First Wordle Problems

I tend to be the one at the party who when all the parents are talking about schooling is like “haha school is stupid and nobody should have to go, right?” then everyone is staring at me.

Most people have to go to economy school to get one of those!

Holy hell. People STILL do not understand the staggering economic leap that happened over just a decade or two.

Oh yeah. The wheels are turning there.

It’s definitely a universe with big space rocks containing big space slugs containing space bats. Which is a place I want to live!

Angleton-pilled. Asking to be "read in" to the children's schedule. Giving a Wife's Daily Briefing. Referring to episodes of the muppets as ELINT. PTA gossip is HUMINT. Burn After Reading packed lunches.

That feels like a very Bene Gesserit kind of thing but of course the Jedi have a ton of that DNA.

I don’t know if anyone ever tried this angle, but clearly there COULD be a secret Jedi discipline that lets you create false memories for yourself that you yourself would believe, at least temporarily? For security reasons or whatever?

@eleanor.lockhart.contact would explain this as the movie expressing the point of view of Luke, at this point just a rando provincial. One of the vast majority of people for whom “the emperor is an evil wizard who basically made all this happen” is the stuff of embarrassing conspiracy theory.

Come on now. That game was an incredible showcase for the noble art of punting, on the biggest stage imaginable. A feast for the senses!

Oh absolutely not, no. Darth Vader is some guy named Darth! Presumably a black man!

Well right, that’s why it’s great. It’s “what if Kurosawa with hot rods, in space.” But yeah, its relation to later “canon” is…suspect.

Like starts out getting totally wrecked by the snow beast and almost dying, then at the end gets wrecked BY HIS DAD. In between he goes on a vision quest where he kills an enemy with his own face. (Maybe it’s all some kind of coma dream?)

Star Wars is a legitimately great movie! Empire too in its own way, but it’s very conscious of itself as a sequel, if that makes sense? Still. There’s something very dreamlike almost about “The Empire Strikes Back”; it’s a note they never really hit again.

Yeah, that's the other big thing. There's no even quasi-legitimate way to elevate an autocrat here. It would always be clearly extra-constitutional if somebody tried it. Which doesn't make it impossible in principle! It's just a big hurdle in your way.

When we're done relitigating Weimar here we'll get to January 6, never you fear. And I will DOMINATE. 🙃

It's the contention of most of us here that a GREAT many Americans like us are strongly committed to this Republic and don't intend to be here for the end of it. Your mileage may vary!

It's not original to say, but there just weren't nearly enough people committed to the republic as it was constituted; not in any real way. The Weimar constitution wasn't even old enough to vote in 1955! Why would anyone care if it lasted?

Yeah, just in terms of its basic structure AND in terms of "not working the way it was supposed to." (I mean, yeah, obviously our own set-up hasn't worked the way it's "supposed to" for a while, if it ever exactly did. But we've never reached THAT level of total dysfunction, not yet.)

Yes I am joking, but Quayle and Pence are BOTH basically comic figures. Obviously Pence did the "right thing," and good for him, but I don't REALLY believe he saved the republic or made that much of a difference, heh.

Dan Quayle. The hinge around which history turned. There was an hour, and there was a man for the hour, and they found each other. In Indiana, for some reason.

Yeah. Like, the tradition of liberal democracy in the German lands was...rather slight, shall we say. It was all paper thin. Maybe it didn't HAVE to birth an autocrat, but in that environment it feels almost overdetermined. And with a whole generation of resentful war veterans all ready to go?

nasty tricksy posters

Yeah. There’s a lot of terrible governments in history. Probably more terrible ones than good ones! We don’t automatically have to leap to the Worst One Ever when searching for a comp. It has a whiff of stolen valor, as it were. (We’re staggeringly wealthy and secure compared to ANYONE in 1933!)

America now (the whole WORLD now!) is just so drastically different from interwar Germany that it's just really hard to draw direct connections. Everything about our history, culture, political tradition, political SYSTEM...it's hard for us to even understand what they were going through.

I feel like we all used up our 1933 analogies and our rebuttals to them last year sometime, so I won't go too deep into it. But I've always thought it was a generally poor analogy for our own situation, one that obscures more than it reveals.

“Recognize when you are being fucking played for a mark” is like Step One in nearly all contemporary politics and so many people on all sides just NEVER GET THERE. It’s exhausting.

WRONG, lowtax. We don’t like Chris Hayes EITHER.

Spelling bee board. BROHIBITION.

Man things got so “woke” for a while that it was practically illegal to be a dude in America. It was the era of

I mean I guess? But in the story we’re told, those legionaries crossed the Rubicon for their beloved commander, right? Not for some dumbass civilian who’s openly contemptuous of them.