I agree with the person you respond with. I haven’t voted for a Republican once and I’m very much here saying the people who didn’t vote “because the democrats didn’t give us a reason to” are as culpable… but I also live in a very red state and one of the few saving graces is in order to participate in the primaries one doesn’t have to be registered to a party. Something I’ve avoided, but also something the state is trying to get rid of. I’m seriously considering registering Republican just to keep targets off my back.

Plus I think we may be passed elections anyways so those not “of the party” are likely to be targeted anyways.

Thank you. Audible was my lifesaver when I was working on the road but I’m definitely on the prepare part.

Oh we’re past the point of no return. The question we’re at now is how much damage can we mitigate from here forward.

The US has killed any of it’s power it’s had in the world beyond military and economic. The power it had through friendships and trade deals, they’re fucking gone. Trade deals have been shown to be temporary and based on whims so why would anyone do it. And friendships? HAHAHAHAH.

So now it’s economic… and oh look, we’re about to start tearing that apart and probably look at a depression that will be compared to the OG Great Depression, while the trade deals are going across the world and China is definitely willing to step up to the plate to be the “adult in the room” in trade deals.

So last it’s military power. And with getting rid of officers to only have loyal ones… that means strategy and tactics will be going out the window for “We have a big hammer.”

That’s the US’s interaction with the world, which most of our lives we’ve been in the dominant position. So that’ll get rough. Now on to the things internally that DOGE has gone through and cleared out, it’ll take years to unfuck the stuff already done.

The worst case scenario, I would argue, is that this ends in the destruction of the world via nuclear war within less than an hour. This is what I am scared of the most.

I just want to know ahead of time frankly because I know where the nuke is likely to hit in our city and I’m out of the insta-vaporize zone so I want to get closer.

Kinda sounds like the mark of the beast.

https://www.benjaminlcorey.com/could-american-evangelicals-spot-the-antichrist-heres-the-biblical-predictions/

I’ll preface with I’ll agree that for the most part, it’s men being whiny about “woke” and other nonsense. They’re assholes. I really don’t have anything to add to that front.

So I’ll add a perspective of the small other crowd in situations friends of mine and I have found ourselves in, that having criticisms of women led stories gets us lumped in with the above group when the same criticism of a male led roles/stories are fine and dandy. And we’re not exactly a group that hates women led stories despite our love of scifi action. Sarah Conner, Ripley, Jesse Faden if anyone has played the game Control.

Some of it I get as a female led cast movie/show will get hate before the first previews even launch so legitimate discussions can happen. However, I can go on absolute rants about how terrible movies can be: Tom Cruise remaking The Mummy was, attempting to do Hellboy without Ron Perlman and Guillermo Del Toro, whatever the Conan the Barbarian attempt Jason Mamoa had, and no one bats an eye. (Lets be honest, those were all terrible movies) However I’ve been called a misogynist when I talk about in the list with those above ones how absolutely terrible the all women cast remake of Ghostbusters was. Again, I knew there was a lot of undue hate, but if I ever discuss it, I’ve had to outright asterisk it every time that none of my complaints were to the actresses themselves but the movie from worldbuilding to some of the concept of it being made itself (As in: It’s Ghostbusters, an IP that’s been around for decades, did we need to dedicate screentime to remaking it from scratch? A complaint I’ll have at every reboot of a popular IP.)

And there’s legitimacy to the why. As you point out, there’s very few women led movies/stories which (I assume) means that with some representation there’s the want to nicer to it, especially as there are people who are outright assholes about it. Vs Another White Guy Does Things is easy to deride a movie because… speaking as a white guy, I’m going to be there mocking that movie too. But that’s why I put the “(I assume)” earlier, because it’s not like I’m lacking in some form of representation, so it’s easy to mock it.

I will wrap up this though with again, it’s a small extra outside perspective for a different viewpoint. If people just complain “There are too many women in x”, no, they’ve stopped having legitimate complaints and are just being jackasses.

The racism never went away it just learned to hide behind code words and shared looks.

Ah yes, the Lee Atwater strategy to bring in the Reagan administration. It’s not blacks they’re against, just “Welfare queens.”

Watergate is as far as you can draw a direct line.

I’d say Nixon administration as a whole. They picked up the dixiecrats post Civil Rights movement. Look up Nixon’s political Strategist Kevin Phillips and his discussion on the Southern Strategy where it was specifically targeting the racist whites to bring them into the Republican party.

But then that’s the part where I can say goes all the way back to slavery, but hey, if you grew up in the South the Civil War was never quite over even to modern era. But I’d definitely say the Southern Strategy the Republicans put into place would be where I’d say the beginning of drawing a direct line to where we’re at now.