Terry Pratchett.

I always get Pratchett and Brooks confused. Too many Terrys.

All my life these are some of the only ones that make me laugh out loud consistently while still having a great plot, characters, and just overall excellent writing in so many ways.

He does a great job of writing a series that can be read piecemeal but pays off if you go through the whole things.

I’m also a big fan of the Myth Adventure series by Robert Aspirin. It’s more comedic, but has a similar vibe.

Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it

Florida has a long history of bombarding the North Atlantic ex-pat contingent with reactionary propaganda and disenfranchising everyone else.

We have a very strong mix of people who don’t get sarcasm and staunch libertarians who do get sarcasm.

Leveraging the broken health care system to attack the revanchist cultural system?

I mean, maybe. But when child birth already runs into the $20k-$50k range, I doubt anyone is going to notice the $150 they charge for foreskin removal until the bill arrives.

I don’t wish to invest that time right now

Maybe don’t cite something if you have no idea how it reached its conclusions.

Detroit failed because of automation and off-shoring.

That’s the mechanism behind why it failed, but not the reason for the policy. Automation and off-shoring were tools intended to re-segregate and depress the wealth of the working class. Once the city sufficiently shocked into collapse, financial investment came flooding back into the city in the form of foreclosure sale purchases and low-wage service sector expansion. The modern city is seeing the first population expansion it’s enjoyed in decades, but with an enormous new disparity in income and political organization between the richest and poorest residents. Dan Gilbert, the co-founder of the largest private mortgage lender in the US - Quicken Loans (now Rocket Mortgage) - owns enormous swaths of the downtown district and has his talons in a host of municipal and state political figures.

He’s revitalized the city with enormous amounts of public money, laundered into private profits, through the private lending racket. And he’s used the depressed wages and real estate values in the town to reap huge margins on the cost of labor, relative to more traditional finance centers like New York or Dallas.

I mean, you can scratch that up more to the war time economy than anything.

If all your young artistic talent is getting methed up, loaded into APCs, and driven into the thick of Russian winter, they’ll have less time to make art at home.

I might argue that the biggest thing we’ve done for the arts in the United States is to eliminate the draft. Now you can have a professional artistic community AND a professional military. Then they can come together to make the next Top Gun or Transformers or Marvel movie.

OP said that hatred of Jews isn’t justified

Conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is a right wing Israel talking point.

I thought we established that we don’t like them

you hold ethnic hatred and disgust for Jews

Is Zionism an ethnicity? Does that mean anti-Zionist Jews aren’t Jewish?

I honestly can’t reach any other conclusion

Reach harder

Florida has one of the highest Latin and African American populations in the country. They just aren’t allowed to vote.

And over half of the under 18 population of Florida is non-white. In another twenty years it will be majority minority.

By the time to state is fully fucked by climate change, you’re going to see reactionaries in the Midwest having a field day saying the state failed because it turned into “Detroit” wink wink nudge nudge

“Your education system is better because it has a lower percentage of school age children”

Brilliant

It’s a bit silly that Florida ranks above states like Massachusetts and California when it comes to higher education

The quality of education in these states varies radically by zip code and regional average income.

In California, the local school board superintendent Joseph Komrosky lost a recall election for trying to ban critical race theory (a thing his district wasn’t formally teaching) on campuses, among other shady bullshit. But his ilk isn’t unusual in the right wing fruit basket of SoCal or the Techbro patriarchy infesting the Stanford campus.

Education in these states can be better. But it can also be right in line with the Florida reactionary crowd, and for the same reasons. This is a national project by American plutocrats to brainwash the next generation of young people.

If billionaire real estate magnets say your education system is good, who are we to argue?

failed state swallowed by the Ocean

Not for another 40-150 years. By then local politics will have shifted substantially in the state, and future external fascists can claim Florida was destroyed for being too brown, woke, and gay.

Nothing he does helps anybody.

He’s been a real boon for the state’s money laundering, human trafficking, landlord profiteering, and fossil fuel industries.

The Left: People who like art

When does his tenure as governor end?

He’s obligated to take a two year hiatus from his current position at the end of eight years. But he’s free to run for another office during the downtime.

That’s why Rick Scott became a Senator after his gubernatorial tenure.

Participating in the Israeli conquest and ethnic purge absolutely deserves hatred and disgust.

This goes well beyond the Israeli’s right most partisan faction and extends to the entire Zionist movement.

You’d hardly be the first guy who thinks only landlords deserve a vote.