California may well be getting a larger total of refugees and undocumented immigrants than Florida gets, yet we don't dump them anywhere. In fact, we get dumped into, because most states other than New York like to ship their homeless population here. They call it "greyhound therapy" in the social assistance trade. So we end up taking care of half of the entire country's homeless population, and on top of that most of the immigrants and refugees from the Pacific side. And nobody needs to be sent anywhere else.

Zero excuses for Florida and Texas.

I took a peek. Parler had the likes of Newt Gingrich and Tulsi Gabbard prominently featured, and lots of right wing fantasy retellings of recent events... but Gab led off immediately with Trumpsky himself, and only took six more posts to feature someone saying the Jews are behind it all. And RT is on there, acting as bad as the domestic conspiracy theorists. Gab wins — if you're a Nazi, that's the place for you.

if that's what it takes to retain privilege and patriarchy. They see the end of democracy as a better alternative than letting a long-term majority of minorities and progressives govern in a way that doesn't respect their historical advantages. They feel the loss of control in their own lives and instead of connecting it to lowering wages and wall street greed, they link it to better treatment of women and minorities, thinking that the wrong people are getting things that should be rightfully theirs.

But of course they never spell that out to themselves, because everything to do with privilege and prejudice in this country is constantly wrapped in doublethink and self-deception. They get constantly fooled and duped because they are constantly fooling and duping themselves with rationalizations to tell themselves they're not bigots.

Also, most of them are evangelical, and have spent their entire lives forcing themselves to believe myths and fairy tales instead of evidence. Anyone who can piggy-back on the type of religious authority to which they have granted power over their belief systems, can exploit it to get them to swallow political myths and fairy tales too. They don't need evidence, they only need the stories to reinforce their sense of cultural identity in the same way that religious fundamentalism does.

The Electoral College punishes third parties and makes them irrelevant unless they can basically steal a majority right away from existing parties. I think that's what the Yangsters are hoping for.

If we had a different voting system, like a ranked choice popular vote, then third parties would fluorish because they could contribute their positives without the penalty of being spoilers for the consensus majority.

I would like to hear somebody articulate a centrist position which acknowledges why centrism has failed and everyone has gone to the edges, which is basically because of income inequality and wage suppression. People are not supporting moderate status quo policies because the status quo is not supporting them back. This is the core of why Hillary wasn't able to sail to easy victory with a centrist position.

https://slate.com/business/2022/06/wilhoits-law-conservatives-frank-wilhoit.html

I do like the turns of phrase of Wilhoit #2, like "Conservatism has long been surrounded by an enormous shimmering halo of pseudo-philosophy." I've noticed this myself: that through their punditry and movement leaders, right-wingers like to throw up a big facade of ideals and ideology, when in fact they don't believe in any ideology at all. The entire Libertarian movement is a piece of that fake-ideological facade, and really, so is a lot of evangelical Christianity. It's all a smokescreen for the simple fact that they want themselves to be privileged and everyone else to be suppressed or subjugated.

I thought Obama was the best prez of my lifetime but honestly, Biden is outperforming him.

In some countries, people manage to own guns without enabling hordes of trigger-happy killers, but sadly, we do not live in such a country. Trigger-happy killers are abundant here, and we are forced to act accordingly. So we enact "red flag" laws to identify who we really should consider not giving guns to.

And in our culture, just wanting to have a gun is already a red flag in itself. When you say you want to keep one or more guns in your house, I feel that you are already letting me know that you have a dark side I can never fully trust.

But that's not the reddest flag. The thing that really lets me know you're not someone I want to trust with a gun is if you show clear racism. I suspect this country has a lot of racists in it who want guns just for when the day comes that they can open fire on people of color. In self-defense, of course, if only in their own minds. They think the threat they will someday need guns for is most likely to be black people.

If a red flag law was really designed to be effective, it would examine people not just for a violent history or mental instability or bloodthirsty ideation or drunkenness, but also for bigotry. Of course, the howls of protest at the unfairness at that would be deafening. They'd say we were just trying to take guns away from everyone who wants one... which in practice might not be all that far off.

What are you afraid of? A zombie plague? A Chinese invasion? A post-nuclear battle for survival? A race war? A driveby from a rival drug cartel? Under what scenario do you think you'll need to fight an advancing horde of other people? Why do you imagine that the citizens around you are someday going to end up needing to be gunned down?

If you just want to shoot automatic weapons because it's fun, why not just go to a range that offers a rental? We could set that up. Why do you want it in your house?

I'm becoming convinced that today's fundamentalist evangelical christianity is not based on the bible, but on some combination of christian dominionism and white supremacism. They're defined not by their faith in Christ but by their intolerance of people unlike themselves. Their biblical literalism is a shibboleth for identifying who to reject. They insist on young earth beliefs and deny evolution because that excludes people who would allow science to tell them that other people are as good as they are. They aren't fascist to support their christianity, they're christian to support their fascism.

Lots of americans are christian in lots of ways, but I'm getting the strong impression that evangelical fundamentalism is a near 100% surrogate for racist fascism.

The world is going to have an ongoing health problem just from people who once had covid, even if nobody catches it again. All kinds of scary outcomes are starting to be noticed in people's long-term health after the acute disease has ended... not just things like reduced aerobic capacity, but things like weaker immune systems, proneness to strokes and heart attacks, lasting internal organ damage... for many, covid may end up being a lifelong condition. And as far as they can tell, vaccination reduces the likelihood of these awful outcomes, but maybe only by about half.

So even a mild case that seems to go away quickly may bite you later on. But there's a simple way to avoid this risk: keep masking!