gattsuru
9d ago
No.
The problem is that there are enforcement of laws that people disagree with, which have very overt parallels to matters where the other tribe received broad victories, which any reasonable reading of the text of the law would not permit, and where defendants either lose in court or never have a fair day to start with. It's a problem when the Constitution seems a scam, and where the BATNA looks like a direct improvement on the very measures that negotiated agreement is advertising itself on.
Part of the answer is that some people wait-and-seed, and eventually the hate crime convictions were overturned for boring technical reasons, and their sentences reduced. There's a fair argument that the results still weren't fair -- the sentencing judge overtly said that he was still trying to give sentence enhancements for the religious focus of the crime, which is kinda sketchy even if specifically authorized by statute -- but it's enough that people who weren't that interested in philosophy of law could claim that everyone had a fair day in court and a neutral law was applied, whether or not it actually was.
Part of the answer is that the Amish are considered weird, and breakaway Amish weirder, and most people don't care about weirdos even where the court is unfair or the law illegitimate. As the list of awful things the government does to weirdos go, it's not going to take a top ten slot, and the people who do care about those top ten slots don't exactly get invited to a lot of parties.
Hell, even as sketchy trials before biased judges go, I can point to worse in pretty recent times.
Reality all adds up to normal. The fiction where one action by a government is so corrupt, awful, self-dealing, evil, and malicious as to result in major political upheaval or revolution is... not impossible, but it's the exception, rather than the rule, and usually downstream of a large mass of other motivating factors. If you look at the motivations for times these sorta things do go hot, there are patterns, and they're often not about anything so prosaic or useful.
It's an unpleasant revelation. Sorry.
gattsuru
9d ago
If you know any lesbians and are under the age of 30, you're likely to run into at least a few lesbians who flirt with transitioning or transition.
Even in older circles, there's been a small portion who've long experimented with small amounts of T to go superbutch; some of them have started liking 'sir' outside of the bedroom context, though the majority have largely stayed mum or paved over the matter.
I've also heard of, though never met, "FTM femboys," who as far as I can tell are women who transition to men who dress as women...
It's pretty rare, but yeah, you can run into that a bit. Pantheggon's probably the most comprehensible to straight(ish) non-furs (and contrast Accelo to see what a bi cis femboy looks like, with the caveat that there's some m/m and even the m/f stuff is about as gay as that can get), though I'm just making an educated guess about the artist's actual gender. Haven't run into it in real life, at least as the sorta thing that they've waved as a flag.
... which is again a bizarre way to arrive at basically heterosexuality. I realize that the femboy thing is distinct from femnininity proper -- try calling a trans woman a femboy and see how it goes -- but at some point the irony and the flip flopping just goes so far that I can't even entertain the logic.
There's a criticism that t4m (or even t4t) transmen can end up 'just' straight with more steps, but I dunno if that really matches up to how it goes in reality, and not just in the sense that some transmen like to top. But I'm really not a fan of the whole 'escalating scale where nonconventional is better' thing, either.
I think some of the weirdness is downstream of seeing-as-a-state-dropdown-box problems, but a lot of it's that coherent names get overloaded quick. A lot of these people are what I'd consider central examples of nonbinary (ie, wanting to present as mixtures of male and female) or genderfluid (ie, wanting to present as male some times but female in other times), but because the terms also include a bunch of random junk you end up a dozen different people trying to come up with new terms that aren't, which get jumped on in turn and often have pretty stupid-sounding names. I keeping hoping that the versions with actual surface grip will have enough time and brownian motion to have a sort of brazil nut effect going on, but even with actual physics that's really dependent on pretty specific requirements, and it's more likely than not they won't be present here.
gattsuru
10d ago
Yeah, that's pretty fair. I'd argue Ellison a few other bits going on (eg, themes of self-sacrifice, some of the hate including legitimate criticisms, a not-IFLS-style scienticism), but I've got of tolerance for well-aimed hate, and I can understand his public persona as a lot deeper a disappointment than Moore-style stuff.
gattsuru
10d ago
Set it myself. I've been trying to mark more adult-content-focused comments; even if the links aren't porn or even strictly speaking nudity, they're probably the sorta thing a lotta people here don't want to be surprised by.
