Time the Crestfallen

Yeah, the Dems are in an awful spot right now. Not only does this validate the Fake News rhetoric for Trump and his supporters, but now Dems and especially the Centrist/Liberal media have a lot of egg on their faces for focusing so hard on the Russia aspect of it and Trump supporters now have impetus to dismiss refocusing on potential obstruction, finance crimes, and other such crimes comitted by him and those around him as 'shifting the goal posts' as it were. Not to mention that this is occuring when the Primaries are going to be getting started, and this will be a huge boost for Trump's reelection bid.

Considering that Barr was in favour of and was consulted on the Iran-Contra pardons by Bush, I don't trust his conclusions at all and the full report should be released to the public. And if I can get partisan for a second, if the President is able to: -Ask an FBI director to drop an investigation, and then fire them when they don't and explicitly state that's why they were fired -Attempt to get the investigator removed from the case -Publicly attack the credibility of the investigators And somehow not be guilty of Obstruction of Justice, then either the law is so finicky and specific about what is obstruction that the law is essentially worthless, or Republicans are officially above the law. Especially considering that they're STILL bringing up Hillary after the FBI didn't recommend prosecuting her.

And then when you take their framing of the term and start pointing at the Nordic countries as successful examples of what they would consider Socialism, they become overnight experts in Marxist Theory and start tripping over themselves to explain how they're not Socialist despite having implemented all of the policies they describe as being the slippery-slope towards Socialism. It gets especially funny when you remember that as early as 2010, FOX NEWS was openly belittling the idea of a Socialist Venezuela and pointing out how 2/3rds of their economy is owned by the Private Sector. It's funny how they dismiss the idea that Venezuela is a Socialist country up until the point where said Private Sector ownership, extreme wealth inequality, and US sanctions are what cause things to get so fucked up, and then it's right back to the 'Socialism/Communism killed 100 gazillion people in the time it took me to boil the kettle' memes.

That little conversation about how the word 'Socialism' is used by the GOP is looking downright prophetic now. Imagine still complaining about Socialism in reference to policies that basically every other 'Western' country has successfully implemented without much trouble.

Yeah, Global Politics is in pretty dire straits right now. However, generally speaking I see it as the last dying gasp of a certain kind of politics that is fading into irrelevancy. Obviously some countries are going to have a longer, more painful time of it than others but I still think that overall the world is trending towards things that people with these beliefs don't like and it terrifies them. Trump and Brexit are the go-to examples for me; both cruising into relevance on the backs of right-wing populism largely fuelled on xenophobia and a desire to return to some idyllic, prelapsarian time where everything was perfect and to the supporters of these things the world seemed to be their oyster, and over the course of their lifespans both have been catastrophic failures that can only be supported if you live in an entirely separate reality where statistics and facts don't matter.

What's especially funny to me is that this dynamic isn't even internally consistent across their talking points. Conservative politicians and pundits have spent decades watering down the definition of 'Socialism' to the point where it's just used as a catch-all term for, as you said, any form of fiscally progressive policy, but then when people take conservative's own definition of the word and use it to point out Nordic countries as good examples of Socialism, then all of a sudden they become experts in Marxist Theory and can correctly identify that a strong social safety net and heavier taxation isn't indicative of socialism. **Cough Cough** Charlie Kirk **Cough Cough**

I honestly don't understand how so many people in the US can be opposed to single=payer healthcare, considering that it is demonstrably cheaper and more effective than the current system.

And on the topic of Kamala Harris, this whole Twitter thread paints a pretty dire picture. As Tarrasque has said, her recent efforts are pretty good by US standards, but she has a pretty dodgy record on some things and the fact that Wall Street is fine with her is a major red flag for me personally.

This turtle infestation is really getting out of hand.

The overweight, vacuous, fake-tanned crony-capitalist that is the United States President invites a College Football team to the White House for a dinner and feeds them fast food. That sentence wouldn't have looked out of place as Soviet propaganda during the Cold War.

Well I did say 'relative' accessibility. It can be easy to get a gun in most of Europe and still relatively more 'responsible' if you will when compared to the US. For instance, even if the laws of gun ownership are more liberal than many would suspect, I'd still imagine that the number of guns per residence wouldn't even come close to that of the US, and this is without going into individual laws on classifications. My understanding is that most of Europe would be a lot more strict when it comes to handgun ownership than the US.

I mean you also have to account for the relative availability of guns in all these countries. You could definitely make the argument that if guns were as easy to acquire in the UK as they are in the US, the gun deaths per capita might be a lot more similar.

My problem is that even if Trump goes down, Mike Pence takes over and his appointments will likely be just as bad as Trumps, so even if Trump goes down to Mueller or something we'd still be fucked if a SCOTUS vacancy opens up prior to the 2020 election. There's also the fact that if the Republicans manage to hold onto a Senate Majority, we might learn whether or not Ted Cruz was serious about Republicans indefinitely blocking Democrat nominations to the SCOTUS.

