People don't see the libertarian platform as offering freedom or the welfare state as being from a heavy-handed government. What people see the libertarian platform as offering is life as a tight rope with no safety net. One wrong move is fatal and you are on your own plus any help that you could either afford or that people are willing to give. It turns out that in a very autonomous society where most people aren't living in deeply rooted families and communities, taking this sort of chance isn't that attractive to most people.

Sigh... I'll just say it, if the lefties would stop wanting to enact whatever nutty gun ban is all the fad this week...

There, that's out of the way.

I am just old enough to have seen a small traveling circus once: the parade, seeing elephants harnessed to pull up the poles for the big top, being close enough to the performers to see the patches on their costuming.

TS3: an important beat is how Bo Peep got thrown away between TS2 and TS3, meaning that there are genuine stakes for these characters, that they might not all get to spend Infinity And Beyond together, a bit that adds a strong element of maturity to the story
TS4: (literally a whole movie that's a Fix-It Fic for Bo Peep)

What I find oddly surprising is the abject lack of traction for a platform of freedom from an overweening, heavy-handed government. There are countless pronouncements and articles about “greedy” people, yet nary a mention of a greedy, self-serving government. When the national dialog is consistently focused on celebrity politicians, noisome legislators, and opinionated judges, we have ample evidence our government has far too much influence on our individual lives. Of course, asking any elected representative to curtail their own powers to benefit society is an obvious conflict of self-interest that needs to be addressed.

Well, there's the fact that unregulated persons and businesses don't have a good history of doing the communal right thing. Pick any area of human endeavour you like, and the libertarian utopia of everyone working in their own self interest with maximal freedom resulting a functional society turns into dust. We didn't need the Clean Air Act or the Clean Water Act until it became maddeningly clear that businesses would pollute everything in a race to the bottom to create maximal profit. We didn't need a Voting Rights Act until it became maddeningly clear that Black Americans were still (in the era of Jim Crow) being actively denied their right to vote by White Americans. We didn't need minimum wages (which have to raised periodically) until it became maddeningly clear that businesses wouldn't actually pay workers what they were worth in a given enterprise. And I guess in your construct we don't need immigration reform (another government intrusion) even though 11 Million or so undocumented migrants underpin major sectors of our economy because they need jobs and we have jobs they are willing to do.

You know where we DON"T need government intrusion? Women's uteruses. Marriage ceremonies. Bathrooms. Gender affirmation treatment. So if the true goal is more freedom, how about joining us pesky progressives and looney lefties in addressing those?

I thought the Thrawn solution was where they were going to go after The Last Jedi, but that would have required the director for Star Wars IX to not be a total hack.

I like the "power vacuum" solution. You beat one empire, now there are 6 want-to-be-empires to face instead.

I think they don't go for that because they always want "THIS movie" to be "THE movie". They're forgetting "The Empire Strikes back".

The daughter and I were talking about Star Wars and how much she hates Rise of Skywalker. The problem plugs right into what you're talking about: that it just folds back on itself to, "Oh, yeah, Palpatine is back." There were two ways this could have gone WAY better.

1) The Lensman solution. You defeat the Big Bad at the end of the book. But when the next book begins, you discover he was only a servant of the REAL Big Bad. Think about if what the sequels had done is gone with the idea that Palpatine was but servant of an even larger evil.

2) The Thrawn solution. The sequel books explored the idea that ending the Empire wasn't as simple as "Kill Emperor. Done." There were other people out there who had abilities and a lust for power. There was a vast military and skilled commanders. You're dealing with the aftermath of the Empire and it turns out restoring democracy isn't as simple as flipping a switch.

Either of those would have been better than the fan service recycled plot we got.

If they go down the rabbit hole of having their own army then they also need walls and control over their borders... at which point their economy would rapidly shrink because they wouldn't have unlimited free trade with the rest of the nation.

For example they currently "import" 25% of their power.

