Case in point: Dick Cheney. And Henry Kissenger.
CrabAndBroom
joined 2 years ago
Thus opening the door for some sort of Clinton-Bush type of future scenario where a Democrat and Republican are buddies behind the scenes and just keep running for one term and alternating for 20-odd years.
It sucks that we all have to live through it, but I feel like the current times in the US are a really interesting test of the sort of limits of democracy. By that I mean, what happens if the majority of the population just willingly elects the worst person they can find, and at the same time every check, balance, rule and tradition that everyone assumed would keep things on the rails just... turn out to be kind of bullshit because nobody is willing to enforce them?
It raises all sorts of weird questions, like at a certain point is it okay to overrule democracy in some way to protect the country and the people, even if the majority seem to want to just run the bus off a cliff? And what about the people who didn't vote for this? Are they expected to just go down with ship or have to leave their home country altogether? An informed and engaged populace is vital to a healthy democracy, but what if enough people are uninformed/propagandized enough that they just willing take down the whole country? Does the rest of the world just let it implode?
I have no real answers to these questions, but I'd love to be studying this whole situation from like 100 years after it's all over.
"Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people, but they'll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad."
- Frankie Boyle
Also even "Today" is not a happy song lol. From Wikipedia:
After the release and minor success of the band's debut album, Gish, the Smashing Pumpkins were being hyped as "the next Nirvana". However, the band was experiencing several difficulties at the time. Drummer Jimmy Chamberlin was undergoing an increasingly severe addiction to heroin; James Iha and D'arcy Wretzky had recently broken up their romantic relationship; and Billy Corgan had become depressed to the point of contemplating suicide and plagued by writer's block. Corgan recalled that "after the first album, I became completely suicidal. It was an eight-month depression, give or take a month, and I was pretty suicidal for about two or three months."
...
The dark, ironic lyrics of "Today", describing a day when Corgan was feeling depressed and suicidal, contrast with the instrumentation. Michael Snyder of the San Francisco Chronicle said that the song is "downright pretty as rock ballads go" but that "Corgan manages to convey the exhilaration and tragic release he seeks." Corgan told Rolling Stone that "I was really suicidal ... I just thought it was funny to write a song that said today is the greatest day of your life because it can't get any worse." Corgan later compared writing the lyrics of "Today" and "Disarm" to "ripping [his] guts out".
Yeah that's honestly the main thing for me too. It's $120 Canadian for the Deluxe version. My price point is like... $30, especially since by all accounts it's not even finished.
Thanks for uploading these, very handy!
You still can, it's on archive.org!
Edit: not sure if I'm allowed to post the direct link, but it comes up right away on the search.
I suppose it's just like most drug addicts, you don't really choose what you get addicted to or when, something just sort of gets its hooks into you at some point and that's it.
Plus if you factor in having essentially no boundaries on your life (ie infinite money and nobody to tell you no or stop you doing anything, being more-or-less above the law, access to high-quality drugs and world-class healthcare) you can probably go on doing stuff like that pretty much indefinitely. IIRC that's how Keith Richards said he was able to go on doing drugs for so long - he was loaded so he could always get the good stuff that wasn't mixed with anything.
Yeah my VPN (Mullvad) is super affordable and I just leave it on all the time so I never have to worry.
Also maybe a seedbox could work for this sort of situation? I'm not overly familiar with them but I assume that would also just be running no matter where OP is.