And here I thought Rushmore couldn’t get uglier.

Funny enough, I think I mask incredibly well. A very extroverted and socially aware friend of mine I’ve known for over a decade commented that in public I masked excellently and seemed to have an excellent grasp of social dynamics and engaged smoothly with neurotypicals, which always confused him as to the inner workings of my mind. He said that in private, I seemed ‘almost autistic’, but every autistic person he ever knew didn’t ‘get’ complex social situations, while I appeared to understand them and just openly despise them the moment the target left the room. For this reason I had a lot of asymmetric relationships growing up, where people were attached to me but I was often utterly unattached to them.

Turns out I’m probably Schizoid, lmao.

No no, I didn’t ask “Did you put in effort”. There is no gold star for effort. It was asked if you had a viable plan.

And you have no plan to get them to agree to such a demand that doesn’t amount to “If we don’t vote and allow fascists to win, this will somehow be a moral victory for anti-genocide”

Republicans are determined to violate every institution in this country possible.

So that’s a no, then.

Have you got a way to make that happen?

“If we all clap our hands and believe really hard, the majority of the electorate will come around to our thinking inside of the next month!”

I don’t know why we weren’t doing that BEFORE a few weeks before election day. Apparently it’s only viable when there’s a serious risk of fascism. I’m sure these people aren’t just trying to get their favorite fascist in office.

Well, it’s probably because he’s the leper king of Jerusalem, judging by that mask

"♪ One cat asked me for a dollar, ♪

♪ I asked him what it’s for ♪

♪ He said ‘I HAVE SEEN THEM’ ♪

♪ I said okay it’s your’s ♪"

Cited plenty of articles where they do nothing except peddle Russian talking points and/or ‘bothsides’ an ongoing genocide, guy.

Then why did 08 Obama carry the party

… because Obama was a moderate neoliberal.

MACRONIVS OPTIMVS MAXIMVS

Too bad he isn’t nearly cool enough to merit such a comparison. In fact, I think we should go for a bit of damnatio memoriae when we get the chance.

Was he even as bad as they say?

Commodus was likely as bad as they say. Emperor Septimius Severus is said to have decried Marcus Aurelius for not strangling the kid when he had the chance. Of course, Septimius Severus’s kid would turn out to be a gruesome fellow like Commodus, so he doesn’t actually have much room to throw stones.

I mean, probably, absolute power and all that, but from what I hear the madness of Caligula is severely overblown since the main sources we have on him are the Roman versions of tabloids, so maybe it’s similar with Commodus.

Caligula revisionism is… very problematic. The most I would say there is that some of the pop culture interpretations of him are false, and some of the incidents mentioned as rumors by Roman historians are likely exaggerated. He was pretty unambiguously a tyrant and extremely arbitrary in his rule. If you take ‘madness’ as ‘detached from reality’, Caligula probably wasn’t mad. If you take ‘madness’ as ‘sociopathic and impulsive’, then Caligula was almost certainly mad.

In the brutal military junta’s defense, semi-meritocratic military junta > aristocratic monarchy

It’s just not, y’know, democracy. Except on the local level, where Roman assemblies in Roman coloniae retained much of the power that had been lost in the city of Rome itself.

… that consolidation of power wasn’t a problem until someone with The Wrong Views™ came into power suggests very much that the issue was not consolidation of power, but the ideology of the wealthy being threatened. You know, the same reason that they murdered democratically elected populist after populist.

Maybe if we’re lucky, they’ll forget to bribe the Vietnamese government and get the death penalty and their assets seized, like that one Vietnamese billionaire.

They were protecting their power because Ceasar was consolidating power, not just for subjugation.

I fail to see the difference. Caesar’s consolidation of power only concerned them because he was a lifelong populare. When the ultraconservative Sulla took the dictatorship, they fell over themselves to lick his feet, and when the opportunistic Pompey had all-but-subsumed the power of the state under his umbrella, they chose him to be their champion.

He was committing genocide.

This is an extremely dubious assertion I don’t want to get into right now, but I promise you that the conservatives who assassinated him didn’t give a single good goddamn about it. Every goddamn time this argument comes up it’s from someone who watches Dan Carlin. The argument is not taken seriously elsewhere outside of French academia, and there only for nationalist reasons.

He used war and the destruction of foreign lands to upold flagrant triumphants.

That is by no means unique to Caesar or even objectionable contemporarily. The destruction of foreign lands was what triumphs were all about, and triumphs happened, meaningfully, only under the Republic.

The real question is, why do we still simp for the Romans?

Because most of Western culture has roots in either Rome, Greece, or Germanic peoples (or Christianity, but Christianity sucks)?

I vote we bring back the old ways. The Romaboo ways. Let’s make a statue of Obama as a Graeco-Roman god, purely for the lulz

Let’s not get crazy