Xariphon

could have*

Dundun dun dun dun dun dun dundun DUN DUN

Including the one that is the reason we call laughably stupid perfect characters Mary Sue.

DS9 still holds up today. I don’t think I will ever reach a point in my life where “In the Pale Moonlight” isn’t some of the best television ever made.

From what I remember he didn’t go completely bugfuck insane until after Hercules.

Thinking back on that series, I’m still kind of amazed at what we witnessed with S8. Not the season itself, obviously, but the phenomenon of it.

GoT was a huge fandom. Everybody was talking about it, for years. People were fuckin’ naming their kids after those characters.

And then S8 happened and the whole thing was just gone. That entire enormous fandom erased more or less overnight. A moment of confused outage and then… silence.

I’ve never seen or heard of anything like it.

I literally wish I had the ability to practice.

That’s really what all my other answers to this come down to. I would love to write better, be a better woodworker, play music, learn languages, learn programming languages, etc. But my mind just… slides right off it. I can’t bring myself to put in the time necessary to cultivate literally any skill.

Trump by default. I mean, you might say Jill Stein when she emerges from her cave of irrelevance for her ten seconds of people remembering she exists, but really all you’re doing is getting out of the Grand Old Cult’s way.

Jumping spiders and those big anime eyes.

Edit: One time, I was at my in-laws’ house and there was this bigass fly none of us could swat. Little shit legit dodged a fly swatter. But I spotted a zebra jumping spider hanging out in the window. So I ended up herding annoying!fly into that window, and suddenly BAM. Spider fren got a meal the size of herself, and we had no more annoying fly. Teamwork.

That would be the goal of the only genocidal apartheid ethnostate in the Middle East. Working as intended.

Tell me again how this has to do with “defending themselves.”

Genocidal monsters.

I just want to say thank you. It’s… so unbelievably rare to find someone else on the right side of this in the wild. To not have to fight this fight alone.

Thank you for stepping up, for speaking out, for… all of it.

Plenty of people vote how their parents did; that’s just how values work.

Plenty of people vote against how their parents did; that’s just how having your own identity works.

Plenty of people vote who think critically about nothing despite their so-vaunted capacity to; those people are idiots, but we don’t require them not to be. And really, most of our politicians could use some lessons in empathy, technically capable or not.

None is a reason for denying suffrage.

And nobody should have to struggle to survive; that’s a failure of modern society. And again, it’s not something we require old people to be tested for; silver spoon trust fund kids who will never know what “struggle” means aren’t kept from voting.

We don’t require old people to justify their votes. They don’t have to be rational enough, empathetic enough, or anything else enough. Old people can vote by rolling dice and nobody will stop them.

At least you followed that far.

At this point I have to conclude you’re not ready to address this conversation in good faith.

Which would end in…?

You go in the booth, it’s Option A or Option B. You fill in the box. Nobody cares why.

What you’ve said here is a meaningless non-answer based on culturally ingrained prejudice.

In reality, we already don’t require old people to actually have or demonstrate either of those things.

Sheltered people and hermits aren’t denied the vote. They don’t have to have experienced anything but the passage of time, regardless of how little they’ve filled it with.

People who watch lies on purpose aren’t denied the vote. They might have no understanding but misunderstanding and still are able to steer the course of the country based on delusions and propaganda.

Think of every garbage politician you’ve seen get elected. All the damage they’ve done. And realize that old people elected every single one of them.

I have a keyboard that supposedly does this. It has never actually worked as advertised.

What are you afraid they’ll do?

What are you afraid they’ll do that old people don’t already do?

That’s part of my point. We don’t require old people to do anything other than… exist for a while? And yet when you start taking about young people all these qualifications start coming out. But stupid people get old too, and nobody keeps them away from the polls.

Young people are people and deserving of rights, including but not limited to the vote. There is no stupid thing a young person could do with their vote that old people don’t already do and we don’t require them not to in order to keep their vote.