I really don't understand the servile boot lickers who don't want politicians being protested, humiliated, confronted, or even just criticized because "norms" or whatever. These ultra-powerful millionaires with armed security need to know how much we hate them somehow.
@gwynnion I couldn't stop laughing, while in the waiting room of a health clinic, when I got to the part where Ben is stuffing dollar bills down the owlbear's pants. 🤣
@timberwraith I really like the Nisha-Rihan duology for telling the story of how "the Old Republic" era ended, effectively, and how bleak and tragic it was for the people swept up in it.
Even if Rihan himbo'd his way through the early phases of the fall...
I love Tangent and Rao! But it was fun revisiting Bob / Agrajag's moon. In the past, it still has a second moon that eventually became the ring system Ben saw in the future!
@timberwraith A lot of modern sci-fi and fantasy stories feel very small in comparison, don't they?
I want that sense of deep time. But also, I want that frisson of familiarity when we visit the past, which gives a sense of the cyclical nature of the cosmos. "This has all happened before..."
@timberwraith We grew up with the Pale Blue Dot and "COSMOS" and the idea of the vastness of space as something humanity could tiptoe into whereas since the end of the shuttle and the drawing down of the space program, most people haven't had a window on the universe beyond sci-fi, which tends to portray things as very small -- everything is about these few characters and their problems, like in "Star Wars."
@timberwraith Navigator was structured so it started "small" with the war between Alice's world and the Five and gradually opens up into bigger and bigger spaces out in the multiverse.
With Katherine as a warning shot about what's really out there. LOL.
Most Americans wouldn't care if Trump went to jail. Most would agree with it. Almost everyone else would shrug and accept it. The only people terrified of this outcome are other corrupt rich white people who think elite status means they get to break the law with impunity, too.
We've already seen Trump's personal "army" on January 6. It's a bunch of middle aged tech bros, used car dealers, and sleazy lawyers who can afford a lot of guns and military style fetish gear, most of whom don't want really to get shot or sent to jail on his behalf.
At some point, it became Democratic orthodoxy that we must never judge candidates or expect better from them because every election is the most important election in history, a continual crisis where we have to pragmatically make tough choices in order to avoid an even worse outcome.
And fine, okay, but the crisis never ends, does it? The people who run on stopping the greater evil never do, nothing is done about it, our options get worse, and it feels like we're being taken advantage of.
If you're a Democrat and a majority of Democrats want you to do X, and especially if a majority of Democrats and "independents" want you to do X, you'd better have a FUCKING GOOD REASON to risk losing an election to a fascist by refusing to do X.
And when X is "don't enable genocide," there is no good reason.