No, we couldn’t. The Democratic Party is nowhere near as bad as the Republican party, but it is still interested more in power over governance and is still pretty far right wing (in contrast to much of the industrialized world.

Since Carter, the DNC has added obstructions to the people choosing a candidate out from under them (curiously, what Trump did to the GOP in 2015-2016) because the people only operate as part of the primary vote. About 2000 principle party members (politicians and plutocrats) have votes with extra weight, so you’ll never get an AOC or a Bernie Sanders or anyone else that is progressive and likes pushing hard on Green New Deal type policies.

In fact, when Occasio-Cortez primaried an establishment Democrat, the DCCC changed its rules to prevent future young progressives from taking seats from old establishment. (The DCCC undid their changes later, but only due to pressure from within the party.)

Progressives are the red-haired stepchildren of the Democratic coalition. They get to dine at their own table while the big boys sit at the grown-up table. Not because they have bad ideas, but because the rich campaign contributors don’t like them much, and don’t want to promote people who will push to install social security nets and election reform restoring power back to the public.

Curiously, it’s these kinds of policies, social security nets that pull US families away from precarity (job precarity, food precarity, housing precarity, health precarity, etc.) that would pull us from the brink of autocracy, since the lumpen voters (those who can’t deduce who serves their best interests) wouldn’t be so desperate for change so as to elect a strongman Mussolini wannabe. If everyone weren’t one paycheck away from hunger and homelessness, and working dead-end jobs, then Trump and Project 2025 would be getting far less traction.

So in this case, the Democratic party and the neoliberal ideology that directs them enables the rise of the transnational white power movement and the Christian nationalist movement. They are the Neville Chamberlain party and are going to feed us right into the hands of the GOP.

(That said, let us see if Biden finally takes up his newfound unlimited powers, say to assure that GOP anti-voter shenanigans in battleground states – gerrymandering, voter suppression, misdirection, neighborhood disenfranchisement, intimidation, election tampering, etc. – are watched for via our surveillance state and neutered in time, as well as any attempts of coups d’etat. Biden says he’s counting on voters to exile Trump, but we know how critical voters have been hobbled. OR if Biden wants to be bold, he can use the US anti-terror machine to target, capture and detain critical participants in the capture and coup movement behind project 2025, say all the folks in the Heritage Foundation. We know who they are, and we know they’ve declared their intention to capture the federal government and repurpose it away from principle US values.)

Sadly, no. The entire Common Era (that is, the one defined by Christianity) has made sexual hang-ups the social norm throughout all of western society (and eastern, once we started trading there). Combined with the industrial revolution (which moved us away from livestock getting it on, which helped normalize sex), we don’t know how to speak plainly without automatically painting ourselves as sluts and perverts.

It gets worse with the rise of far-right cultural identity movements like the transnational white power movement / Christian nationalist movement in the US, which intrinsically gatekeep and seek to prosecute anyone outside the mainstream norm, and tend to walk back sexual equality, including sexual liberty, suffrage and personhood.

That said, some places we’re actually teaching consent to kids, starting outside sexual context (e.g. can I hug you? You can play with my toys if you like) and including these lessons all the way through adolescence, which might not only inform intimacy, but contracts and terms of service with commercial interests. In contrast those of us without consent training just learned to tolerate transgressions of our privacy and our rights because the serving companies held the power.

With the SCOTUS ruling of Trump v. United States (2024) fresh on our minds, and awareness of the nearness of tyranny, we expect autocracy and hard times ahead, but may emerge from it a more enlightened, more cooperative society who is able to speak more openly about our needs without being judged.

But it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

So part of the significance of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov is how our society has responded to it, and for a truly deep dive (that I’m in the process of going through, myself), check out the Lolita Podcast by Jamie Loftus which begins with the story of how Daniel Handler (that is Lemony Snicket) suggested Lolita to Jamie when she was still a kid looking for book recommendations.

Also as noted by Jamie, both the 1967 Stanley Kubrick film adaptation and the 1997 Adrian Lyne adaptation portray the story with Humbert Humbert as a sympathetic character (with James Mason and Jeremy Irons playing Humbert, respectively.)

So yeah, the story simultaneously invites the reader to walk a razor’s edge between sympathizing with a child predator and watching the story unfold the way one looks at an automotive collision, watching a monster deeply past the moral event horizon justifying his behavior.

