This exactly.

They don’t see imposing a state of fundamentalist Christian supremacy as tyranny, because their ideology is one of Christian Nationalism (which in the US is inherently white nationalism).

They see the erosion of their relevance as the tyranny they’re supposed to stand up to despite it mostly being driven by cultural changes instead of government mandates. This means that the militias are meant to commit violence against civilians; they know the cops will side with them in a scrum. They’re more afraid of a lesbian with blue hair than a rogue sherrif depriving them of rights.

I’ve been meaning to watch it for a while now; I’ll have to make that happen soon.

Ever seen The Frighteners? The CGI definitely does not hold up, but the plot and acting are top-notch. Combs plays a super creep in it that you love to hate.

Jeffrey Combs.

He’s mostly a supporting actor, but he’s a chameleon who always delivers.

But what about the freedom to lose one’s life savings to an insurance company?

I take your point, but look at the way power is arranged in our society from the makeup of the ownership class to the way unpaid labor usually falls to women.

I do like the framing, but I see it as evidence of the patriarchy and how it damages men too and I don’t think it’s a difficult argument to make. Women have only recently, within my mother’s lifetime, been able to get their own credit lines separately from their husband. They recently lost their hard-won reproductive freedoms. They are far more likely to be killed by their long-term partners than are men. Furthermore, the issues that you bring up where men are worse off is also due to the expectations this system puts onto men, and who is worthy of charity & support.

There has been a long and sustained project to keep women from the levers of power through subjegation, and the perpetrators are the reactionary men who vote, terrorize, and argue that women shouldn’t be the equal of a man. Their ideology comes from a long western tradition that is thousands of years old. It seems in my mind incongruous to suggest that there was not a patriarchy in Roman times, when a paterfamilias could legally kill anyone in his family (including his wife), or during the middle ages or Renaissance when women were kept from political or religious offices (with minimal exceptions), or today when women are legally restricted from moving between States due to pregnancy. There is certainly a continuum between what constitutes patriarchy or not, but I don’t think it’s time to slide over to the “not” side yet, especially as the hits keep coming.

I do appreciate your well-thought out post though, and will certainly incorporate your points into my position in the future.

One of the most insidious parts of the Dobbs ruling is that they took away abortion by stripping our right to privacy.

It’s natural to focus on the people it targets most: people who are pregnant. However, we lost a lot more than reproductive freedom when that reactionary decision came down.

They want to return the status quo of the 19th century in so many ways.

It’s exactly why reactionaries have spent decades demonizing feminism: it keeps men defending the patriarchy that damages them too (although not as much as other people).

Huh, I always thought Incel culture was c. diff.

That’s it, they’re making Games for Linux Live now.

Great colors and texture!

We’re in a new era now where they’ve given Trump unprecedented power.

The past is past; we’re living in a brave new world now. I never pretended they didn’t rule against him. I’m saying that they won’t in the future because it’ll expose how powerless they are to enforce anything against him, and would also put a target on their own backs.

Yes, that was my point.

Let me know when it’s in an official ruling or any other way that matters.

They know they’d better not disagree.

They literally don’t care. All they want is to win an argument against leftists in the moment; they actually see it as a weakness to be beholden to facts.

They’re playing a different “game” entirely, one where rhetoric is more important than reality.

From They Thought They Were Free, the Germans 1933 - 1945

[…] "I gave them French and English literature, more so than before, although to do so was one of those vague betrayals of the ‘new spirit’; still, it had not been specifically forbidden. Of course, I always said, to protect myself (but I said it in such a way that I hoped the students would see through it), that the foreign works we read were only a reflection of German literature. So, you see, Herr Professor, a man could show some—some independence, even, so to say, secretly.” “I understand,” I said.

“Many of the students—the best of them—understood what was going on in all this. It was a sort of dumb-show game that we were all playing, I with them. The worst effect, I think, was that it made them cynical, the best ones. But, then, it made the teachers cynical, too. I think the classroom in those years was one of the causes of the cynicism you see in the best young men and women in Germany today.”

[…]

"Tell me, Herr Hildebrandt, what about [Shakespeare’s]Julius Caesar?”

He smiled very, very wryly. “Julius Caesar? No … no.”

“Was it forbidden?”

“Not that I remember. But that is not the way it was. Everything was not regulated specifically, ever. It was not like that at all. Choices were left to the teacher’s discretion, within the ‘German spirit.’ That was all that was necessary; the teacher had only to be discreet. If he himself wondered at all whether anyone would object to a given book, he would be wise not to use it. This was a much more powerful form of intimidation, you see, than any fixed list of acceptable or unacceptable writings. The way it was done was, from the point of view of the regime, remarkably clever and effective. The teacher had to make the choices and risk the consequences; this made him all the more cautious.”

One of my favorite birds, they look huge and amazing when they take off; like a dinosaur in the sky.

These dumbasses really think capitulation will make the fascists go away? That’s never how it works. Now you’ve emboldened them to go further, you utter idiots.

You’re absolutely right! Thanks, edited.

Bro needs to learn to slice the pie and check those corners.