Ginny [they/she]

making cheese grate again

I’d bet bigly yuge that Trump is incapable of that gouda pun.

I’m not American, but I feel like I would rather go out in a blaze of glory, as it were, than be sent off to the queer prison biblical re-education camps that don’t seem to be very far away.

Barack… Obama? Oh! You mean Captain Drone Strikes?

Well, in scripture a circle can be 10 cubits in diameter and 30 cubits in circumference, so…

I guess all that we can conclude is that through god, all things are possible.

It’s very important to note that Catholics believe that Jesus was both fully man and fully god, and in times past would straight up kill you for heresy for saying he was half man and half god.

I can’t wait for Jurassic World 6 when we send the dinosaurs to space!

Fairly unsurprising conclusion, really.

Is it actually prompting any soul searching, though? To be sure, those who were already inclined toward supporting The Squad™ are now getting more vocal about it, but we’re also seeing a huge amount of people actively cheering the government on for rounding people up and putting them into cages and sending people to prison camps without due process. (I can’t find the source, I’m sorry, but) I saw something recently that said well above 60% of USians support government policies that help the poor, but that drops to about 30% if you call the same policies “welfare”. [Edit: found the source here.]

I think Zizek’s qualified support for Trump’s first term was a gamble that the US would then look at the consequences and then resolve to have to grow up and start taking politics more seriously. And I think that gamble was silly, both because of how the US currently is, and because of how often that hasn’t worked in the past 100 years. And that, amongst other reasons, is why I generally take what Zizek has to say with a pinch of salt.

Well, Freud was the first to say (or at least the first to popularise) ideas that - in retrospect - should be obvious, like that human behaviour is motivated by unconscious drives, or that past trauma influences your current behaviour. However most of his theories about how the unconscious works were basically unfalsifiable and based on nothing more that his own interpretation of what he’s noticed about his own patients (though to be fair, I think that’s mostly the case for most of psychology). I think a lot of the early psychology of Freud, Adler, and Jung is quite enmeshed with the philosophy of Nietzsche (who said some truly wild about human nature without providing a single source) and remains more popular than it should be for that reason.

I don’t think his reasoning was prescient and correct, though.

If Trump wins, both big parties, Republicans and Democratics, would have to return to basics, rethink themselves, and maybe some things can happen there. That’s my desperate, very desperate hope, that if Trump wins—listen, America is not a dictatorial state, he will not introduce Fascism—but it will be a kind of big awakening. New political processes will be set in motion, will be triggered.

he will not introduce Fascism

Neither party rethought anything (your point about Mamdani shows just how little the Dems have rethought) and now the US is rounding people up to put them in camps.

And re. the transgenderism/Freud comment, I think it mostly serves to show that he puts way more stock in Freud than he should, because Freudian psychology is largely a load of wank.

(Yes, the use of a sexually based pejorative to disparage Freud was deliberate. Please appreciate my clever joke.)

Slavoj Zizek also advocated for voting for Donald Trump in 2016 and says that “transgenderism is incompatible with Freud”, so his advocacy doesn’t count for much AFAIAC.

If I had a million dollars we wouldn’t have to eat Kraft dinner.

But we would eat Kraft dinner.

Ice cubes and artificial sweetener?

So no.

If you’re inclined to be charitable, I believe the capitalist-brained reasoning goes something like:

These grocery stores will inevitably run at a loss and/or need to be subsidised - costing the taxpayers money - because the state couldn’t possibly run them as efficiently as a private enterprise competing in the free market.

(Not saying I agree.)

If I had to describe my feelings about this, I would have to say that I am bivalent.

Any floury potato will do. In England we would probably use Maris Piper potatoes.

It depends on your definition of “legitimate”, I suppose.

My point is that the targeting of civilians is still and always has been common in war. It may now be de jure illegal but it is de facto not policed.

You couldn’t make Brokeback Mountain today. Some Hollywood studio would be like “hey you can’t make Brokeback Mountain, we own the rights to that.”

According to the British (during the Malayan Emergency) and Americans (during Operation Ranch Hand), indiscriminately starving enemy civilians by spraying Agent Orange everywhere was legal.

In more recent history, we of course have Captain Drone Strike’s reign of terror against wedding parties and aid workers in Afghanistan.

The only thing that’s changed since the Geneva conventions of 1949 is that when civilians are targeted, the rest of the world says “tut tut, that’s a war crime” before it proceeds not to do anything about it.*

* Unless you’re from Africa or the Balkans, apparently.