astronautboots

[astronautboots]

“Broken“ by Eve Shepherd green-patinated cast bronze sculpture

[astronautboots]

reputation vault song leak lyrics

I stay up with all of my friends

[???]

talking more shit about you

they told me I should never try to compromise

then we do it again, [you lie with a grin]

you never thought I could tell you

and finally I was starting to realize

that I should just

run for the hills and never look back

block all your texts and never [call back]

you'd be the the one who made me [unveil my eyes]

I possess all the things you told me I lacked

all of my colors faded to black

when you were the one that helped me paint all my skies

[astronautboots]

Bruna Marquezine photographed by Agata Serge for Numéro Netherlands, September 2023

[astronautboots]

No matter how this ends, Novak Djokovic will be lying awake about serving for the match and doing a double fault instead

[astronautboots]

Absolutely. You cannot underestimate how many conservatives simply don’t want to admit they messed up. Saving their party from embarrassment is worth more to many than democracy itself. In the south especially The Party is the same thing as their church. Abandoning the GOP is tantamount to renouncing their faith. A vote for Trump is a vote for Jesus no matter what.

Additionally, any political analysis that forgets that Trump got 11,200,000 more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016 in the popular vote is incredibly naïve and doomed to misunderstand and underestimate the Republican voters.

Just wondering your thoughts about the GOP 2024 nomination. Common wisdom seems to view Trump as the inevitable heir apparent for obvious reasons like poll numbers and De Santis tanking (as anyone outside the conservative bubble probably could have seen coming once a breathing human who was undecided actually met him on the campaign trail).

But I feel these assessments are missing the inherent chaos of real life. Trump could very well get indicted and struggle to run anything close to the 2016 campaign or run at all if in theory he’s in jail or otherwise disqualified. He’s in his late 70s, he could genuinely just die of any number of health issues before then. This “foregone conclusion” seems somewhat naive to me.

Really, the GOP was screwed when they didn’t turn on him on January 7th. The nation would have been with them as much as it would ever be, they could have harnessed that outrage to peel off all but the most fanatical cultists, and they could have started looking into building up new candidates. Trump was always going to tear down anyone who competed with his spotlight and he’s more vicious to former allies than to enemies. Now they risk losing any promising candidates to his vitriol AND something could happen where he ends up not even being able to run.

I mean don’t get me wrong, I’ll be overjoyed if they fall apart in 2024. And even if he is the nominee and squeaks out of all the court cases with his liberty and reputation intact, I think Trump is toast with independent and undecided voters (people forget how many votes he picked up in 2016 just being a new thing with no record to point to, he refused to get pinned down on any issue, so people figured they’d take a chance on the new thing over Hillary but now he’s got a record and can’t just say he would have done the opposite on anything that went wrong in the past). He couldn’t win while he was the incumbent. He’s a weak candidate.

Anyway, just curious about your thoughts. Am I the only one who thinks the GOP is naive or aware and screwed when it comes to their 2024 nominee?

Welp. There are a lot of things going on here. It goes without saying that they are all a flaming dumpster fire of absolute squalid seditionist anti-democratic bullshit, because that's literally all the Republican party is these days. So, you know. Cheerful!

First, barring him literally keeling over and dying before November 2024 (oh please oh please oh please), Trump WILL be the Republican nominee, even if he is actively in the process of being convicted/has been convicted and is trying to appeal to every court he can possibly think of (since as noted before, he will do his DAMNDEST to get them all to his pet SCOTUS under the flailing hope that they will exonerate him). I think there's still a certain amount of denial about this: the hope that because we are all so sick and tired of dealing with the orange psychopath and his Nazis, that he will just finally fucking DISAPPEAR and not force us to go through another election with him. Unfortunately, this isn't going to happen. The entire crumbling skeleton and gasping oxygen of the once-vaunted GOP is sucked up by Trump. The people theoretically running against him, aside from Chris Christie (who was a Trump sycophant until he wasn't) won't even mention THAT HE IS UNDER MULTIPLE STATE AND FEDERAL INDICTMENTS FOR TREASON-LEVEL CRIMES. You'd think that would be great for an opposition candidate! But since the only way they can win the primary is by getting enough of Trump's insane fans to vote for them, they're walking an impossible tightrope of not being Trump but still also trying to be Trump. Vote for them, please! They promise they can be just as heinous!

Now, the establishment GOP, or what's left of it, is perfectly well aware that Trump is a treasonous loser and a massive electoral liability, but they can't say so because of the same problem of Trump's rabid masses turning on them. See all these accounts of Republicans being plenty brave in private when it comes to criticizing him, but in public: crickets. They know that they've lost every election since 2016, when Trump became the leader of their party, but they also can't stop the insane GOP primary voters, still drunk on that Orange Trump Kool-Aid, from renominating him. As I said in a recent post, there is about 35% of this country that is just, as of now, totally beyond help. They love Trump and only Trump, he's the manifestation of the absolute worst of all their racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, etc. impulses, and they love him more the more awful he is (and the more "Joe Biden's Mean Evil Government!!!" punishes him, in true martyr fashion). There's no helping them. They WILL vote for him no matter what, and there's no way, as it currently stands, that any other GOP candidate has a prayer of getting past him. DeSantis was once hyped as the Alternative to Trump, but the instant actual people get a single look at him, they're repulsed. He's fucked.

