No predictions, only warnings

<rant/>

"The world we’re going down into, the kind of hate-world, slogan-world. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep. And the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke." — George Orwell, Coming up for Air

No matter who wins this U.S. election, there is a fight to be had after it. If we get a rebooted Trump regime, my earlier post on insurrections covers that. If the Harris campaign wins, I have different concerns: That people go back to brunch for another four years. The fight against an authoritarian crook is more transparently difficult. the fight against 'bla' complacency may seem to have lower stakes, but it's how we avoid landing here again. The last four years should have been concerted effort to stop the present situation from being here.

I'll never willingly type anything positive about Joe Biden. Back in 2020, Elizabeth Warren was my 1st choice, and Bernie Sanders was an acceptable and close 2nd. The party went for Biden. He wasn't even my 3rd preference, he was a non-entity. Yet of course I was going to vote for him against another four years of Trump back then. That just made sense. I knew he would be a one-term wonder, an also-been, a palette cleansing cracker. I didn't know how chaotically he'd abandon the Afghan people or that he'd end his term bankrolling a genocide against Palestinians and the start of a regional conflict. He refused numerous appeals to reform the Supreme Court before adding it to his by-then doomed campaign last summer. And I just can't stand that loud whisper thing he does in speeches. It's creepy. "Genocide" Joe is his legacy, don't @ me. I'm glad some students got their college loans written off. I'd strap those people back with their debts in an instant if that was tradable for all of those lives lost in Gaza.

The real threats are not the candidates, but what the bring. Trump packs exponentially worse baggage: violence, disregard for the law, the constitution, his critics, women, minority groups, Muslims, gay, transgender, etc. He will give green lights to the autocrats and thugs abroad to speed up and "get the job done," from Putin to Netanyahu. This list can go on, but I can't. Harris packs other threats: complacency, lethargy, but most of all another kind of fear: one that people have when they're worried to death that if they make the slightest peep of criticism that they will be ushering a return to the bad times, undermining good enough. This also is not democracy.

I hope for the easier fight, but more than that I hope people are actually going to be up for it this time.

"Good night, and good luck."

</rant>