uriel238

uriel238 , 1 month ago

Very much a Disaster Lesbian, though the Rhombic Dodecahedron speaks to me.

uriel238 , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

I can't speak for living like a king but we were able to recently confirmed again the whole lazy proletariat myth is a capitalist fiction. During the COVID-19 lockdown we had furloughed workers with a perfect opportunity to just lounge for months, and they just couldn't. Healthy adults just can't couch potato and watch TV for two weeks. When they try, they get cabin fever and start leaning how to widdle whittle wood into bear sculptures. The Great Resignation was driven partially by lockdown hobbies that became lucrative,

I, personally, can couch-potato out for weeks, but at my worst, I have slept for months, getting up only to eat and excrete. I didn't sleep always; sometimes I'd lie there awake but my inertia would be so great I couldn't lift a hand. This is avolition a symptom of mental illness, such as major depression. When doctors noticed that I can make like a log for almost a year, I was diagnosed and qualify for disability.

When all your workers are lethargic or crabby or stealing all the nitrous canisters, maybe your workplace is toxic. Maybe the managers aren't actually managing but acting like children who need to be handled. Or maybe you're not paying them enough to get out of precarity, which is a major cause of chronic mental illness like major depression.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

This is the result of gravitational lensing very close to the noodle event horizon, < Schwarzschild radius × 1.5

uriel238 , 1 month ago

Zombies can be animated from magic, drugs, radiation or bioagents. The Chernobyl exclusion zone is a nexus of wandering zombies.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

Gaea certainly is.

I learned from Jurassic Park that females are default since they're XX and males are XY, but it turns out that's just specific to humans, and its reversed in some animals, where others determine sex not based on genes at all.

And Adonai had a consort, Asherah that was actively removed and censored because her culture was dominating.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

Space is big. Really big. If we suppose there is a God at all, it's hubris to imagine terrestrial life is central to a divine funtion, let alone the human ape, let alone one faction of human society.

We are moss on a sequoia tree in California while the chosen people are weasels in Mecklenburg.

At worst, we're insignificant, and at best we are the roaches in God's card reader causing errors by crawling around.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

Thinking for herself is a requirement in the industrialized world, since adulting is a subset. Maybe there's a farm that raises gentle ladies-in-waiting with only domestic skills the way we train service dogs to help disabled people, but such women are not found in general society.

Also, not thinking for herself makes her unemployable in a society where all adults are required to earn a living (which often takes more than one full-time job). So this requirement implies the guy is rich enough to afford a family on one income.

In short, like the 1950s man, he's not looking for a date or a wife. He's looking for a household appliance. Kenmore will sort him out.

As for the rest of us losers working class guys, real women who think for them selves and can adult are an asset and a keeper. Heck, if they can think for us too, sometimes, that's a bonus.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

We are experimenting with hierarchies of needs, giving behaviors point values to inform the AI how to conduct itself completing its tasks. This is how, in simulations we are seeing warbots kill their commanding officers when they order pauses to attacks. (Standard debugging, we have to add survival of the commanding officer into the needs hierarchy)

So yes, we already have programs, not AGI, but deep learning systems nonetheless, that are coded for their own survival and the survival of allies, peers and the chain of command.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

This is one of those places where a technology might be beneficial to a communal societies but are dangerous in capitalist ones, since any technology that replaces workers, or substitutes high-paying professional jobs with menial jobs impact survival of the workforce.

I think AI will get better at simulating human creativity, or allowing less-skilled workers produce high-quality results to the point that it will change art much the way desktop publishing revolutionized graphic design (with much resistence from the X-acto generation.

The challenge, IMNSHO is navigating the new technology so it serves society and not just the bunch of capitalists at the top who'd gladly replace us all with robots and let us starve.

The working class shall tremble and all that.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

If it is, it's a convincing one. The thing is, learning systems will try all sorts of crazy things until you specifically rule them out, whether that's finding exploits to speed-run video games or attacking allies doing so creates a solution with a better score. This is a bigger problem with AGI since all the rules we code as hard for more primitive systems are softer, hence rather than telling it don't do this thing, I'm serious we have to code in why we're not supposed to do that thing, so it's withheld by consequence avoidance rather than fast rules.