It's under the ... menu for each comment, though only available for you (and, presumably, moderators?). Have to post it and then mark it after it's posted.
gattsuru
10d ago
Trying to work my way through NoStarchPress's Computer Graphics from Scratch (caveat: got it deeply discounted during a Humble Bundle, definitely wouldn't pay full price). It's a little obnoxious because I've dabble enough in newer technologies that a lot of the early tutorials are annoyingly useless, but I'm also finding all the places I've missed conventions or misunderstood processes before.
Blanchard draws from wayyyy too little experience. I can give you furry examples of autoandrophiles in the gay male, cis woman, and trans man spheres, and even point some pretty clear distinctions between the autoandrophilic (cw: ftm in shibari and y-fronts, artist is nonbinary and I have no clue birth gender) and not-auto-androphilic (cw: ftm in panties, artist is straight male) treatments.
And that's been around for a while. The first Drayk 'intersex' commission I can find was pre-2010, and trying to find a good word that covers what people want in the fantasy (since some people want themselves, but transitioned, and other people want a character that never had to transition) was both getting a lot of controversy and eventually got an awkward compromise on e621 in early 2016.
gattsuru
10d ago
Can you give an example of a potential EO rule to change this?
How well-grounded do you want?
I don't think we'd see a Democratic President put forward an EO holding all asylees, once granted asylum, to be treated as having "been lawfully admitted for permanent residence" at the time of their entry, rather than the time they were issued a green card, but that's for political reasons rather than fear of judicial review. A court case would inevitably point to such retroactive adjustments in other contexts (the Cuban Adjustment Act was a statute, and had a portion of "lawfully admitted" happening up to 30 months before registry), but the real power would just come from the courts, and especially SCOTUS, not being able or willing to retroactively strip citizenship from hundreds of thousands of people, no matter how improperly given. A unilateral executive modification of the immigration registry date falls under similar problems -- even if a 2029 Dem admin had unilaterally granted it a green card to someone under this law that couldn't possibly have legally been eligible (eg, having been born after 1986), it's not clear anyone would have standing to challenge it... and it's just as unclear what political results would fall from that.
These are still mechanically possible; both could lead to a large number of people being given American citizenship overnight.
For a more politically plausible path, take something more like a soon-as-possible policy of rubber stamping of asylum claims, followed by a late-in-administration full rule setting a rubber-stamping of asylee-to-green-card-to-naturalization process. The strict read of the relevant statutes has six years, but it's not clear that even a fair-handed judiciary would read it that way rather than five years. This wouldn't get people voting overnight, but it'd be able to naturalize them within a single President's administration. The APA tomfoolery we've seen with DACA applies here; it could well be done with one term if the following administration was forced by courts to keep the old policies running.
There's other options that are more politically possible, but I'm not comfortable discussing them publicly.
Also, hasn't SCOTUS been pretty open to claims of standing by states challenging Federal policy?
Not really. Massachusetts v. EPA's what everyone points to requiring courts give 'special solicitude' to state challenges of federal policy, but that's literally only been used for that one case at SCOTUS, with every following case leaving states high and dry.
I'm not sure how much of Ellison's writings are his own faults, rather than exaggerated versions of failures he's seen and done, but there's definitely a mix and I agree that it probably doesn't favor him -- the man did end up with a bipolar diagnosis late in his life, and it pretty clearly wasn't some badge-of-accomplishment diagnosis. And he definitely has some of that 'I talked to a taxi driver' rather than 'I did this enough to grok it' going on.
