Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra, On the Town, 1949

I didn’t get a slow cooker until I was an adult, and it was a life changer. I love a recipe that consists of “ingredients, plus 6-8 hours.”

Aww, my suffrage. :(

I did my best. Do I get to vote?

I’m perfectly comfortable with taking it as far as “so long as it’s all consenting adults, it’s none of my fucking business, and I wish them all well.”

If it’s not my thing, no big deal. Some people like feet, and it’s not my thing, so no big deal.

Even if I find it personally gross, again, consenting adults, no big deal. Some people are into watersports, but hey, so long as they’re not leaving a mess or hurting each other, no big deal.

We’ve got enough trouble in the world without also trying to police what adults are doing in their goddamn personal lives. I yearn for a day in which more people could accept the “it’s none of my fucking business” ethos.

I’m not convinced it can be anyone. Trump is a remarkable combination of horrible, stupid, and snake-oil-salesman charismatic. Anyone less stupid, and the base can tell that he’s just pretending to be like them, and they don’t like it. Anyone less charismatic can’t sell the con. Anyone less horrible would actually be less horrible, so that’d actually be better for all of us, but again I think then the base would turn on them for being insufficiently horrible.

About the only one I can think of on the public stage right now who checks all those boxes is Marjorie Taylor Greene, and she’s a wOmAn, which also disqualifies her for a good chunk of the Trump base.

But then again, this is the stupidest timeline, so for all I know they’ll just decide that Ron DeSantis is their new god when Trump finally exits the scene and deny that they ever hated Ron’s stupid fucking guts.

I know they meant “worst” in the sense of “bad at math,” but now I’m imagining the world’s worst mathematician trying to figure out how to use math to commit ethic cleansing or poison water supplies or make pugs’ noses even more fucked up or something.

We need never be afraid of the vote of informed Americans. It is only the ignorant voter we have to fear, ignorant politically, no matter how fine his house or how expensive his schooling. Such people have never experienced democracy; they have merely enjoyed its benefits. It is hard to explain what democracy is; it is necessary to participate in it to understand it.

The former Berlin businessman I referred to earlier told me that he blamed his own group, people with the time and the money and the opportunity to know better, for what happened to Germany. “We ignored Hitler,” he said. “We considered him an unimportant fellow, not quite a gentleman, not of our own class. We considered it just a little bit vulgar to bother with him, to bother with politics at all.”

They thought of the government as “They.” The only possible route to a clear conscience in politics is to accept political responsibility, either as an active member of the party in power or as an equally active member of the loyal opposition.

—Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government