Well… that is entirely a you problem. You should do a little soul searching to figure out why it is so difficult for you to pay someone dear to someone you call a friend the bare minimum amount of respect.

Would you be upset if your friends constantly misgendered you, then acted like you were the asshole because you took issue with it?

Sure thing, buddy. Here you go:

Well, unfortunately the guy used an e-bike with GPS tracking on it as his getaway vehicle, so I very much doubt he’s going to get away with it. But yes - I agree with you on the death penalty. Shit gets complicated when the state gets involved.

But those who think that they are virtuous have no problem celebrating this guy being killed calling it karma. And this comment will be totally downvoted because how dare someone point out their hypocrisy.

“Virtue” is a relative thing. What is virtuous to one person might not be virtuous to another. You, for example, seem to believe that celebrating the death of someone is unvirtuous, even if that person was a monster. This is pure speculation on my part, but I’m also guessing that you hold the belief that nobody deserves to die.

These beliefs are not universal. While you would be a hypocrite for violating your own strongly held beliefs, it would not be accurate to apply that label to someone who doesn’t hold those beliefs. For example, I believe that death is the worst punishment you can give to a person. I also believe that some people absolutely deserve it. I would not find it virtuous to falsely pretend otherwise. I have no moral qualms with celebrating the death of someone who I think deserves it. Similarly, I have no qualms about celebrating good things that happen to a person who I think deserves them. In both cases, I consider those things to be the universe working out as it should.

You’ve never wished for the death of serial killers? Rapists? Pedophiles? Dictators? Animal abusers? The odd mime?

Somehow, I don’t believe you. But, on the off chance that you’re telling the truth… this is for you:

Man. The writers for this timeline really are lazy pieces of shit. How can they just reuse the same stale plot line and continue to collect paychecks? This show has really gone downhill.

When there were three TV stations, did any of them highlight police brutality? Overincarceration? The military industrial complex?

This is a very fair point. True, having very limited news options didn’t allow for a lot of deviation in agreement on observable reality, but to your point, it could also easily paper over a lot of very ugly parts of the actual reality. Chomsky writes quite a lot about this in his book “Manufacturing Consent”, which basically is a dive into how media organizations can be used as the propaganda arm of the government. Everything from choosing what you show to choosing how you talk about things goes towards bolstering an underlying narrative that you want to project.

I’m not sure what a solution would look like, if one is even possible. But solution or no, the narrative divergence in this country has primed us to detest each other, which is the first crucial step towards mass violence.

I’m less worried about that, not because there aren’t evil people among the Democrats, but because the Democrats are positioning themselves as the anti-fascist party at the moment. Starting up a fascist movement of their own at the moment would be bad business.

Long term, though? 100% agree. Can’t trust none of these fucks. Hopefully, the Interstate Popular Vote Compact kicks off before that happens, and we can do away with the EC. Won’t completely solve the problem, but it will help.

True, but have you looked at the “intelligentsia” of the Republican party? They’ve got nobody. Just grifters and sycophants. It’s one more small mercy. Obviously, this situation can’t be counted on to continue indefinitely, but once Trump is gone, the only thing ready to take his place is Trump-based nostalgia, and people looking to profit off same.

I think that the US is primed to have a civil war. Ever since Reagan fucked the fairness doctrine in 1987, we’ve been getting more and more divided. Gonna sound like an old fogey here, but it used to be that everybody tuned into the same news, and watched the same anchors deliver the same updates about the same world events. We had differing opinions on world events, but we all agreed on what was and what was not reality.

We don’t have that now. It’s like two completely separate universes occupy the same physical space. In one universe, climate change is fueled by anthropogenic forces and is causing more and more catastrophic damage, viruses are real and vaccines are effective tools to combat them, and thousands of traitors tried to overthrow the government because their cult leader lost an election. In the other? Climate change isn’t real, and also the Democrats have secret hurricane machines that they are using to punish Florida for being a red state, COVID isn’t real, and also it’s a super virus concocted in a lab in Wuhang at the request of Hillary Clinton, vaccines don’t work, and also vaccines are secretly a government tool to kill people, and Jan 6th was a peaceful protest of patriots, and also it was a violent insurrection by Antifa.

We don’t share the same reality with each other. In one reality, Democrats are basically similar to milquetoast conservatives from any other first world nation, and they care much more about maintaining the status quo than they do about making progress. In the other reality? Democrats are evil incarnate, and they’re waging an active campaign to round up all of the patriots and send them to concentration camps, and they’re also pedophiles and Marxists. In that reality, it’s far more preferable to vote for a dead pimp than it is to vote for a standard, run-of-the-mill Democrat.

And it’s not just the whole two-realities thing. Ever since Obama became president, the brains of a huge chunk of people in this country just broke. Some of the nicest-seeming people you’d ever met instantly turned into vile, hate-spewing racists, and started mass subscribing to every single conspiracy theory feed out there. That was 16 years ago. Their rhetoric has been getting more violent every year since. That’s to say nothing of the huge increase in terrorist incidents since then - according to the CSIS:

The number of domestic terrorist attacks and plots against government targets motivated by partisan political beliefs in the past five years is nearly triple the number of such incidents in the previous 25 years combined

So yeah. I think that this country is primed for organized, mass violence. At this point, all that it’s lacking is the organization. Thankfully, Donald Trump is an incredibly stupid man. I don’t think he’d be capable of organizing people to that level. He can stoke their hatred, for sure. He can inspire the craziest among them to firebomb a mosque or shoot up a Democrat’s office… but he ain’t built to lead people. If someone who had even 1/10th of his prowess as a cult leader, but who was actually intelligent and had a tactical mind came along… hoo boy.

Huh. Guess I’ve got some vision loss.

Fuckin’ yikes, man. Real edgy 15-year-old energy here.

Here’s a version with the labels still in it:

Maybe they were just quiet quitting.

Better a martyr than a president.

God, I loved that game. I have spent so many fucking quarters in pizza parlors on that shit.

You can’t spell manslaughter without laughter.

I think you’re severely overestimating the average intelligence of the population.

I think you’ve got some very mistaken ideas about who Democrats are if you think that a supermajority of them would be totally up for implementing a slew of progressive policies. They’re way more progressive than the Republican party is, for sure. But that’s such an incredibly low bar that it’s laughable. Democrats will do things like make Cesar Chavez day a holiday, or fly BLM and LGBTQI flags, but expecting them to actually pass legislation that addresses the root inequities in a meaningful way is an uphill battle.

Those shorts allow him to take an incredibly wide stance.