Honestly, most writers probably feel the way you feel.
But having read hundreds, if not thousands, of writers...no one is particularly special, except maybe to a specific person for their own reasons.
If the story isn't good, no amount of technical wizardry can save it. And if you can't write so that 95% of it just slides by the eye, then it doesn't matter how good the story is.
Same. I had to get a new car recently. Prices were crazy and I wish I had gone with a new instead of a used. But Tesla was off the list from the beginning. I figured I'd wait one more car to get electric. Should be in a new place by then where I can install a home charger too, and the prices will probably be drastically lower by the time my current car dies again.
It's not. Another judge mentioned it as a reason that abortion wasn't a thing in during the colonial period.
He ignored that women were discussing it in home keeping books and guides. They just didn't call it "medically necessary abortion" - they called it bleeding or stopping the blood.
It's insane how many left leaning leaders were assassinated. And it isn't a coincidence that it was during the red scare. What we KNOW about McCarthyism is crazy enough, now think of all the stuff they wouldn't say out loud to fight the "red menace."
More than 30 years, sadly. There's a great book called Bring the War Home by Kathleen Belew.
In Vietnam, racist pieces of shit were angry that they had to fight with black people. As you can imagine, they were assholes about it. Couple that with terrible conditions, and they built this persecution fantasy about how the political elite abandoned them to the jingles to die (and made them eat with black people, how dare), so when they came home they lied about pretty much everything to their troglodyte friends and families, and passed these persecution fantasies down to their children.
Now these same people run training camps throughout the US for urban warfare, because their fantasy includes "bringing the war home" to the US so the us normies have to experience the made up trauma that they decided to pretend they had, plus all the actual trauma.
You can go back to pretty much any instance of reality and find a small subset that is actively deluded. The issue now is that they all found each other, and are working in concert. It's a gordian knot.
Republicans need to repeat back some words and look like cleancut white people to win reliably.
Democrats need to be geniuses, correct at all times, never angry, and also gorgeous if they want a chance in hell of being able to sit at the table. But even then, that's only the list until they start pushing back against republicans, at which point all bets are off.
Advertising is a huge waste of societal resources.
Think about it: what's the actual point of advertising, from the consumer's point of view? I would argue it's to get notified of available products, and why you might want that product.
But that's not what advertising does 99% of the time, now. Advertising now is a collection of products that you already know exist, have probably already looked at, but now you're getting spammed. Because they aren't trying to educate you as a consumer - they're trying to use exposure to trick you into buying their particular product instead of someone else's identical product.
If you look at the total GDP that goes to advertising, it's frankly insane. It's lost 20%. Add finance into that, and most of our GDP is centered around meta-economics rather than stuff people want/need/will use.
I mean, yes, but also the entire regressive ecosystem is gaslighting centrists with "both sides" nonsense, so if you actively freak out it will just alienate the people we need to care.
I think the best course of action is to get as involved locally as you can. Show up to school board and city council meetings. Have and express your opinion on the current business before them. Volunteer, do community outreach, and explore mutual aid.
The right has a well established network for communicating their doctrine and giving people east activities to gradually ramp up their involvement. We need to create similar structures for ourselves even more than we need to scream at elected officials who will ignore us anyway.
Build parallel power, and then use whatever leverage you can to force saner voices to prevail.
It all boils down to resource management and selectorate theory. They don't care that the overall quality of life will be reduced for most people, because they themselves will personally benefit. They are willing to accept a reduced pie if it means they don't have to share it.
And to the point of the other person responding to you - the constitutional changes they want are real, and that factors in. If they can get even a few light red states more solidly so, they have a stronger position for an eventually constitutional convention, at which point they will rewrite the whole thing.
Feinstein's a terrible senator, which should surprise no one, since she's not been particularly good at any of her jobs.
Additionally, her cognitive abilities seem to have declined substantially.
All of this is completely independent from a power of attorney, which is absolutely normal and should be something all families discuss doing when they have responsible adult children. If you do not do this, it would take a court order to help out a parent who gets admitted to the hospital suddenly but still needs to pay bills, or you'd have to get the person declared incompetent if they are being scammed and you need to step in to fix it.
Power of attorney sets up the framework for dealing with those issues in a timely manner, but it has to be done while the person is competent and of sound mind, so you have to do it before shit hits the fan.
Also, for family finance planning, keep in mind that medicaid has means and asset tests that basically mean old people have to spend everything before they can get the government to pay for long term care. And the government can claw back property if it is transferred within a few years of needing that safety net. My mom and her mom worked all this shit out years in advance and it went very smoothly, compared to my father's paranoid parents who wound up having to fork over hundreds of thousands of dollars that they spent their whole lives saving, just to have necessary medical care in their 80s and 90s.
Let me clarify. It is complicated - there are a lot of moving parts, as you say. But again, that is 100% design choice.
Complexity means that there's some level of uncertainty. I don't believe that there's any uncertainty with how we have structured education. It works consistently to force individuals to shoulder the burden, while providing benefit to the people who need it least. If you implement these policies, you'll get the same outcome every time.
Great posts. Sounds like the fascists are mad that they don't get access to the largest instance without having to follow it's rules.