Impossible! Everyone knows Jesus is a white man with blond hair and beard and shining white teeth who lives in a cloud above Arkansas or Kansas, he wants us to bomb the shit out of brown people, our pastors say so.

People who will win: defense contractors, evangelical christians with investments in Israel, oil companies that can pull the “make money” lever at whim, saudi princes and everyone who is going to shore up around the capitalist might of US/Israel’s war machine.

People who will lose: anyone who needs insulin, food or childcare.

Yah it’s great and all… if you ignore the context that we’re at a point where cities are posting public signs aimed at and against our own federal government.

I think people are already adapting to this new, chaotic world, but for someone older this is some of the most fucked up shit I’ve ever seen in my life in this country.

a specific timeline

If by that you mean, prehistory’s Q-anon scraping together vague gestures towards barely discernable timelines and a massive knob polishing for the people of Israel, then yah.

“After the number of the days in which ye searched the land, even forty days, each day for a year, shall ye bear your iniquities, even forty years…”

From this they decided that this was a “key” for translating the other vague messages that deal with timelines. It was entirely assembled and patched together in the imagination of men who needed hobbies.

This is a weird vulnerability in the human condition that our minds developed faster than our actual innate sense of reason and logic. We are the same species we were 5000 years ago, and the same species we were 100,000 years ago, just with more fancy tools around us. Still searching for meaning in abstraction, still trying to find some personal validation in a cold, uncaring and basically random universe.

They WANT the world to be wiped out in Armageddon, they don’t actually believe in death, they think if nukes turn the world to ash and cinders that Jesus will come save them and it will be fulfilling prophecy. They want maximum damage and they want the whole world to burn. And I’m not even exaggerating.

A lot of people really don’t get this, that evangelical christianity is a fucking death cult, this is why they’ve wanted Israel to literally blow up the entire middle east and spark WW3 for decades now, because to them it would mean prophecy is being fulfilled. And these people work in the highest levels of our government right now.

I grew up in a family of Christian apocalypse preppers, they wanted Israel to take control of Palestine and the entire middle east for their entire lives until they drank themselves to death.

And we gave them the keys to everything.

No, it gave a bunch of feverish hallucinatory bullshit that was so vague across thousands of years that it could mean anything.

Source: I grew up with christian apocalypse preppers.

But boiling the entirety of 21st-century American political dysfunction down to one glib sentence about punishment is lazy, inflammatory, and historically unserious. We can do better than this. Or at least we should.

I think you are way over analyzing the idea here, that it was the first of many major opportunities missed to start turning the country towards a more equal and progressive future, but our country has demonstrated over and over that it doesn’t actually want that.

If there WAS a huge show trial and hangings as their should have been, would that have altered the course of history? Maybe or maybe not, but it’s what should have fucking happened, and I kind of resent and suspect people who have to get on a soapbox to defend our failures of the past. We analyze the past to reduce harm in the future, ideally, so understand how useful this simplified message in this post could be towards that end before deciding you’re the main character who needs to set shit right.

There’s some deep psychology at play for a person who writes books dealing with bigotry, xenophobia and the worst human attitudes, but then reflects all of those traits himself. I don’t have the energy anymore to try to dissect it, at least he’s not a highly vocal billionaire trying to advocate for shit.

Agreed, but the reformation of the south was one of many chances our country had to turn things around and start actually practicing equality and democracy properly, and instead the country bent to the racists who wanted stable business. Some ideas just kept repeating for the following century and a half.

Orson Scott Card wrote a very satisfying book called Pastwatch that deals with the alternate timeline.

Just you know, death the author and all that.

There is a weird division among populations who have a hard time distinguishing between historical analysis and understanding cause and effect, and thinking that it’s attributing blame and walking away.

We understand the past to prevent such problems in the future. (Ideally.)

But what if the election is rigged? But what if there are armed squads of killer ICE agents at the polls? But what about if Trump calls martial law and cancels elections even if it doesn’t work that way and states can do what they want anyway??? WHAT IF A PLANE CRASHES ON ME ON THE WAY TO VOTE???

I’ve had connections to people who did that kind of work also, they tell a lot of stories about people who have their passports or other vital documentation or cash savings confiscated on arriving and then they’re not allowed to leave and forced to work long, dangerous hours or not get paid or fed. These are often people from poor families or with little means to get out on their own.

They actually have a lot of airplanes.

I’m also pretty sure they (Dubai or Qatar) have more than ONE airplane.

They have basically an entire caste system of lower-class migrant workers or indentured servants of a sorts populating large swaths of the region, all the people who actually run the cities and manage the services and clean the streets and bathrooms and unload the grocery trucks, and they’re the only ones who can’t afford private flights out of the cities, so guess who’s going to die when the missiles rain down.

It sure as shit ain’t going to be Saudi princes.

They have a lot more guys, no company keeps all of its data centralized anymore, the really important shit is distributed across a spectrum of secure, hidden or reinforced bunkers around the world. There is big money in converting old war-time nuclear shelters and silos into secure data centers for companies to store part of their data on.

Okay I invite you to block me because again, a lot of people are going to be making dark jokes right now because it’s how we cope. I didn’t want any of this and I can’t stop it.