The first time I saw my friend after he decided he was a woman, he said something to indicate he thought his old self had died. Thinking about that conversation later, it occurred to me that if my friend had "died" than whoever this new person was wasn't necessarily my friend.
But at the same time he is the same person, and he's not dead. Frankly, his death would be easier to come to terms with. It's confusing enough for me (because the situation is nonsensical) when it's just a close friend. I can't imagine how it would be for a father/son where the son thinks his old self "died" and yet there are still familial obligations on the part of the father.
Either way you play it ("son is dead"/"son is alive") isn't going to be entirely logically consistent, because you are playing a nonsensical game.
In the US the only things that require a witness is the deed and the mortgage if you get one. Terms of the sale are just signatures.
I sold a house having never even physically met the guy who sold it for me. They sent me a stack of paperwork to fill out, one page of which was "where do you want the money transferred" and I could have entered anything there and the money would have been sent to that account. Then I sent that stack of paperwork back in the mail, praying that no one along the way replaced that one sheet of paper with one with a different account number.
You'd be amazed how many things in the world still operate based on nothing more than "please find a scan of my signature attached to this email" sent from the correct email address.
With "add signature" in Acrobat you don't even need to physically sign something. Two clicks and add a signature to any document you want.
"Oh you didn't sign that? Well then you let some rogue staffer have unauthorized access to your signature -- which is a huge breach of national security -- and we throw you out right now."
His campaign website is still up. Which to anyone who has worked for a big organization is really weird. Normally a Press Release goes out at a particular time, and that's the "go live" time for everything else related to that PR (such as updates to a campaign website for a candidate who has just dropped out of the race to indicate that)
Around 40 is when you've spent over 50% of your life as an adult and remember things as an adult that happened before young adults today were even born.
Visiting my alma mater recently and realizing that most of the students weren't even born when I was a student really drove home the reality that I was no longer "young".
The people saying this absolutely will not have the stomach for mass deportations.
Can't take credit for this, but public school teachers are a good candidate. You don't want that sort teaching kids anyways, and any other time it'd be damn near impossible to get them fired.
My line of thinking is more "smack their instigators down hard (because they just shot one of ours), and only if they've shown they can behave* can there be a mutual de-escalation where if either side instigates they get smacked down."
Unless and until that happens you have to do tit for tat. Arguably smacking them down hard itself is tit for tat since that's what they did for 1/6.
* Which given their total reversal in less than 24 hours is highly improbable.
It's a tactical matter whether or not you wish to employ the strategy against any given person. I probably wouldn't do it to someone I otherwise liked and who I didn't think would do the same thing to me.
That said, at a higher level I think society has gotten too casual in its use of "war verbiage" in politics. OP is right that "war is a continuation of politics by other means", so I would think then that unless you are prepared to go to war you wouldn't want to speak of existential threats, and heavily discourage people from speaking in such terms.
You could see (and I commented on several times at the time) in the aftermath of the 2020 election the same sort of "war verbiage" (eg. "if we let this election fraud stand we don't have a country any more"), and I said at the time (before 1/6) "these people saying these things are playing a dangerous game, because you risk people taking them seriously and taking them to their logical conclusions. So if you say them then you'd better really believe them, because some people will." And lo and behold, a lot of the politicians saying those things actually didn't believe them; and a lot of normal people who did are sitting in prison right now as a result when support they probably thought they had completely evaporated.
And it's happening here too: "threat to democracy and our very way of life" taken to its logical conclusion is...what almost happened on Saturday. If you believe that statement is true (which I don't of course), then the only logically consistent critique of the shooter is that he didn't actually wait until Trump won the election. And now a husband and father is dead, as is a 20-year old kid who got whipped into a frenzy by being exposed to it for half his life.
So I would say that if you don't want these things to happen every election you need to tamp down heavily on that sort of verbiage unless you really mean it. Ideally the politicians and press who pushed this would be in prison for instigating it, but I think we both know that won't happen. The next best thing (but far from a perfect solution because it punishes normal people) is for there to be consequences for normal people saying such things the same way there is for joking about bombs in an airport security line.
It can be useful to strategically pretend to be shocked and disgusted, because normal people legitimately are shocked and disgusted.
If for example a coworker you don't like says something like "too bad he missed" it may behoove you to act "shocked and disgusted" in front of HR who (even if they too are sad he missed) now will probably be obligated to take "glorification of violence" much more seriously than two weeks ago now that first blood has been drawn.
Think of today as 9/14/2001: tenured university professors could say "the US deserved it" in the right company, but otherwise that was a good way to get into a confrontation. But this is a limited time offer that won't last forever.
Haven't seen them this much on their back foot since shortly after 9/11. Which isn't saying much, but normally this would not happen.
They get comfortable saying this shit, then when something bad happens they have to be reminded that actually normal people are horrified when you tell them they "deserved" that bad thing that happened because they're normal people doing normal stuff.
You want to get some annoying shitlibs fired/reprimanded, now is the time to do it.
This one's from 2016. Apparently made by some anti-Trump guy who nevertheless manages to make him look awesome.
Without the beard he's like a young pudgy Norm MacDonald.
James Carville (Dem strategist for Bill Clinton) has said much the same thing.
I hope he lives long enough to see his left-wing "End of History" world collapse around him. Fate worse than death.
Also possible. I still hear that sort of opinion in my neck of the woods sometimes (though I would say it's uncommon since it's a bit more obvious now that he's the man with one eye in the land of the blind).
I think it's interesting that he wrote that sort of book while being NeverTrump, because it doesn't make a lot of sense that someone who would write that book would be NeverTrump. Which makes it a bit more likely his later support is genuine and not purely opportunistic like it is with some.
Also since he's around my age and comes from a similar type of background as I did, I wouldn't be surprised if he was similarly raised with a general dislike of the guy. Whenever his name popped up in the news as a kid my parents would usually comment on his bankruptcies and how that either meant he was dishonest or not a very good businessman. Can take some time to undo that (or at least to decide to put up with it)
The guy who wants reparations for Blacks would have been better?
The only thing vaguely right-wing about RFK Jr is he didn't receive the post-WuFlu patch on vaccination testing and so believes the same thing that just about everyone did prior to 2020: that you should thoroughly test a vaccine before approving it let along mandating people take it.
Who would you have picked?
Who should he have picked instead? Criteria:
- Assassination insurance
- Wants the job
All the worst people hate him, and he's made all the "let's lower the temperature in the room" people on the left re-enter "threat to democracy" mode less than 24 hours after they pretended to exit it.
I suspect it would have taken less effort for him to be an attractive-looking man than a weird-looking "woman"
I can say a lot of things about what he did, but it being an "easy solution" isn't among them.