People also have this idea that collapse is this overnight thing, like a zombie apocalypse. But while that does sometimes happen historically, a gradual degradation is much more common and realistic. What that actually looks like on the ground is just a general decline in the standard of living all around. In an advanced capitalist economy, we rarely have actual shortages, where the supply of goods simply runs out. Rather, whenever the supply of anything gets tight, the price soars until demand drops.

As things degrade, everything’s just going to become ever more expensive. People used to eating beef will have to switch to chicken. Then they’ll switch to tofu. Eventually just rice and beans. And as prices rise, the world’s poorest, a few million at a time, will find that they can’t even afford rice and beans, and no one will be able to afford to give them food aid either.

Housing will gradually become ever-more expensive. We have a finite capacity to construct housing. And as natural disasters destroy more and more homes and infrastructure, we have to spend more and more of that finite capacity just rebuilding what we’ve lost, rather than constructing new homes. This drives the cost up ever-higher. People switch from owning their home, to renting an apartment, to living with roommates, to abandoning the nuclear family entirely and living in large extended households again.

This is what collapse actually looks like. Prices on everything slowly rise until we look around and realize that the global population has been cut in half by starvation and all but the riches survivors are living in penury.

I just want to live long enough for the anti-aging vaccine to be invented.

BRB, off to go wish for more wishes…

It is something I can take from them. Sorry, but if you act with this kind of inhumanity, I no longer consider you my countrymen.

Reminds me of a story of a friend of mine… She did her undergrad and masters in classics and archaeology. As part of her studies she participated in a summer dig on the island of Cyprus. She spent the summer working on remote archaeological sites in the rural countryside.

Well one day she needed to go into town for something. She goes in to the only store in town, a tiny little grocery store. She finds what she’s looking for then goes to check out. Suddenly, with horror, she realizes, “wait, I don’t know how to talk to this guy. I can’t speak modern Greek.”

So she attempts the next best thing. She tries to talk to the shopkeeper…in ancient Greek. She tried to have a random conversation with someone in ancient Greek in modern Cyprus.

The shopkeeper looks at her like she has two heads, pauses for a moment, and says, in English, “lady, no one has talked like that here for two thousand years!”

Hennig Brand approves.

Sorry. SCOTUS already is way ahead of you. They’ve already carved out broad dubious religious rights exemptions that allow doctors to let trans and queer people die if they show up needing care. I’m proposing that we simply give them a taste of their own medicine.

Well apparently they can, because that’s what the whole article is about.

I never suggested Trump winning would be a good thing, or payback for anyone. And in my hypothetical, I was suggesting progressives might have a better time winning in a Republican primary than a Democratic one.

What you’re saying is that you’re so myopically blinded by partisanship, that if someone like Bernie somehow won the Republican nomination, you would still vote for the Democrat out of team loyalty. Again, this is all just sports to you. You don’t believe in anything except the blue team winning.

You are living in a dream world.

So you’ve failed my simple request. Biden is such a Zionist he can’t even be bothered to denounce outright ethnic cleansing.

Hint. The reason he can’t is that his adminstration made their own attempt to arrange the explusion of the Gaza population. The Biden admin was fully onboard with ethnic cleansing. Trump is just more crass about it. You’re distracted by shiny over substance.

Cringe liberal cyber-stalker.

All you’re doing is telling on yourself. You’re obsessed with teams. You hold no real values. You don’t believe in anything. Politics is just a sports game to you. And yes, I care about actually making meaningful improvement in people’s lives. If the DNC has the Democratic party locked down on permanent regressive mode, then progressives should seek all other options. If that means running third party, so be it. If that means trying to coopt and take over the Republican party, so be it. I care about outcomes. You care about sports teams.

“Legislation IS the force.”

BWAHAHA.

God. Where do you get this stuff? It’s hilarious.

Typical liberal obsessed with gotchas. It comes from a place where you assume no one has any consistent beliefs or values. That probably says a lot more about you than it does about anyone else.

Yes, of course that was me. And that statement is as true then as now. Trump and Biden’s Israel policies are indistinguishable from one another. Trump is just a lot more of a crass asshole about it. You’re distracted by messaging rather than actual on-the-ground policy. Trump is a lot ruder, so you assume that his policies are worse on Palestine than Biden’s were.