Tbf, my gutcheck has some of the exaggeration in The Essential Ellison feels like self-loathing, even before I knew about the BPD... but it wouldn't, wouldn't it, whether because he actually had those flaws that bad or because he felt his minor failures were the end of the world. On the other hand, it's hard to tell how much of his hating was anti-anti-semitism rather than just being a hater in general -- the man famously loathed Star Wars and Spielberg in general, and had a number of non-Jewish cause celebres like van Vogt.
On the gripping hand, it's hard to tell how many of those cause celebres he really cared about, rather than just hating their enemies: From Alabamy With Hate is the best-known example, and particularly damning because its denouement revolves around a letter from a bigot who was 'bad as mud' but 'better' than racial minorities, without much consideration of what made Ellison good rather than just better than bigots, but it's pretty consistent everywhere from race to sexual behavior to the military to his stories to convention behavior. His enemies being idiots, or nazis, or chuds, or the teeming fandom masses, or normies, or whatever... might be better than racial resentment, but it's still not good.
I don't have a lot of room to criticize a hater for hating. I do have a lot of room to criticize a man that wrote at length about how science fiction and speculative fiction aren't the same thing, who can't do anything more himself.
On one hand, there is a point where you have to kill the buddha. Most heroes have feet of clay, few philosophers can commit to the bit to Diogenes level. Especially in media there's always going to be a temptation to present someone who's better than you can be, and whatever extent the mask molds the face, it's never going to be perfect and it can't change what's already happened. It's never pleasant to recognize the extent a writer's real positions are weaker than what they present, but Litany of Tarski -- but in turn neither does a philosophy of life become wrong merely because its proponents can't live up to it. Pratchett's view had its flaws and its failings, but wanting something that isn't true, or maybe even can't be true, because it's worth the progress toward it, is an acceptable tradeoff in my eyes.
On the other, I'm trying to write up an effortpost about cyberiatrogenic conditions (and, uh, come up with a better name than that), and one of the subleads is "the things we needed to hear, from the people who should have been there to say them", and how that's incredibly dangerous. Few heroes are carved full from in-situ marble, few philosophies can survive being used every day... except in this distant or fiction view, where every consideration comes through the camera lens, at most from wholly-artifical canned challenges built to reinforce the themes of a story. It's easy to forget that, or what it means. This is a way you'll be burned, and the stovetop hurts, and you'll be burned again. That's part and parcel of how heat works. Tech has let us forget that, for short periods and for induction cooktops, but that's an artifact of memory, not of the world.
Real people, whether Ellison or a childhood friend, will not be clones of you or homonculi of what you want or want to become. Real relationships mean friction. Pratchett's view had its flaws and its failings. Carrot Ironfoundersson (mostly) doesn't and can't. Beware what extent the latter has hacked your brain.
gattsuru
11d ago
Yeah, a lot of the gameboy- or ds-form factor devices seem like they're extruded from a press somewhere. Miyoo and TrimUI seem like they're at least aimed at enthusiasts, but most of what actually get advertised seem like glorified ewaste aimed more to be good gifts than good things you'd want to buy for yourself.
That project sounds like it'd be a blast, albeit also a pretty sizable challenge. The MiSTer is pretty impressive tech, if probably more dedicated to fidelity than I could recognize. I've heard far more mixed things about the Retrons, although I do appreciate having something more legitimate than 'tots-ripped-yourself' rom-dedicated machines.
gattsuru
13d ago
I've fallen down the emulation rabbit hole. Or perhaps it's emulation hardware?
I was looking for a portable and moderately linux-friendly device to host this project that wasn't a stupid phone ... and I'm probably going to end up just using a busted-ass stupid phone, all the non-Apple dedicated 'tablets' are either huge or crap or both, and I had some familiarity with portable gaming handhelds like the Steamdeck and thought 'oh, how hard could it be to figure out one with decent battery life'?
Surely there must be some market between eWaste web browsers and ItCanPlayCyberPunkForFiveSeconds, even if it's a bit of a weird niche--
Who wants to drink from the firehose!
