She said ‘This was why I couldn’t get off and stay off. Just as the cliché warns. I literally wasn’t keeping it in the day. I was adding the clean days up in my head.’ She cocked her head at him. ‘Did you ever hear of this fellow Evel Knievel? This motorcycle-jumper?’

Gately nods slightly, being careful of a tube he now feels. This is why his throat had had that raped feeling in it. The tube. He actually has an old cutout action picture of the historical Evel Knievel, from an old Life magazine, in a white leather Elvisish suit, in the air, aloft, haloed in spotlights, upright on a bike, a row of well-waxed trucks below.

‘At St. Collie only the Crocodiles’d heard of him. My own Daddy’d followed him, cut out pictures, as a boy.’ Gately can tell she’s smiling under there. ‘But what I used to do, I’d throw away the pipe and shake my fist at the sky and say As God is my fucking witness NEVER AGAIN, as of this minute right here I QUIT FOR ALL TIME.’ She also has this habit of absently patting the top of her head when she talks, where little barrettes and spongy clamps hold the veil in place. ‘And I’d bunker up all white-knuckled and stay straight. And count the days. I was proud of each day I stayed off. Each day seemed evidence of something, and I counted them. I’d add them up. Line them up end to end. You know?’ Gately knows very well but doesn’t nod, lets her do this on just her own steam. She says ‘And soon it would get… improbable. As if each day was a car Knievel had to clear. One car, two cars. By the time I’d get up to say like maybe about 14 cars, it would begin to seem like this staggering number. Jumping over 14 cars. And the rest of the year, looking ahead, hundreds and hundreds of cars, me in the air trying to clear them.’ She left her head alone and cocked it. ‘Who could do it? How did I ever think anyone could do it that way?’

-Infinite Jest

Best case scenario: the less corrupt, less cruel (note: less) democrats wrest power back. At which point all hidden failures will become public and blamed on them. Republicans will claim everything was peachy under their watch and everything went to shit as soon as a woman or a person of color got control.

This belittles sex workers more than it describes Musk. Just because they’re naked doesn’t make their work any less demeaning than rotting behind a desk waiting to have your retirement stolen.

If your brother gets suicided, you may fear those potentially responsible and have strong motivation to carry their water. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mark and Ghislaine continue to provide convenient denials and clarifications. If they didn’t have the spine or moral compass to do the right thing before, than I wouldn’t expect them to do the right thing now.

Musical chairs rules dictates that once the last bit of life in the universe is inevitably blotted out, all that will be left is morally inert, inanimate matter, and therefore evil will not exist for millions of years. It’s winning the battle but losing the war on the grandest scale.

I take almost no comfort in the inevitability of good prevailing. Selfishly, mostly because I don’t have that kind of time. On a cosmic scale, none of this matters. A rock in space is not evil, and once we’re obliterated either by devices of our own making or the march of entropy, the universe will be neither good nor bad. Bad only loses due to the mortality of man, but once bad is finally “defeated” there will be no one left to appreciate it.

This is the fundamental issue with civilization. Good faith power must get power, hold power, and actually successfully govern; bad faith power is free to devote all of their resources to the first two. Evil will always be more nimble and more unfettered.

I bet the person at the tavern at 10 am with a plastic fry basket full of opened pull tabs thinks better times are just around the corner too.

This for me is the weird cishet paradox. So afraid to look “weak”, that they obsess over not looking weak. But you know what looks super weak? Being insecure about being weak. Like, the more you have to prove you’re a big tough guy, the less big and tough you seem.

Also, I feel like they’ve never considered that gay doesn’t necessarily mean effeminate. Or even that effeminate doesn’t necessarily mean weak/meek.

Pardon?

This is generally the compact. If you kill all the cattle, you’re fucked. We’re the cattle. The con is supposed to be that they feed and water us and we enable their lifestyle. But they are forgetting their job due to unchecked greed/avarice.

I bet this would likely cause her actual physical arousal. We’re not dealing with well adjusted people here.

There are more of us then them, we are more self sufficient than them, we are more resilient than them, we are more desperate than them. The real world is our natural environment, the rich are the arrogant invaders. Vietnam comes to mind when I think what a war of rich vs poor might look like. It won’t be near misses and broken escalators for long, when a sufficiently large number of people become sufficiently mad, their ivory towers will become prisons.

Blackmail

Huh? This doesn’t make physical sense. The bullet was traveling at airplane speed when fired, so in theory is going plane speed + bullet speed. Unless I’m misunderstanding things?

We’ll deal with step 2 after step 1.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_burn

To be fair, it seems more like a rich asshole thing, than a political affiliation thing strictly speaking, but there definitely seems to be a strong Republican bias to the perpetrators. I mean, I think even Donald was technically a Democrat during the birthday card period unless I’m mistaken.

Edit:

Republican (1987–1999): Trump first registered as a Republican in 1987.

Reform Party (1999–2001): In 1999, he left the Republican Party and joined the Reform Party, even forming an exploratory committee for a potential presidential run in 2000.

Democrat (2001–2009): He changed his registration to Democrat in 2001.

Republican (2009–2011): He switched back to the Republican Party in 2009.

Unaffiliated (2011–2012): Trump briefly registered with no political party in 2011.

Republican (2012–present): He rejoined the Republican Party in 2012, ahead of the 2012 presidential primary, and has remained a Republican since.

The card is from 2003, so during his Democrat phase. Though it’s pretty clear the man has no actual actual convictions (so to speak) and just does whatever he feels is personally adventageous at any given moment.

Well, frankly him dying now, having avoided all real consequences his entire miserable life, having contributed nothing positive to planet earth, lying and raping his way all the way up to the highest office in the contry, is also not fair.

I can’t see a way to see what each defcon is/relates to. Like, what are the different defcons and what is the real world example of each?