I got about 1/3 of the way into a blog before I decided that maybe just keeping my mouth shut is the best course of action. At least about what I was writing about. For many years my life was an open book for readers who came down here to read the blogs, but now I don’t feel safe just talking to no one in particular. The wrong people are watching me from the shadows behind the regular readers. It’s just another way that I have been isolated from others.
I’m not enticed by wealth and power for the sake of controlling others, but I certainly desire enough so that I could simply say fuck you to all the people who nip at my heels all the time. I want to do what I want without infringing on others and not allowing them to infringe on me. Unless I sit down ant create something truly amazing it’s not something I expect I’ll ever get to experience. At this point I’m not sure I have whatever spark it takes to make such a thing anyway. I thought I did for a long time, but there haven’t been the kind of results to back that up. I guess time will tell, assuming I have enough left.

Anyway, maybe someday soon I’ll at least be able to get back to telling the actual story I wanted to. Although I have enjoyed some of the nonsense I’ve filled the times between with.

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I don’t know if this is at all comparable to what you were writing about, but I’ve removed certain bumper stickers from my car in the past couple years because I don’t feel safe advertising my political opinions in public anymore. It’s just asking to be targeted by extremists. Maybe some day we’ll find our way back to a world where it isn’t a partisan position to say that being able to tell reality from fiction is good.

The country had seriously fallen into a trap of political supremacy at the expense of human dignity and proper judgement. Nobody that I’ve seen is interested in honest debate. It’s all become a case of “my side is better than your side”.

This is why I believe the upcoming midterms will amount to nothing. It won’t change the partisan ideologies of either side and will only lead to reinforced division in both houses at the expense of national function. I’ve genuinely given up on listening to and providing political viewpoints as they are nothing more than simple shit starters to issues that we need to be looking at together as a people.

I think it certainly doesn’t help that, particularly in NA politics, both sides suck.

I wish it was easier to just build up a new system from the ground up that didn’t fuck over the common grunts of the world

Sadly that system has yet to emerge. Don’t burn down the stablility you have without an idea of what to replace it with. You’ll miss that stability when it is gone. And instability only helps the powerful grab more power anyway.

Socialisma and even Communism were supposed to be “power to the people” sorts of systems but they just crerated a new set of oligarchs.

The only solution is to *be* one of the powerful and use your power to liberate rather than control. Or control as ligtly as is practical where control is needed.

The problem is that we’re not exactly liberating so much so as we’re assigning privileges. Liberty and freedom are keywords that get thrown around too liberally and arbitrarily in this country when in reality, they’re pretty much privileges spun in a different context in the Constitution.

Moving on, the current democratic system that we have is not exactly one of the people, by the people, for the people. I see it as a choice oligarchy that decides the interests of the people while guising itself as “representational”. We don’t exactly have genuine representation as the people themselves aren’t A: Smart enough to understand how political reality works and B: Mature enough to handle political reality in contrast to their day-to-day lives. We cast a ballot in the name of “freedom” and “patriotism” and expect the so-called representatives to work miracles. It’s for these unfortunate circumstances why we still have the constituency complaining about non-representation and senators pointing fingers across the aisle to those who stand in the way of American values. It’s become a bickering contest and all we can do is vote on who gets the better leverage while leaving long-standing issues with the nation unresolved.

The only way out of this is for the constituency and their representatives to start listening to each other and swallow their pride for the sake of working towards a collective logical resolution, which nobody is interested in.

So any faith in the midterms and the next presidential election is going to be miniscule. The only thing that can be done is gamble with the vote and hope that the next senator is more altruistic than the other, even though the outlook is bleak.

This is exactly why the United States is no longer capable of the self-government its Constitution requires. As John Adams famously said: “Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”

We started dropping the morality in the 1960’s, and religion followed shortly thereafter. The only reasonable outcomes are either a return to morality and religion, or the fall of the nation.

I think we can all see which is most likely at this point.