Okay, emulation has taken off. I'd messed around with SNES or PS1 emulators back when they were all the rage, or the GameCube a decade ago, but I'd kinda gotten the impression the late PS2 era had been a brick wall, with only weird specialty projects like Yuzu as successful exceptions that aimed for the low-hanging fruit and getting absolutely clobbered by lawfare. Hardware wise, I'd seen a million different Raspberry Pi compute stick shells, and just slapped the same code on a RaspPi I already had and considered RetroArch checked.
Nope. Gone are the dime-store-3d-print shells. Forget BCM2711s or RK3399 (... mostly). Even the Bricks built for gameboy-level emulation are running on more specialized and capable processors, and some of the higher-end machines can be comparable to desktop machines I would be pretty comfortable playing 2022 AAA-games on. Sure, Nintendo can cost the software developers or website hosts a pretty penny, but you don't even have to run to skeezy AliExpress offers to get giant deliveries of embarrassingly overt piracy... and maybe some software herpes. The PS3, despite its weirdo architecture, seems like it's actually working okay? And on things like the XBox, Microsoft cares so little about it that you can just rip software straight from an unmodded console, with nothing more specialized than a USB spinning rust drive. Who expected the day when M$ wasn't the bad guy when it came to archiving old games?just don't look at their OS. When you can't play something, it's usually a sign of serious software limits some nutjob is willing to work surprisingly hard to solve, or you're emulating a wii game with a prolonged jerkoff joke as a central game mechanic that doesn't translate well.
Now, there's a lot of sketch here. At the high end, you have fun questions like iffy USB-C-PD implementations and driver hell. More often, expect a ton of hardware that cycles in and out in months if not days, from a manufacturer that's apparently colorblind and depending on Kickstarter churn. Even when everything works out fine, commitment to the LGPL is more in theory than practice, and there's a lot of reason to suspect that the Snapdragon8gen2 chips were 'surplus' from conventional projects -- I dislike Qualcomm's resale policies enough to think that's a plus, but from a support and longevity perspective it's a red flag.
And, yeah, a lot of these come with just piles upon piles of piracy. Ostensibly, you could play native games (many newer devices are fairly fully-featured linux/android, albeit with all the !!fun!! involved since most of the cheaper ones are ARM). Ostensibly, you could just rip games you own or collect, and I'm enough of a hoarder collector that I've actually been able to do some of that, but in all honesty? They're built for piracy. You know it, I know it, most vendors are pretty unabashed about letting you pick how much piracy you want and know it, the less graymarket vendors having to explicitly warn you that they aren't doing the piracy for you know it.
There's an optimistic view that's kinda nice. Yeah, it's a little twisted to be so ruled by nostalgia that you're putting as much processing power into a 2002 handheld game as could run a 2022 AAA one. And if everybody could have just bought a 5 USD rip of great games like Grand Theft Auto 3 or Shadow of the Colossus or Okami and run them on their cell phone, we probably wouldn't have gotten remasters of them. But in turn, there's a ton of other games that will never show up again, or where they are remastered get butchered in the process, or get remastered for a console or environment that itself has a shelf life measured in months. The Baptists-and-Bootleggers of Obsessive Weirdos and Literal Thieves haven't just kept a lot of otherwise abandoned games archived and usually playable (oh boy Games for gofuckyourself Windows Live), but they've made a lot of equipment and play options that would otherwise not exist, even if that requires pretty dedicated design and engineering work. If it also means you can get an unlocked Android device that'll accept alternate bootloaders for less than the cost of last generations Nintendo handheld, I'm not gonna complain.
So I dunno. I'm still more of a keyboard-and-mouse gamer, but some of the options are looking pretty good when I'm away from my desk or my documentation or my reading list. And even for normal gaming time, I think it might be worth firing up Megaman Legends or Robot Alchemic Drive again.
gattsuru
13d ago
I agree he's more sincere than John "Article III is <Not> Worth a Dollar" Roberts, fair. But I don't see any way to make VanDerStok workable in the same frame as Bostock.