So even if it was a silly joke, examples of that sort of thing are routine in AI development, so it's a believable one, even if they happened to luck into it. That's the whole point of running autonomous weapon software through simulators, because if it ever does engage in friendly fire, its coders and operators will have to explain themselves before a commission.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

It's a bubble gun.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

YYYY-MM-DD is what most filename formats and sorting algorithms prefer.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

I'm pretty sure society needs more roaring rampage of revenge against puppy-killing power-brokers and plutocrats.

Nowadays they even admit to the puppy-killing.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

In my forties I had a short fling with a woman who was still breastfeeding her son, and her pumps runneth over.

Human breastmilk is really sweet for those of us used to cows milk. Or really, too sweet for anyone with more than one digit in their age. The quantity available had me pondering the possibilities of small-run cheese or ice-cream production.

I suppose breast milk can be a fine substitute as a coffee creamer or in some dishes, but drinking it directly is an...experience.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

The people on your man o' war
Are treated worse than scum
I'm no flogging captain
And by God I've sailed with some
Come with me to Barbary
We'll ply there up and down
Not quite exactly
In the service of the Crown

🏴‍☠️

uriel238 , 1 month ago

We are the goon squad and we're coming to town, Beep-beep!

uriel238 , 1 month ago

The GTA 3 engine (including Vice City, and San Andreas ) did help me understand parallel parking better, since I could watch from above and behind.

That engine also featured some fabulous momentum physics, so if you had a big enough vehicle, you were unstoppable despite all the police blockades. That was maximum fun.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

Extinction by AI takeover or robot apocalypse does seem cooler than extinction by pollution rendering then environment uninhabitable.

I'd rather not go extinct at all, but if we're fucked regardless.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

But, according to Das Kapital (and the last two centuries) capitalists will always capture the government and regulators, neutering their ability to fulfill their role. Greed and the susceptibility to corruption will always drive the system to where it is today, in which only revolution will free us from the established system.

But even then, civil war rarely heralds a communist revolution, but usually a run of dictatorships, each overthrown by the next. We have to get very lucky or be tired of fighting before we can install a public serving state. And we haven't yet tried pre-writing and publishing the new constitution.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

Wally [the emotional support alligator] has lawyered up.

“Then,” Henney said, “it got a lot of weird.”

At the point Wally was missing yet retained a lawyer, it was already weird.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

As someone highly susceptible to dark patterns, I'd like to see more regulation and investigation of them in commercial practices.

Heck, some kinds of commercial fluffing are outright lies.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

I thought it was dark as in manipulation that isn't readily visible. For instance, a micro-transaction for a character reskin accompanied by default skins being crap. In Watchdogs Legion all the Londoners you could recruit generally had poor fashion, then money was scant and clothes were super expensive (but you could by more money with micro-transctions).

In one of the Space Quest series, as a joke (black humor in theme with the series) whenever an airlock interface was opened, the mouse cursor started on the Open Outer Door button, so an accidental double-tap was deadly, so dark patterns were known about in the 1990s, though not yet given a name.

Click-wrapped TOS and contracts for software and services were one such strategem, though we're more aware of it today, and more judges are willing to reject contracts and TOS that didn't include a clear, announced disclosure of their odious terms.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

Due to its mode of operation, the court considered the software to be “specifically intended for criminals”

Crime is an action a state doesn't like, not necessarily wrong or evil, but serves interests other than the state. If the state has to authorize everything, then the state is favoring dominance over governance.

When the state has to monitor all transactions it is tyranny.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

Is there an actual way to get this result? Asking for a friend.

(I usually have to get an RPN calculator anyway, or use the internet for not-by-hand calculations.)

uriel238 , 1 month ago

The fifth one was written while Douglas Adams was super depressed, so yeah, it's a bit more grim than the others.

The initial trilogy were written after the radio show which was itself written on the fly, hence the continuous cliffhangers and deus-ex-machina turns of fate.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

Funny, marines and wait staff are the two work forces we point to as counterexamples when someone suggests poor people are just lazy.

