Catpurrple

I’m so sorry. But on the one hand, if you haven’t started anything yet, that’ll be less of a paper trail for you. I’ve been on hrt for a year, and I can only imagine they’ll try and ban the drugs entirely. I haven’t changed my name, but I have changed my gender marker. You’re losing time, time you’ll sadly never get back, but in my case, I will lose time, my meds, all the progress I’ve made. I… don’t know how to deal with this.

And then when they do update the game, and add 20 more dollars of new dlc at the same time, if you’re someone who likes mods, well congratulations. Your installation is ruined and you can’t go back to your saved game(s) without there being some level of headache involved. At this point a high seas version of stellaris would probably be a relief, since there’s no auto updates and all dlcs. But here I am, a sucker who bought like three-quarters of the dlc over the years and can’t even play it because I’ll just be sad my last playthrough got ended prematurely with a dlc release… Fuck Paradox and all their games.

Well it does matter though.

The way I see our choices is, one old man, the blue donkey, has the goal of continuing to support the status quo, for better and worse. He also has that baffling willful ignorance about the increasingly rabid violent behavior of the other guy’s colleagues and voters, and how he definitely needs to fucking do something. But at least he hires people who are less old and more mentally secure than himself, since a president’s cabinet and advisors are vital to the administration’s function, and tend to fill in where they fall short.

But the other old man, the red elephant, he has the very well-published goal of severely lowering the quality of life for all us citizens besides wealthy white men, in some cases removing the right for some demographics to live at all (trans people, for one). The plan also includes smash-and-grabbing the federal government and raiding its wealth; this is all that Project 2025 thing that people need to talk more frequently about. He also hires unqualified criminals for his cabinets, and is a convicted criminal himself; just not in the eyes of his dogmatic culty voters, or in the majority opinion of the unelected for-life supreme court that he had previously rigged in his favor. And he is known to be in the pocket of a sadistic oligarchic foreign government for whom the cold war never actually ended.

Sure, long term this country won’t last, but in the short term, this is the last shot at renewing our fragile democracy subscription while we still can. If we lose it completely with this looming fascism takeover, it will require the spilled blood of tens of millions of lives and more, to ever get it back, and at the minimum it will come with the severe decline of quality of life for all US citizens, besides wealthy white men, and the destruction of decades of history and culture that we currently take for granted. Think a US version of China’s great firewall, book burnings, server wipings, cops raiding your home and smashing up all your hard drives.

And that’s only if this country could even be taken back, considering, you know, the USA has the most guns and nukes of anyone, and I don’t see an average Joe who happened to already own an assault rifle being successful in employing the second amendment on a missile drone swarm. Probably the best case scenario would be Balkanization, and being lucky enough to end up in a good region of the former-US, and just getting bombed over the border back and forth occasionally, and hoping everybody continues playing nice with the nukes. Because the only alternative in an unshattered fascist US at that point would be waiting for a natural decline. But as we’ve seen with the likes of North Korea, that process could end up taking so long that none of us here will live to see it, just the kids of our kids and on.

I’m never voting for the crazy felon cult guy who officially wants me dead, among so many other things. I don’t think that any combination of our laws or legal system should have ever allowed him to return to the polls for this election, or done anything besides end up in a cell or be executed as a high threat terrorist traitor. But it’s just how it ended up. But please don’t act like it doesn’t matter, and nobody should be keeping up with that bullshit propaganda bot lie that the outcomes will be the same either way. Sorry for the long incoherent rant, I barely even remember what your comment was, nor do I particularly want to scroll up to read it again, but nothing makes me more irritable and verbose than people giving into hopeless apathy.