Trivially, VanDerStok isn't clearly saying that the GCA definition of "firearm" is massively broad; that's why it has to keep wavering back and forth from ordinary meaning to what Congress 'meant' to say whenever discussing "artifact nouns". That's very far from Bostock's explicit division from what Congress intended to say from what the statute actually spells out.
But more critically, VanDerStok is a dodge. Gorsuch does not write to say that the GCA definition of "firearm" is so broad as to even cover all of the plaintiffs. He discovers that APA challenges must act as a facial challenge such that no enforcement of the regulation could ever be a valid interpretation of the statute, after the plaintiffs never argued it and the government defending the law disavowed. Even were he absolutely sure that the ghost guns rule were perfectly in line with the statute, he's not actually committing to it, either.
gattsuru
13d ago
I'm pretty explicitly spelling out why the alternative wouldn't be judged much better, given the background and details available.
gattsuru
13d ago
Yeah, the original there were a handful of unlock events for most of the status and health level gambits. They could have used a bit more granularity and evenness (why is ally: lowest hp or foe: lowest hp a mid-game thing?), but it did help a bit. And the ones you could get from chests in the original also avoided the whole 'giant list of shit to buy' problem Zodiac Age had.
In exchange, Zodiac Age hide a lot of spells that were previously buyable by putting them in chests. Which, imo, feels a lot worse. Though at least it did fix the damage limit that made a lot of those higher-end spells useless.
gattsuru
13d ago
Even the best Final Fantasy are beautifully flawed -- anyone that thinks VII was perfect can shove it up Guard Scorpion's tail. XII's world always struck me as much more interesting than its plot, just as the combat itself seemed more interesting than the gambit system you end up spending more time working around (though I've long been a Tales of fan so I may be judging the gambit system a little too harshly).
Agreed that the remake is in an awkward place. Like X and XI, it's in that awkward early stage of 3d work that's just high enough quality that it can't cruise on retro feel or imagination, but still so low-res that it's painful to watch and not easily vastly improved with emulation and upscaling... while the remaster also screwed around with enough of the systems that it's not a clear upgrade from gameplay perspectives. I prefer job systems in general, since some of my favorite games in the series have been FFXIV and the original FFT (and arguably Legend of Mana, though handwaves), but it definitely moves away from the learn-and-automate feel of the original. I'd guess that it was set that way under the assumption you'd have played the original enough that it'd just be repetitive? But that's not really right, either.
That said, both the original and remaster seem like they've been big sources of Lessons Learned for other games in the series, so well worth knowing just for that (in contrast to something like FFType0).
Hope you enjoy the Switch 2.
gattsuru
13d ago
I'd like to believe that, but Gorsuch wrote Vanderstok: solely a textual interpretation of statute, very well-documented and very clear law, also a complete duck because it'd be unpopular.
gattsuru
13d ago
The minimum sentence under state law for a single one of these acts would have had the exact same punishment. So it's either no effective increase in sentence for the third (conviction for) rape, or someone who committed enough (almost-certainly repeated) rape of two very young minors, after having been caught by DNA evidence, would have been allowed to plea to a much lesser crime than a single one of them.
Which isn't better.
((On the upside, pretty good chances it's a life sentence, no matter what the court decided! Though from a rule of law perspective, not too happy about Kennedy v. Louisiana ending up there, either.))
Maybe it'll have some marginal impact on parole hearings, but I think NJ's 'mandatory minimums' restrict parole eligibility, too.
gattsuru
14d ago
To steelman, let's start with a different hypothetical law: African-Americans are prohibited from using metformin, and whites from using topiramate, for the treatment of weight loss, and for the sake of the hypothetical, assume that both formulations are off-label. In one sense, these are neutral laws, where both are prohibited from using a drug for a given diagnosis. In another sense, they aren't: one race is prohibited from using one drug, and another from another entirely different one. Recognizing them as 'similar enough' risks a bunch of absurd arguments, like banning one from doing something very common and the other from doing something that's facially similar but never actually desired. Similarly, it'd be nonsensical for it to be perfectly okay to do these laws as one unit, but consider them discriminatory if the state enacted them piecemeal.
