There was a little cat that used to accompany me on my walk home from work most nights. I would walk through this pretty quiet neighborhood, and the cat if he was outside would run up and walk along with me. Like "Oh shit, we buddies, let's go on patrol together." Eventually, it would be too far and he would take his leave. Then, same thing next night.
In retrospect, Seinfeld was a very dark show. Somewhere on YouTube there is an insightful little video essay about how the first few seasons of the show are basically the story of how Elaine, a perfectly decent person, gets drawn into their little circle and over time adopts their awful selfishness and sociopathic behavior to try to fit in. How most of the problems of the show are caused by their selfishness and dishonesty, and often involve significant harm coming to someone else, and they don't care.
I can't even remember which comedian it is, but someone had a bit about how the darkest joke he ever heard was a Seinfeld bit about being at the movie theater and just throwing his drink on the ground at the end for someone else to clean up. Like it's a small thing, but the guy talking about it was genuinely alarmed by the depth of how far he genuinely just doesn't give a fuck and doesn't mind if you know it.
Too many people on the left don’t want illegal immigration. I don’t want illegal immigration. But, I really am disgusted with how it’s being handled now (and in the past too).
Jesse what the fuck are you talking about
I personally don't care about "illegal immigration." I've had good friends who came here "illegally," and ones who've experienced some extremely severe consequences because of it. Fuck that. But even regardless of all that, what ICE is currently doing has absolutely 0 to do with enforcing immigration law. They're actually breaking immigration law left and right and violating a bunch of different court orders. If you care about "legal vs illegal," which again in this case I couldn't possibly give less of a fuck about, you should be extremely upset against ICE right now, and agitating to stop them.
Now, I don’t mean we should all go shoot people
Good, glad we agree on that part.
but those politicians and “influencers” promoting hate and fascism need to feel deep down that they are truly unsafe.
I don't necessarily disagree. But, there is a way to do that that can escalate into a real revolution of the people that will still maintain a working country. There is also a way to do it that can escalate into AOC and Bernie being the first up on the assassination list, along with Hasanabi, Paul Pelosi, the local mayor if he tries to put in bike lanes, fuckin' whatever.
This particular way of "fighting" for improvement is guaranteed to make things worse.
We need to make them stop—with escalating intensity that stops when they stop.
This part, I completely agree with. Is your impression that shooting Charlie Kirk will make them stop? I think it will make them accelerate. There is no number of Charlie Kirks that you can shoot that will ever make them stop.
They have a lot more money for security than Elizabeth Warren does. There is one side and one side only that will be disproportionately impacted by this.
You should donate (and volunteer) for the people organizing against ICE, or legal defense for people in their crosshairs. That can develop into an actual resistance as things get worse and steadily worse (which they probably will). Donating to encourage random assassination will instead make things exponentially worse, it will basically hand it over to the Charlie Kirks of the world.
Hey, you're right. We do need to urgently work to improve the systems of media and education so that people have some idea of what the fuck is even happening, so that they won't elect open fascists to power and think that they're doing a good thing. We have some urgent problems now that can't really wait for that, of course, since that whole vital apparatus has been deliberately destroyed by the rich people over the course of about the last 50 years. But yes, the elections aren't the only piece. If we could have a Mamdani level event in even one out of every ten elections that happens, that would be fuckin' fantastic, instead of just letting one open socialist get within a hair's breadth of the literal US presidency in 2016 and then giving up because the rich people cheated him out of power. It almost fuckin' worked. Also, gerrymandering, mail in voting, open fraud enabled by Trump and his allies, et cetera. There are a ton of problems that we will never in a million years vote our way out of.
I'm glad you said that. It would have been absolutely nuts if you were agreeing with my parent comment which more or less to me could be interpreted as "Let's bring political assassination by random nuts into the mainstream of the US political spectrum as a way of making change, that'll help and the left will definitely win that game in the end."
Absolutely not. It'll be much better for all concerned if he mentally deteriorates while he's still physically well, so that he's acting like a lost grandpa at press conferences, visibly shitting himself, forgetting what's going on in interviews and not even being able to cover it as well as he currently does his forgetting-what's-going-on-and-covering-it, all that stuff.
Let it play out to do as much undoing as possible to the cult of "Trump can do no wrong" because they're trying to double down to their friends and family about how he definitely didn't just spend five minutes yelling about "the Japs" and drooling when he was talking to reporters or something. That would be my wish, at least.
"Fuck off I don't like you, I'm happy out here, it's where the birds are"
Edit: A counterpoint, Matt Damon told an entertaining story about adopting a small cat that they found more or less in the jungle during a vacation, pretty injured but generally fighting to survive. She hung around and ate the food they gave her for a couple of weeks and they decided we have a cat now.
He thought that they would take her home, get her veterinary care, and she would become a little jungle-cat terror of the neighborhood, but he said that once they got her home she literally never went outside again.
One of the best meals I have ever had in my life was some ceviche from a little hole in the wall place in Honolulu. Never had tiradito but I assume it is top tier.
I have never seen a bright blue eye like that on an orange cat. I think Photoshop is definitely a possibility, but also, sometimes nature just does a wild artistic cat for all of us.
NYT is only center-left within the American political spectrum. In any normal democracy they'd be a pretty staunchly conservative paper. They have a long history of cheering for all kinds of American imperialism (Nicaragua -> Iraq War -> drone strikes, with Israel as a consistent through line) and they have a long history of shitting on or downplaying candidates who are more or less smack in line with the country's population's general political alignment (Bernie Sanders / Mamdani), because they are way too far left for the media's political alignment.
Seriously. I am having trouble finding the Reddit AMA from before the election (which is its own little brand of worrying), where one of the New York Times editors was asked why they were so hyper-critical of Biden on a few different valid bases, but willing to give a broad free pass to Trump on many objectively horrifying things he was doing or planning. And they basically said, well Trump's popular and Biden is not, so we're reflecting that reality, it's okay if you don't understand news you're not a professional like me 😎.
I'm glad if they found their voice now that it's more or less too late, but I still admit to a little bit of guilty desire to see Trump's goons smash up their offices or something, so that maybe they'll take the lesson a little more thoroughly to heart, and fucking remember next time what their fucking job is.
There was a little cat that used to accompany me on my walk home from work most nights. I would walk through this pretty quiet neighborhood, and the cat if he was outside would run up and walk along with me. Like "Oh shit, we buddies, let's go on patrol together." Eventually, it would be too far and he would take his leave. Then, same thing next night.
Wonderful stuff, man.