"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard." - H.L. Mencken

Hey c'mon - it's either save the world for our descendants or make sure a handful of corporate executives, stockholders and bankers are able to afford more houses and bigger yachts. The choice is obvious, right?

And that's the entire point really.

Behind all of the sturm und drang and all of the Christian nationalist noise and all of the hate and all of the furor is, and has been from the start, a handful of fabulously wealthy psychopathic fuckwads who recignized in Trump an opportunity to protect and even expand their entirely undeserved and grotesquely destructive privilege.

While there are strategic advantages to that - if he wins, it'll feel more like a mandate that will justify whatever horrifying shit his administration intends to do and if he loses, it's an instant objection - I tend to think that the real foundation of this whole attitude is just Trump's delusional narcissism.

Trump's reality isn't rooted in actual objective reality. It's based on himself and himself alone - if he believes it, then, to him, it is and can only be true, and he believes whatever serves to assuage the squalling demands of his titanic ego and his childish greed and need for attention.

I have no doubt that in the fantasy universe in which he actually lives, he really can't possibly lose. It's just in the real universe - the one the rest of us live in but he does not - that he can (and hopefully will) lose.

Rather obviously, there's one and only one real reason why they would try to bar federal monitors - because they don't want any witnesses to whatever they're planning.

Actually, that's been the case for just about exactly 16 years. I watched it happen in real time.

I went through a libertarian phase in the 80s and 90s, mostly because I couldn't reconcile my anarchist sensibilities with the fact that humanity just isn't ready to do entirely without authority. I eventually just gave in and shifted to anarchism, since it's really the only position that's consistent with my principles, and I just treat it as more of an ideal toward which to strive than an actual immediate goal.

In any event, I knew the libertarian movement of the era. It was more right- than left-wing even then, but it was primarily libertarian, exactly as the term implies - primarily focused just on minimizing political authority.

Then came the Tea Party.

The first Tea Party protests were organized by actual libertarians and were specifically against the Wall Street bailouts in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis that Wall Street had essentially single-handedly caused. And notably, they were against the Bush administration.

But then, shortly after Obama's victory, with a suspiciously well-timed and widespread boost fron the legacy media reporting on an even more suspiciously well-timed on-air comment by Jim Cramer, the Tea Party was recast into a Republican protest against the left. And it almost immediately transformed from a series of protests against the Wall Street bailouts to a traveling right-wing carnival of hate. (And conveniently enough, the focus on the Wall Street bailouts completely vanished).

While I saw that happen I didn't recognize the near-immediate Overton Window shift it triggered until I noticed a sudden influx of libertarians on anarchist forums. And they all had the same story - they had abandoned their libertarian forums because they had been taken over by angry, stupid Republicans.

And that became the status quo. The former libertarians mostly settled into their own sub-community of "anarcho-capitalists" and the libertarian movement is now pretty much just angry, stupid Republicans who are only marked out by the fact that they lean more into corporatocracy and militarism than religious fundamentalism and social war.

There is zero chance that there is not going to be fairly significant violence from Trump's supporters between November and January.

It will happen, absolutely no matter what.

Either he's going to lose, in which case they're going to engage in retaliatory and/or insurrectionary violence, or he's going to win (or be handed the win by the Supreme Court Rubber-stamping Service), in which case they're going to engage in celebratory, very enthusiastic and likely officially sanctioned violence.

That's it. At this point, there is no third option. Trump, in his pathological narcissism and complete lack of empathy or sound reason, has fostered an atmosphere of anger and hatred, and it's not a question of if it will result in violence and murder, but simply of when and of what specifically will touch it off.

See - this is why I don't give a shit about copyright.

It doesn't protect creators - it just enriches rent-seeking corporate fuckwads.

Amongst all of the Republican insanity of recent years, the thing that definitely stands out to me the most, as the weirdest, is their slavish subservience to Putin.

I understand it from an extremely cynical point of view, but still, it's just so weird snd so directly contrary to everything they've ever claimed to stand for. It's hypocrisy and malfeasance and amorality and pathetic subservience all rolled into one and cranked up to 11.

Israel is a rogue state.

There is absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy.

I wonder if he'll be thinking about the irony of having said that when Trump is in office, democracy is dead and he's plummeting 20 floors to his death after one of Trump's operatives has thrown him out a window.

I'm with him 100% on the first bit - at this point, the single most important thing the Dems have to do is stop bickering.

As for the rest, at this point I don't even much care. I can see arguments both for and against in both directions - either choice is going to involve some risk but either choice can be made to succeed.

So the important thing, and really the ONLY important thing, is to pick one and run with it. Stop with the dilly-dallying and the second-guessing and the bitching and moaning and hand-wringing and make a choice and stick with it, so we can focus ALL of our attention on pounding those fucking fascist traitors' dicks into the dirt.