Accurate.

Trump got about the same number of votes in 2024 as he did when he lost back in 2020, whereas Harris got fewer votes than Biden did, so strictly speaking we are getting exactly what all too many of us didn’t vote for.

13 year old: “I’ll just take the death penalty, thanks."

unless we have a major nuclear exchange

I was going to say, it really depends on just how hard we go on the “let’s kill everyone” vibe.

Under a blanket. In any weather. I have cold urticaria, where if my skin feels even the slight chill of cool sheets, it assumes I must be under attack and deploys just enough histamines to make me feel itchy and keep me from sleeping. It fucking sucks. I’ve just barely learned to cope with it.

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.

It’s fucking rich Thiel trying to coopt Robert A. Heinlein. The man believed in people being free to do as they wish, but he was no fucking kleptocrat. I’m not convinced that his philosophy would comport particularly well with modern libertarians, who amount to sock puppets for the GOP.

He believed fiercely in being politically knowledgeable and involved:

The former Berlin businessman I referred to earlier told me that he blamed his own group, people with the time and the money and the opportunity to know better, for what happened to Germany. “We ignored Hitler,” he said. “We considered him an unimportant fellow, not quite a gentleman, not of our own class. We considered it just a little bit vulgar to bother with him, to bother with politics at all.”

They thought of the government as “They.” The only possible route to a clear conscience in politics is to accept political responsibility, either as an active member of the party in power or as an equally active member of the loyal opposition.

He believed in rationally-considered governance:

If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.

And while he sure seemed to hate Communism, something I don’t find all that surprising for a man of his generation, he arguably hated corruption and capitalist decay even more:

Of what use, then, are the American Communists?

They serve one function extremely useful to you and to the country, so useful that, if there were no Communists, we would almost be forced to create some. They are a reliable litmus paper for detecting real sources of danger to the Republic.

Communism is so repugnant to almost all Americans, when they are getting along even tolerably well, that one may predict with certainty that any social field or group in which the Communists make real strides in gaining members or acceptance of their doctrines, any such spot is in such bad shape from real and not imaginary social ills that the rest of us should take emergency, drastic action to investigate and correct the trouble.

Unfortunately we are more prone to ignore the sick spot thus disclosed and content ourselves with calling out more cops.

All of those quotes are from Take Back Your Government, a nonfiction book about how and why to get involved in politics, and one that I wish more people would read and take seriously. All of his fiction… you have got to take with at least a grain of salt. He loved to put political philosophy rants into his writing, but he also loved exploring weirdo scenarios that he may or may not have totally believed in, himself. Just because someone took a given interpretation from one of Heinlein’s fictions does not mean that he would be chill with a bunch of vampires bleeding the planet dry.

They’re working on that.

You can always track further back to earlier causes, but I think that we took a real hard turn for the worse in this country when Ford pardoned Nixon and an angry mob didn’t rend Richard the Treacherous limb from limb. If the powers that be can just dispense Get Out Of Jail Free cards to their buddies and the people are unwilling or unable to fight back and force there to be consequences, then nobody in a position of power ever really needs to worry about abusing their office.

I suspect that a party that ran a ranked choice primary to select a candidate for a FPTP election would have an advantage over an opposing party that didn’t. I haven’t got the math or statistics to back it up, but everything I’ve read about ranked choice discouraging scorched earth politics sounds like it would be healthy in a primary.

Surveys indicate that 100% of people respond to surveys.

Yeah, I actually think Lovecraft was doing what was probably the healthiest thing available to him at the time with all his fucked up phobias by turning them into inspiration for spooky stories. He was creative and articulate enough that he could have been writing political screeds and trying to get others on board with driving out all the immigrants, but instead he wrote about crab monsters from space. Far from the worst possible outcome considering a lot of the other possibilities from the time.

Whether or not you should consume HP Lovecraft media despite the fact he was a racist is entirely up to you because he is long dead. He doesn’t make any money. He isn’t even racist any more. Because he’s dead.

I always say “If you’re going to be a shitshow of a human being but a talented artist, the least you can do is also be dead.”

See also: Phil Spector, Pablo Picasso.

Hegseth: You there! Jackson! I want plans on how to invade Greenland on my desk by the end of the week!

Johnson: [Looks at filing cabinet full of plans for invading every other country] Oh, yeah, sure thing, sir. Gonna be a few all-nighters, though. Me and the boys are gonna need some pizzas and a few bottles of Mountain Dew and some cinnamon dipperz.

Hegseth: No problem! Just take it out of the Preventing Kids From Being Thrown Into The Orphan Crushing Machine fund! You’re a good man Jackson!

Johnson: Sir, yes sir.

Hegseth: [takes enormous swig out of family-sized plastic bottle of bourbon]

The Tyrannosaurus rex from Jurassic Park because first of all, I’m actually pretty sure I’d be fine so long as I can get in my car and drive away at a reasonable pace. Secondly, just think of the absolutely incredible collateral damage. Even if I get killed, it would be one of the most talked-about and confusing incidents in American history for the rest of time.