If we’re going fictional characters, then Havelock Vetinari from the Discworld novels.

The coalition of the ascendant concept is kind of insane when you remember for a moment that the popular vote is kinda worthless in winning elections. The electoral college is structured in such a way that conservative whites have a larger share of the electorate relative to their minority peers. It doesn’t matter if you’re a lock for California and New York (enclaves of coastal elites and minorities alike) if you lose the entirety of the South, Southwest, and Midwest, enclaves of…the opposite of those things, really. This 538 article on it has links to other discussions related to this and represents a fascinating look into the relationship between popular votes and electoral votes. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-a-difference-2-percentage-points-makes/

Democrats suffer from a condition that I’ve come to call “Democratic Realism,” named after Capitalist Realism. No matter how much they get their shit kicked in. No matter how badly they do. No matter how little they accomplish. No matter how badly they look or do in debates. Democrats always believe, beyond a shred of doubt, that they’ll win elections without trying. Not because of their own merits, but because they’re just the only “real” choice; they simply can’t fathom anyone willingly voting for their opponents.

Hillary barely campaigned in the “flyover states” that she needed to win because she couldn’t be fucking bothered to actually try. It wasn’t worth the effort to try and persuade people she thought of as her lessers. And the DNC just went “well, it’s obviously her turn. She’s been waiting for the chance at the presidency for 20 years now. We should go ahead and let her be president.” Because that’s the mentality. They don’t have to “win” elections. They just pick a candidate and they get to win, because there is no “real” alternative. That Bush and Trump won don’t indicate that, yeah, actually, you do have to fight for the people who are voting for you, otherwise they’ll vote for the schmuck that appeals to their basest and most venal instincts. Those were just flukes…right? And you don’t have to inspire confidence and admiration in others, because they should just recognize how smart and accomplished and inoffensive their candidates are, and that they’re told to vote for them by people that are smarter than they are, so they should just shut up and do it.

It’s a party driven less by any kind of ideological goals and more by a pervasive sense of smug, impotent, lazy egotism. And, yeah, they’ll get a shitload of votes in the elections because the alternative always seems to be someone who is one goose-step shy of a literal Nazi. Biden will probably even win the popular vote. Y’know…just like Hillary did…

Fuck, the original Pacific Rim wasn’t even good. Like, how you gonna set such a low bar and somehow slide under it with room to spare?

“My daughter Murph. I keep gettin’ older. She stays the same age.”

Also, I love how he had a son who just wanted to be a farmer and that meant that Matthew McConaughey’s character was justified in being totally emotionally disinterested in him, compared to his genius daughter. Seriously, at a certain point I think Nolan forgot he wrote this guy with two kids. His entire character was defined by his relationship with his daughter. Why even give him a son in the first place?

“This woman, who suffers from body dysphoria and constantly gets more and more plastic surgery (a behavior which harms no one but herself) is the same as this fictional serial killer who tortured hundreds of people to death.”

But in all seriousness, I don’t think it’s nice to make fun of people’s appearance.

Don’t Bother Reading

It’s an interesting idea, though, that one’s preference for a particular design or aesthetic, especially when that design or aesthetic is emblematic of a particular historical or cultural moment, is never wholly isolated to its visual or material components, but also innately tied to our memory and understanding of that moment. I personally don’t think you can extricate a particular aesthetic from the psychic background noise surrounding it. Our minds don’t work that way. It’s always forming these subconscious or unconscious connections, binding events and memory to abstract signifiers.

We don’t like the 90s aesthetic because it’s “better” or even attractive. I mean, nobody has wallpaper in their home with those pastel and neon triangles. Many of us like it because it reminds us of childhood, of not having responsibilities other than waking up early enough on Saturday to catch all your cartoons and of not complaining too much when you have to go visit your grandparents who can never remember your birthday and who always ask you how old you are this year, of finishing Super Mario on the SNES before your friend does so you can brag about being better at video games than him. It’s of a simpler time and place, because we were simpler. And it was, in retrospect, of an America briefly sandwiched between the end of the original “Forever War” that was the Cold War, and the beginning of the 20th Century’s new “Forever War,” that is the War on Terror.

First time?

Churchill was a master of historical non-fiction. Not “history books,” per se, but basically books about historical topics pertaining to England that interested him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_English-Speaking_Peoples. They were very popular during his day.

Ah, yes, Drawn Together. The perfect show for people in the early oughts who thought South Park was both too clever and not nearly crude or mean-spirited enough. I’ve seen every episode at least twice.

On reddit, there’s a subreddit called r/lrcast, which is the dedicated subreddit for the Limited Resources podcast. The primary purpose of the subreddit, however, is not to discuss the podcast, but to discuss the “limited” format of Magic: the Gathering, which constitutes draft and sealed. It’s a very difficult, very expensive format of Magic to play and is a niche subsection of an already fairly niche hobby.

I get the feeling a lot of our more vocal free speech absolutists are going to be conspicuously quiet on this one.

Yes, we should ban all those, too. Or just enforce EU style privacy laws in America.

Controlled opposition.

You mean how he goes to see that play?

Massive spoilers for the movie, obviously, but technically Predestination:

The only truly reasonable position to have on this question is pure agnosticism: you do not and cannot know if life exists elsewhere in the universe, especially intelligent life. We could, in theory, be the only intelligent species to ever evolve in this universe. Period.

The Mayflower brought the Pilgrims to America, not Columbus (which is also, for some reason, misspelled in the title of this post). I’m guessing OP didn’t pay much attention to their history class this year in what I’m going to assume is middle-school.

I mean, both are bad. I definitely don’t advocate for body shaming.