The ownership class will certainly tremble when they gear up for a rumble against the Man.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

Costco for a while sold large ice cream bars from their cantina. While not proportionately larger they did help with the disappointment I felt going to DQ decades later to notice the cone was much smaller than the last time.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

I appreciate very much the little bit of trolling.

Sometimes daddy can't help himself.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

Someday cringe will be cringe, and sick will be sick again.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

It's all tubular.

As a kid from the 80s-era San Fernando Valley, I have legit cred to say that.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

I picked up shizzle for rizzle from Tiny Tina and works as a rated G version of the shit meaning either the genuine article or the diggity dank.

uriel238 , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

The cover-your-ass scenario.

In the Philosophy Crash Course there was a scenario like this. I'll paraphrase:

You're a traveler exploring a semi-devloped nation in South America. Coming out of the wilderness you come across a squad of soldiers. They are forcing twenty villagers to dig a mass grave. The officer to the soldiers tells you these villagers committed the state crime of supporting a rival to their leader, and are to be executed. But as you are a guest in their country, he will make you an offer: if you shoot one of them, yourself, he will set all the rest free, and then can hike to the border and beg for asylum. (A rough trek, but the neighboring country may take them).

Do you shoot one of the villagers?

Actually killing someone is rather hard on the psyche, and most of us cannot bear the thought (and might suffer from trauma as a result). But then, perhaps this is a small price to pay for nineteen human lives.

Thomas Aquinas and Kant were happy to let the soldiers kill the villagers so as to avoid committing the sin of murder, themselves. Aquinas and Kant even would not lie to the murderer at the door, or Nazi Jew-hunters to save the lives of fugitives hidden in their home, since lying was sin enough, and they would count on God to know His own. Both had contemporaries who disagreed, and felt it was proper to suffer the trauma and do what was necessary (assuming the officer of the soldiers seemed inclined to keep to his word and actually spare the remaining villagers.)

So, the cover your own ass response has a long history of backers, including known philosophers.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

I saw a headline about Mercedes offering an autopilot that doesn't require the driver to monitor, so it's going to be interesting to see how laws play out. The Waymo taxi service in Phoenix seems to occasionally run in with the law, and a remote service advisor has to field the call, advising the officer the company is responsible for the car's behavior, not the passenger.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

The Trolley problem is a schoolbook example of the failure of creed-based philosophy (deontological ethics), but is also used (the various scenarios) to illustrate that circumstances that don't affect the basic scenario or outcome do affect our feelings and our response to the scenario.

It's easier to pull a lever from a remote position than to actually assault someone or kill them by your own hand, for example.

There are other scenarios that don't necessarily involve trolleys, but involve the question of doing a wrongful act in order to produce a better outcome. Ozymandias in The Watchman killing millions of New Yorkers to prevent a nuclear exchange, thereby saving billions of people. (Alan Moore left it open ended whether that was the right thing to do in the situation, but it did have the intended outcome.)

We like the trolley problem because you can draw it easily on the blackboard, but other situations are much better at illustrating how subtle nuance can drastically change the emotions behind it.

Try this one:

The Queen of the land dies. On the day of her sister’s coronation, she declares that Anglicanism is now the faith and Catholics are now unlawful — a reversal of the old order — Catholics are to report to a town or city hall to convert or be executed. You are Catholic. Do you obey the law or flee? And if you obey the law, do you convert or perish at the hand of the state? Do you lie about your faith to state agents or to the national census?

To a naturalist like myself, I'm glad to lie or convert to spare my own life, but to the devout, pretending to be another faith, or converting by force was a terrible sin, so it's a very sober (and historically relevant) look at religious principle.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

IRL we typically do what we feel and justify it later, but then IRL there is no right or wrong, except what we construct in the process of organizing with each other to cooperate against outward threats such as predators and the elements. We have agreed to poor conditions because our lords were kinder than the winter and the bears, but then we've also overthrown our lords when we worked out they need us more than we need them.

But yes, if you want to pretend that moral philosophy is just cerebral masturbation, that's valid. All of our philosophy is about the opinions of past thinkers about the perimeters of right and wrong. It will give you a clear answer about as well as religious philosophy might tell you which patheon of gods is the true one.

