FFS, quit normalizing Donald Trump's comments and behavior.

And if you see local media doing this, call them out. That means phoning them or even paying them a visit. Recruit five like-minded friends to picket the news organizations dismissing Trump's dictator and anti-democracy comments as just "Trump being Trump".

Trump is not how sane American politicians are supposed to act. No matter how long he's been making dangerous and unhinged comments, it just plain isn't normal.

gaslighting hypocrite RunD Paul

rundpaul political ads blaming President Biden and VP Kamala Harris for “Border Protection” when in FACT gQp maga repigliKans refused to pass their very own Border immigration legislation- several times!

try telling the truth rundymouth paul

This. Is NOT. Changing!

The spin machines for the FILTHY rich elite continue to propagate lies that loud, hateful, non-intellectual, name-calling MTG-types keep repeating. All AGAINST their own best interests:

Remember those Trump-era conservative tax cuts from that better-quality first image? THAT was only the beginning...

Trillion-dollar Apple - as an example - was able to dodge approximately $40 BILLION in taxes by using a relatively paltry amount of its offshore $252 BILLION untaxed cash-on-hand (that's literally CASH, not asset equity) to "reinvest" in US ventures thanks to further sweetheart legislation that they, with Microsoft, Facebook and Alphabet, combined to spend more than $16 million JUST IN THE THIRD QUARTER OF 2017 to get passed through Congress! For reference:

Still reading? All-told, as of 2017, the FORTUNE 500 had approximately $2.6 TRILLION in untaxed offshore funds (CASH, not asset equity)! What was in YOUR wallet in 2017? And how about now?

If you're working class, the FILTHY RICH and YOUR GOVERNMENT owe you! They've been cheating YOU for a VERY long time!

MAGApocalypse

Bloodsuckers from Outer Space (1981)

by Glen Coburn

Just training my deep vibrations.

do you think there will ever be some kind of realization or reckoning from the liberals/leftists about israel? whether it's admitting they were wrong about the settler colonialism narrative or realizing anti zionism was a mask for anti jewish? i am trying to stay hopeful that one day people will "see the light" but even normies are pushing insane theories and anti jewish rhetoric. i wonder if this is a reality that we just have to live with (that majority of leftists are bloodthirsty and indifferent to jewish suffering) i have already seen people rightfully say they feel politically homeless and alienated from the left (both jewish and non jewish) because of its stance on israel.

the left is suppose to historically stand with the oppressed, but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. is there anything we can do to help people wake up or just accept fate? i find it difficult to have even mundane discussions about israel or try to fact check something. it always goes back to the same lies: jews are white, israel is a settler colony that doesn't deserve to exist, palestinians can do no wrong.

"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." --George Carlin

The thing about zombie lies is that they are pretty much impossible to get rid of. I do not believe large-scale re-education is possible for any group, liberal / leftist or otherwise. That's just not how people work. Our minds, our societies, are organized around recognizing patterns and fitting those patterns into our earliest instilled beliefs - regardless of whether the patterns are real or the beliefs are correct. A newspaper column will not do it. Getting leftists to recognize that Israel is not a colonial apartheid state will be akin to getting MAGA boomers to recognize that vaccines don't kill you and there's no child cannibalism ring. It can be done, but it's hard and slow and really requires cult deprogramming tactics. Do you want to take on that challenge? How much of your life are you willing to devote to it?

What I feel is realistic - for your average person to ask for, and to hope your average liberal / leftist can give - is just to ask for consideration, for an equal space to speak. To ask them to reconsider their priors and weigh the possibility that they might be wrong - that the less immediate personal history and stake they have in this context, the more likely they are to be wrong. It is an ask based on intellectual openness and epistemic humility. Some people respond very badly to it, but it is still worthwhile, on a small scale, face-to-face. The opposition's frenzied rush to shout us down and deplatform us really gives the game away - if what we were saying was so dumb and obviously false it wouldn't be threatening to them, they'd actually want us to say it more and be exposed.

There seems to be no stopping the zombie fans of Donald Trump. Rather than seeing the former president’s multiple criminal indictments, including new charges filed in Georgia last week, as a reason not to support his 2024 run, nearly 3 in 4 Trump voters say showing support during his legal fights is a reason to support him.

According to a CBS News/Yougov poll released Sunday, Trump not only holds a commanding lead over the field of his Republican rivals, he now holds his largest lead yet since CBS/YouGov started polling on the 2024 race. Trump has the support of 62% of likely Republican primary voters, while his nearest opponent, Ron DeSantis, trails him with a measly 16%. That’s a 7 point drop in DeSantis support among those voters just since June.

