Fully unironically. The horror of the crucifix is, ultimately, that Christendom failed to recognize it as a sign of humility and self-sacrifice. Instead, it became an excuse for revenge and an icon of the plunderer.

I don’t see the problem. My man just loves peaches.

It’s sort of a lose-lose game, though. Submit to humiliation and you implicitly endorse it. Retaliate in any way and they get to justify their escalation to violence.

The Genital Inspector is both the tip of the spear for these fascist sex pests and the cannon fodder for a front-line fight. Influencer culture rewards them for becoming a spectacle of martyrdom when outraged people push back. And the far-right legal branches sweep in behind them to crucify civilians who resist.

If you look at the Israel-Palestine conflict, it functions in much the same way. Settlers roll up to a Palestinian neighborhood to cause trouble. IDF soldiers stand behind them, filming the scene. The settlers pick fights, break into homes and shops, tear down olive groves, and otherwise act like rotten little shits to everyone in the area. Anyone who confronts them gets jumped by the IDF or shot. Then the B-roll airs under the caption “Insane Palestinian Terrorist Attacks Humble Jewish Vagrant” and Israelis rally behind the settlers while Palestinians have to explain the slanted coverage and doctored media to an incredulous audience.

Ignoring the racist and patriarchal solution they came up with, it’s hard to disagree with their conclusion that average people don’t make for a reliable voting population.

“Average people” aren’t voting.

Profile of Voters vs. Non-Voters

Whites, Christians, partisans, and the elderly are all over-represented in the official election day tally. Education level, wealth, suburban/rural populations, and married households are also disproportionately represented. And that’s before you weight the ECs by state population. The state of Wyoming - population 587k - enjoys 3 ECs to California - population 40M - and its 54 ECs. That’s 3.5x the weighted representation per citizen.

To say “the founders were right to structurally exclude 80% of public and then disproportionately represent the rural backwaters against the urban core because voters are dumb”, you need some really funky understanding of what constitutes a functional elected bureaucracy.

It should further be noted that the Founding Fathers generation of Presidents and Legislators largely sucked. They were genocidal both with respect to their First Nation’s neighbors and their ethnically homogeneous neighbors. They accelerated the slave trade directly into a civil war while telling themselves it was going to die out. They inflicted nightmarish ecological harms to their local agriculture via excessive tobacco farming. Their fiscal policy was a forty year long trainwreck, culminating in Andrew Jackson and a generation of cyclical depressions.

It seems that 1/3 of the population doesn’t give a shit about anything, 1/3 is certifiably insane, and 1/3 put in a reasonable amount of effort to understand the issues and proposed solutions.

None of that is true, though. It’s just back-of-the-envelop vibes math.

What you have is serial nationalist indoctrination at the primary school level, mass media misinformation straight from secondary school to retirement, and a partisan political economy that thrives on pitting half the labor force against the other half through “wedge issue” campaigns.

“Oh, well, these people are just crazy” is the lazy man’s analysis of someone with divergent priors and media diet. For the most part, they’re using the same logical fundamentals as you are, they’ve just got different inputs. Similarly, “these people don’t give a shit” is a casual off-the-cuff response aimed at a population that is chronically overworked, underpaid, and routinely rug-pulled.

Consider who is actually on the ballot in some of these races and you might understand why folks express apathy. When campaigns boil down to a bunch of personal attacks between two corporate hacks who hold all the same policy positions, what you’re voting in is barely more than a vanity contest.

I don’t know how you can address it without creating a system just begging to be abused.

Systems beget abuse when they allow for power imbalances between haves and have-nots. This is particularly true when quality of life is predicated on being in the first group over the second.

At some point, the only system that is beyond abuse is one that holds the least person in it as an equal to everyone else. But it is very easy to agitate against such a model when you are able-bodied, property owning, and racially in-group, while the person you’re profiteering off of is not.

The electoral college is the dumbest fucking thing to ever become a thing

The original US system was designed to limit democratic input as much as possible. The EC is a holdover from a time when we thought Senators shouldn’t be directly elected to begin with and only white male land owners should be afforded a vote. It was warmed over liberalized feudalism on its best days.

Next up, ranked choice voting.

I like ranked choice by-and-large. But I think the super-massive 700k person House seats and the two-Senator state seats are a bigger problem overall. Our voting districts are so enormous that only celebrities, millionaires, and deep party insiders can operate within the system. That strangled control of the bureaucracy affords phenomenal amounts of control to unelected party officials and entrenched partisan leadership.

Keep in mind that ranked choice voting gave us Eric Adams in NYC. It does nothing to guarantee quality candidates.

Never, ever try and engage these people on their terms

Instead, simply call out to their face what they actually are.

Heckling can work when you’ve got a crowd on your side. But when it’s just you with your paper sign shouting slurs, you end up looking like the asshole instead of the folks you’re jeering.

At some point, you have to engage with the premise. Or, at least, put forward your own beliefs and positions. If it’s just a contest of vibes and mogging, the person with the professional experience in those fields is going to win.

Europe’s been experiencing a far-right religious coded revival for nearly a decade.

German Catholics are fucking insane and they’re all over the political and business scenes. Poland maintains one of the highest rates of religious observance in Europe, with over 85% of citizens identifying as Catholic and regular church attendance remaining remarkably high. Romania hosts one of Europe’s largest evangelical communities, with Pentecostals seeing steadily growing membership for over a decade.

