Yeah. The evangelical parents that kick their queer kid out aren’t just doing it because they want an excuse to get rid of their child. They do it because they believe what their pastor said.

I think the key mistake is assuming that a lot of these people will happily jump ship if given an off-ramp. Will some of them? Sure, people are people.

Plenty won’t.

Like man. I love the dude to death but I’ve lived in red country. Understanding that these people believe what they say they do is crucial to surviving in those places.

If you want to be useful right now, bother the shit out of or primary:

Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA)
Sen. Angus King (I-ME)
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV)
Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV)
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL)
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)
Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH)
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA)

They caved.

Like the degree to which some people on this app are leaping to paint all democrats with the same brush when it’s a **SPECIFIC SUBGROUP** of them whom the **REST OF THE PARTY IS REALLY FURIOUS WITH** for doing this is telling.

In order to make stories about evil vs good believable to good people (at least modern audiences) authors have to pretend that evil can comprehend and preempt good, that it can outmaneuver it by understanding it. But this is by and large a myth. Evil is not brilliant, it is vicious and stupid. /End

Ordinary decent people do not understand this, because they by and large do not interact with truly evil bastards on a daily basis. So when they see a villain not comprehending the protagonist’s goodness, they think “how can this bad guy not understand the obvious?”

It’s because they’re evil. 4/

A recurring theme amongst truly evil people in history is that they don’t actually think good people are good. They think they are faking it so that people will like them, so they’re deeply flummoxed when good people stick to their principles. 3/

A story where the bad guys are so viciously stupid that they can’t comprehend the good guys is doing to read as stupid to ordinary decent people because they have an ordinary decent persons view of morality. They assume that evil comprehends goodness as they do. But most of the time it doesn’t. 2/

Anyway yeah. Nothing is worse than an insecure nerd. Especially one that holds a ton of power and the ability to ruin economies with their mood swings. /End

By the way group 1 is not free of toxicity either. Nothing can be worse than a nerd who discovers in their 20’s that they can become physically strong. Some of them take that pain of having been roughed up and go “nobody will feel that way on my watch.”

Others are like “IM THE BULLY NOW.”

4/

Because group 2, boy lemme tell you, when they realize that the same guys they see as having bullied them in school and gotten all the female attention are **still** naturally better positioned to be good at swordplay than they are? They tend to have a total fucking meltdown.

3/

I chalk this up to a weird thing where nerds who read a lot of fantasy novels when they were younger sort of internalized the idea that swordsmanship and other archaic ways of fighting are “nerd” things and thus “belong” to them. 2/

How is Trump supposed to be a dictator when Mamdani has the financial leverage to lock him in the Tower of London to starve.