Likely GOP primary voters also weighed in on Trump’s latest indictment, with 77% saying they believe the indictment is politically motivated. Trump and 18 others were charged in Georgia last week with felony crimes related to his attempts to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.

The poll also questioned likely Republican primary voters about the events of Jan. 6 and Trump’s attempts to overturn the election. Among MAGA supporters, 41% said that then-Vice President Mike Pence did “the wrong thing” that day by counting states’ votes (aka not letting Trump subvert democracy). Only 21% said Pence did “the right thing,” while 38% said they were not sure.

Despite Trump’s countless lies, 71% of Trump voters believe he is a source of “true” information, beating even their own friends and family, who ranked second with 63%.

The worse thing about Claude’s Sreng operation is the amount of Sreng people it’s going to get killed or no reason. Claude doesn’t actually care to help them out here, he’s using them as another set of bodies that he doesn’t care about so he can protect his friends and that’s all well and good but how do people not see how absolutely fucking mental it is to casually reignite a war you aren’t even invested in knowing damn well the side you’ve just spurred on is going to lose and is only there to be a distraction, not so you can take out their enemy, but so you can get one person and then leave. Arguably Claude killed more Sreng people doing that than he would have if he just attacked them because we’ve seen that if the odds aren’t in their favor, Sreng will retreat and they were even making progress.

I will say, it was smart of Claude not to attack because if he had attacked them while posing as Faerghus, they most likely would have surrendered because if Faerghus has warships then Sreng can’t fight them but if it’s just someone saying Faerghus is weakened? There’s only a chance for success there.

That's why I mentionned they were a distraction and/or fodder!

Dimitri notes how the Sreng forces are small, and usually, they shouldn't pose any problems, but this time, since Faerghus has to stretch its forces thin to fight the Alliance, Adrestia and Sreng, they're in a difficult situation.

Imo it's still a bad spot on Claude's track of "it's the church that is the cause of xenophobia" because he reignites and triggers this present battle between Sreng and Faerghus - but actually makes an enemy of both! What do you think Sreng's reply will be when they will realise Almyra/Leicester used them as fodder to waltz in Faerghus for their own gain, not giving a fuck about them being "allies"?

And even if the devs used something probably illegal to sniff before writing the Zahras chapters, can anyone seriously think Faerghus (especially Dimitri himself!!) wouldn't despise the Alliance/Federation at the end of GW? They became the Empire's lapdog and invaded to kill a refugee, while trampling and "rampaging" in cities for the very speficic reason to kill Helen of Troyes, re-igniting another conflict and banking on more deaths as "a distraction" to make a beeline to the capital, effectively killing people for no plausible reason (everyone knows the 'kill rhea so supreme leader will lose her goal to pursue the war' is completely bonkers, since her main goal has always been to MAGA!) to rekt Rhea.

It's like FE7, if someone attacked Pherae and killed Eleanora as an unwanted consequence of barging in the land, and trying to kill the Nini-siblings because surely Nergal will stop trying to start a continental war if the dragons he is looking for are dead.

(hint : it doesn't work, and the Nini sibs died for nothing because Nergal, by virtue of knowing where Arcadia is and ultimately growing stronger than Athos, could have "borrowed" dragons there, like say, Fa, to open the dragon gate for him?)

On the one hand, Claude's Sreng invitation is pragmatic, in a short term way - but on the other hand, it will create more issues for him afterwards, if we weren't in Nopes's magical world where nothing has consequences.

In a famous book series, a family is lauded for being "pragmatic" and killing a lot of enemies using under-handed tactics... but then we see in the following books how this family and their allies actually lose everything, partly because of that "pragmatic" move (Frey pies! + North bannermen uncharastically ally to rekt the Boltons! + Lannisters cannibalising themselves - Jaime cannot be the True knight Brienne is because of Tywin's pragmatic "move"', Cersei is Cersei, and Tyrion might realise too late that pissing on his family's name and legacy is less important than actual threats to the world, Zombie!Cat slaughtering people the Lannisters are supposed to protect indiscriminately and more popular support siding with her than with the crown...)

I won't call it karmic retribution, but there is a reason why in FE4, both Arvis and Travant are fucked when the 2nd gen pops up, even their own children are - Arvis's son (Saias who) dies and his line is erased from the throne (Julia will never sit), and Aerone is, uh, missing when Quan's line unites the peninsula (but Leif isn't like his dad so won't consider Thracians as savages).

The only route where he reaps what he sowed is Supreme Bullshit, where trying to turn against Supreme Leader, if all stars are aligned, costs him his life.

