To be fair, if you had a dragon would you be afraid to use it?
OngoingConversation
Provided it wasn’t a metaphorical dragon, then yes. It’s a free creature, entitled agency beyond my command!
BorkBorkBork
You’re thinking of wild dragons, not domesticated ones. I have to recommend this three-part documentary series, made by the cryptozoologists at Dreamworks, that extensively teaches you how to train your dragon.
Taffy
Fuckin’ SJWs are ruining the iconic dragon guarding the captive’s tower, smfh.
I kinda live for this strange conflict Dorothy and Jennifer seem to have. It’s interesting, it’s like interacting with Jennifer brings the worse out of Dorothy somehow.
Jennifer actively seeks personal pleasure and drama out with no consequences or thought to anyone but herself. It makes her a disaster queen but it’s oddly liberating.
Dorothy lives every second of every day caring about others and planning her world to the minute.
Counter-argument: Jennifer is NOT completely selfish. She seeks personal pleasure and drama, not merely for herself, but for EVERYBODY. On a very fundamental level, she wants to help everybody be like her, because she assumes that that is the most desirable way to be. She could just spend all her time being a disaster bisexual insecure party girl herself, but INSTEAD she’s constantly doing everything in her power to help people learn to be disaster bisexual insecure party girls THEMSELVES. This can actually be really beneficial at times – e.g. helping Ruth because party girls aren’t allowed to get depressed and commit suicide, helping Joyce because party girls aren’t allowed to be wimps about going to the doctor – but obviously, it also comes with the drawbacks that have totaled all of her close friendships and romantic relationships up to this point.
And THAT is what actually makes her even MORE of an antithesis to Dorothy than you claim. Dorothy wants everybody to be as responsible as her. Jennifer wants everybody to be as irresponsible as her. They’re fundamentally in conflict, but also kinda speak to each others’ most repressed desires (or not so repressed, as of the last couple of arcs)!
Imo Dorothy seeming so put together, supportive, kind and generally likeable without being insincere is a threat to Billie’s sense of superiority. Outside of highschool she isn’t top of the social food chain, so she needs to drag others down to feel bigger, especially those who’ve seen her at her lowest.
Dorothy was seeking power because she believed she could fix everything for everyone.
Raidah somehow managed in a single sentence to point out the President doesn’t do that. Its a position with a huge party to answer to as well as violent military responsibilities.
Which I suspect Dorothy had been suppressing for awhile.
I still don’t get what the big deal is. If we assume, for sake of argument, that somebody *has* to press the “murder innocents” button, I would think somebody that really doesn’t enjoy that particular part of the job and is always looking for alternative methods would be an ideal candidate!
an ideal candidate would need to have that attitude, and be able to accurately represent the interests of 300+ million people AND be an effective leader
That is to say, they do not exist. Hoping for an ideal president, a single person that’s the ideal package for handling all that power responsibly and effectively, in the long run is no more futile than centuries’ old hoping for a perfect king as was venerated by monarchies of centuries past.
oh kind of The Divine to arrange matters such that, no matter where on earth or when in history you (royal) happen to be born, the nation and traditions into which you were born at random just so happen to be the ones most likely to keep you on the One True Path To Happiness™
Archieve
I think the problem is that the system a caring president would have to run in rewards false bravado and reassure over carefully thought out answers that don’t always have a feel good answer. Dorothy in particular struggles to clap back at opposition or pretend to be reassured when in reality she has doubts which in American politics is considered a win for the other side.
Adept
France and the US both make the mistake of investing too much power in the hands of the president. Of course the US is now going fully off the rails with no safeguards, so it will be so much worse.
fridge_logic
A good one would. This clip from the American President still holds up, it’s a clip that puts fire in my heart and could still put the fire back in Dorothy’s.
Even if you believe that, are you willing to become the sort of person who exploits and causes the suffering of innocents for the sake of your own power? Are you willing to become the sort of person who could become president?
BBCC
Would you rather leave the Presidency to people who have absolutely zero compunctions about slamming the murder innocents button a bunch of times in a row just because they’re bored?
I, personally, at the very least, would rather it be a GROUP of people sharing those same powers and responsibilities, and for terms to either be much shorter considering that in this post-industrial, information age era, orders of magnitude more tumultuous change could happen in the span of 4 years today than what was all possible 200 years ago when the US’s plan for government was first written down.