Because considering the SCOTUS Judges that are the most likely to die/retire right now are Ginsburg or Breyer due to their advanced ages and if Trump or someone like him gets to nominate their replacement the outright Conservatives (as far as I understand Roberts can be a bit of a swing vote) would have a 5-4, potentially 6-3 majority for probably at least a decade. Perhaps 'completely fucked' is a hyperbolic statement, but my position is that it would be extremely detrimental to the US if the current iteration of the Republican Party was able to place a 3rd Judge on the SCOTUS.

The mere fact that a) something like this goes to a 5-4 decision and b) that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are very clearly voting along a party line paints a dire picture for what the Supreme Court decisions will be like for the next 3 decades. My only hope at this point is that Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor don't die/retire until there's a Democratic president, because if Conservatives get to put a 3rd person on the SCOTUS then the US is going to be completely fucked.

He literally had Ben Shapiro do a skit on Meme Review and gave a glowing review of Jordan Peterson's book, never-mind following a veritable who's who of Right Wing political figures on Twitter (ranging from Dave Rubin, to PJW, to actual fucking MGTOW/white supremacist Stefan Molyneux). I'm not sure how those qualify as 'just jokes' considering that all of these people are explicitly political figures, but whatever you say mate.

He did it again, this time with someone who referred to Sonicfox with racial and homophobic slurs and openly compares the Trans community to Nazi's. EDIT: Forgot to post the receipt for that one

Full event details for Christmas 2018 https://news.fate-go.jp/2018/christmas2018/ The Banner for the event (5* is Bradamante, with both Marthas as the 4*) https://news.fate-go.jp/2018/christmas2018_pu/ I already didn't care about Bradamante, but her design is bad, her voice is annoying, and personally speaking her NP animation is embarrassing to watch. Sandbag the shit outta this lady.

This just got posted onto 2chan

The fact that you chose this as your primary example is kinda showing your hand mate. Anyway, the answer to your question is that nothing really can be done to get rid of 'hijackers' because political movements are not monolithic entities in which all participants belong to a hive mind, nor do they have individuals with executive power who can just kick people out. It's why we draw distinctions between different 'branches' within a movement i.e. TERFs being it's own label within feminism.

Well my stubborn solo rolls manage to net my Yu Miaoyi, so that's nice. I've heard speculation that the 5* for Christmas 4 will be Gareth, which could be interesting.

Completely failed to roll Xiang Yu and was left with six tickets and a dream when Shi Huang Di came out. Didn't get him either, but I got a Prisma Cosmos out of it, so oh well.

So that makes 5 Reds, all of whom are swordies. Meanwhile, Grima is still the only colourless Legendary Hero and has been on rate up like 8 times at this point. IntSys is cancelled.

I mean the big problem is that their is just no reason to care. The entirety of Book 1 and all the paralogues prior to Book 2 was just fucking about in meaningless conflicts with no stakes in the Worlds of the mainline games so that they have a reason to introduce the latest characters. The only thing close to a story they had going was the sub plot about Bruno and Veronica being cursed which, whilst legitimately interesting, has just been left dangling due to Bruno just having straight up disappeared for the last year or so. Which would've been fine in all honestly, not everything needs to have a deep and engaging story least of all a mobile spin-off, but when the consequence of going from excuse plot to a legitimate attempt at dramatic storytelling is that they've basically skipped the characters and setting components of a story and just gone straight into plot and conflict. Like, let's break it down; Muspell destroyed Nifl and has now teamed up with Embla to conquer/destroy Askr. 1: Bizzare tonal shift. Going from meaningless excuse plot to attempted genocide doesn't work, especially considering that their was no build up to it. 2. Why do I care about Nifl? Their was no mention of it at all prior to Book 2 and the first thing I learn about it is that it's just been destroyed and we literally don't meet a single character from their until after the fact. 3. Similarly, why do I care about Muspell? Leaving aside it having the same 'we're literally just learning this place' as Nifl, even the stuff we do learn about it is bollocks. At least Embla had the rather thin excuse of trying to gain control of/destroy the Summoning thing, the only reason they have to be literally attempting genocide is 'because Surtr wants to' and the only reason Surtr wants to do so is because their was only two words written on his character sheet snd those words were 'fucking arsehole', so he's gonna do the most one-dimensional, generically evil thing he could do in every situation regardless of whether it makes sense in universe or adds anything to the story. 3. Why do I care about Askr? We've spent literally a year in this country and not only do we know fuck all about it, we've literally only met 3 people from their, one of whom is an Anna and the other says and does literally nothing half the time.

Well there's no reason a white woman couldn't beat Trump; their is sadly a not insignificant chunk of the population that would look for any reason (real or fake) not to vote for a minority candidate due to racial bias alone, and dealing with the combined racism and misogyny factors would be utterly hellish. That said, I feel like the campaign issues will matter more than the gender/ethnicity of the candidate, and I have a gut feeling that the Democrats will avoid actually promoting a policy platform and will just repeat the same old song-and-dance of 'Trump is bad and colluded with Russia, us Democrats are slightly less bad than Trump so you ignore all our many shortcomings, something something Bipartisanship' even though it very provably doesn't work but hey, at least they get to avoid actually having a platform to campaign on.