They're fraudsters and seditionists, pure and simple. All of their efforts in 2020 were to effectively overthrow the US government by fraudulently handing the election to Trump, and since they failed, all of their efforts since then have been to try to make it so that they can succeed in 2024.
On the one hand, there will be legitimate protesters there exercising their constitutional rights. They need to be free to do so
And on the other hand, there will also be Republican-, Russian- and/or Israeli-backed agents provocateur there trying to incite violence in order to discredit the protests and the Democrats more broadly, and they need to be dealt with appropriately.
Funny - at this point, when I see an article that sort of backhandedly promotes Trump or undermines Harris - just enough careful bias to be recognizable but not enough to be objectionable (like serving the Trump campaign's interests and their obvious desired PR spin by helping them distance themselves from Project 2025 while also downplaying its very real threat by characterizing it merely as "a conservative initiative seized on by Democrats"), I just immediately assume that it's the NYT. And it inevitably is.
Edit to add - I should've made clear - it's not their bias that bothers me so much as their cowardice.
One of the greatest songs ever IMO, though I much prefer the original.
All songs start with silence, then build a series of sounds until a song is achieved, then return to silence, but few illustrate the magic and wonder of that process quite as well as A Forest.
Oh yeah - I get your point, and agree as far as that goes.
I just think that a system that has to actually have laws in place to limit the abuses carried out by psychopaths in positions of power is self-evidently a failure. A society should have standards in place that either prevent psychopaths from gaining power or strip them of their power should they gain it.
The world as a whole is not insane. Insanity is concentrated among those in positions of power. And we ignore it. We spend so much time and energy arguning back and forth about policy and ideology, and treating things as givens so all we can do is choose the next step in a series of events, when the reality is that the entire situation exists solely because the people with decision-making authority have led us to this situation, and that because they're deeply mentally ill.
I think we should be calling out the mental illness - putting the spotlight on that.
So, for instance, any executive who would sign off on Disney trying to dodge responsibility for a death their negligence obviously caused is self-evidently mentally ill. It can only be the case that they have a lack of empathy, compassion and remorse that is pathological and therefore shouldn't even be allowed to hold a position of public responsibility.
That's the way I see it. It just makes no sense at all, as a society, to allow people who are demonstrably willing to act in ways that cause suffering to have access to power over others. They should be removed from influential positions, and potentially removed from society as a whole, and should be under the care of mental health professionals rather than running loose, warping society to accommodate their own mental illness.
Much is periodically made of public mental health issues, most often depression. But far and away the most significant mental health issue humanity faces, and quite likely the most significant issue, period, is psychopaths in positions of power.
Just your daily reminder that much of the power that rules the world - the immediate political power and the wealth that buys influence over that power - is in the hands of literal psychopaths who value their short-term self-interest over anything and everything else, including humanity's health and well-being.
One day there will be a memorial erected over a lifeless Earth - "Here lies the human race - billions of lives and millennia of history destroyed so that a few psychopaths could buy mansions and yachts."
Write enormous screeds about how literally insane it is that the world is being actively destroyed at the behest of and for the benefit of a wealthy, powerful and profoundly mentally ill few.
Play video games and work in the garden.
The first likely accomplishes nothing of any note - even if other people recognize it, part of the insanity is that the psychopaths in power have arranged things so that nobody can stop them.
The second doesn't accomplish much of anything either, but they're at least situations in which my efforts aren't systematically undermined and exploited for the benefit of psychopaths. Instead of being rigged so that whatever I do benefits the ruling class, they're situations in which I can actually make choices solely based on what I think will work best in a given situation and reap the rewards if I choose correctly.
All indications are that Trump doesn't understand how anything works. That's just not the way his mind is organized. He skates on the surface, focused exclusively on finding things that appear to serve his immediate interests, which are limited to greed, lust and the incessant demands of his insatiable ego.
So there are only two possibilities - either Vichy Twitter is such a poorly run site that it crashed on its own, or it's such a poorly run site that it's not prepared to deal with being DDOSed.
It's so perfectly on brand for crybaby Trump to file a suit claiming that he's being persecuted because the Justice Department got a search warrant based on evidence that Trump was illegally holding classified documents, carried out the search warrant, and found the exact classified documents he was suspected of illegally holding.
"Waah! I'm being persecuted because I deliberately committed a crime and got caught!"
"Slammed by former president" as a reference to what Trump himself said is one of the most egregiously misleading bits of headlining I've seen in a long time.
And of course the entirely useless MBFC bot is fine with it.
Luckily enough, the actual story is Trump throwing a hissy fit over Harris "copying" "his" promise in Vegas to eliminate taxes on tips, as if he was the first and only politician to ever trot that one out, and no amount of diversionary headlining can fully distract from the fact that all this really is is a grown-ass man acting, yet again, like a spoiled child.
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.
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.
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