Let alone what could happen in the span of a LIFE-TIME of an appointed Supreme Court Justice. Life-time terms made sense at the time of the Constitution being written because back in the colonial era, people just didn’t live as long as they do now. In the colonial era, sudden death by diseases like smallpox and typhoid was very common and accepted as a fact of life.
Implements for removing corrupt officials simply were not designed to be as powerful as they should be today because back 200 years ago we could literally depend on death and disease to do it for us.
To say the least our government needs some MAJOR overhauls to actually be able to accurately represent us and accommodate our needs as a massive, diverse population living in 21st century circumstances.
clif
“people who have absolutely zero compunctions about slamming the murder innocents button a bunch of times in a row just because they’re bored?”
When did we start talking about Robin?
eh, whatever
and for terms to either be much shorter
Or?
clif
Or we decide the humans have no business running things and that the thing to do is turn it all over to an AI.
And then we fight a brutal war over which AI to use.
or at the very least have more powerful ways of removing corrupt officials
thejeff
It’s fun to fantasize about restructuring the entire political system, though I suspect less fun to actually try to do so beyond broad strokes like “let’s have a group!”. With any complex system the devil is in the details and those are much less fun and probably more important than the broad strokes.
With a group of co-presidents, how do you prevent the kind of gridlock we’ve seen in Congress? Congress, which essentially is the group you’re looking for. Part of the reason the President has taken on more power in recent decades is that Congress hasn’t been able to agree, but things still need to get done. Whether that’s the rise in the use of executive orders or of the administrative state.
One of the Project 2025 proposals, for example, is to take regulatory rule making power out of the hands of executive agencies and return it to Congress. Sounds good, right? Less executive power. More control by groups of elected officials. But it means that to regulate every new potentially dangerous chemical or to modify such regulations when new evidence comes up, Congress has to pass a law.
And Congresscritters, unlike bureaucrats, need campaign contributions.
it’s better to have a group with all that power and “never get stuff done”, than it is to bestow all that power and responsibility to a single person for 4 years and just pray they won’t use it to make things worse
concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good will of those who allow it to be. a king who is liable for being replaced but every 4 years is still a king
thejeff
It isn’t though, because stuff actually has to get done. People die when government stops.
The rhetoric about “a king who is liable for being replaced but every 4 years” sounds good, but isn’t true. The President is the most powerful single person in government, but is still limited in many ways. There are many things he can’t do without Congressional support. The Supreme Court can block basically anything he tries that’s outside of specified Constitutional limits.
Trump is a threat, not just because he’s willing to push those limits harder, but because he’s already got a sympathetic Supreme Court and will likely have the backing of both houses of Congress – though there are signs they’ll block some of the more extreme moves. Not enough to prevent a ton of damage though.
people also die when bad government doesn’t stop, if RFK Junior pushes his anti-vaccine shit or SSI gets gutted, disabled people like me gonna die. If the US starts yet another war with no exit strategy, that’s HELLA DEATH happening when government can carry along with the nebulous category of “getting stuff done”
indeed a house divided cannot withstand, it’s gotten to the point to which the “United” States might as well be two countries pretending to be one
it is demonstrably clear that the Confederacy and what it stood for being abolished in Law did not make it so in life. It’s no coincidence that of the Supreme Court Justices who ruled in favor of the segregation being Constitutional™ in Plessy v. Ferguson, three of them were former slave-owners.
all over BlueSky I see trans and queer folk in the southern US setting up go-fund-me to move to CA and escape persecution, yet another Great Migration happening, as we speak we are witnessing history in the making
vulnerable minorities and our allies and organizations over here are going to do absolutely EVERYTHING in our power to prevent any goals of Project 2025 from being fulfilled — even if/when that comes down to drawing a line in the sand
as history demonstrates, it is wise for us not to mistake our nation and it’s traditions and territories and status quo which we are used to being this way since being randomly born here, as that which will necessarily go on forever.
thejeff
Yeah, I don’t dispute any of that, but the answer isn’t some pseudo-libertarian “Stop the government from doing anything.”
Hell, half the bad shit they want to do is just stopping the government from doing things. Like vaccine requirements or running SSI.
Thag Simmons
I think people who actually have compunctions about it don’t get to be President. Either they beat it out of you compromise-by-compromise, or you stick to your principles and lose.
Yup. In our current system, the way you get those powers in an election is by appealing to the militarism and nationalism-venerating white people who have the power to get you there.