Maybe a preferential ballot with instat run-off would help?

Just throwing up your hands and saying both sides bad ignores some important differences like how one side is increasingly calling into question the validity of elections themselves if they don’t win (the republican arizona governor candidate for just one example). And that’s the same side that has historically tried to put up as many obstacles to voting as they can.

Democracy sure has its issues, but I still like it better than some sort of autocracy.

Never mind that obvious chicanery was involved. Obvious and provable. Remember the Detroit elections, where Republican poll-watchers were forced out of the building under the guise of “Covid” while enormous cardboard sheets were put up in the windows. That happened. And it absolutely should not have.

Was this surrounding the 2020 presidential election?

I just spent a very small amount of time googling and what you’re talking about is just a false narrative. Sure some were forced out of the building, but that was because they were well over the limit of allowed election challengers in the building (over 500 at one point according to the articles, when the legal limit is 134). There were still plenty in the room after.

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2020/11/06/republican-challengers-barred-detroit-tcf/6190533002/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/11/10/fact-check-videos-crowd-locked-out-detroit-center-lack-context/6195038002/

Maybe spend a little bit of time double checking things instead of listening to whatever you’re getting this from.

It still doesn’t change the fact that partisan politics was, is, and always will be a contest of supremacy over one-sided interests. Slamming the results when your side doesn’t win is nothing new. In fact, you can expect constituents to call foul when their side doesn’t have the results they want even if everyone and their pet dog voted. That’s the nature of sports and political campaigns have become a sport.

And for the record, I LIKE Democracy too but it is in some serious need of tweaking which needs to start with the constituency, their understanding of political reality and their vigilance towards their elected so-called representatives.

There’s a difference between slamming the results and launching however many lawsuits the Trump campaign did after they lost (which were all thrown out because they weren’t willing to put forth their claims in court where there are actual consequences for lieing). We’re getting beyond just “sports” here. There’s a core of them that have gone into cult status. I don’t know how many.

Of course, I also want some kind of reform to our election system, like one of the solutions towards getting rid of the first past the post system we have like ranked choice voting (or some other solution, I’m not particularly picky and I haven’t spent much time looking into which solutions are better). So maybe we could actually have more than 2 parties.

Unfortunately, some energy that would go towards things like that currently have to go towards making sure we even still have a democracy.

Learning video editing from scratch isn’t really that hard. Being good at it would take some work but I had to put a video together for a Art Direction class once without any prior video editing experience.

If they just wanted to stitch multiple takes together and cut out dead air I’m sure they could muddle through it.

“I’m not enticed by wealth and power for the sake of controlling others, but I certainly desire enough so that I could simply say fuck you to all the people who nip at my heels all the time.” – Amen to that!! …God the world is réally f*cked up right now! (Although I’m not convinced it has éver been all that much better to be honest.) :-(

All honestly. I’m loving the side story nonsense we have been getting lately. It’s helped your world feel more alive.

Plus not many webcomics I know of have puppets as a non creepy aspect.

Oh man, tell me about it. It’s why I’m conflicted about doing anything- people will see me. People will Have Words. I’m trying to be strong enough to handle being “teased” so, maybe slowly. By the way, here’s one for free, a story within a story I once made up:

Once upon a time there was a special little child
They were kind and animals loved them,
They were very good at many things,
Until the day they were burned by the village,
The End

And the moral that the next little child learned was, don’t show you’re special.

Dude….. You’ve created something amazing…… Many of us wake up to see what you’ve come up with to amuse, roll eyes at, or just laugh ourselves silly and then look forward to the next one. Keep up the good work!

Can only disagree in that I usually read of an evening.

While It would be nice if you could get back to the main story (For one thing that would mean things are going better in your life and that would be great) the in between bits have been fun and haven’t felt filler-y except for the fact that they are in the middle of another arc. Even if they are not advancing the main plot they have had a lot of good character bits

The Times Between 48.

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