I can’t help but read the ph as an f, even though it is clearly a concatenation.

And there you go from the moral/intellectual high ground, mocking them as toddlers and saying it’s right and normal to laugh and make fun of them.

I can’t stand vaccine hesitancy and anti-science bullshit. I’ve had to deal with this becoming a Fox News thing in my own family, and lost too many people from alternative “Eastern” medicine over “Western” medical science. But the mockery and ridicule only feeds into the Christian persecution complex most of that rural white population already embraces, and causes the wagons to circle.

A bunch of empty calorie LitRPG desserts right now like He Who Fights With Monsters, The Primal Hunter, and Unbound, with my currently active book being the first book in the Infinite Realm series. I am eagerly awaiting Beware of Chicken 4, and I have the latest Bobiverse book queued up as the audiobook dropped this week.

Audiobooks really allowed me to get back into reading due to time constraints, so I almost always have a book going in one ear throughout the day. I cycle between “realer” literature and light fun reads, but have been on a nice trashy kick for a little while now. I am debating another attempt at Malazin Book of the Fallen because I have no idea where I got cut off in my last listen through, and possibly another thrip through of Dune due to the movies and the nearly 2 decades since my last read through.

As someone who has been a fan of the Sword of Truth series, I can confidently say that Wheel of Time is superficially similar but definitely better. Both main characters are unknowing chosen one’s with mysterious lineages, who go on their heroes journey to save the world. Both have an interesting magic system, and mostly engaging and enjoyable characters. Both have a morally headstrong lead character who has a hero complex after being thrust into the position, who are genuinely fun to root for as they grow into the hero they become.

Wheel of Time is a much larger story, more grand epic in comparison, with a larger cast and 5 “main” characters that are followed with their satellite characters. The timeline and scope start out with the entire world and remain on that scale in comparison, and Jordan is a significantly better writer in my opinion. I would say that Wheel of Time is like if J.R.R. Martin wrote the Lord of the Rings, so there is more individual depth (almost too much sometimes) and so the story takes longer to tell but is incredibly “lived in”.

I have a real soft spot for Terry Goodkind, having found the series in the late 90s or early 00s. It was one of my first big high fantasy series and before Wheel of Time. That said, i just couldn’t really get further than Confessor in the series. It looks like there were only 4 more books in the series, so I may have to go back and try and finish it and see if it gets better. Goodkind has a habit of pulling new powers out of Richard’s butt or changing how magic works when he seems to have written himself into a corner, which eventually killed my suspension of disbelief. And as much shit as Jordan gets for “men writing women”, his female characters are significantly better written than Goodkind’s. Both stories are rather traditional male power fantasy, but Goodkind can be kind of egregious there.

I am not ragging on Goodkind even if it seems like it, honestly, but read Wheel of Time because it is that good. The best way I can describe the difference is that it feels like going from a YA or main stream series to adult literature. You won’t be disappointed.

January 6th is not seen as an insurrection but as citizens banding together to protect democracy. Collusion with Russia was always seen as a false attempt to make him look bad, especially with things like the dossier being faked. Tax evasion is considered smart if you can do it legally, and the New York prosecution for what the industry considers standard practice reinforced the perspective that it was weaponizing the justice system. Autographed bibles are no more sacrilegious than any of the megachurch/televangelist who buys a private jet because God wants him to to.

Each one of those hurtles may take someone out of his camp, but for some that will only be if there is a viable alternative. Keep in mind that the alternative on the democratic side is trying to end their 2nd amendment rights, open the borders to secure a permanent underclass voting block, and lose the national protection of God by persecuting Christians. It doesn’t matter to what degree any of that is true, that is the hurtle they have to clear.

Since armed service is venerated more on the right than the left, and has higher percentages of veterans and their children, this might indeed be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for some or many. He is grifting in so many areas, that if he is also shown to be a grifter on respecting the armed services in addition to being a false Christian and 1 percenter elite then parts of his base might see him as no better than the Democrats.

I have never heard someone call all of recorded human history relatively recent outside of paleontologists or geologists.

Immigration is never a crime, because immigration is done through established channels.

Maybe your right though and we should stop calling people who violate international borders or break the law by violating visas illegal immigrants, because that is a politically correct term.

I know you are actually arguing against the existence of countries in favor of a single planet spanning global commune, I just couldn’t resist.

If there was credibility for a Jewish ethnostate 70 years ago due to the Holocaust and global antisemitism, how do we get to say things are better now and take the country back. Especially with all the other ethnostates in the world.

Obviously there is a problem because the region had changed hands over the past 1-2000 years and had other ethnic groups when the country was established by the Allies. The idea of having taken the land from Germany instead of the area around l Jerusalem sounds like poetic justice, but ignores that they have a historic homeland. Anyone would want their historic homeland with their historic religious sites back over somewhere else.

It seems like Jews are treated as second class when it comes to that. Talk of giving Mt Rushmore back is because it was that tribes sacred religious site, and no one would be happy giving them another mountain in another state.

You indicated that anyone that is Zionist and anyone who has served in the IDF should be deported to wherever they came from or wherever their father’s family line last held citizenship. With the IDF being mandatory service, that is basically the majority of able bodied people.

You also said the same should happen with the US and Canada, which are over 200 years old, so I am not sure why Australia gets a pass. Better optics on treatment of aboriginals than first nations and native Americans?

Actual justice to you is deporting all people without sufficient/correct bloodline from Israel to Europe, and the Americas back to Europe, Africa, and Asia, to return those lands to their “correct” ethno states? I assume you would include Australia and New Zealand, and Africa as well. Very “sins of the father to the third and fourth generations”.