The link below showcases to what degree we tend to rely on a few states to produce the bulk of specific products. So Arkansas produces more rice than every other state combined and sells it to them. The other examples here are hogs, eggs, and cattle.

California-a-nation either needs free trade with the US to a crazy level by international standards or they lose a huge amount of their GDP.

http://jaysonlusk.com/blog/2017/11/1/how-much-does-your-state-rely-on-other-states-for-food#:~:text=The%20average%20Bostonian%20imports%20110,hogs%2C%20eggs%2C%20and%20cattle.

Don't move here, then :^) A carrier strike force does nothing for the state's actual military goals, which are to interdict the inflow of Texans.

Sure, and be at the mercy of the Antifa hordes on the commanding heights of Capitol Hill to sap and impurify all of their precious bodily fluids.

Currently loving the show The Expanse.

But the same problem. Somehow the five people on one ship always manage to somehow be the right place to save everyone in the entire solar system, and now the whole galaxy a bunch of times. What is everyone else in the solar system doing other than getting in the way?

There is an often cited fact that California would be a G10 country if it were an independent nation but this neglects the fact that California does not have to pay for its own defense and still gets some money from the Federal Government (especially for disaster relief).

I think your accounting is wrong here. California has a state GDP now, of which roughly 19% gets sent to Washington, DC and 12% goes to Sacramento (plus locals). As an independent country with that same GDP it would no longer send money to Washington, and could spend a portion of that 19% on its military. That's quite likely to cost less than its current contribution: the US spends ~3.5% of GDP on the military; most European countries seem to get along fine on ~2%. The details might be interesting. Currently, California's "share" pays for something over one full carrier strike force. I don't think an independent California would have much interest in one.

One of the themes of LOTR is that the fight against the Enemy is so difficult, maybe even doomed, because the people who should be the allies don't trust each other. The key illustration of this is blindfolding Gimli on the way into Lothlorien.

GRRM is doing something similar, with all the conflict, from petty sniping up to and including the War of the Five Kings, happening in the face of an existential threat to humanity that's almost entirely ignored by everyone south of the Watch. (Melisandre, as sketchy as she is, at least gets this right. ) What GRRM hasn't been able to do is merge those two stories and show us what's going to replace brutal, treacherous medieval politics that can deal with the Others.

Maybe we've always been at War with varying degrees and terms of Truce.

Except I don't think there's any coherent "we" in that sentence. But I do think there's a coherent Truce.

There's a way to request your entire twitter history as well. Get it emailed to you a few hours or days after you put in the request.

But it's a pain to do.

Easier to live in the now.

(Though you can do a search from:@name "keyword or phrase" and find out if the journalist who wrote a story about a guy saying something bad a decade ago said something bad 5 years ago.)

well. Twitter Advanced Search lets you put in your @ and a date range, and you can get all the tweets from that range. You're right that it's not "click Profile and scroll down" but they are there.

Of course, there's people out there who have this thing where they routinely delete all their tweets older than five minutes, so half my tweets are either quote-tweets of nothing or responses without context.

The Tulsa Massacre, the Matewan Massacre, the US Army taking control of Gary Indiana and declaring martial law, a lynching almost every week, the Klan virtually running the Indiana state government.

Point being, American history is astonishing violent from the viewpoint of us who only experienced the post WWII prosperity.

And yet the 1920s are looked back on with nostalgia. Claire Briggs certainly didn't think he was living in a nation beset with Troubles or civil strife, but he did.

We don't have to game this out or use our fortune telling prognostication powers. America has already experienced convulsions of polarization and violence on a large scale.

The good news is America survived and became a better place.

The bad news is the victory wasn't inevitable and the outcome could have been much worse.

That's what Domestic Terrorism Laws are for.

I certainly take your point that Divorce is very impractical... maybe impossible. Are we sure the ruling out Divorce means we've also ruled out War? I'm not so sure. Not that we'd start it... they would start it, of course.