You’ll never win them over, because you can only really do so by going by THEIR standards of Politeness and Respectability™, and those standards are designed to stripe away any actual anti-establishment parts of discourse. If you engage them in a way THEY deem acceptable, you water down the message, and eventually if you want to stay in the picture you’ll become a nationalist yourself.
BBCC
That’s just simply not true. If Biden had no compunctions about it, a LOT more people would be dead than if Trump had been there.
Thag Simmons
What in the last year has given you the impression that Biden has any compunctions about the blood on his hands.
thejeff
I’m not sure what you mean by that?
BBCC
What in the last ten has given you the impression there aren’t people far, far worse than Biden?
If Biden had no compunctions about murdering innocents, there would be a lot more people dead. It doesn’t even matter which issue you’re referring to – there are many, much bloodier, ways he could have handled things if he truly had no compunctions about it.
Thag Simmons
You can make the argument that Biden was less destructive on the matter of Gaza than a Trump presidency would have been. This does not absolve him of anything. He is still stained with blood from a war of extermination that he supplied and supported.
BBCC
Trump’s talked repeatedly about turning Gaza into a parking lot and building hotels on whatever is left. Biden has been working on a ceasefire since November of last year. No, I wouldn’t say that’s ‘having no compunctions about slamming the murder innocents button’. It’s true, there’s lots of times where the President is stuck in a position where they end up stained with blood. That doesn’t change that someone’s gotta do it and it’s better to have someone who’s not going to pick the worst option possible.
if it’s always a person who’s hands gonna be stained with blood in that position, isn’t the least convoluted solution to recognize that the problem is fundamentally with the position itself?
according to current rules there has to be a president with all that power, but as citizens of a democracy we gotta ask ourselves — does it REALLY need to be that way?
Thag Simmons
If you believe Biden was genuinely working on a ceasefire and it wasn’t just a lie trotted out to placate people rightfully enraged that the USA was bankrolling a genocide you’re a fucking mark, I don’t know what to tell you.
BBCC
@ NGPZ – It doesn’t HAVE to, but I’m talking about the existing position, system and geopolitical state of the world that the US is currently working with.
@ Thag Simmons – Biden’s administration was a key negotiator in the temporary ceasefire last year and they’ve put forward at least five or six different offers for deals this last year off the top of my head, including at least two that Qatar encouraged Gaza to accept. Whether or not you think the deals were good enough, yes, they were real. We also know Biden’s been trying because Trump’s admitted he’s been encouraging Netanyahu to ignore him.
yeah, the election of the president, of a single person with all that power, is a game which is inevitably going to favor the Everyman.
For people in the US to romanticize this system in which being the Everyman confer power upon you is still systemic bigotry by very definition, and is inevitably still part of the problem.
Charles Phipps
The thing is that Dorothy has already seen violence personally up close with the stabbing of Rapist DudeTM and the death of Toedad. Dorothy doesn’t want any job that will involve committing or being complicit in violence.
Which is fine. It’s perfectly justified given her experiences and morality.
SocietyPilled
I couldn’t become that person if I tried, because I have neither the charisma, nor the money, nor the political connections. But if some genie said “I guarantee you will magically come across as presidential in public appearances, and that your party will support you the same way they support all their presidents even though you are literally just some guy. But do you really want to become president knowing all the hard decisions they make? Don’t you want to just let Trump be the president instead?” then it may well be the easiest decision on earth.
Adept
Yes, any halfway decent and normal person in place of Trump might actually save the American Republic. We are living through critical times regarding both the climate crisis and nature loss / extinction event. Humanity and the whole biosphere of Earth can’t really afford Uncle Sam descending into senility and madness, but here we are.
Thag Simmons
That’s not the question though. Would you be willing to try to become the sort of person who could come across as presidential and be supported by your party
It’s not just that you need to make hard decisions as president, it’s that you need to sell your soul to the institutions of the american empire to even have a shot at it
Needfuldoer
She was fooling herself by denying the unpleasant aspects of the job.
Raidah didn’t just point it out; she took what, at first glance, looks like the morally superior route: that, no, she’d never take THAT job, can you imagine the atrocities you would have to commit?
Except. She’s studying law? To be a lawyer, right? Which is, to be clear, a job that never requires you to do any morally questionable actions? Raidah has already chosen a career that will end with her either condemning innocents or freeing murderers and rapists, from a statistical view.
Raidah’s point was just to put Dorothy down and make her question herself.
