FWIW, the article author also wrote a book called “Freedom from Want: The Human Right to Adequate Food”

Boo Radley weird vs Bob Ewell weird

I think I agree, but I’d phrase it a bit differently. The problem in our country isn’t division, it’s that there’s an energetic fascist movement that needs to be stopped. The problem with assassinating Trump is that it gives that movement a martyr and would very much energize them (disorganize them too, since they wouldn’t know for sure who to follow anymore, but they’ve never needed to be too organized to do damage and they could do plenty before succession fueled infighting really started to take a toll).

Killing Trump won’t kill his ideas, the only way to do that is to embarrass Trump and Trumpism badly, so I think the best series of events would be a) Trump loses the election, b) prosecutors explain Trump’s many crimes in meticulous detail to a series of juries who sentence Trump to years and years behind bars, c) Trump dies of a heart attack while taking a shit in prison.

The fact that the voters already did a) once in 2020 and the system’s let us down on b) is deeply frustrating and worth acknowledging for the sake of identifying the country’s underlying problems (it’s the politicians and lawyers more than it is the voters), but it doesn’t change the fact that assassinating Trump is the last thing we want to do at this point.

I don’t recall learning about the last time the Tops grocery shooter looked at porn

Homeless people with French citizenship are being left alone entirely I’m sure /s

Gerrymandered Congress, no campaign finance laws, bought and paid for judiciary - Allow us to introduce ourselves

I have never felt so seen by a piece of media as I did when I got the solution to this thought

Well, so long as they’re not migrants anyway

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

The same way punk rock got popular after Jimi Hendrix and a bunch of other people pushed the envelope in terms of technical musicianship, people wanted something new and the logical place to go was into making something simpler and more aggressive

Yep, here’s an NPR article laying out all the details for the curious

Fair enough, just to be clear this was just my own initial reaction to this meme and I have not done any investigation into whether OP is an asshat or not, and this is the sort of thing an asshat-y person could say

Or this is an attempt at even more critical thinking, i.e. “These are fine concepts, but if you don’t reckon with the context of what you’re talking about before throwing one of these out because it kinda fits you actually bring conversations down and keep people from exchanging more pertinent ideas and information.”

They probably could have communicated that better if that was their intent, but that’d probably kill any humor potential which was probably more of a priority here.

This article came out around the time of his NY arraignment and did a really good job making this point

The arrest and arraignment of former President Donald J. Trump may have been an unprecedented moment in American history, with seismic implications for the political process. But as a legal process, it was more routine: On Tuesday, he became just another one of the roughly 31,000 people arraigned for felonies in dreary courtrooms across New York State each year.

Constitutionally, those people are entitled to equal treatment — but practically, we all know that’s not true. Usually there are handcuffs and mug shots, two indignities Trump himself avoided. (Law enforcement officials told the New York Times he wasn’t considered a flight risk.) But he couldn’t get around the fingerprinting.

There’s also no evidence that Trump spent time in an overcrowded holding cell, an experience that seems to cut through the haze of memory for many defendants, who described moldy sandwiches or pee-filled plastic cups.

By contrast, Trump was allowed to self-surrender and arrived in a multi-car motorcade, escorted by the Secret Service officers routinely assigned to a former president.

We asked people what the experience is like when you’re not a high-profile White defendant, arrested for a white collar crime, with access to top-flight lawyers, campaign donors, crowds of well-wishers and supporters. Some were indicted before their arrest, some after. The picture they give — as mostly defendants of color, mostly arrested for violent crimes — is of disorientation and hopelessness.

And usually the world is not paying attention.