Exactly. Look back at the Jim Crow era. That’s the goal. Jim Crow didn’t work by white people stealing the vote. It worked by writing laws that openly made it so black people couldn’t vote. Ultimately it’s a lot more sustainable to simply write laws that serve your side than it is to try to hold onto power by repeated election fraud. With the latter, you ultimately have to worry about the military just refusing to acknowledge clearly fraudulent elections. But if the elections are crooked but entirely within the law? Much more difficult for the military to refuse to acknowledge those.

Let the world know that in my great humility, I’m also agreeing to decline any nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

I wonder how much flexibility is possible with Congressional districts? Does a district even have to correlate to a geographic area? Could a state separate its districts, say, by age?

Imagine what that would look like. Each state gets the same number of districts it does otherwise. If a state has five representatives, its population pyramid would be divided into five equal-area chunks. People in each of those chunks would then vote together. So the youngest 20% vote for one representative, the next 20% vote for another, etc. The boundaries would shift automatically. There would be no possibility of an unfair district, as you’re basically just lining up your entire state’s population in a line sorted by age, dividing the line into equal chunks, and asking people in each of those groups to pick a representative. It would cancel out a lot of the effects of differing voting rates by age.

Honestly, TSA itself creates a huge terror target. If some latter-day Bin Ladin wanted to disrupt the air travel system through acts of mass violence? The airport security lines themselves are a huge target. IIRC there actually have been cases of terrorists attacking airport security lines. If you’ve ever been to a packed airport on a busy travel day, it should be obvious. Giant TSA line, hundreds of people packed in like cattle. What keeps someone from just wandering up with a bomb in their carry on and detonating it right there in the line? Nothing. And nothing can. You going to make people wait in a security line to get into the security line?

And in terms of actually disrupting the infrastructure of travel, disrupting society, the economy, etc., such attacks have impacts similar to blowing a plane out of the sky. How long is that airport going to be out of commission now that the mandated security line is now a mass crime scene?

Anyway, these are the darker thoughts I think in the back of my mind when stuck in an endless TSA line…

Don’t watch the first few episodes of The Walking Dead while actually in the hospital under heavy opioid medication. That’s how you end up with extremely terrifying and vivid dreams of a zombie apocalypse in the very hospital you’re currently in! Ask me how I know!

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NY Times, you sack of shit, the word you’re looking for is “an act of treason,” not “an escalation.”

No one has been able to explain how Epstein got his money to get this whole thing started. He did also have a lot of ties to the Mossad and senior Isreali leaders. It’s pretty likely his work was an Israeli influence operation. Fund someone to build a sex island and staff it with illegally young girls that can’t be found in such numbers anywhere else. Provide means for the rich and powerful to discretely access the island. Fill the place with video and audio recording equipment. Create records of everything that happens there. Then, invite as many members of the American ruling class to rape children on the island as possible. You now have lifelong blackmail on every one of those people. For the cost of a few tens of millions, Israel bought itself control of the American political and business elite. Even if they only manage to snag 1 in 10 of these leaders in their web, it’s enough. That guarantees that whenever a big decision is made regarding US-Israeli relations, there will be someone in the room that the Mossad has lifelong blackmail material on. There are few more powerful forms of blackmail imaginable than telling someone “we literally have video of you raping children.”

It does go a long way to explaining both parties’ total capitulation to Israel. Up until the 1990s or so, Israel was an ally, but we didn’t see this fawning supplication we do now. Presidents were willing to actually stand up to the Israeli government and use American funding to rein them in. At the same time, Israel also wields the Mossad, probably the single most competent espionage, influence, and assassination outfit on the planet. Look at what they managed to do to all those Iranian nuclear scientists or the mass pager attack. The Mossad are terrifyingly competent, and they truly believe in their cause. Blackmailing the US political class on a massive scale is something entirely within their capability.

Schumer is going to personally enlist as an ICE agent, announcing he’s going to “change it from the inside.”

Dude. The heads of both parties are all over the Epstein files. They all hang out in the same social circles. It’s a big club, and you’re not in it.

Don’t forget to vote for the Washington Generals every election!

Whoosh.

Would it have been better if there was violence, but only one side was violent?

Peace happens when both sides have a motive to achieve peace. You cannot have a peace treaty when only one side is willing to use force.

At the end of the day, the die hard MAGA folks are a quarter of the country. The stuff they’re doing is wildly unpopular. At some point you have to fight for democracy. It is worth dying for. It is worth killing for. If we have to go through a troubles, so be it. Frankly, this probably isn’t going to end until we start seeing a whole lot of dead Evangelical Christians. The Christian nationalists are so used to being able to violently oppress and persecute everyone else. They don’t realize that their own lives and freedoms can be just as easily destroyed.

We already are in a civil war. One portion of the population has declared war on everyone else, hell bent on forcing their evil beliefs on everyone else. They do so in the confidence that they themselves will never face persecution, the loss of their rights, or a threat of violence. White Evangelical Christians are way too fucking comfortable.

Honestly, a troubles might be the best thing to knock some sense into these fuckers. Once the retaliatory killings start and their churches start getting torched, maybe it will finally get through their thick skulls that if you want to live in a democracy, you have to be willing to respect other people’s choices and let them live their own fucking lives.

The troubles ended because both sides felt threatened. No one felt safe. This encouraged everyone to come to the table. Right now one side feels invincible. They believe they can act with complete impunity against the rest of the population. So far, we’re all just holding our punches and trying not to escalate things, but these fuckers just keep pushing. Something will have to give.

Mutual bloody violence is a superior option to one-sided bloody violence, which is the situation we have now.

Well, at least I know your favorite sports team!

You must be a big fan of the Washington Generals.

The other kind of divorce is no-fault divorce. You don’t have to give a reason there, you silly goose!

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As a voter and a taxpayer, I’m waiting on some important concessions before I can support this. Were Trump, for example, hoisted in front of the arch by a crane and dropped from the top into an inflatable kiddie pool filled with cottage cheese, this could become an important and beautiful landmark for D.C.

You know what? I can get behind a tyrannical triumphal arch in DC. If a president ever turns tyrant, we can hang them from it, Mussolini-style.

This issue has been settled (violently).

It hasn’t been settled at all. All it would take for secession to be legal and an available option would be for someone to get elected president on a platform of “I’ll let states secede.” That’s literally all it would take. If the person commanding the military just refuses to use it to put down a secession, secession will happen.