Dorothy’s stuck on the fact that the future she was focusing her entire life on wasn’t as wonderful and amazing as she had thought. However – she’s missing the fact that *there still needs to be a leader* of the country, and an amazing amount of good can be done by that person. They can’t be perfect, but even if all they do is a mediocre job, they still fulfilled the role of keeping a tyrant out of power.
I hope that Dorothy’s arc leads her to a *real* reason for wanting to go into politics – to help people who the system either ignores or harms and to make positive change – and not a childish “I’m going to be the President and make everything better because I’ll be so awesome!” view.
Loki
Is Raidah studying criminal law? Because otherwise, there are lots of areas where she doesn’t “condemn innocents or free murderers and rapists”.
Samniel
Well, we know Raidah’s a social climber of the worst kind, the sort that sees everyone around her as a stepping stone on her way to the top. The likeliest idea is that she’s eyeing a cushy job at a law firm that works directly for the rich and powerful (like, say, the one that has Ruttech as a client).
In those sorts of law firms, you may end up getting your clients out of heinous stuff like sweeping the opioid crisis under the rug, throwing the rug that a CEO’s kid wrapped his dead hooker into the river, and getting rid of the parking ticket from the truck used to drive her to said river.
pope suburban
Arguably, corporate counsel does worse, like allowing companies to get away with poisoning the water supply or subjugating people in the developing world. Or she could work for giant lobbying groups doing shit like Prop 8, also massively harmful. By virtue of scale, representing individual criminals is small potatoes.
BorkBorkBork
No, I admit, that’s only one possibility. But unless she runs her own firm, I don’t see it likely that she’s doing something that isn’t immoral on one level or another, to the same degree that Dorothy can’t imagine a President who isn’t a war criminal.
What I’m saying is, this is a situation that was extremely transparent that Raidah didn’t really believe what she was saying; she was using it to assert herself as superior to Dorothy and telling her that her dream wasn’t worth persuing.
thejeff
Also not really fond of the idea that a lawyer defending criminals is inherently immoral.
Like, if you’re a mob lawyer that’s one thing, but a standard defense attorney is doing an important and necessary job.
Bysmerian
Hell, Raidah didn’t even take her down as much as she thinks she did. While she meant to cause damage–and make no mistake, she’d probably rehearsed this conversation some before she brought up Dorothy’s ambitions out of nowhere–it was probably more in the sense of cleaving Walky from his existing friend group.
If she knew how shaken Dorothy is now, she’d probably take the credit for it. But she didn’t see the cracks that were already there: she unintentionally took the doubts swirling in Dorothy’s head, that had already made her reconsider changing schools, and gave them reality.
Raidah’s story is one of the things I’m curious about; Sarah’s flashbacks show her more insecure and open with her feelings, while the proto-lawyer she’s shaped herself into is more heartless and nakedly ambitious
254 thoughts on “Unravelling”
TrueVCU
Somewhere, Walky is UNBEARABLY horny and he does not know why
BorkBorkBork
For Dorothy, sure, but Jennifer is basically like a sister. There’s no chemistry there.
Now, if Dorothy, Amber, and Lucy were fighting, he’d probably pass out.
Charles Phipps
Bah, Jennifer is like his sister in a Cruel Intentions sort of way.
“Hot.”
Stephen Nedland
Walky and Jennifer, are brother/sister, in a Japanese Eroge; given the chance, those two would be getting tangled in the sheets.
Allen Alberti
Why Lucy? there’s no chemistry there either.
Akane
Actually, there kinda was. Though to be fair, those women all would have more amazing chemistry!
Doctor_Who
Panel 5:
Jennifer: “…Are we gonna kiss?”
Dorothy: “I want to say no, but with the way my day’s been going so far I honestly couldn’t swear to it.”
Vanessa
lol That’s about right.
GholaHalleck
You have no idea how badly I want them to bang each other, just for them to both moan the wrong name mid climax.
TheKelliestKelly
Well darn, now I also want that
DJTsurugi
even better because Dorothy moans “Joyce!” ~<3
Stephen Nedland
It would be better, if she came out to Joyce, but Dorothy is so worked up, she’ll probably make out with any girl that gets in front of her.
Michael Steamweed
Panel 5:
J: …Are we gonna kiss?
D: Sorry, no. I wanna, but I’m faithful to her. I mean, to him.
J: …Oh really!
mindbleach
Jennifer runs a photo of Sal and Dorothy labeled “Amazi-Girl (left) and girlfriend.”