Now, I'm wondering, if Almyra's king is very sad (tm) when his favorite son goes missing, to the point where he signs things he doesn't understand and offers his navy on a whim, how would he react if Claude is killed in Nopes?

Shahid took a majority (?) of Almyran forces to mount his invasion of the locket, so without the military, and without a king (maybe he retires, or becomes even more useless than he is in Nopes? or is killed in a powergrab? and succession wars ensue?) what happens to Almyra? Does it fall to anarchy, or something similar to the Kingdom after Lambert's death, without a heir like Dimitri?

Don't think that patiently explaining the legalities and details of the Trump indictment will change the minds of the MAGA crowd about it. Those folks, like Trump, simply don't believe in the rule of law.

There may be some Republicans who secretly believe the charges have merit but are scared shitless of what may happen if they say so in public.

A reasonably healthy party might give its indicted leader some benefit of the doubt, while calling for judgment to be withheld before he has his day in court. But Republicans correctly understand that their party will consider Trump an innocent martyr regardless. The sickness of the Republican Party as it is presently constituted is that there is no conceivable set of facts that would permit it to acknowledge Trump’s guilt. What has brought the party to this point is the convergence of its decades-long descent into paranoia with its idiosyncratic embrace of a career criminal.

Yep, the GOP has been drifting in this direction for a long time. Trump's emergence finally nudged them into being a full-blown paranoid cult.

The Republican Party’s internal culture has been shaped by what Richard Hofstadter famously described as “the paranoid style” in American politics. Hofstadter specifically attributed this description to the conservative movement, which, at the time, was a marginalized faction on the far right but has since completely taken control of the party and imposed its warped mentality on half of America. To its adherents, every incremental expansion of the welfare state is incipient communism, each new expansion of social liberalism the final death blow to family and church. Lurking behind these endless defeats, they discern a vast plot by shadowy elites. In recent years, the Republican Party’s long rightward march on policy has ground to a halt, and it has instead radicalized on a different dimension: ruthlessness. Attributing their political travails to weakness, Republicans converged on the belief that their only chance to pull back from the precipice of final defeat is to discard their scruples. A willingness to do or say anything to win was the essence of Trump’s appeal, an amorality some Republicans embraced gleefully and others reluctantly. Trump, by dint of his obsessive consumption of right-wing media, grasped where the party was going more quickly than its leaders did. This aspect of Trump’s rise was historically necessary. All Trump did was to hasten it along.

This is Trump's legal philosophy (if you want to call it that) in a nutshell...

Trump was not raised in a traditional conservative milieu. He came into a seedy, corrupt world in which politicians could be bought off and laws were suggestions. He worked with mobsters and absorbed their view of law enforcement: People who follow the law are suckers, and the worst thing in the world is a rat.

Trump is basically a petty mobster. That explains why he hates the FBI.

It is the interplay of the two forces, the paranoia of the right and the seamy criminality of the right’s current champion, that has brought the party to this point. Trump’s endlessly repeated “witch hunt” meme blends together the mobster’s hatred of the FBI with the conservative’s fear of the bureaucrat. His loyalists have been trained to either deny any evidence of misconduct by their side or rationalize it as a necessary countermeasure against their enemies. The concept of “crime” has been redefined in the conservative mind to mean activities by Democrats. They insist upon Trump’s innocence because they believe a Republican, axiomatically, cannot be a criminal.

That Manichean view fits in well with the radical Christian fundamentalist tendency in the GOP. Though instead of Jesus Christ, the credo of Republicans is to accept Donald Trump as their personal Lord and Savior. By that reasoning, Donald Trump is incapable of wrongdoing.

Michael Steele, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, on Sunday, ripped Donald Trump supporters as “MAGA zombies” as he expressed his frustration with those who don’t appear to believe the former president will likely attempt to deliver on his increasingly wild threats if he wins back the White House. . . .

. . .

“Why don’t they see that he’s trying to build a sycophantic army of, I’m calling them zombies, MAGA zombies, to do as he’s instructing them to do?” Steele, while guest hosting on MSNBC, asked former Trump White House national security adviser John Bolton.

“What is the disconnect that people don’t seem to get?” Steele added.

“I think people really don’t believe it could be as bad as it might be,” Bolton, now a fierce critic of his former boss, Trump, replied.

“I think a Trump victory risks continuing constitutional crisis,” he continued. “I think we’ll survive it. I don’t think democracy is threatened, but I think we could suffer a lot of damage, and many others have tried in different ways to convince, especially Republicans, that this is serious. But as you say, we have not been successful so far.”

