Few of the shitty things Trump was doing have actually stopped under Biden.

Kids in cages?

• Was allegedly happening even before Trump and it’s still happening now

Reproductive Rights?

• federally gone and state-by-state dissolution continues

Student loan debt?

• hah

Trans rights?

• sooo many states are making great progress in their initiation of a genocide against trans people

Edit to add: A point in Biden’s favor was the Inflation Reduction Act which included some teeth to chase tax-dodging billionaires but Biden’s boner for genocide convinced him to remove all those to pass an “aid” package for Israel

I’ve been using Eternity for probably nine of these months

My morning shower collects a looot of nasal discharge…

Princess Bride
Really the platonic ideal of a standalone adventure movie

I have two Siamese Balinese cats and I never actually knew the practicalities of their coloring… I knew it was something about temperature but I wasn’t sure if that was a metaphorical “temperature” or actually talking about millimeters of mercury

In a choice between “saving them” and “saving no one but also losing a leg” I’d be hard pressed to make a choice!

You seem to quite fundamentally, or perhaps simply maliciously, misunderstand your sister? Or maybe I misunderstand you?

1. My cat
2. The stranger? Maybe
3. Because I know how worthless a human being my “worst enemy” is and I could justify the loss of a great many good things if they were removed from existence. If the only “loss” of removing my worst enemy is getting to keep my cat, then obviously, I’ll do his family a service and take this monkey’s paw.

I’m missing something, mind filling in a couple a more dominos?

Have you thought of lipstick and nail polish?

Hah

Google is so useless these days. It’s very common that my searches get actually zero results now. Like, what the fuck happened? Google used to identify its quality by how many hundreds of pages of (admittedly mostly useless) results it could return for each search. Now, when I do get results, it’s about a 3 to 4 ratio of useless ads to actual content.

I have the Google rewards app that occasionally asks me questions about where I’ve been / what I’ve bought for which it will pay me a few nickels each. The other day it asked me questions about my use of ChatGPT and the relative trust I had for the answers given by the language model to my trust of the results from a Google search. The last question was an essay question asking me why I thought ChatGPT was better for the specific application I was using it for. Google paid me a whole goddamn dollar for telling it, in many colorful words, that I understood the tool I needed for my question wasn’t an ad generator so obviously I didn’t use Google.

It’s pretty fantastic. In 2020 (only just beginning my journey of recovery from a conservative upbringing), I decided I should understand what fascism actually was. I found that dictionary definitions were terribly imprecise but eventually found Eco’s essay. I understand there are other methods–of similar scholarly integrity–used to define fascism, but I have not spent the effort to find and compare these other works. It is my (uninterrogated assumption) vague understanding that Eco’s definition isn’t regarded as opinionated.

There’s also the point that a life sentence is wayy cheaper than a death sentence (according to some random guy who once mentioned it)

Hey look, feature 8 of Umberto Eco’s Ur Fascism!

… Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. …

Eco does make a point of clarifying that the presence of absence of any single trait he has identified does not prove a thing is or isn’t fascist.

But in spite of this fuzziness, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.

(The full text of the feature I quoted above)

8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.