I like to contextualize this in a modern form. I like to say, "there are no billionaires in Heaven. In the end, every last one of them burns." When I see Musk, Bezos, or Trump, I see men who are literally and inevitably headed for the very literal fires of Hell. Let them have their vanity here. In the end, they're all gonna fry.
I don't know what qualifies as "rich." But I don't think a modest 401k to support yourself in retirement is going to damn anyone. I don't know where the line is, but by the time you get the obscene level of a billionaire, you have been consumed by greed.
I like to imagine wealth and as an anchor. Would you die, your soul tries to ascend upward. But those with great wealth find themselves chained to a great golden weight, a spiritual manifestation of their wealth and greed on Earth. And as they try to fly upward, they instead are pulled down, down, and down. They see the surface of the Earth rise up above them like a diver descending beneath the ocean's surface. And they do not stop falling until they reach the Pit.
There are about 2 million minors on Tricare. Around 1% of the population is trans, then that's 20,000 kids. The suicide attempt rate among trans kids untreated is about 40%. If only a quarter of those succeed, that's 2,000 dead kids among Tricare's current enrollees.
Now your despicable suggestion that people rely on GoFundMe for their life-saving healthcare? Or your hope that most families on Tricare have good insurance through their other partner?
When military famously move so much that the other partner mantaining a good job is difficult? Those have obvious problems with them. The GoFundMe is a particularly demonic suggestion. Suffice it so say that no, thousands of families of trans kids are not going to find donors for thousands a year on fucking GoFundMe. This is healthcare, and that is what health insurance is for.
So yes, thousands of dead children is not in any way an exaggeration. Congress just willingly voted to murder several thousand children. And people like you are perfectly happy with it, as you do not consider trans people to be human beings.
Mean what? It's simple math. Whether it's a good idea or not is a separate question. But the actual mechanics make it not as ridiculous as it sounds. Remember, Americans at the time thought buying Alaska was a mad folley as well.
As far as whether I think it's a good idea, for $110 billion? Yeah, that would be a fantastic long term investment for the US. There's the mineral and other resources on the island currently. And as the planet continues to earn, owning more northernly land is never a bad thing. I don't support some colonial invasion to take Greenland by force. But its population is so tiny that just writing everyone a big check is possible.
I actually see the "buy Greenland" as the most practical of the territorial expansion claims Trump has floated. You're not annexing big chunks of Canada or Mexico without committing some horrible crime. They're unlikely to want to join willingly, and not even even the US is wealthy enough to offer some massive life-changing bribe to millions of Canadian or Mexican citizens in exchange for voting for annexation. So any expansion into Canada or Mexico would be a hostile invasion, and I do not support such a thing. I'm perfectly fine expanding the US if it makes sense for us and if the people want to actually join the US.
Any system based on medical or intellectual tests is doomed to fail. There's a reason we had to end literacy tests. Any test has to have people that design, administer, and grade the test. Age limits are a crude and blunt instrument, but there is a reason we use them for other matters of politics in the early stages of life. We have a voting age, not a voting competency test. And we have minimum ages for House, Senate, and Presidency eligibility. Yes, you could try to write qualifying exams for these positions, but the history of literary tests shows how that would go. Age is a crude instrument, but it is objective. You were born on certain day, and assuming accurate public records, that is a fact that isn't open to interpretation. It is clear and unambiguous.
An age limit for high offices makes perfect sense. If we can have minimum ages, we can have maximum ages. And any argument for why maximum ages won't work would also apply to minimum ages, yet our constitution is based on minimum ages, not fuzzy ability tests.
I doubt a primary would have even helped. There was no time for a proper full primary. It would have just been through horse trading at the convention. And that process would have inevitably resulted in another centrist geezer empty suit winning the nomination. Populist firebrands aren't the type that win such back room contests.
There need to be hard red lines. Human rights are one of these. This bill is literally, without any exaggeration, going to result in several thousand dead children. But the very survival of trans people is "political," so it's OK to sacrifice our lives for the sake of political expediency.
