nickwitha_k (he/him)

Congratulations! I hope you have a swift recovery and feel more at home in your body.

Great. We’ve got acid attacks now. Fuck this.

The entire US government has just been handed over to open fascists that state that they want to erase LGBTQ+ and non-christian people from the country. The US system wasn’t parliamentary, where there can be snap elections, etc. The president nominates candidates for lifetime appointments to the courts. The legislature confirms them.

Even if the fascists don’t do what they say they want to, the courts are gone for at least a generation. They are now there to rubber stamp anything that a theofascist wants. The US Supreme Court has already signaled that they may take up the right to marry people of different ethnic backgrounds and have already decided that a president is a king.

So, yeah. The most optimistic scenarios in the US are ones where trans people, LGBTQ+, and ethnic minorities are oppressed, and the people have no political power as the courts will just overrule any outcome that they don’t want.

Things are going to get ugly, likely very quickly.

I think the intended thought isn’t necessarily “winning” but rather, “if you’re going down, go down swinging”. I’m not sure that I’m that pessimistic but, I’m certainly not optimistic at the moment.

Did you put them under your pillow for the Nut Fairy?

Congrats! I’m delighted for you. Every small victory deserves to be celebrated!

Jealousy?

Yikes. It’s times like these that I am glad to not follow any particular celebrity fandoms. Not everyone who is widely known is a shitty person but, a lot of them are. And they’re less interesting than most other people you’d meet.

Either way votes are even more futile on lemmy. They barely have any impact on anything and it’s not like the threads here reach the thousands of comments where a relatively few votes would bury a comment. There’s also no karma so it’s even less impactful. I personally think it’s good that way but whatever. To each their own!

One of my favorite things about Lemmy. I love that the fake internet points have no real impact and karma farming is not incentivized. On Reddit and SO, it was a good idea to try to give something to judge authenticity on but, like everything else, people found ways to game it for nefarious purposes. Overall, I think the experiment showed that karma points do more harm than good.

Very well done and nice color! Any time I try it looks like a crime scene.

Makes me think of my thoughts on seeing the first few episodes of Attack on Titan.

They were referencing the US far-right’s desire to recreate the failed slave state known as the Confederate States of America (CSA, aka The Confederacy). The CSA was formed in Feb 8, 1861 by seven Southern US states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas; South Carolina declared secession in Dec 1860; Arkansas, North Carolina, and Virginia joined by mid-1861, making the number eleven) when their goverments declared secession from the US, an action not recogized as legal under US law.

The principal reasons given by the states that found it important enough to document were the preservation and expansion of chattle slavery of those of African descent and enforcing white supremacy (this is the “states’ right” that US conservatives refer to). The white supremacists were concerned about the potential abolition of slavery, the ban of slavery in new provinces, and freestates’ refusal to enforce runaway slave laws aft civil war when Confederates attacked Fort Sumter, a US Army fort off the coast of South Carolina.

The CSA was marred not just by a particularly brutal form of slavery but also great wealth disparity and a severe lack of industrial capacity, due to its agrarian, plantation-slavery economy, run by its slaveowner aristocracy. Their military thus lacked domestic arms manufacturing capacity. This resulted in having to rely upon imported arms that quickly saw problems due to naval blockades, and suffered from a lack of professional soldiers and officers.

On March 18th, 1865, the CSA’s government adjourned for the last time, dissolving officially by its president on May 5th of that year, 5 days before his capture while attempting to in womens’ clothing (actually a thing - TIL). The span of its existence (4.25 years) is shorter than the airing of the creepy American child beauty pageant reality TV show “Toddlers & Tiaras” (4.8 years).

tl;dr - “The Confederacy” is referring to the failed slave state that fucked around and found out.

One of the PCs though (who joined after the other guy left) is an artificer who was born without legs (currently has prosthetics they made) and the reason he’s out adventuring is to bring legs to those who lack them. Like his mentor did for him.

That’s my kind of power fantasy right there.