Ohhhhhhh! That makes so much more sense, thank you!

Okay, but have you considered that it sounds like I’m from an Ace Combat country if I say it?

Astronomy. I have a big ass reflector that I use for struggling to find globular clusters, oggling the fuck out of Jupiter and the Orion nebula, and very slowly working my way through the Messier list*. I considered going to school for it, for a hot second, but I kinda really don’t want to end up the fucked up publish-or-die academia world making less money than I do now but with PhD debt.

*I don’t use a GOTO system. No judgement for people who do, I’ve even considered a GOTO mod for when I do outreach, but I think there’s some magic in slewing on to target by hand.

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Yeah, it does sound kinda dumb, but so are we

Mexicans and Canadians are also from North America, and, hence, are American.

USian here, don’t think twice, fucking do it.

I guess, man, but we’re talking about people that seem to have an unlimited capacity to distort reality in order to make the narrative true. Never forget that on J6 the capitol was stormed by righteous patriots trying to save democracy and that they were just on a peaceful tour after being told to go in by capitol police and also that they were a violent antifa mob.

For me, it was always the gap between what I read (the gospel) and what the people around me in church believed. I don’t know what book they read, but we never were reading about the same guy. The dude I read about would have never been okay with bulldozing the homeless, siccing the cops on people, conflating wealth with righteousness, and the government denying people basic rights. Jesus never would have been cool with a theocracy; following Christianity was always and only ever meant to be a personal choice between you and God. What broke me was when the SCOTUS ruled that gay people could get married, every church we visited was screaming about how they were being oppressed. I gave up on going to church, and, over time, re-examined my beliefs. Today, I identify as a Buddhist. Not a very good one, mind you, but it is something I find helpful for framing my worldly existence.

I wish he wouldn’t. I know he doesn’t feel like he has much choice but to try and deal with the US, but as a USIAN, I wish he wouldn’t trust this administration. They’re going to rugpull him and the entire country of Ukraine literally whenever they want, they’re going to try and make Ukraine a neocolonial asset, and I just wish that he wouldn’t grant this administration the legitimacy of trying to negotiate with them in good faith.

Commenting to emphasize this.

Wait, really? Imo, JD had that “guy who’s been trying to turn a friend into a fuck for three years now” energy for Trump. I’m really surprised anybody saw that as masculine and powerful.

The US is trying desperately hard to achieve scumbag singularity. PeRsEcUtEd white South Africans? Bring em on! Scumfuck manosphere influencers? Let’s bring them home! Rich assholes no longer welcome in their home country? Yeah, will that be cash or check?

Though, the thought occurs that the scumbag concentration increases on a curve that’s inverse of the square root of distance from the White House. Maybe all these assholes will just gel together in DC like some Sci Fi mutant scumbag blob and we can just, like, cast fire on it or cut the city adrift into the Atlantic to go become some old sailor’s myth like the Flying Dutchman or Belgium.

God damn, Carl Sagan 360 no scoping the 2020s from the 80s and 90s.

We couldn’t even get our fellow countrymen to wear cloth masks without them screeching and guzzling horse dewormer. We’ve been demanding universal healthcare since at least the 90s; we got a fucking insurance marketplace instead, and the right wing has never stopped bitching about it to this day. If we could clean it up, we would have, but there’s a subset of our population that’s hopelessly propagandized. The only upshot here is that it tends to be a regional phenomenon and might be able to be addressed via balkanizing; just walk away from the table and let the fucking bozos be bozos in their own little bozoville.

Those who are really going to do things about stuff shouldn’t yap about it on social media. Loose lips sink ships.

Right now I’m in a holding pattern. There’s a non-zero chance that Trump will be distracted by something shiny and we’ll move on to the next fucking fever dream crisis. There’s also a really, really good chance that if he does order to invade Canada, real shit will start to pop off here.

As a Californian, I’m hella stoked for the future nation of Pacifica.

I’ve heard that for non-ADHDers, it actually does hit them like Meth, which I find a little bewildering. The biggest, most noticable difference for me is that Adderall just turns off my elevator music.

Oh, so far we’ve got one European or Canadian downcoping and telling themselves “but it really will be different for us”.

Fuck around and find out, bud. Hope you don’t enjoy your social programs.

The rest of the world watching the US be an extra dysfunctional mess for the last forty years and finally blow its own legs off: “well, okay, but they said it’ll be different for us”