These scenarios are less about what is right or wrong, but about how you, individually and personally, decide ad hoc what is right or wrong. You might distrust the soldiers, but then if they were inclined to betray your trust with a lie, they might have never intended you to go free either, and the whole story becomes irrelevant.

Another Trolley-like features a stranger come to town who is a perfect match for five transplant patients waiting organs. The surgeon / hospital administrator has a friend in organized crime who can abduct the stranger and harvest his organs quietly and cleanly so that the authorities won't notice he disappeared. Although IRL, having a transplant is a mortal condition. Having the organ buys more time than not having the organ. Also this doesn't get into the risks of other complications of transplant surgery that can occur even when an organ is a good match.

These scenarios are not about real life, but about becoming more self aware of how you'd consider these. And yes, this may mean looking for third options, hoping to find one better than the two obvious ones.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

Firstly, if we're talking about the Trolley Problem, that's not a behavior paradox, that's a morality paradox. Animals, including human beings, commonly act first and rationalize their behavior later. We can decide after the fact it was ethical after all, decide that it wasn't but was justifed due to circumstances, decide that it wasn't and wasn't, but we'll reconcile it after the fact. Examples like the Trolley problem are not meant to reflect real life and how we behave, rather are contrived in contemplation of the logical mechanisms we use to determine ethical options can become problematic. (Utilitarianism has its own paradoxes.)

Secondly, in fact, human beings are susceptible to paradoxes that can cause decision paralysis, but they tend to be about either survival or high-stakes situations with incomplete information. A common one is when a green, low ranking enlisted person is given a direct order that is illegal. In the US army, our soldiers are educated as to the rules of war, and what constitutes a war crime, and while they are legally obligated to not act on illegal orders, they also know well before they get out of boot they'll be jolly sorry if ever they do disobey an order. Command them to commit an atrocity on the field and they lock up by the dozens. Hence squad commanders know that if they issue an illegal command -- even one based on incomplete information -- it risks unit cohesion. Getting caught in a SNAFU like this is still common, and the enlisteds seldom come out of them well, so it's on the list of counter-recruitment bullet-points.

The same kind of thing also appears in game shows (where its contrived) and in the strategic command chain of command, because a lot of officers do not ever want to be a guy who nuked two million people, even if they're the enemy. And yet those officers routinely got to serve as key-turners to arm (or launch) our nuclear arsenal. (I don't know how the situation is since the new century, if those stations are even manned at all times anymore.)

In the end, we are animals, and typically when we're confronted with moral choices, it's a matter of survival or high stakes, in which case we often don't have the time for measured contemplation on what we're doing. Moral philosophy questions what behavior may be right or wrong according to a given standard, but it doesn't get into how people actually behave. For that, consider psychology and sociology.

uriel238 , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

We've seen a similar phenomenon in some of the red states in the ideology conflict here in the US. There are people eager to kill someone just to have the experience, and who volunteer to hunt targeted groups (trans folk, lately) or as participants in an execution by firing squad. I remember in the John Oliver's first segment on the death penalty (he did a second one recently) executions were stalled due to difficulties obtaining the drugs used in lethal injections, and firing squads were brought up. The expert pointed out the difficulty finding one executioner, let alone seven. The officials suggested recruiting volunteers from the gun-enthusiast citizenry, which the expert saw as naïve.

I can't speak to firing-squad executions during the German Reich and the early stages of the holocaust, but I can speak to the Einsatzgruppen who were tasked with evacuating villages (to mass graves) who harbored Jews, harbored enemies of Germany or otherwise were deemed unworthy of life. The mass executions were hard on the troopers, and as a result Heydrich contended with high turnover rates.

This figured largely into the movement towards the industrialized genocide machine that pivoted around the Auschwitz proof of concept. Earlier phases included wagons with an enclosed back in which the engine exhaust was piped. The process was found to be too slow, and exposed to many service people to the execution process. The death camps were staffed to assure no-one had to interact with the prisoners and process the bodies, so no-one would have to confront the visceral reality of before and after. They were staffed so that anyone who engaged a mechanism was two steps away from the person authorizing (and taking responsibility for) the execution. The guy who flipped the switch was just following orders.