… or she notices who Dorothy was sexting and now thinks it’s Joyce.
Or, one step stupider, she goes downstairs and realizes Joyce has a tall clone, whom nobody ever sees. “The Prestige!”
Kep
Jennifer DOES seem to go for people being really angry, so…
Sirksome
Look out. Keener’s on the edge!
cbwroses
She has a dragon and she’s not afraid to use it!
clif
To be fair, if you had a dragon would you be afraid to use it?
OngoingConversation
Provided it wasn’t a metaphorical dragon, then yes. It’s a free creature, entitled agency beyond my command!
BorkBorkBork
You’re thinking of wild dragons, not domesticated ones. I have to recommend this three-part documentary series, made by the cryptozoologists at Dreamworks, that extensively teaches you how to train your dragon.
Taffy
Fuckin’ SJWs are ruining the iconic dragon guarding the captive’s tower, smfh.
StClair
May I offer you this finely crafted comic?
(be sure to click all the way through to the epilogues)
StClair
(tch, I should have scrolled down a bit further – here’s a link to the original post and artist.)
butts
to be fair, Billie has made an art out of pretending not to care, so of course that’s what she thinks other people are doing
Doopyboop
I kinda live for this strange conflict Dorothy and Jennifer seem to have. It’s interesting, it’s like interacting with Jennifer brings the worse out of Dorothy somehow.
Charles Phipps
Jennifer actively seeks personal pleasure and drama out with no consequences or thought to anyone but herself. It makes her a disaster queen but it’s oddly liberating.
Dorothy lives every second of every day caring about others and planning her world to the minute.
Jennifer is her antithesis.
Mturtle7
Counter-argument: Jennifer is NOT completely selfish. She seeks personal pleasure and drama, not merely for herself, but for EVERYBODY. On a very fundamental level, she wants to help everybody be like her, because she assumes that that is the most desirable way to be. She could just spend all her time being a disaster bisexual insecure party girl herself, but INSTEAD she’s constantly doing everything in her power to help people learn to be disaster bisexual insecure party girls THEMSELVES. This can actually be really beneficial at times – e.g. helping Ruth because party girls aren’t allowed to get depressed and commit suicide, helping Joyce because party girls aren’t allowed to be wimps about going to the doctor – but obviously, it also comes with the drawbacks that have totaled all of her close friendships and romantic relationships up to this point.
And THAT is what actually makes her even MORE of an antithesis to Dorothy than you claim. Dorothy wants everybody to be as responsible as her. Jennifer wants everybody to be as irresponsible as her. They’re fundamentally in conflict, but also kinda speak to each others’ most repressed desires (or not so repressed, as of the last couple of arcs)!
Bogeywoman
Imo Dorothy seeming so put together, supportive, kind and generally likeable without being insincere is a threat to Billie’s sense of superiority. Outside of highschool she isn’t top of the social food chain, so she needs to drag others down to feel bigger, especially those who’ve seen her at her lowest.
Theluxland
Interacting with Jennifer bring out the worst out of everybody actually
clif
It saved Ruth’s life.
Carla may have helped.
Yeet
someone trying to start shit will do that to many people
Doopyboop
Yep, but no one seems to take the bait quite like Dorothy does. …Except maybe Ruth but for those two that’s a weird foreplay.
NGPZ
Um, there’s more ways to show you care about people than by seeking position of president, Dotty?
also WTF Jennifer, at this rate you gonna be less cut out for real journalism, more cut out for fuckin TMZ (-_-)
Charles Phipps
Dorothy was seeking power because she believed she could fix everything for everyone.
Raidah somehow managed in a single sentence to point out the President doesn’t do that. Its a position with a huge party to answer to as well as violent military responsibilities.
Which I suspect Dorothy had been suppressing for awhile.
SocietyPilled
I still don’t get what the big deal is. If we assume, for sake of argument, that somebody *has* to press the “murder innocents” button, I would think somebody that really doesn’t enjoy that particular part of the job and is always looking for alternative methods would be an ideal candidate!
