I’ve better things to do in this, the last week of 2023, so this is my last reply to you on this article.

There’s your fair tax and income plan.

It still doesn’t account for the utility issue. No flat tax proposal ever has or ever will.

The practicing term is psychotic dedication.

And I suppose you’re AOC’s psychiatrist now, huh.

Such ideas as an immediate end to coal use. Despite clear technological advances that has brought us both Cleaner sorting, better mineral recovery, and carbon capture, AND carbon reuse. Or the fact that an immediate end would leave over two thirds of the world without reliable power.

I’ve never seen her demand an immediate end to coal use. No one is stupid or foolish enough to truly believe we can immediately end using all fossil fuels right now. But transitioning away from them, and doing it faster than we are right now, is a lofty-yet-achievable goal that I wouldn’t consider to be “psychotic” unless I was being paid shitloads of money by an oil company to protect its best interests. As for the “cleaner fossil fuels” bit: They may be “cleaner” but they’re still polluting the world at levels and rates dangerous enough to make climate scientists start sounding louder and louder warning bells.

you fail to comprehend that the party whole is not your tiny far right nutz

The GOP no longer has a place for people like Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney. The GOP is beholden to its orange demigod and his willingness to court extremists in exchange for votes, power, and money. Given how the GOP has largely bent over backwards to keep Trump happy since he became the party’s presidential candidate in 2016, I daresay the party has become a party of Christofascist authoritarians who want to turn the U.S. into Gilead. (And given how they finally managed to kill Roe v. Wade, they’re well on the way to doing that.)

I prefer gradual change to the ease of betterment in time. You demand immediate acceptance.

I don’t demand “immediate acceptance”⁠—if I were to demand anything, it would be immediate tolerance. You don’t have to accept queer people; you only have to let them live and exist in the public sphere. Right-wingers (especially Trumpists) are the ones who can’t even accept gradual change. They’re the ones who are salivating over the idea of SCOTUS revisiting Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas so that queer people can be turned back into second-class citizens despite no evidence that queer people are actively damaging society by merely existing. They’re the ones who are passing laws that target trans athletes, who are so few in number at even a high school level that those laws end up targeting a single individual trans person. Don’t you ever give me this shit about “demanding immediate acceptance” again, Lodos⁠—you’re not going to convince me that queer people need to give Trumpist fuckwits any more time than they’ve already had to accept the existence of queer people.

there are many factions in the Republican vote as well

And most of them still coalesce around the idea that Republican rule is (or should be) the natural state of affairs, poor people need to be fucked over at every turn, Republicans (especially presidents) are above the law so long as they can deliver power to the party, and petty sociopolitical “culture war” grievances are the most important thing to talk about at every possible opportunity. They might quibble on the details, but they tend to agree far more often than they disagree.

That it didn’t happen is proof of your misunderstanding of the event. There was no riot.

Hundreds, maybe even thousands of people marched onto the Capitol grounds on a day when the building was closed to the general public. Those people destroyed windows and doors to break into the Capitol, then destroyed and looted property inside the Capitol. They assaulted police officers with weapons to the point where several of them suffered major injuries. They chanted “hang Mike Pence”. We have all the evidence of that on tape. You’d probably be one of the first to call any event similar in tenor and activity happening in a Democrat-controlled state or city a “riot”; for what reason does what happened on the 6th of January 2021 not qualify as a riot other than your obvious sympathies towards the rioters and their cause?

If you want to blame the tiny percentage of criminals in a peaceful post election protest against the party whole, you must equally condemn BLM for the tiny criminal elements that committed class 1 felonies under the guise of protest.

No, I don’t. “BLM” is not an organized group in the sense that the movement as a whole has top-down leaders on a national level. The GOP is such a group, and its de facto leader knowingly riled up an already-hostile crowd to the point where they attempted to subvert American democracy so that leader could stay in power despite having lost a free and fair election. You’re not making a good enough argument to convince me otherwise; I doubt you ever will, given your near-blind loyalty to Trump.

I said there was fraud. More than before. That is a factual statement.

The implication of such statements (ah, there’s that pesky “subtext” concept again!) is that the fraud happened at levels that could’ve affected the outcome of the presidential election. You know damn well that it didn’t. Implying it did doesn’t help you look like less of a Trumpist.

A, you wouldn’t be. I pulled the trigger of my own accord.