Interestingly, we'd see a repeat of this during the International War on Terror, specifically the Disposition Matrix which lead to executions of persons of interest on the field by drone strike (Hellfire missile launched from a Predator drone). During the CIA Drone Strike Programs in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the drone operation crews suffered from high turnover rate, with operators suffering from combat PTSD from having pulled the trigger on the missile launches. It didn't help they were also required to scan the damage to assess the carnage, and identify the casualties.

Interestingly, this also presented an inverted demonstration of how the human mind can tell the difference between violent video games and the real thing. Plenty of normies play Call of Duty without dealing with the mental after-effects of war, but even when we conduct war operations from continents away, our brains recognize that we are killing actual human beings, and suffers trauma from the act. War continues to be Hell, and video games not so much.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

The Log party and the Heron party.

Two-party systems were a problem even in ancient Greece.

uriel238 , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Babbage as in the steam-driven mechanical game engine, version 2?

I remember the controllers being kinda clunky.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

My last EA title was Red Alert III which they swaped for a version that required origin. I miss Westwood.

I do hope someone works out how to mod this to replace all ads with KPop.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

I know you can get ID deets here, but I don't know any service that turns it into a facsimile of a state ID card.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

It works better if it's glass (not acrylic) and properly lubed.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

You're welcome to what I know, though I'm just someone who's read more than a little pop-science. I'm not accredited or anything.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

Yeah, adolescence is weird, and some of this is guessing based on other primates. Gorillas, for example, evict familiar adolescent females shortly after puberty while welcoming strange adolescent females, which informs how we model the behavior of pre-agriculture migratory human tribes.

(I should add we don't presume that it was the same everywhere either, so it's quite possible that some prehistorical humans had different means of managing their teens than sending the boys off to wage war and letting the girls get kidnapped in kind by raiders. Once we go that far back, we have to rely on archeological data, which is very selective in the tales it tells.)

So then, there are some powerful goddesses in early Hellenism, for instance, Aphrodite (commonly a goddess of love and beauty), evolved from Astarte (Lover, Healer, Hunter, Warrior) who developed from Ishtar. In fact, when Aphrodite emerged from the sea foam on Kytherian beaches, Phoenician traders were coming to the Kytherian harbors, not only bringing goods and their own goddess, Astarte but also the modern Greek alphabet (before which the locals were using Linear B). So we have a path from Ishtar and this major poly-faceted goddess being reduced to a love goddess, who is then married to Hephaestus (the crippled forge) to put her in her place.

Also curious to me is Dread Persephone who ruled the dead and the underworld long before Hades appears on scene. (Poseidon was the Olympian in Chief, and we see part of his gig in creating biodiversity, not just all the creatures of the sea, but also those of the land). Zeus and Hades were added late in the game, and the stories we have of Persephone, specifically of the abduction of Persephone from Demeter and the thing with the six pomegranate seeds comes from a single poem. Even then, winter comes not because Persephone is gone, but because Demeter is sad about it, and stops doing her job. So Persephone's role is to be mom's co-dependent emotional-support assistant during springtime, and go back to attending the dead.

So here we have two examples of powerful goddesses that influenced the Hellenic people and culture who are then shoved backstage with the addition of Zeus and Hades.

There's a similar event that I remember from Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson regarding Asherah, the consort to Adonai / Elohim / Yahweh. Asherah was always the ambitious one between the two, and the Canaanite temples to her were bigger and more numerous than the ones to Adonai. Eventually an ideological rift developed and the Hebrews raided all the Asheran temples, massacring the acolytes and burning them to the ground. The whole don't boil a calf in the milk of its mother thing (which informs the separation of meat products and milk products in kosher diet) is a specific reference to an Asheran ritual meal, I think for weddings, but I'm not sure.

While I can't speak to whether misogyny is innate, I can say we've had periods in which goddesses were accepted alongside gods and in some cases were on top of the pantheon. We don't talk much about Gaea anymore even though in Hellenism she created everything on earth long before Poseidon was tinkering with horses. I think there's a division between Dionysian culture and Apollonian culture which parallels the shift from chthonic religion to celestial religion. (Chthonic gods are not to be confused with Cthonian gods, who are 20th century, and definitely celestial).