Lolita doesn’t play out as a love story. Delores isn’t precocious or mature nor is she mentally equipped for an adult relationship, and yet Humbert insists his pursuit of Delores is proper and justified, despite not only Delores’ age and minor status, but also the power relationship, with Humbert the legal guardian of Delores. The story is psychological horror.

And the story plays out showing in older Delores the psychological consequences of child sexual abuse. This is not a story of a May / December couple in love living happily ever after. Despite Lolita being described as an Erotic Novel by critics and literary indexes.

But then, in the 1980s, one in three American women surveyed were victims of child sexual abuse. Also in 1987 Suzanne Vega put out the song Luka highlighting a long standing culture that whatever happens in your house is none of my business (🐸☕), and before the Satanic Panic and the SRA scares, CSA was not an oft-prosecuted crime (it was assumed incest laws covered them) and the believe was kids who were victimized not by drunken daddy were instead victimized by strangers in white vans offering candy (rather than say, John Wayne Gacy, who held frequent neighborhood barbecues, or the coach of girls’ physical education). Only in the 1990s and the new century have we taken CSA and human trafficking of children seriously, and then, not very, considering how some US states are letting kids work in hazardous conditions and letting children marry. So it doesn’t really surprise me that Lolita is thought of as romantic or erotic even when it is the testimony of an abuser.

Sexy times are not for everyone, I admit.

Queer is forever.

But I do like this:

Vlad is the one with the beard.

I only smile in the dark
My only comfort is the night gone black
I didn’t accidentally tell you that
I’m only happy when it rains
– Garbage

This to me, feels like a cute proposition for sex (as in getting freaky).

If there are higher dimensions, say the extra seven asserted by String Theory, then we have breadth (thickness?) along each axis that is non zero. The higher-order string theory dimensions (which communicate particle information like gravity) are tightly rolled up.

Brian Greene uses the metaphore of an ant on a wire who can move along the wire freely, but can’t go far laterally. They may be so small that our quantum bits can’t drift anywhere, so our liver doesn’t abandon us drift along a high-level axis.

If there are flat higher level dimensions, then either a force or some kind of membrane would have to exist to keep our blood from leaking.

That said, when we have pure elements, or even pure minerals or chemicals, they retain the same density (mass to volume, sometimes affected by temperature) which suggests nothing is hiding away in other dimensions whenever we take measurements. If there is room along higher axes for unseen activity, it doesnt bug us enough to work out consistent properties.

Ten dimensions plus time in string theory.

I remember uneven wealth distribution was a bad thing even in pro-capitalism Economics 101 (macroeconomics), like this is the thing that will collapse your economy and cause death, disasters without response and eventually popular uprising.

FOX NEWS has, for decades now, been showing us our oligarchs don’t care.

For most of us (like around 88% of the US population) you’re closer to being homeless than you are to ever owning a home even a crappy apartment in the waste shadow of an industrial zone.

None of the girls were willing to be the one that wore green lipstick.

That’s why cat ears are mandatory when you’re computer hacking.

So far! no-one has ever died from loaded halloween candy. (The few incidents have all been inside jobs, like a parent poisoning their own kid).

The fentanyl candy scare came from brightly colored Oxy tabs that looked like packed-powder candy such as Sweetarts. It was a non-issue, but made for a scare piece to frighten conservative people who believe in teen rainbow parties.

So my take is I should put a Croc on my dog’s head and will be enlightened?

Is the guy in the second panel Quasimodo?

To be fair, Jesus’ message (some of it, scripture is not univocal) is that divine power is within the grasp of us mere mortals. That everyone who follows him would be able to do miracles like his.

(Apologists suggest he was referring to just the apostles to explain why the rest of us are bound by naturalism, but there are implications that’s not what he meant.)

Note that Gospel Jesus was big on direct evidence.

That said, the cross was made of wood, and Jesus wasn’t the only convict tasked with carrying one. The gravity is in being willing to die for one’s principles which all of these characters would do unflinchingly.

This is why you have to run when you find a goose among your ducks.

I thought up Goose as a superhero for a street level setting, essentially she’s a tough scrapper, easy to underestimate, and is really good at blending into crowds or workstaff. Mistique without the mutant shapechangey stuff.

I assumed I was already being spit-roasted.