NGPZ
an ideal candidate would need to have that attitude, and be able to accurately represent the interests of 300+ million people AND be an effective leader
That is to say, they do not exist. Hoping for an ideal president, a single person that’s the ideal package for handling all that power responsibly and effectively, in the long run is no more futile than centuries’ old hoping for a perfect king as was venerated by monarchies of centuries past.
oh kind of The Divine to arrange matters such that, no matter where on earth or when in history you (royal) happen to be born, the nation and traditions into which you were born at random just so happen to be the ones most likely to keep you on the One True Path To Happiness™
Archieve
I think the problem is that the system a caring president would have to run in rewards false bravado and reassure over carefully thought out answers that don’t always have a feel good answer. Dorothy in particular struggles to clap back at opposition or pretend to be reassured when in reality she has doubts which in American politics is considered a win for the other side.
Adept
France and the US both make the mistake of investing too much power in the hands of the president. Of course the US is now going fully off the rails with no safeguards, so it will be so much worse.
fridge_logic
A good one would. This clip from the American President still holds up, it’s a clip that puts fire in my heart and could still put the fire back in Dorothy’s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Qqa0w_qXEI
Thag Simmons
Even if you believe that, are you willing to become the sort of person who exploits and causes the suffering of innocents for the sake of your own power? Are you willing to become the sort of person who could become president?
BBCC
Would you rather leave the Presidency to people who have absolutely zero compunctions about slamming the murder innocents button a bunch of times in a row just because they’re bored?
NGPZ
I, personally, at the very least, would rather it be a GROUP of people sharing those same powers and responsibilities, and for terms to either be much shorter considering that in this post-industrial, information age era, orders of magnitude more tumultuous change could happen in the span of 4 years today than what was all possible 200 years ago when the US’s plan for government was first written down.
Let alone what could happen in the span of a LIFE-TIME of an appointed Supreme Court Justice. Life-time terms made sense at the time of the Constitution being written because back in the colonial era, people just didn’t live as long as they do now. In the colonial era, sudden death by diseases like smallpox and typhoid was very common and accepted as a fact of life.
Implements for removing corrupt officials simply were not designed to be as powerful as they should be today because back 200 years ago we could literally depend on death and disease to do it for us.
To say the least our government needs some MAJOR overhauls to actually be able to accurately represent us and accommodate our needs as a massive, diverse population living in 21st century circumstances.
clif
“people who have absolutely zero compunctions about slamming the murder innocents button a bunch of times in a row just because they’re bored?”
When did we start talking about Robin?
eh, whatever
Or?
clif
Or we decide the humans have no business running things and that the thing to do is turn it all over to an AI.
And then we fight a brutal war over which AI to use.
NGPZ
or at the very least have more powerful ways of removing corrupt officials
thejeff
It’s fun to fantasize about restructuring the entire political system, though I suspect less fun to actually try to do so beyond broad strokes like “let’s have a group!”. With any complex system the devil is in the details and those are much less fun and probably more important than the broad strokes.
With a group of co-presidents, how do you prevent the kind of gridlock we’ve seen in Congress? Congress, which essentially is the group you’re looking for. Part of the reason the President has taken on more power in recent decades is that Congress hasn’t been able to agree, but things still need to get done. Whether that’s the rise in the use of executive orders or of the administrative state.
One of the Project 2025 proposals, for example, is to take regulatory rule making power out of the hands of executive agencies and return it to Congress. Sounds good, right? Less executive power. More control by groups of elected officials. But it means that to regulate every new potentially dangerous chemical or to modify such regulations when new evidence comes up, Congress has to pass a law.
And Congresscritters, unlike bureaucrats, need campaign contributions.
NGPZ
it’s better to have a group with all that power and “never get stuff done”, than it is to bestow all that power and responsibility to a single person for 4 years and just pray they won’t use it to make things worse
concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good will of those who allow it to be. a king who is liable for being replaced but every 4 years is still a king
thejeff
It isn’t though, because stuff actually has to get done. People die when government stops.
The rhetoric about “a king who is liable for being replaced but every 4 years” sounds good, but isn’t true. The President is the most powerful single person in government, but is still limited in many ways. There are many things he can’t do without Congressional support. The Supreme Court can block basically anything he tries that’s outside of specified Constitutional limits.
Trump is a threat, not just because he’s willing to push those limits harder, but because he’s already got a sympathetic Supreme Court and will likely have the backing of both houses of Congress – though there are signs they’ll block some of the more extreme moves. Not enough to prevent a ton of damage though.