The truth is you can’t have higher support than 100%.

Can you name a single Trump policy on Israel/Palestine that Biden or Harris have come out to publicly oppose? Can you name a single one? It’s a lot easier for them to do so now as they’re not in office. They have far more free reign now than they ever did while in the oval office. If they’re not willing to denounce any of Trump’s Israel policies today, then it would be brain-dead moronic to assume they would have different policies if they were in office.

Oh, people can’t resist a government in the modern age? Tell that to Bashar al-Assad.

Gestapo thugs have to sleep sometime.

ICE agents are not Americans. They gave up the right to call themselves that the moment they put on that uniform.

Frankly, I’m at the point where we should be openly conspiring to strip the civil rights of Evangelical Christians and conservatives in general. I don’t give a shit about the optics; the right wing fever swamps will say what they’ll say regardless.

We need to find ways to strip the civil rights of Christian Nationalists. Part of living in a democratic society is that we need to accept that all people deserve rights. I agree to let you live your life the way you please, and you agree to let me live my life the way I please. It’s meant to be a peace treaty. I may not agree with you on every choice you make, but we both agree to leave each other alone.

But Evangelical Christians have given up that value. They have abandoned this central peace treaty at the heart of a free democracy. They’re hellbent on taking the rights away from everyone else, but no one is trying to take their rights away. They’re allowed to go on endless offense, but they never have to play defense. They know they can take rights away from everyone else, and everyone else will be far too polite to give them a taste of their own medicine.

Fuck that. It’s time these fuckers actually started feeling the same fear the rest of the population has to because of their actions. Let them go to bed at night worrying that their rights will be taken from them one by one. Let them show up to voting locations only to find their name has mysteriously disappeared from the ballot. Lets start calling their media obscene and trying to legislate against it. Let’s pass laws declaring being pro-Israel as “Islamaphobic” and start cracking down on pro-Israeli as terrorist organizations. Let them feel a fraction of the fire that they so casually burn everyone else with.

We have a serious problem in the US’s body politic. We have one group of people, Christian Nationalists, who are able to actively conspire to take the rights from everyone else.

The only way to restore equilibrium is to start threatening the rights of conservative Christians. That’s literally the only way to get them to stop this madness. They need to realize that this is a fight that they can actually lose. They need to realize that when you start taking rights away, others in turn can start taking your rights away.

We need to get a hell of a lot more creative. We need to show the same evil creativity that Evangelical Christians show when they’re trying to destroy minority groups. It’s only when the fear of God has been put into the Christian nationalists that we can have any kind of peace.

We’ve gotten to this moment through decades of unilateral disarmament. One group of people is working tirelessly to strip the rights of everyone else, and the rest are too polite to start giving them a taste of their own medicine. They broke the peace treaty and are actively dropping bombs, while everyone else is pretending the peace treaty is still in effect.

I’m not advocating for civil war. However, it is absolutely imperative that you don’t let the threat of civil war prevent you from protecting your rights.

Rights are worth fighting for. Rights are worth dying for. And no, don’t try to “both sides” this. In the original US civil war, there was one side that was objectively on the right side of history. But I imagine if you were alive in the 1860s, you would have been advocating to just let the Southerners keep owning human beings. After all, civil war is just death and atrocities accomplishing nothing. It’s better to throw every one of our rights in the garbage before risking civil war.

Because in New York City, a global megalopolis with one of the largest and most well-funded police departments in the country…can’t be arsed to provide police protection to its highest ranking elected officials.

Imagine if the NYPD tried to arrest Trump. Do you think the Secret Service would just let that happen? Yet state and local Democratic officials aren’t willing to actually use their legal power to protect themselves from unlawful arrest. These leaders should be under constant state or local police protection. But they’re so addicted to normalcy that they simply cannot bring themselves to take reasonable but unusual steps like this. They just can’t mentally handle it, so they let themselves go unprotected.

It should not be possible to arrest the Comptroller of the largest city in the country without first having to go through a whole bunch of local police officers.

But Democrats are cowards, so they let themselves be lead to the showers.

This won’t end until ICE agents start being disappeared by people dressed up as ICE agents.