PostmodernPythia

Theoretically, equal protection on the basis of sex would mean you couldn’t commandeer a pregnant person’s body for gestation because there are protections for impregnable citizens’ bodily integrity. Practically, the people in power quite obviously don’t care about the law when it doesn’t suit them.

I am a huge fan of my Volcano. Doctor told me to use a flower vape instead of smoking. Good life choice.

Better to provide context than promote censorship.

Right? I just want to live around people I’m not certain would shoot me if there were no consequences.

People know that. But power isn’t divided that way. So when people look to alternatives to federal power, they usually look to the existing political infrastructure of states, not, for instance, less-organized/-powerful counties.

It’s gonna be that or fascism for everyone, so I’ll take the messy breakup.

Oh, I know. I’m just trying to get people to stop eliminating the one option that might spare us.

Have you been paying attention the past 25-50 years? I’m not someone who became a pessimist because of Trump. The problem is largely structural, baked into our social, political, and economic institutions. It’s because I’m a student of history and politics that I think the way I do. The patterns in our political life over the past several decades have many historical analogies, none of them good. I believe in fighting back, but sometimes strategic retreats are necessary to win a war.

Wanting civil war isn’t the question. The question is, what do we do when the right manipulates the system to give itself perpetual, absolute power? Give up? Fight? Leave? Leave and fight? Not many people want civil war because it’s not obvious to them yet that the alternative is worse. Give it time.

What evidence would it take to change your mind? What makes Americans more likely to be good than people who participated in authoritarian atrocities historically? Where is your confidence that things will be fine coming from?