Fuck off, I voted and I’m fucking rowdy.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say even Putin doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life in a bunker.

You say that, but that’s literally the plan for all the tech bros and billionaires when climate change finally starts to slap. They have all the money and power to stop it from happening, but they’d rather just live out their last thirty years in a fucking hole.

Dems showing up to a federal agency they fund and being told “no, you can’t come in to the public entrance” should have been met with “there’s forty of us and one of you, you can’t arrest us all, mf, now watch this kickflip”, not “okay :(”

Isn’t hilarious chaos a Nazi instance?

Tbh, feeding them is cheap if you supply them with table scraps. They’re basically feathered pigs.

Well, yeah, but those costs are for tomorrow’s executive to figure out, we need those profits NOW

You know, I’ve got to give their marketing team props for managing to sell a vehicle with the engineering quality of a Saturn to people with more money than sense for a whole ass order of magnitude more than it’s worth. Game recognizes game.

Drivers don’t need to be watching the road, they need to be watching this ad.

There is no ambiguity here. This is it. They’re dumpstering the constitution right now and clapping while it happens. As somebody on the left side, I’m livid. I’ve heard for years and years and years that we can’t have nice things because of the constitution, I even came around to believe in the constraints of the constitution, and it turns out that the conservative allegiance to the constitution was about as real as their belief in Christ’s teachings.

Say, isn’t there an organization out there whose members all take an oath to defend the constitution from all threats, foreign and domestic? I wonder what that organization might have to say about something like this, can anyone get their thoughts?

Say, I’m starting to think this guy is trouble.

I would point you to the siege of Hostomel airport in the Ruso-Ukrainian conflict. It is ridiculously easy to render an airport unusable, temporarily if you think you can hold it, and semi-permanently if you’re less confident.

I hope the other countries and their people see the US blowing its legs off and take a moment to reflect if right wing reactionaries really are right for them.

Edit: West Europeans, I’m specifically calling you out. I’ve spoken with my share of right-curious Euros who insist that it is / will be different for them. No it fucking won’t. We’re your ghost of Christmas future. I hope that all that immigration reform stuff is still worth it when the alt-right sells your rights and benefits off to the billionaires for scrap.

I’m not aware of a country that’s swinging right where living standards are rising. They’re all either stalled out or falling in spite of narrative and expectation. Sure, Germany isn’t bad compared to some others, but plenty of Germans recognize that the standard of living they’re used to is starting to diminish. Unfortunately, instead of recognizing the real causes here, that angst is being channeled into “yes, but what if we tried out fascism again?”

The thing that’s wild to me as a USian is that we’ve had the fruits of reactionary conservatism (starting on the path with Reaganism) on full display since the oughts, and other countries seem to see our shambling fucking mess and go “well, yes, but the rich people told us it’ll be different for us.” No, it fucking won’t.

Bro, Mexico isn’t really that badly off. They’ve got their problems, for sure, but who doesn’t?

Second, California is sure to have its own defense industry, and I don’t know if you’d see tech abandon their silicon valley HQs. It’s going to be hard to walk away from that pool of skilled labor they’ve concentrated in that area.

I would honestly love to see a gravy road.

Jokes aside, there’s a reason why there’s only a few major roads going through the Sierra; it’s a major PITA to lay new routes, and even rebuilding old ones is a huge pain (I should know, I’ve seen them get washed out). Many times, these roads have many and large choke points where your maneuvering choices are a rock face on one side and a cliff or drop off on the other. Even if you could repair the roads quick, they’re ripe for guerilla warfare, sabotage, and espionage. Really, it would be IED central, and those IEDs would likely set off land-slides that would have to be dealt with to get the road usable again. And keep in mind that we’re talking about crossing an entire mountain range to get into the interior of California. Invading Cali by land would be a real bad time.

So, I think this could happen. Trump and Musk are just trying to speedrun smashing the administrative state; it’s difficult to overstate the enormity of the damage they’re going to do to the federal government’s ability to govern over the next two months. Laying off all these administrators and closing their offices is going to create a glut of administrators at the same time as it creates a demand for administrative capacity to make up for what the feds dropped. Plus, they’re going to want to stop California, but how will they when they’ve gone and replaced every competent person in the DOJ/DOD/FBI/CIA with incompetent stooges?

California has an advanced enough administrative state to handle breaking off, jokes aside. California also has the economy. Here’s the kicker: California has the geography. California would be a complete bitch to invade; for most of the coastline, the mountains (hills, as the locals call them, but they ARE mountains) just run right into the ocean, and the ocean is notoriously a bastard for much of that coastline; as for an overland route, there’s basically, like, three big highways that cross the Sierra Nevadas to inland Cali. A couple of big bombs or cal fire bulldozers would make short work of them. Plus, California has a LOT of agriculture to support itself with. Basically, the one weak spot is water supply, and we could be doing a lot better than we are if we just tightened up on our industrial, livestock, and rich dumbass consumption.

2 billion dollars / 800,000 people gives an average of 2,500 dollars per person. I’m going to venture a guess based on vibes that this was a more or less normal distribution and the median loss is close to the average loss. That’s not YUGE per person, but it would still chap my ass real good.

Hot damn, I’ll buy you a coffee if our paths ever cross

Everybody thinks they’re deeper in the in-group than they really are.