That doesn't necessarily make them good or bad policy. Hence some of the specificity in my hypothetical: there actually are some reasons you might want gender- or race-specific restrictions on those two specific weight loss drugs. But because the aftermath of Caroline Products is such a clusterfuck, almost everything passes rational basis scrutiny, and the exceptions are so unusual that they're usually treated as some special not-really-just-rational-basis example. Heightened scrutiny is necessary before courts even consider whether a law's motivations are more than pretextual.
((This distinction is kinda what nara_burns is complaining about as a distinction between Kagan and the other left-leaners on the bench: Kagan recognizes that this is still an early preliminary injunction hearing and SCOTUS has had relatively little briefing on the facts, so it's should still be plausible for the state to present support for the bans that would survive intermediate (or even strict!) scrutiny.))
There's a lot of flaws to this steelman: the Caroline Products footnotes are completely unmoored in actual constitutional text, what types of discrimination and categorization gets protected is a result of arbitrary coincidence or political demand more than real analysis, courts routinely put their thumbs on whether a particular law is analyzed under one framework or another, so on.
((It doesn't help that the majority in this opinion is muddled, even by the low standards of a Roberts opinion. Whether a particular patient can be diagnoses with "male-pattern hair growth" is absolutely tied to biological reality, but that biological reality is a result of sex. And that's the example Roberts picked!))
gattsuru
15d ago
Medicare estimates a national average compensation rate around 7.5k USD at hospital facilities (you may have to click the down arrow for "more cost information"). Most insurance companies (have to, ACA) cover it for gender care, but how that works out with deductibles is a treatise on its own.
I'm ... skeptical about the Milgram theory in general, and for this behavior in specific, but even presuming that they're correct and generally believing the Beware Trivial Inconveniences theory, I'd be really worried if a plane ticket and a couple weeks in an Extended Stay Express were enough of a trivial inconvenience, especially compared to everything else involved.
gattsuru
15d ago
For 'bottom' surgery, yes (ish; not everyone does actually go to The Best, and some transmen don't do what they'd count as bottom surgery and just get a hysterectomy that their local surgeons can do). For top surgery, it's a lot more varied, and I personally know trans people who've had mastectomies or breast augmentation in Red Tribe states. For other surgical procedures, as far as I can tell, very long distance travel seems an outlier. You might hike to the best facial cosmetic surgeon in the region, but you don't need to cross the ocean to find someone pretty good at it.
((And that's ignoring stuff like laser hair removal that gets categorized as 'surgery' for stupid medi* reasons.))
gattsuru
15d ago
The procedural posture here is also weird, even if no one but Kagan wants to rest their opinion on it. This is an appeal of preliminary injunction that was denied, while other preliminary injunctions or final judgements against other trans minor laws were upheld. Including one where SCOTUS pared back a wide preliminary injunction... to just the plaintiffs).
So now there's a SCOTUS-approved preliminary injunction for an equal protection challenge that SCOTUS just said can't win, sitting in the 9th Circuit. Except they didn't really hold that, they just made it really clear what the breakdown of how they hold the balance of law. Except in this case, the only person treating it like it's not final judgement was Kagan, and that in a minority-of-a-minority dissent.
laws that classify in some other way, which only get rational basis review (almost impossible for a law to fail this one).
I'll caveat that there's two forms of rational basis review: the normal form a la FCC v. Beach Communications where the law is upheld even if the government provides no good reason for the statute, so long as the court can imagine a single even incorrect cause; and the Cleburne version where the law is held to be motivated by animus, and then the statute near-always falls even if there is a named good cause. Some of the finangling in the oral args were about that.