NGPZ
people also die when bad government doesn’t stop, if RFK Junior pushes his anti-vaccine shit or SSI gets gutted, disabled people like me gonna die. If the US starts yet another war with no exit strategy, that’s HELLA DEATH happening when government can carry along with the nebulous category of “getting stuff done”
indeed a house divided cannot withstand, it’s gotten to the point to which the “United” States might as well be two countries pretending to be one
it is demonstrably clear that the Confederacy and what it stood for being abolished in Law did not make it so in life. It’s no coincidence that of the Supreme Court Justices who ruled in favor of the segregation being Constitutional™ in Plessy v. Ferguson, three of them were former slave-owners.
all over BlueSky I see trans and queer folk in the southern US setting up go-fund-me to move to CA and escape persecution, yet another Great Migration happening, as we speak we are witnessing history in the making
vulnerable minorities and our allies and organizations over here are going to do absolutely EVERYTHING in our power to prevent any goals of Project 2025 from being fulfilled — even if/when that comes down to drawing a line in the sand
as history demonstrates, it is wise for us not to mistake our nation and it’s traditions and territories and status quo which we are used to being this way since being randomly born here, as that which will necessarily go on forever.
thejeff
Yeah, I don’t dispute any of that, but the answer isn’t some pseudo-libertarian “Stop the government from doing anything.”
Hell, half the bad shit they want to do is just stopping the government from doing things. Like vaccine requirements or running SSI.
Thag Simmons
I think people who actually have compunctions about it don’t get to be President. Either they beat it out of you compromise-by-compromise, or you stick to your principles and lose.
NGPZ
Yup. In our current system, the way you get those powers in an election is by appealing to the militarism and nationalism-venerating white people who have the power to get you there.
You’ll never win them over, because you can only really do so by going by THEIR standards of Politeness and Respectability™, and those standards are designed to stripe away any actual anti-establishment parts of discourse. If you engage them in a way THEY deem acceptable, you water down the message, and eventually if you want to stay in the picture you’ll become a nationalist yourself.
BBCC
That’s just simply not true. If Biden had no compunctions about it, a LOT more people would be dead than if Trump had been there.
Thag Simmons
What in the last year has given you the impression that Biden has any compunctions about the blood on his hands.
thejeff
I’m not sure what you mean by that?
BBCC
What in the last ten has given you the impression there aren’t people far, far worse than Biden?
If Biden had no compunctions about murdering innocents, there would be a lot more people dead. It doesn’t even matter which issue you’re referring to – there are many, much bloodier, ways he could have handled things if he truly had no compunctions about it.
Thag Simmons
You can make the argument that Biden was less destructive on the matter of Gaza than a Trump presidency would have been. This does not absolve him of anything. He is still stained with blood from a war of extermination that he supplied and supported.
BBCC
Trump’s talked repeatedly about turning Gaza into a parking lot and building hotels on whatever is left. Biden has been working on a ceasefire since November of last year. No, I wouldn’t say that’s ‘having no compunctions about slamming the murder innocents button’. It’s true, there’s lots of times where the President is stuck in a position where they end up stained with blood. That doesn’t change that someone’s gotta do it and it’s better to have someone who’s not going to pick the worst option possible.
NGPZ
“someone’s gotta do it”
says WHO exactly?
if it’s always a person who’s hands gonna be stained with blood in that position, isn’t the least convoluted solution to recognize that the problem is fundamentally with the position itself?
according to current rules there has to be a president with all that power, but as citizens of a democracy we gotta ask ourselves — does it REALLY need to be that way?
Thag Simmons
If you believe Biden was genuinely working on a ceasefire and it wasn’t just a lie trotted out to placate people rightfully enraged that the USA was bankrolling a genocide you’re a fucking mark, I don’t know what to tell you.
BBCC
@ NGPZ – It doesn’t HAVE to, but I’m talking about the existing position, system and geopolitical state of the world that the US is currently working with.
@ Thag Simmons – Biden’s administration was a key negotiator in the temporary ceasefire last year and they’ve put forward at least five or six different offers for deals this last year off the top of my head, including at least two that Qatar encouraged Gaza to accept. Whether or not you think the deals were good enough, yes, they were real. We also know Biden’s been trying because Trump’s admitted he’s been encouraging Netanyahu to ignore him.
NGPZ
yeah, the election of the president, of a single person with all that power, is a game which is inevitably going to favor the Everyman.
For people in the US to romanticize this system in which being the Everyman confer power upon you is still systemic bigotry by very definition, and is inevitably still part of the problem.
Charles Phipps
The thing is that Dorothy has already seen violence personally up close with the stabbing of Rapist DudeTM and the death of Toedad. Dorothy doesn’t want any job that will involve committing or being complicit in violence.