A few thousand dead kids is nothing, because deep down, people don't see trans people as human beings.
Well as long as the soldiers get their Christmas bonuses, I suppose a few thousand dead children is an acceptable price to pay. We wouldn't want the soldiers to have their Christmas ruined, and it's not like it would be the Republicans' fault for politicizing a must-pass spending bill. Oh well, it's not like trans kids are really human, a 9/11 worth of child corpses is fine. We wouldn't want to ruin Christmas.
I mean, its population is small enough, that realistically, if we really decided we wanted it for geopolitical purposes, really wacky solutions do become possible. For example, you could cut a $2 million check to every man, woman, and child in Greenland, and the cost would be a $110 billion. That's nothing to the US federal budget, and it would be a solid long term investment. You give every resident of Greenland enough cash to just straight up move to and retire in the US if they want to. And the cost would be minor compared to trying to seize it by military force, if such a conflict spawned a war with the EU. Even if us seizing by force just resulted in the EU applying a bunch of trade sanctions, straight up buying out the entire population would likely be far cheaper than doing it by force.
The best way to consume raw chicken is in cocktail form, specifically the pollo colada. It's like a piña colada, except you substitute raw chicken for the pineapple.
Honestly, the powers that be probably prefer people have these discussions online. First, most people who post even inflammatory content like Luigi memes are just venting. I'll make such posts and comments, but honestly, never in a dozen lifetimes am I personally going to attempt to repeat his actions.
Second, the thing about the Internet is anyone can read it. Machine learning is deployed right now at a vast scale to trawl all corners of the web and find any instances of people actually actively planning acts of revolutionary violence. As tools for plotting actual acts of violence, social media sucks. Luigi succeeded because the whole thing was plotted in the one place the NSA can't probe - the contents of a single man's mind.
Third, you have to look beyond the Day of the Great Banning that you propose. What happens next? Well, tens of millions of disgruntled progressives and leftists are still going to want a place to vent or make their feelings known. And if the Internet is out, that just leaves good old fashioned IRL organizing. And it's a hell of a lot more difficult to monitor in person groups that do all their activities with pen and paper than it is for bots to monitor social media for potential threats. Also, when people meet in person, they start discussing en masse various means of fighting back, non-violently or violently. People meeting in such groups can also radicalize each other. Someone who once was content just to post a Luigi meme might instead become radicalized and seek to hold in-person protests to call for his pardoning, hold non-violent actions to disrupt the trial, or in the extreme, even form a violent group to try and bust him out of jail. Fewer people will be willing to go up each step of that ladder, but the potential exists.
Really, social media largely serves the powers that be. It's like an emergency release valve for society's collective rage. It doesn't have no effect, over time it can shift the zeitgeist enough to eventually effect actual government policy. But no one is going to successfully cook up a neo-leninist uprising on any fediverse instance, let alone on Bluesky. In a world of hyper-monitored electronic communication, any real revolutionary acts are plotted in person, on paper, or through entirely private encrypted communications.
It's a series of highly efficient machines, each optimized to the point of fragility. Think of the supply chain disruptions during Covid. The cost of shipping is so cheap that it can make sense to ship even simple products back and forth across the ocean several times as they move up the value chain. But if one of those links breaks, the whole house of cards collapses. In generations past, commerce needed huge buffers in the supply chains, and the chains themselves were kept simple. In the days of wooden sailing ships, ships arriving late or not all were common. Before computerized inventory tracking and just in time manufacturing, storing large quantities of intermediary parts was also required. These buffers in the systems represented economic inefficiency, but they also produced resiliency.
America is a series of highly efficient industrial juggernauts built on feet of clay. Any good you buy at the grocery store or big box retailer is going to have a huge logistics supply chain behind it. And that chain will be, in economic terms, highly efficient. It will also be very fragile.
Except that's all been tried and promised before. The concept of SMRs is nothing new. It's been tried again and again, every few years since the 1970s. It's never panned out, and the promised savings from mass production of small reactors never materializes.
So you think you're God? How comic book villain of you...