There is some wiggling around to deal with Gorsuch's opinion in Bostock (which is what causes Alito to concur in parts of the opinion rather than the full thing since he dissented from Bostock), but Gorsuch joined this opinion in full, so apparently he didn't have a problem with the Court somewhat limiting Bostock here.
Yeah, that's a mess, and I dunno how he's juggling it. Roberts says tries to distinguish by saying the law here distinguished based on a transgender diagnosis rather than sex, using the metaphor of hirsuitism, but since whether someone will be diagnosed with hirsuitism depends on their sex that seems transparently wrong (and he even spells out that this is often called "male-pattern hair growth"). Presumably he's done that because he knows a hard limit on medical exemptions recognizing sex will result in the same law coming right back up with the medical exemption excised, and that's worse from a pragmatic perspective, but as a matter of law it's clear as mud.
Gorsuch signed onto it, so I guess he must agree? Or maybe he didn't want a bunch of circuit court misreadings if this case ended up in a 4/1/1-3 mixed-majority. But the reasoning here's vague enough that red circuits can draw every other transgender case that isn't specifically a CRA thing (and maybe even some that are) as about Skrmmeti-like distinctions, and blue circuits can draw every other transgender case as more like Bostock.
Thomas or Barrett's distinctions are clearer, but in turn they're a lot more strict.
gattsuru
15d ago
I expect red states to increasingly adopt anti-hormone and anti-puberty-blocker legislation, and blue states to explicitly protect it, and probably we will also start seeing "trans your kids by mail" services not unlike what we have with abortion. So the victory will be mostly symbolic (which may count for something, but may not).
Tbf, surgical interventions tend to be a lot more central to many of these controversies, and they're a lot harder to send by mail and a lot easier to enforce laws against. I'd expect some of that turns into 'holiday' surgical trips, but there are limits to how that can be practically done given what degree of surgical interventions are long multistage procedures including post-operative care, and we have started to see (and I expect will continue to see) people moving from one state to another over these policies.
gattsuru
15d ago
This, although I'll caveat that I was kinda expecting more of a punt than this opinion ended up being.
Ar'kendrythist handles power scaling better in the first few books, where there's not merely charged conflict but the protagonist being a pretty severe underdog. Even well after that, there's always a bigger fish until (arguably) the back half of the last book, and that's the point where the protagonist dying stops mattering and what the villain could do to everybody else becomes more important.
While it's still a little obnoxiously progressive-in-the-inevitability sense even by my standards, that works out pretty well for keeping the tension high; what fixing a wasteland of slavery and infighting even looks like is a more interesting question than who's power is more maximum and can blow up a city (though that happens a lot too). The author's also willing to kick out legs under the protagonist often enough that even some situations where it seems like they should be certain to win, a problem will show up and whatever the heroes built collapse. Never quite to the point of being unfair, though it gets a little close at times.
I will also highlight the Teamster delivering face shields to rioters. Could just be coincidence, but the timeline I have been able to figure out for the LA riots is really tight, and the LA-area Teamsters and SEIU are both known to work together and for 'energetic' protest. Even if the DoJ does seriously investigate things I dunno if it could be proven, so no way to know whether the early parts of the LA protest were waiting for something to start rather than were outraged and surprised by Heurta's arrest and spontaneously acted.
And, from the other perspective, I'll point to characters like Judge Duggan, or the various Try To Arrest Me, ICE politician protests, or to the Dem nominee for New York City mayor having Luigi fanboys high in the communication and outreach ladder.
Maybe, but I'll point out again that Lujan Grisham wasn't impeached, censured, indicted by a grand jury, called a fascist on national television or a nationally-syndicated paper, yada yada. She did technically receive a preliminary injunction, but it was immediately stayed. Fauci isn't under arrest. No lawsuit Carter Page could file would ever get to trial. Mahmoud Khalil is out on bail.
Maybe that'll change. Duggan could end up being the first swing of a very hard-hitting hammer. But every single attempt to bring these forces forward has a built-in time crunch. And there's a lot of ways to delay and slow and drop every single effort.
More options
Context Copy link