Which is fine. It’s perfectly justified given her experiences and morality.
SocietyPilled
I couldn’t become that person if I tried, because I have neither the charisma, nor the money, nor the political connections. But if some genie said “I guarantee you will magically come across as presidential in public appearances, and that your party will support you the same way they support all their presidents even though you are literally just some guy. But do you really want to become president knowing all the hard decisions they make? Don’t you want to just let Trump be the president instead?” then it may well be the easiest decision on earth.
Adept
Yes, any halfway decent and normal person in place of Trump might actually save the American Republic. We are living through critical times regarding both the climate crisis and nature loss / extinction event. Humanity and the whole biosphere of Earth can’t really afford Uncle Sam descending into senility and madness, but here we are.
Thag Simmons
That’s not the question though. Would you be willing to try to become the sort of person who could come across as presidential and be supported by your party
It’s not just that you need to make hard decisions as president, it’s that you need to sell your soul to the institutions of the american empire to even have a shot at it
Needfuldoer
She was fooling herself by denying the unpleasant aspects of the job.
BorkBorkBork
Raidah didn’t just point it out; she took what, at first glance, looks like the morally superior route: that, no, she’d never take THAT job, can you imagine the atrocities you would have to commit?
Except. She’s studying law? To be a lawyer, right? Which is, to be clear, a job that never requires you to do any morally questionable actions? Raidah has already chosen a career that will end with her either condemning innocents or freeing murderers and rapists, from a statistical view.
Raidah’s point was just to put Dorothy down and make her question herself.
Dorothy’s stuck on the fact that the future she was focusing her entire life on wasn’t as wonderful and amazing as she had thought. However – she’s missing the fact that *there still needs to be a leader* of the country, and an amazing amount of good can be done by that person. They can’t be perfect, but even if all they do is a mediocre job, they still fulfilled the role of keeping a tyrant out of power.
I hope that Dorothy’s arc leads her to a *real* reason for wanting to go into politics – to help people who the system either ignores or harms and to make positive change – and not a childish “I’m going to be the President and make everything better because I’ll be so awesome!” view.
Loki
Is Raidah studying criminal law? Because otherwise, there are lots of areas where she doesn’t “condemn innocents or free murderers and rapists”.
Samniel
Well, we know Raidah’s a social climber of the worst kind, the sort that sees everyone around her as a stepping stone on her way to the top. The likeliest idea is that she’s eyeing a cushy job at a law firm that works directly for the rich and powerful (like, say, the one that has Ruttech as a client).
In those sorts of law firms, you may end up getting your clients out of heinous stuff like sweeping the opioid crisis under the rug, throwing the rug that a CEO’s kid wrapped his dead hooker into the river, and getting rid of the parking ticket from the truck used to drive her to said river.
pope suburban
Arguably, corporate counsel does worse, like allowing companies to get away with poisoning the water supply or subjugating people in the developing world. Or she could work for giant lobbying groups doing shit like Prop 8, also massively harmful. By virtue of scale, representing individual criminals is small potatoes.
BorkBorkBork
No, I admit, that’s only one possibility. But unless she runs her own firm, I don’t see it likely that she’s doing something that isn’t immoral on one level or another, to the same degree that Dorothy can’t imagine a President who isn’t a war criminal.
What I’m saying is, this is a situation that was extremely transparent that Raidah didn’t really believe what she was saying; she was using it to assert herself as superior to Dorothy and telling her that her dream wasn’t worth persuing.
thejeff
Also not really fond of the idea that a lawyer defending criminals is inherently immoral.
Like, if you’re a mob lawyer that’s one thing, but a standard defense attorney is doing an important and necessary job.
Bysmerian
Hell, Raidah didn’t even take her down as much as she thinks she did. While she meant to cause damage–and make no mistake, she’d probably rehearsed this conversation some before she brought up Dorothy’s ambitions out of nowhere–it was probably more in the sense of cleaving Walky from his existing friend group.
If she knew how shaken Dorothy is now, she’d probably take the credit for it. But she didn’t see the cracks that were already there: she unintentionally took the doubts swirling in Dorothy’s head, that had already made her reconsider changing schools, and gave them reality.
Raidah’s story is one of the things I’m curious about; Sarah’s flashbacks show her more insecure and open with her feelings, while the proto-lawyer she’s shaped herself into is more heartless and nakedly ambitious