WatDabney

Yes - they will sacrifice public lands to the oil industry. And the mining industry And the lumber industry. And any other industry that pays them sufficient bribes.

And when the people can't take it anymore and finally try to stand against the wanton destruction, we're going to learn first-hand why all those Cop Cities are being built.

Yellowstone is an odd and awkward combination of things.

I grew up in that part of the world and, unlike the author of the linked article (and the people he writes about), I spent a lot of my time in the outdoors. In fact, in the summer, my family spent more time traveling and camping than they did at home. I don't even remember learning about the outdoors - it's as if I've just always known how to function in it.

And from that point of view, there are two distinctive facts about Yellowstone.

First, as noted and as is obvious, it's packed full of tourists, most of whom know nothing at all about the outdoors.

The other thing though - the odd and awkward thing - is that it's unusually dangerous - not just to ignorant tourists, but to anyone. As a matter of fact, between the geysers, the terrain and the wildlife, I'm hard-pressed to think of another place in the whole of the northwest that's more immediately and inherently dangerous than Yellowstone. I mean - there are certainly places you can get to that are more dangerous - high in the mountains or deep in the deserts - but those all require significant effort. To just get out of a car and walk 50 feet into danger - nowhere else is even close to Yellowstone.

So it's just sort of ironic that it's also the place stuffed to the brim with dumb tourists.

Trump is rather obviously profoundly mentally ill, and it's long past time for that to be noted every single time he goes off on another of his delusional rants.

Exactly as noted in the article, it's not even enough to fact check him (though that should be done as a matter of course) because it's not just that so much of what he says is false. The much more significant fact is that so much of what he says is insane. It's not ideas and beliefs shaped and presented by a rational mind, but the disjointed ravings of a lunatic, and that's exactly how it should be treated.

Just the opposite. I'm the one who goes off to do something else at family gatherings because they just talk and talk and talk.

Though it's not so much that they talk so much as that it's just the same stuff over and over - alternately, my brother slavishly regurgitating right-wing techbro quasi-libertarian bullshit and my mom reciting in excruciating detail some anecdote that's maybe vaguely related to the topic at hand and that she's told countless times already, because it's her go-to every time something in that vicinity comes up.

And what I wouldn't give to know them less well...

Most similar to Advance Wars:

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance

Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis

Super Robot Taisen: Original Generation

Shining Force:Resurrection of the Dark Dragon

Just in general:

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow

Summon Night: Swordcraft Story 1 and 2

Drill Dozer

Golden Sun 1 and 2

Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap

Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town

Guru Logic Champ

Metroid Fusion

Metroid Zero Mission

Medabots RPG

Klonoa: Empire of Dreams

"Effective! Oooh know what I mean? Know what I mean? Nudge nudge! Know what I mean? Say no more!"

Well, it's sort of like picking out the most enthusiastic of a group of gang rapists and focusing exclusively on him, but I guess it's better than the standard US government strategy of just ignoring them entirely, so that's something.

Those two things are not mutually exclusive.

A great many people in the US, Trump supporters certainly included, are experiencing uncertainty living in an economy in which the lifestyle earlier generations took for granted gets further out of reach every day - in which they find themselves ever further in debt with less all the time to show for it, and in which they're one catastrophic illness away from destitution.

Trump has cynically exploited that uncertainty by beating the racist, and especially anti-immigrant drum. People are primed to find somebody to blame for their misfortunes, and he's provided them with somebody.

And yes - to the degree that they've responded to his rhetoric, it's because they were already racist enough that when he led them in that direction, they willingly followed. So as far as that goes, yes - racism really is a driving force. But their racism isn't just some atbitrary thing that appeared out of thin air - for a great many, it's a specific reaction to a specific set of circumstances, and those specific circumstances are largely economic uncertainty.

It's sort of akin to people with chronic respiratory problems ending up hospitalized during a period of high air pollution, then other people arguing about whether to blame their respiratory conditions or the air pollution. Rather obviously, "or" is the wrong conjunction - it should be "and."

And by the bye - that whole dynamic is a good part of the reason that Musk and Thiel and many other billionaires are supporting Trump - because they and their actions comprise the lion's share of the real reason that that economic uncertainty exists, and Trump is not only determined to hide that fact, but to self-servingly make it so that they'll be free to cause even more harm.

Virtually all of the focus has been on the racists and misogynists and christofascists and all the other reactionary fuckwads who are supporting and promoting Trump and who contributed to Project 2025 and so on.

But they don't really matter. They're just tools. The people who matter are the ones who are funding it all. Aside from some personal quirks (like Musk's weirdly aggressive pronatalist thing) the people who are funding Trump and Project 2025 and such really don't give a shit about all of that. Those are just emotive issues to make a lot of noise about to win over the base and provide cover forbthe real goal. The real goal - the exact and only reason that they're funding all of that - is quite simply to destroy US democracy and institute an autocracy, so that they can have a system in which their rule and our submission are codified and absolute.

This isn't a culture war. That's just cover for the real war, which is a class war. And it's not a war that might happen - it's a war that already is happening. The rich are already fighting it, and have been for quite some time now. And if we don't do something, we're going to lose it by forfeit.

All I see here is a selfish extrovert who resents not being able to feed off of enough other people's energy, so is degrading and belittling introverts and trying to frame the issue as some sort of "war" that needs to be fought.

To which I have to respond, in the baldest possible terms, fuck you.

Um... yeah We got that that was your intent.

More precisely, we got that you're a desperately insecure loser who's terrified of the prospect of a world in which women are allowed to do anything other than service the fragile egos of pathetic manchildren like yourself, and who therefore haplessly resents and desperately wants to belittle any and all women who might dare to do anything else.

Try to keep up.

It's especially amusing that Trump is reduced to a sniveling ball of cowardice by someone the Republicans keep trying to characterize as a "DEI hire."