Basically, the Republican party, as in the career elected officials, are well aware that Trump is a deadweight loser, but there's no getting out of the trap they've created for themselves. They KNOW perfectly well that Trump is a weak candidate and a perennial loser, but they can't stop their self-created monster of the radicalized Republican electorate from putting him in there again. Their entire toxic self-sustaining right-wing media ecosystem has been churning out lies for decades, that has only kicked into overdrive in the Trump era, and there is nothing they can do about it, because they're craven miserable anti-democratic power-hungry shitstains who will say or do anything to cling out a scrap of influence and money for just a little longer, and their whole platform now consists of being outrageously cruel to other people. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of Nazis, etc. Witness them all vigorously condemning Trump in various interviews (looking at you, Bill Barr) and then either admitting they'll vote for him if he's the 2024 GOP nominee, or cowardly ducking the question. Because... they themselves will vote for him, so it's no wonder the primary voters will do the same. As long as he puts in more religious zealot judges and destroys everything the Democrats are trying to do, they're cool! Democracy? Don't know her. They're over it. See the Wisconsin GOP already running their mouths about trying to impeach state Supreme Court justice Janet Protasiewicz, elected in a landslide in spring, if she does anything to overrule their insane gerrymanders. They're all just as bad.

So in short, yes: they may very well screw themselves into a situation where Trump is totally unviable for 2024 AND there's nobody else they can have to replace him, because that is the devil's bargain they have made. They've all sold their souls. Trump will insist he's running until the very last moment, because it's his final gamble to keep himself out of a hefty prison sentence and the one thing he has escaped for his entire misbegotten existence: i.e., real consequences for his terrible actions (as like any good sociopath, he has no concept of those and they all seem outrageously unfair). If they were going to ever actually do anything about Trump, that was a long, long time ago. Now they're stuck with him, they're too cowardly to denounce him, they're left hoping that Jack Smith and the indictments will eventually take him off their hands, but in the meantime, to save their own necks, they fundraise and whip up public outrage and tell endless lies about how Trump is such a blameless martyr. So yeah. They're fucked, they've made themselves fucked, and they're awful and they deserve it. Etc. etc. never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake. Fuck 'em all.

[astronautboots]

“82 studies in a row on therapy of ADHD that didn’t involve medication failed to show ANY detectable lasting benefits whatsoever. everything but medication has completely failed” 💀

[astronautboots]

TAYLOR SWIFT wearing custom Stella McCartney, photographed on film by Beth Garrabrant for the Evermore album visuals, 2020

“Knowing someone well makes creating something for them easier. With Taylor, everything happened so naturally; the pieces I made reflected the effortless emotionality of her album. Complementing a friend’s creation is rare and precious and feels incredibly special.” – Stella McCartney

[astronautboots]

taylor swift really knows how to apologize to someone she wronged huh

[astronautboots]

twitter’s death is so pathetic I don’t even feel up for a crab rave

[astronautboots]

Theseus and the Minotaur by Antonio Canova, 1782

[astronautboots]

Halsey’s debut, Badlands, is one of those listen-on-repeat albums whose cool colors and icy layers shape-shift with every play. A moody, electro-pop singer/songwriter in the vein of Lorde and Ellie Goulding, Halsey has a resounding voice with just a dusting of grit. Badlands feels so ripped from her personal journal that you instantly connect with her freedom and vulnerability. And when she speaks truth on “Castle” and “New Americana,” it’s like the graduation speech you’ve always wanted to hear.

[astronautboots]

new journal + old journal 

[astronautboots]

by Cindy Wright (1972, Belgian)

[astronautboots]

Though I can’t help feeling a sudden death cheats you of something. Death is an experience of life. You only get one death. I would like to be aware it was happening, even if that did mean enduring pain and fear.

Trudi Canavan, Last of the Wilds (book 2 of the Age of the Five trilogy)

[astronautboots]

THE TOMORROW PEOPLE (2013-2014) Luke Mitchell as John Young in 1x01 Pilot

[astronautboots]

[astronautboots]

.....are you honestly telling me you think it's normal to go through your friends personal belongings, deleting and throwing away things you don't like?

AGAIN, on the one hand: Isaac talking about privacy and then taking Colin’s phone to delete his pictures himself creates something of a dichotomy

on the other hand: if my friend said he was going to be getting off to the intimate media of women who absolutely had not consented to him seeing them, vocally resisted deleting intimate media of exes who he was no longer seeing, and then sloped off while everyone else in our friendship group was being suitably accountable and told me to fuck off when I called him on it, I too would be wanting to delete his pictures myself. OR throw his phone into a wood chipper. (And this is Isaac, king of the big cranky physical gesture. my man was being RESTRAINED.)