Florida!HTTYD Book AU

(specifically Florida Panhandle! AU) 

Like Hiccup, I too grew up around an archipelago of islands full of venomous and dangerous reptiles! (Had a couple of close calls too!) I went kayaking, boating, hiking, fishing, you name it! Unfortunately, growing up in Florida meant I had to deal with Floridians. So, again, like Hiccup, I ran into lots of...characters.

This idea started off from me making a joke to my brother about how Madguts would be a Trump supporter and drive a Ford ages ago. Then it all went downhill from there. (Honestly, I could write a whole post on Florida!Madguts alone.) Someone in the reblogs of one of my posts also wished for it. This one goes to y’all.

Incoming cursed-as-hell long-ish post:

Main Characters:

Hiccup - from a military family, can't go in the military because he can't pass any of the boot camps, works with his friend Fishlegs, obsessed with Marine Biology, scored 6s on the FCAT every year,

Fishlegs - Works at Publix, Wafflehouse, Coram's, Whataburger, etc., almost dies regularly from horse and yellow fly bites,

Stoick - giant, fat beach dad vibes, retired vet, always wears a big polo or Ron Jon Surf Shack Shirts with polarized sunglasses on, boomer Facebook profile, Corona beers, Margaritaville, drives a pontoon called the Fat Penguin, sold his old sail boat the Peregrine Falcon to Humungous Hotshot,

Baggybum - Marines, never takes off his raybans, goes hunting constantly, camo jackets, guns guns guns, Bass Pro Shop

(Basically, Stoick loves saltwater and Baggy loves freshwater)

Snotlout - Military brat, sports scholarships, ROTC, loves the beach, riding four-wheelers and going mudding, 

Bertha - school bus driver, ROLL TIDE, "You might be a redneck if...", Basically just Nanny-Maw, “plaid shirts with the sleeves ripped off” lesbian vibes, Blue Ribbon or Busch beer I can’t decide

Camicazi - loves the mud, always doing dangerous stunts on whatever motorized equipment she can get her hands on, constantly catching frogs/possums/snakes and brings them inside

Others:

Madguts - definitely wears a MAGA hat, drives a Full-Size Heavy-Duty 2022 Super Duty F-450 King Ranch® Pickup (tailgates EVERYONE), spits tobacco, hot boxes his trailer on a regular basis, runs a crime ring in the boondocks(drugs, dog fights, or simply selling stolen goods), divorced 4 times, Rob Zombie, meth, breeds Pitbulls,

Gumboil - also spits tobacco, Malboros, always rides shotgun with Madguts in his Full-Size Heavy-Duty 2022 Super Duty F-450 King Ranch® Pickup, Alabama Crimson Tide merch, has like 14 trucks he swears he's gonna sell and turn around in his yard, always speaks in inappropriate countryisms

Needless to say, but they're both huge gun enthusiasts and drink Bud.

Thuggory - listens to Butt Rock and Pop Country, Y'all Means All, camo and plaid long sleeves, well fitted Levi's, does everything with his Dad

Humungous Hotshot - Lives on the Peregrine Falcon, “#saltlife”, hooked on fishing, Hooters, sandles with socks underneath, Hawaiian shirts, GOLF, Panama Jack,

Tantrum - not even from Florida, prefers to be in the Keys, comes up to the Panhandle with Humungous so he can see his friends, "#beachbabe", This Video, Ed Hardy

Gobber the Belch - Thunderbeach, drives Harley’s, drives to Alabama to buy illegal fireworks, scary Wafflehouse chef, also Snotlout and Hiccup’s football coach/history teacher

This is the autobiography the MAGA cult zombies need to read. Oh, I forgot, MAGA cult zombies don't read...

It’s a horde of hungry zombies coming for a fresh filet of flesh ripped from his face, but he's more afraid of the shadows that race against his silhouette, so he outpaces a dark figure that chases, running right into a venue where he is on the undead menu.

Meanwhile, I throw lightning under the feet of a tired runner whose more afraid of the rumbling thunder.

It is like maga maniacs that claim the way they act is justifiable, that anyone with a unique lifestyle is more of a threat than a gun pointed at their head.

Like considering racism and educating humans about historical systems of oppression is more dangerous than the fascist who is trying to rob me and you.

Like the immigrant is deviant, but the capitalist and congressman who hold the power in their hands to devastate billions of lives by making policies that ruin the families of anyone unable to bank a couple hundred grand or more a year is morally superior.

My peers tremble in fear of a higher being they claim is love, while allowing the destruction of safety nets that protect the most vulnerable among us.  So, the illusion of a threat is more powerful than real life dangers that affect their family and friends.

-2023