It seems that you are arguing that only the Jewish people who stayed or managed to return to the region prior to the 18 or 1900s count as “real” Jews, and those that came after the foundation of Israel are Europeans faking being Jews for the purpose of colonizing the middle east?

Ah, so as long as you push a people/culture out of a region long enough, they no longer count as having been there. Or are you saying that the Jewish people interbred with Europeans too much after the Roman diaspora and thus Jews are no longer of middle eastern descent? Is there an argument that the Jews originated in Europe or elsewhere and not from the region surrounding Jerusalem?

I am ignoring the entire subject of the state of Israel, I’m just trying to understand the logic on the Jewish people and culture not being “already there” in the region.

Have you seen children? Empathy is one of the last things to develop. There is a specific purity of cruelty attributed to children for a reason.

Civilization is conditioned into humans as a general rule, not the other way around, and needs consistent reinforcement. Humans are eusocial, but like chimpanzees and ants where war with other “tribes” is closer to a baseline than cooperation.

That may or may not be entirely true, but you have to admit that was a damn good burn. Someone had to say it, it was too perfect a setup not to.

Once again, state politics are direct democracy. You don’t go vote for your Governor and Representatives and your federal House and Senate candidates, and then have your county or district results generate an elector to vote on your behalf. There are no mini republics. Those states are operating as you are arguing for the federal level to operate, while complaining about their results and believing you can erase those results by removing the last vestiges of states rights. Throwing the baby out with the bath water, because there are no legitimate states rights issues, only bigoted ones. Your dismissal of any concerns from the rural and agricultural regions of California out of hand as there aren’t enough of them to matter, and the later implication that they are just bigots anyway so should be ignored is pretty clear.

Your entire argument is that you don’t like how conservative rural states are, because you are apparently better than them and want to rewrite the rules to finish writing them off. Not everything you disagree with is a dog whistle, Wyoming doesn’t want to retain its 3 electoral college votes to disenfranchise brown people, and everything isn’t a conspiracy of white supremacy. You seem to just want to handwave all state level rights conversations away as bigotry, and I guess you just keep on doing you. I don’t expect this conversation to actually go anywhere from:

You fucking know it’s just a power fix, “states rights” is just a dogwhistle for pulling the democratic rug before the browns and queers get too many rights.

You apparently believe that the enlightened EU apportions votes by equal proportionality based on population of member nations, but that isn’t true. Germany, with over 84x the population of Luxembourg does not get 84x the number of MEPs. Luxembourg’s population get 8x the MEP representation of Germany’s. It is a degressive proportion system just like the Electoral College, for exactly the reasons I stated.

Point two is literally just you saying you don’t like the way it works and trying to discredit it by calling it archaic, as if the concept of direct democracy isn’t just as old as representational republics. No one is arguing that it doesn’t create swing states and tilt the balance back towards the mid and small sized states, because that’s what it was designed to do: make it so the smaller states must be included.

Really not sure what your last paragraph is about as it’s not very clear, but within a state everything is direct democracy. This means that the large population centers do run the states like you want, which results in situations like parts of California trying to split off because they have no representation. Unless it violates the constitution or other applicable federal law, states get to set their own rules and laws.

And all that is working as intended, because the US is a gestalt entity created of 50 states cooperating in concert with each other. We have an electoral college to balance the power between the biggest and smallest states so that every state gets representation under a representational republic. Extrapolate out to other similar organizations like the European Union. Would Luxembourg join or remain in the EU if votes were done by direct democracy of the population of each member country and Germany alone nearly outnumbers the bottom half of the EU by population? Each member state deserves representation. The same is true for the US, where it’s illegal to leave the union after you’ve joined.

The House of Representatives are the voice of the actual people (unfairly restricted in size which needs to be fixed but that’s another story), the Senate is supposed to be the voice of the States (but we made them directly elected instead of appointed by the state governments making them just a super version of the House but that is yet another conversation), and the President to run the government and act as our figurehead. This is supposed to allow the vastly different needs of each state and for the differing needs between urban and rural areas to be represented. This is why yes, if your amendment cannot convince 75% of states that it’s a good amendment, it probably shouldn’t pass in the first place.

TL/DR: Direct democracy is practiced at the local and state level, then representationally at the federal level because we are a republic of cooperating states that each have their own needs and desires. We have fucked with/fucked up how that representation works in the republic for better or worse, and the system as designed allows the possibility for a tyranny of the minority because it was the only way to prevent permanent tyranny of the majority.

You’re right, which is why it should be slowly and continuously changed along with the times and through the mechanisms in place to do so, not drastically and sweepingly every 50 years or so. You don’t throw out and replace the constitution or other foundations of law without massive societal upheaval, which is just as bad as permanent stagnation.

Do you honestly want to live in a country where the established foundations of government changed every 50 years? That kind of chaos and instability would be crushing. There are places like that right now, and first world countries they are not.

Then get enough of the population to agree with you to convene a constitutional Congress and pass that new constitution. It shouldn’t be hard if at least 75% of the US aligns with you. If you don’t have that much of the population in agreement, then you aren’t communicating your desired constitution well or the current one works well enough for enough of the country.

Otherwise you are either implying that we need war to crush the pillars of our society, necessitating the rebuilding of our institutions like what happened with WWI and WWII for the other “modern” countries I presume you are wanting to emulate, or you want to disenfranchise at least 30% of the population because WE is not everyone and YOU “deserve” a new constitution and fuck the “other side”.