HelixDab2

Can anyone explain WTF he was wearing motorcycle goggles in this photo? "Working" without a shirt, okay, sure, he wants a sunburn, that's his problem. But goggles? Is this some proto-cybergoth bullshit?

Not correct. I voted green in a very, very blue state in 2016, because Stein--at the time--seemed like the best candidate to vote for to register my opposition to Clinton and the conduct of the DNC. I suspect that there were a fairly large number of people like me in the state that I lived in at the time, although the state still handily went blue.

I voted for Stein too. OTOH, I was in a solidly blue state where there was no real chance that Clinton wouldn't win. And TBH, I'd voted for Clinton in the primaries in 2008, because I wasn't sure if that Obama guy had the experience necessary to be president, since he was a one-term senator. But by 2016, and given the way the primaries ran and Sanders got sandbagged by the DNC, I was done with Clinton.

I solidly blame Clinton and Wasserman Schultz for the 2016 debacle. If Clinton had campaigned hard in PA, MI, and WI, and if Wasserman Schultz hadn't made tipped the scale for Clinton in the first place with the entitlement bullshit, then none of this would have happened.

"Vacillated" is a very interesting way of saying that she's refused to straight-out say that Putin is guilty of war crimes for invading Ukraine and pursuing a war of aggression. Every time she's been asked about it in interviews, she's used weasel-words to avoid coming right out and saying it, while implying that she has said it. OTOH, she will absolutely say that Israel has (and is) committing war crimes in Gaza, and is pursuing genocide.

Ever seen Battlefield Earth?

The aliens really liked it. It's going to be on endless loop on every streaming service, including YouTube.

There are some people you don't want to associate with, even when you have common cause.

Hezbollah is opposed to the genocide in Gaza (and the murder of Palestinians in the West Bank), as is Iran. I'm opposed to the genocide in Gaza. I'm sure as fuck not gonna ally myself with Hezbollah or the Ayatollah Khamenei, even on that one issue.

I'm not saying that TST is a bunch of terrorists, but I'm using hyperbole to make a point. It's up to you if you want to associate with a group that has some very, very shady upper leadership. Personally, I loved 95% of the people at a local level when I was a member; I think there are a lot of great people involved. I just think that national leadership is entirely untrustworthy and fucks up things that should be simple and easy.

I've seen people on them. Not a ton. But I would see people on them every so often when I was heading to shows at House of Blues, usually later in the evening in the summer and early fall. I can't imagine using them in the middle of winter, when it's -10F and winds are whipping around at 30mph.

That explains why the decor is so 70s.

1870s.

Sure, and I don't hand out with anyone that I know is on the right here in GA either.

It's esp. maddening because if I talk to people at shooting competitions, we can agree on a lot of the core issues, but then most of them are still blindly following Trump because it's all feels, no reals.

Ossof and Warnock were both elected in 2021; IIRC, both of them had run-off elections, and Republicans didn't vote because they thought the election was 'rigged'. Biden was elected because Trump was deeply unpopular; a number of people that had voted for Trump either didn't vote--esp. because around here it seemed like a foregone conclusion that he'd win again--or switched side in 2020.

OTOH, Kemp wins Governor elections pretty handily, and he's not exactly a centrist Republican like, say, Mitt Romney was/is. He clobbered Stacy Abrams in 2022, 53% to 46%. That was even stronger than the first time he beat her, in 2018, 50 to 49, and in 2022 she had put in four years of trying to build a stronger ground game.

Is the state gerrymandered all to hell? Oh yeah. But given the results of the last governor's race, I wouldn't be looking at Georgia to break Trump.

AFAICT, Mesner, not Misicko. Look at the legal filings, where they're incorporating TST-related entities, etc.; Doug and Cevin have to use their real, legal names on those documents.

The antisemitism you can kind of handwave, because it's hard to disentangle being opposed to Judaism as a religion, versus Jewish people. Mesner has been a little wishy-washy on that, but the most charitable way of reading it is that he's opposed to the religion, in the same way that he's opposed to Christianity, Islam, etc. It's just messier with Judaism because Jewish is both religion and ethnicity/cultural. (This, BTW, is the same way that people opposed to Israel's actions in Gaza and Lebanon get tarred as being antisemitic.)

Ties to the far right are probably valid.

Views on eugenics is... Complicated. Eugenics is, by itself, not really bad. Ashkanzi Jews have practiced eugenics to almsot entirely eliminate Tay-Sachs Syndrome in their communities, because marriages are arranged, and all couples go through genetic testing before being allowed to marry. You could do the same thing with sickle-cell anemia; test everyone before they get married, and couples that both have copies of the gene don't get married. OTOH, in both of those cases you're talking about specific, known genetic disease; most people that are in favor of eugenics aren't talking about eradicating genetic diseases, but are talking about very nebulous concepts of 'purity' or some such. E.g., blond hair/blue eyes ubermensch nonsense.

An immediate problem is that the org itself is deeply authoritarian, and numerous people that helped the org grow have been thrown out (or left) because they don't want a top-down leadership structure. Doug and Cevin--mostly Cevin--have total legal authority over the organization, and there's no mechanism in place to censure or remove them if they do things the membership disapproves of, or engage in misconduct.

I think that you vastly overestimate that. When you look at states like Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, etc., they're almost overwhelmingly Republican. If elected officials aren't Republican, they're often still deeply conservative on social and fiscal issues.