I gave you the gun, a target, and false information that was designed to turn you into an emotional wreck⁠—all with the full knowledge that you were likely to pull the trigger once my setup was complete. I fail to see how I wouldn’t be responsible for the death of the person I effectively sent you to kill even if I never directly asked you to kill them.

Revenge murder doesn’t bring someone back.

And to quote Rick Sanchez: “I’m on more of a revenge kick than a results kick!” You can know revenge won’t bring someone back and still want revenge.

Those that committed crimes were either part of, or at the time following, known militant groups.

You really want to say that everyone at the rally was a hard-right militant? You really wanna go with that argument when there’s no proof to back it up? Alright, but…

What such material does show is that the speeches on the 6th did not motivate those that were planning an assault long before.

…Ashli Babbitt, so far as I or anyone else knows, didn’t belong to any such militant groups and didn’t plan on going to D.C. that day for any reason other than the Trump rally. She’s dead because she made a bunch of bad decisions, the first of which was listening to Trump and the last of which was not listening to cops. But sure, go ahead and tell me how she was secretly a Proud Boys leader. You’ll be a liar, but at least you’ll be telling a new lie instead of trying to pass her off as a martyr to the Trumpian cause.

You’re accepting blame for action another person did of their own free will.

Yes, that’s a thing I would do if something I say or do inspires someone else to do something awful⁠—and that’s because I’m not a goddamned sociopath.

Yes, absolutely positively sure.

In the heat of the moment, faced with a two-ton death machine in your path and a head-on collision that could likely be fatal, do you really believe⁠—with the absolute and unyielding certainty that only God could have⁠—you can control your self-preservation instincts to the point where you’d willingly let that car hit you and kill you?

For killing women’s hard fought rights. Notice your “girls” are destroying women’s records despite never coming close to men’s qualifiers?

Notice how you didn’t give a single fuck about women’s sports until the GOP told you trans girls were “invading” and “dominating”? Don’t hand me this bullshit, Lodos⁠—I know that for all those claims, trans women aren’t dominating women’s sports to any significant degree.

And last time I checked, by the way, trans women didn’t take away a woman’s right to have an abortion⁠—that was all a bunch of cisgender Republicans working for decades to unravel federal abortion protections, then pass laws against abortions once Roe fell.

I’d tell you to find some sympathy for trans people, but you’ve proven that you’re incapable of sympathy for anyone but your family and the GOP.

I see a real chance for a third party break in 2024

I’m going to say this one more time and pray it breaks through your thick-as-steel skull: No third-party presidential candidate has won a single electoral vote in decades. You would be voting for, at best, a candidate who will play spoiler by siphoning off enough votes from one of the only two viable candidates such that the other one wins the state. Your vote would send no message to anyone but yourself. Your vote would be a waste.

You’re going to vote for Trump when the time comes because you can’t stop hating Hillary Clinton and you’ll eventually realize that wasting your vote isn’t going to help you or your family. And to paraphrase Paul Heyman: That isn’t a prediction⁠—that’s a spoiler.

Having 4 competing large candidates offers room for a non-standard choice.

Again: It won’t matter because any candidate who isn’t one of the Big Two stands literally no chance in hell of achieving anything but “spoiler” status. The last time any third-party candidate managed to achieve anything close to actual success in an election was Ross Perot taking nearly 20% of the popular vote in 1992⁠—and he still didn’t win a single electoral vote.

What I won’t do is vote for a person likely to make most people I know wind up in the front lines of a Pacific war over the military equivalent of a slap or middle finger.

Yes, yes, we know you give a shit only about your family and not anyone else who might be affected by a war in that region⁠—or by GOP policies that attack the marginalized, the poor, the downtrodden, the broken, the beaten, and the damned.

I’m a queer atheist, Lodos. The GOP you voted for, you supported, you helped put into power in 2016 (and tried to keep in power in 2020)⁠? They would prefer that people like me didn’t exist. And so long as I live, I will vote against that preference. I will vote not only to protect myself, but to protect other queer people and other atheists⁠—even ones that I don’t personally know!⁠—from the Christofascist authoritarianism of Republican politicians and those who help them rise to power. I will vote to help keep from the levers of power those who would use those levers to marginalize all women into being nothing but baby factories akin to the handmaids in Margaret Atwood’s most famous novel. I will vote to support candidates who want to end homelessness and poverty rather than push it out of sight so no one has to think about it.

But you keep voting only to protect a small group of friends and family, Lodos. They seem to be the only society you actually care about.