Sassy Damar

Two things. First, a political commentator with such naked resentment of politics is just absurd to me. Political theater matters. What people think matters. That you agree already isn't the point. It's not about you. Stop engaging with this stuff on such a narcissistic level. You want the world to validate your viewpoint with concrete action rather than doing as the politico does... and working until your viewpoint IS accepted reality. As long as a single person out there believes Fauci was righteous, the job isn't finished. The real reason the GOP is so bad at politics is that so much of it, to include its voting base, rejects politics. Which is odd, because politics has existed for as long as the civilization they wish to be the vanguard for. Leave the post-political fantasies to the inane revolutionaries. Second, zooming in? The only quasi-plausible legal basis upon which to challenge that pardon is Trump's autopen theory. Which will just never win in any court. Not only because too many judges are libs, but also because there's a burden of proof required that Biden had no conscious intent to pardon Fauci. If we can even suspect that Biden had the conscious intent to pardon Fauci, that theory fails because POTUS' ability to do that is absolute. Which is why we need... politics. And to manipulate perceptions.

Folks complaining the actors in The Odyssey don't look Ancient Greek are oddly nostalgic for the era when John Wayne was apparently the most qualified Mongolian on Earth.

Politics is returning. Not "politics" as Americans understood it (policy and position) but the real deal of "who is my friend and who is my enemy?" Trump did not create the conditions of his rise (a large base of middle America that feels besieged by their traitorous elites) but he did harness and brand it. What you have is an upper class, liberal, largely coastal elite who have systematically gutted the working and middle classes of the nation while importing a permanent foreign underclass. This is opposed by those who feel resentment at this theft of patrimony, lashing out at the elites who have disinherited them. This populist movement is not necessarily right-partisan, but tended in that direction. To counter, the monied elite classes leaned left to gain allies. They charged the very people they'd robbed as racists, sexists, and -'phobes of all types (more simply, 'low class chud'). This led many "leftist" types, especially of the champagne variety, to adopt the weaponized positions of the financial class as ideological signifiers and a reified "leftism as product" lifestyle brand. This has turned the brands of "left" and "right" as labels more appropriately understood as financial capital + their serfs fighting to eviscerate the remains of the American middle and working classes. Those in the lowest class gain patronage from the "left" while those who aim to join the elite need its priestly vestments as symbols of class, and similarly, the "right" becomes a compressed heuristic of "do you identify primarily as an American?" rather than above (as the global managerial class) or below (as the underclass) said national signifier. These factions end up being hilariously close to a Marxian class war, albeit with most self-described Marxists on the side opposing the working class, for which they must produce much cope and theory (often via Twitch). War here means zero or negative-sum games. If the "left" totally wins, America will cease to exist as a nation and become, in the short term, a parody of state capitalism via regulation, money printing, and weaponized Cantillon effects, before descending, longer-term, into a corrupt analogue somewhere between Brazil and South Africa. Contrarily, if the "right" totally wins, there would be mass expulsions of the imported underclass, a restoration of law and order that would be unseemly to a liberal mindset, and grievous consequences to the global financial types who tried to profit from running a bust-out scheme on a nation. This means that politics increasingly becomes existential, with outcomes determining who can vote, who gets "debanked", who goes to prison, whose children inherit what country, and potentially, who stares face-down into fresh ditches. Under such conditions, politics escalates. If Trump's choice to brand the populist pushback empowered and legitimized it, then that's an existential risk for former right-liberals who were fine with being "culturally conservative members of the bust-out board". For his crime, he must be destroyed. Similarly, former overt Marxists who took "the working class" seriously (and not as an theoretical contortion) have found themselves in strange alliances with internet racists and trads. This has resulted, in fits and starts, in a "left MAGA" branding that I suspect will have more purchase once Trump-the-man has receded for Trump-the-brand, assuming the underlying crisis has not been resolved. Trump is not Trump. Trump is a battle flag for declaring to which side of a slow-boiling civil war you're loyal.

i still get those from time to time i haven't had the one where i'm chewing something and pull several teeth out in a while

Reddit: Odyssey is a MASTERPIECE and NOT WOKE Opening scene: