Worse for everyone except for the greedy, power-hungry assholes who can’t stand the thought of people having anything resembling freedom and want everything to be a vector for their psychopathic desire to control everyone and everything.

Unfortunately, much of our government (and even more of its security state bureaucratic apparatus) is comprised of exactly those assholes.

Cutting taxes for the rich, raising taxes for the poor and increasing the national debt is an economic plan in the same sense that sitting on the couch eating frosting from a can is a diet and exercise plan.

I grow more convinced all the time that the Republicans and their wealthy cronies and patrons are actively and deliberately destroying the US.

The actual plan is to steal as much value as possible, ultimately triggering economic collapse, which they’ll ride out in security and privilege somewhere else (Greenland, for instance). Probably engineer a war or two along the way too. And between the economic collapse, the wars and the destruction of the healthcare system, they’ll cause the deaths of many millions of people.

Then, when things are at their worst, they’ll move back in, with mercenary armies, claim literally everything, and rebuild the US as essentially a feudal state, with the wealthy few owning everything and everyone else reduced to the status of serfs.

Presumably his advisors determined that he needed to Overton more and faster if he wanted to ensure that he’d be the neolib weasel the DNC shoves down our throats in 2028.

The DNC is a direct and explicit enemy of leftism and of we the people.

If we have elections in 2026 (I’m somewhat doubtful), it’s not going to be enough to vote against the Republicans. The first and arguably even more important step is going to be to primary every single one of the corrupt sacks of neolib shit that are enabling Trump and the Republicans.

Business as usual establishment Democrats possibly aren’t going to be enough to overcome the Republicans, and even if they win, certainly aren’t going to actually do anything to oppose them. We the people need real, honest, courageous populist leftsts - people who won’t just mouth leftist platitudes while gorging themselves at the corporate soft money trough, but who will actually stand up and fight to save this country from the greatest threat it’s faced in modern history.

I doubt that.

I expect that, if pressed, they’d register some mealy-mouthed quasi-criticism, simply because there’s no possible way to even convincingly pretend that it’s justifiable, let alone acceptable. But that’s just mouth noises - they’re never going to actually take a meaningful position against it or against anything elseTrump says or does, simply because, at this point, continuing to support Trump requires so much dishonesty and misrepresentation that if they start questioning any part of it, there’s too great a chance that the whole house of cards is going to come tumbling down, and they’ll be revealed as angry, toxic fools, and they can’t allow that.

I think that the focus on the violation of the will of one by another defeats relativism.

The killer’s expression of his will is not simply something he is doing, but something he is doing to another, and the will of that other must have priority.

If the will of the person upon whom the act is committed isn’t held to be paramount, then the entire concept of interpersonal morality collapses. So an act that brings harm to another contrary to the will of that other must be seen to be wrong entirely regardless of one’s personal views on the matter

Note though that that’s subject to the essentially “mathematical” concept of morality I addressed elsewhere. That an act that brings harrm to another contrary to the will of that other is necessarily and without exception wrong does not preclude the possibility that it might be justified, if it serves to prevent a greater wrong or bring about a greater right - if it’s such that the negative value of the act in question is offset by a greater positive value, such that the “sum” of the specific “integers” that make up the entire course of action is positive.

That actially gets into the second thing I mentioned.

My view is that morality is best seen to function in a sort of math-like way - individual acts have a fixed moral value, and the moral value of an entire course of action is the “sum” of all of the relevant “integers” that make it up.

So, for instance taking the life of another contrary to their will has a negative moral value always. There are no exceptions - the value of that individual act is always negative.

However, protecting people from a known predator has a positive moral value, and similarly always has that value.

And depending on the severity of the threat and the severity of the response, it’s possible for the “sum” of those two acts to be positive, which is to say right, and even as the value of the individual act “taking the life of another contrary to their will” remains negative.

That’s not to say or imply that I believe that acts can be assigned actual numerical values - rather it’s just a way to conceptualize the matter - to hopefully provide the absolutism that morality needs to be even-handed while still allowing for the flexibility it needs to be useful.

So to your question - in and of itself, taking the life of another contrary to their will - even if that other is a serial killer - is wrong. However, protecting people from a known predator is in and of itself right. So the two need to be weighed against each other, and I would say that if the risk the killer poses is sufficiently great (certain or near enough to it to make no meaningful difference) and if there are no other at least equally certain methods to prevent future killing, then execution would be justifiable. Which is to say, executing him would have a positive moral vaue, in spite of the fact that taking the life of another contrary to their will always has a negative valie in and of itself.

There’s much more nuance to all of this - issues with the necessary unreliability and potential deliberate misrepresentation inherent in predicting the future, differences of opinion regarding the relative values of various acts and thus potentially the final value of the course of action as a whole, different methods for resolving disagreements on those things, and so on and on. But that’s grist for other mills.

Wrong, IMO, is defined by the violation of the will of another.

That’s the common element to all things that are broadly considered wrong.

For instance, if somebody chooses to give you something, that’s a gift and it’s fine. But if you take that same something from them against their will, that’s stealing, and wrong. In both cases, the exact same thing happened - a thing went from being their possession to being yours. The difference - the thing that separates the right act from the wrong one - is that one was done according to the will of the other person, while the other was done contrary to their will.

And the same holds true consistently - assault, kidnapping, rape, even murder - none of them are characterized by what happens, but by the fact that it happens contrary to the will of the “victim.” And in fact, that’s what defines a “victim” - whatever has been done to them was done against their will.

And it should be noted that there’s an odd sort of relative aspect to this, since the exception to the rule is the violation of the rule.

What I mean by that is that if one decides to violate the will of another, one is instantly wrong, which essentially negates the requirement that ones will not be violated. Your will to violate the will of another not only can be but should be itself violated.

I also have an idea for reconciling the need for an effectively absolute set of moral standards with the fact that morality is necessarily subjective and relative, but that’d require another, and likely even longer, essay.

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For the first, I think that white meat is in fact superior breaded and deep fried, because flavor really is irrelevant at that point. You don’t bread and deep fry something to enjoy the flavor - you bread and deep fry it to make it satisfyingly crunchy and chewy (and use a dip for flavor) and white meat has a better grain for that.

For the second - I’m just saying that though I otherwise agree that dark meat is better, I don’t dislike white meat. I guess I felt some need to stick up for it a bit…

I’d disagree on one count - white meat is better breaded and deep fried. It has a better grain for that, and its lack of flavor is irrelevant.

And I don’t dislike white meat in soup or the like, though I do think that dark meat is superior.

In fact, for lunch today I made chicken and rice with a leftover whole chicken that was mostly white meat. I started by boiling it until the meat fell off the bones, then adding spices and vegetables and cooking it down until it was thick, at which point the chicken was in shreds. I like that, but at that point, the chicken isn’t so much chicken - it’s just protein and a carrier for the spices.

Not necessarily.

Trump doing his thing 2016-2020 met with a lot of obstacles and pushback.

Then he was out of office for four years, and while he was crashing around spewing nonsense and vitriol, some very intelligent and very evil people were working behind the scenes to secure some significant Supreme Court rulings and to draw up a step-by-step plan for instituting fascism in the US.

And now Trump doing his thing is met with almost no obstacles or pushback - virtually the entire government is bending over backwards to enable him.

And it must be noted that he’s not particularly smart or sane, but he is a childishly greedy and selfish narcissist. That means he’s incredibly easy to manipulate. All anyone has to do is frame something in a way that appeals to his crippled emotions and drop a few hints to get him going in the right direction, then just stand back and let him do his thing.

Not saying that that’s certainly what is happening, but…

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I’m guessing you think

You don’t have the foggiest idea what I think, so don’t you fucking dare mansplain it to me.

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard.” - H.L. Mencken

Ahhh…

I had (and still have) Rattus Norvegicus and this on vinyl, and they were one of the first pairs of albums I put on two sides of a 90 minute cassette.

Yes.

Both before and after.

All of them, real or imagined.

Wow… there’s a name I haven’t heard in years.

I lived in Denver through most of the 80s and saw lots of live music, so saw her perform… I don’t know how many times. She always put on a good show.

RIP

Even if this is true, it’s already so awful that I don’t know how anyone would notice any difference. What would it do? Go from “really sucks” to “really really sucks?”