why not?

Before the gerrymandering fuckery, I daydreamed briefly of a veto-proof majority. It seems any plan to do anything will need R buy-in or wipe out, or extra time

I was so mad when he ran again. I had a distinct memory of him running as a “transition” president in 2019 - which my fool ass took to mean one term

I distinctly remember when they told Walz to stop calling out how weird the Elon/Vance/Trump crew all were. It was working and I couldn’t understand why stop. Some wormtongue consultant or PAC? It was baffling

I hope it’s written well enough that it includes “non affiliated PACs” that are coincidentally funded by foreign governments. AIPAC loves pretending it’s not AIPAC

Warm-up! https://maydaystrong.org/

Fuel/oil Maersk, if I recall, does container shipping and has other ways of moving boxes, but all of them burn fuel

Would things be different in a parliamentary system? I’m not actually so sure. Every single member of the house of representatives is up for election in November and they don’t seem worried enough about their electoral chances to restrain him in any way.

Congress is still nominally the strongest branch of US government and they’re fully abdicating their responsibilities. What would a parliamentary system solve when one party is a death cult?

Getting ready, I suppose. We need an actual grassroots movement with commitment and organization. General strike seems about all that’s left to us

We can, in theory but shit’s hard in practice. Any systems for exerting collective power have been incredibly degraded, some of which has been intentional by motivated power systems. We don’t have local community groups with power anymore - we need strike funds, mutual aid groups, local leadership and activism… And none of that is really in place right now.

My take is that lack of collective power is giving rise to lone gunmen types that don’t feel they have any recourse

At 35% mortality rate, it’s exceedingly unlikely to cause a pandemic. Still sucks for everyone affected, of course

I saw an interesting observation during returns last night that there was a trend of more rural districts keeping incumbents while those closer to cities flipped to Trunp-endorsed candidates. I’d love it if these redhats get whomped by Dems in the fall,