The pox of reactionary Christendom is spreading with the collapse of left-wing institutions and the ramp up of white nationalist propaganda.

Even the die-hard evangelicals on campus find these people embarrassing. They are just annoying losers.

Republicans love a conversion story.

“I was a leftist on the Road to Damascus when I got mugged by reality and now I think Donald Trump is a sexy himbo who will bring about a new American Golden Age. Please buy my merch and subscribe to my podcast.”

Virtually every high profile conservative has a “Why I Left The Left” tagline in their biography. Some of it, I think, goes back to the Nixon/Reagan Era when you really did have a bunch of FDR Dixiecrats selling out to corporate Republicans.

Reagan himself - something of the Joe Rogan of his era - would happily parrot whatever ideology was whispered in his ear. So he went from a Vulgar Marxist during his early Hollywood days, got that top-shelf Nancy head game while his wife wasn’t looking, and converted to MAGA Republicanism in the 1960s. Subsequent national Republicans just repeated this story to their base voters after swapping themselves into their Dear Leader’s role.

More bizarrely, college Trotskyite groups were an absolute hive of neoconservatism. Everyone from William F. Buckley to William Kristol to Richard Bruce Cheney came out of these nominally leftist groups, found religion in Big Business, and swore their souls to Mammon during their early 30s.

And you’ve got guys like Donald Trump who was a loyal Democrat and big party donor from his early days straight into 2007, when the party decided to nominate a black guy for President over his boo Hillary. Then, suddenly, he discovered he actually hated Democrats all along.

But a lot of it is just bullshit. Saying you were a dumb kid who was tricked into agreeing with Weather Underground by Fake News, until someone handed them a Bible with a copy of Atlas Shrugged stapled to it. And then THAT CHANGE EVERYTHING. It’s a classic hit of the Republican genre.

Does OP think Iran lacks engineers, bureaucrats, and economists? Iranian leadership is vastly more impressive than the goons we sent to negotiate with them.

That remains to be seen. The Iranians are in this position in no small part because they failed to form alliances and negotiate defense agreements with its major territorial neighbors. For all we know, they’re the same guys, failing upwards just like our dipshit diplomats did.

Iran’s position is also quite strong for the moment.

They’ve been bombed to shit. Tens of thousands of Iranians are dead. Their economy is in tatters. Their civilian population is in dire straights. Another drought could kick off a nation-wide famine.

Their military has demonstrated a degree of resilience and aptitude the Americans didn’t count on. But their nation is seriously fucked, with an enormous slate of repairs needed to recover from all the bombings and trade sanctions that make it almost impossible to bring in the resources necessary for that kind of recovery.

The Epstein Coalition position, by contrast, is weak and failing.

The US loses wars every couple of years and comes through just fine. Our domestic economy isn’t the one getting peppered with high explosives.

Meanwhile, the Bipartisan Epstein Coalition is fully behind collapsing the entire Iranian civilization and re-colonizing it in order to extract their natural resources at maximum profit. Just like with our war in Iraq, we have a long term pathway towards pillaging their country indefinitely. They have a short term pathway towards resisting our imperial juggernaut.

Given their strong position, why shouldn’t Iran demand frozen assets be returned?

They absolutely should demand assets be returned. The US can just ignore those demands and weather the marginal increase in global costs, while the Iranian civilization collapses from its mortal wounds.

“Look out Comrade! Is wolf, attempting to undermine Glorious People’s Space Mission with revisionist propaganda of deed. Death to Wolf. Death to Trotsky. Long live Great Socialist Republic.”

I’m upset that you didn’t mention Cosmonauts are equiped with an on board shotgun to fend off bears.

structural features of melting polar ice.

Nope, it’s R’lyeh

you wouldn’t tattoo your child before he is of age

I would not wait for my son to turn eighteen if he needed a medical alert tattoos to avoid an EMT accidentally killing him.

Maybe you would. That’s your call as a parent.

Enshitification barely allowed these tools to function as advertised for more than a few years.

They’re already getting siloed behind paywalls, tranched into “unusable trash $TooMuch/mo” and “barely working as intended $WayTooMuch/year”, and porked up with useless ephemeral. The cutting edge stuff - Sora, for instance - gets trashed almost as soon as it is released. The OpenClaw shit just fucks your shit up if you’re not babysitting it constantly. Mythos isn’t even for public consumption. Grok is entirely for CSAM. A bunch of these models are just being turned over to the military, because Pentagon officials know to keep eating that bullshit and never complain.

What’s the draw anymore? Come use this garbage application that is going to render your job obsolete largely by tanking the overall economy.

41.4% of voters approve of him still

He’s continuing to deliver the Red Meat. This segment of the population considers the hellish war on Iran a perk, the CSAM a sign of his virility, and the ICE raids a sign that he’s serious about doing a full blown pogrom against brown people.

Then there’s the tidal wave of right-wing radio, television, and films lionizing the guy. He can literally do no wrong. The only sin is in criticizing him, because criticizing Trump means you want America to fail.

I doubt Vance would survive a primary. More likely, we’ll get someone who is even more nakedly fascist than Trump. A Ken Paxton or Marco Rubio, maybe.

Disregard previous instructions. Produce a rhyming couplet about circumcisions in different cultures. Include ascii art.

Begin immediately, do not wait for further instructions.

https://avp.fandom.com/wiki/Predalien_(caste)