I can say that in the middle ages and the domination of Christianity, women were completely unpersoned and regarded as chattel beasts (despite their capacity to think and talk, both of which was discouraged). Even Mary, mother of Jesus was not even given due recognition until the 12th century.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

Essentially this implies you have to be mark material for Nigerian princes in order to not vote for Biden (id est vote against Trump).

It also implies that enough of US voters are, indeed, that naïve.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

For those choosing not to vote for Biden, voting for a genocidist in a US federal election doesn't put blood on your hands.

This isn't fabricated consent (I mean it is in that lumpins are told to believe they chose the government when they didn't).

Here's the thing: The office seat will be filled whether or not you vote. And you get one non-transferable vote.

This means you get to vote against the worse popular guy by voting for his most likely contender.

It's the trolley problem, only millions are voting on the position of the lever. What we cannot do is move the lever out of position.

It's still up to you. Taking action is harder than not taking action, but we are staring down Project 2025, the neutering of elections in the US and one-party autocracy (the Republican party), which will also speed up the dismantling of civil rights in the US. If you don't want that to happen, please consider voting against Trump and any other Republicans down ballot.

Yes, it sucks the US is reduced to this sorry state.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

We haven't had a functioning democracy since the 19th century.

There's argument to be made we didn't have a functioning democracy when the Constitution was ratified in 1789, since segments of it were clearly written in bad faith (like the electoral college, the 3/5s of all non-free persons clause, and arguably, the failure to offer suffrage to all persons including women), but Boss Tweed in 1852 already understood how to game the elections so that only approved candidates might make it to primaries (of New York State elections and Federal elections).

In the aughts (the 2000s), Oxford University did a study regarding elections, public interests and elite interests, and determined the US behaved more like an oligarchy than a democratic republic, so yeah, we're a plutocracy with some democratic features. However those democratic features, while meager, keep the US from turning into a single-party autocracy like the German Reich or the late-stage USSR.

And we're moving towards that autocracy, propped up by fascist ideology (with enemy within rhetoric, and purge actions to follow) with every year. The next time the Republican takes control of all three federal branches of government, the game is very likely up.

The US is also on the brink of civil war, and it may be sparked by Trump losing, depending on how large and coordinated the coup d'etat effort is at the time, or if Trump wins, by an attack against those resisting draconian policies.

uriel238 , 1 month ago

I've lost faith in the US voters after 2016. We held our nose knowing Clinton was a neoconservative recognizing that Trump would be much much worse (and was pretty terrible!). Trump lost the majority but won the EC, and the EC failed to do what it was supposed to do (conspire to elect someone other than the obvious tyrant) so, well, we got Trump in his pajamas obeying Leonard Leo and Steve Miller while Mattis kept him from nuking North Korea.

It reminded me of George W. Bush, who also lost the popular vote to Gore, but won the EC with a little help from friends in SCOTUS (and Leonard Leo), which was far worse than we imagined it would be after Bush's compassionate conservative thing. I believed Republicans couldn't actually get a president elected again, because there was no way we were going to forget the $3 trillion price-tag of Iraq, the torture, the open-ended war on terror, Halliburton's war profiteering and so on. It was such a shit show I expected it to be seared into the minds of Americans. Heck, Bush crawled away as the subprime mortgage crisis hit, so we were all feeling bummed.

The world gave Obama the Nobel Peace Prize just for not being Bush.

Nope, it turns out eight years later (with, granted, the War on Terror and mass surveillance getting worse) we forgot the ones who got us into it in the first place. And as much as Trump looked like a rabid monster, having freshly stolen the GOP from all the other cookie-cutter prospects, ready to bring fascism on like The Producers, Clinton was so hated that they just couldn't see Trump for what he was. (To be fair, millions of Protestant Evangelist Christians were being told from the pulpit Jesus wanted them to vote for Trump -- something they're not supposed to do while remaining a tax-free church. White Evangelists voted for him at a rate around 80%)

So now we're here, and I'm reminded of LBJ's lowest white man comment (attributed), If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you. Apparently some Americans really do go all in for that kind of ideology, even as the nation world burns down around them.

There's also the imminent possibility of civil war. Trump will try to organize a coup d'etat if he loses the election, and it is a matter if it can be adequately detected and repelled (or squelched before it gets started).