Ain’t sabers rattling a precursor to war? Russia’s been at it a couple of years already, I wonder why you’re only hearing them now.

House arrest?

Like, to a lot of people actually.

You asked who protects you at violence at that point.

It damn sure ain’t a cop. Ain’t ever been a cop.

Fuck off, all day.

The cops ain’t ever protected me from violence and are scarier to me than either the random man (the random man could be a cop, but the cop definitely is) or the bear.

You can’t threaten me with violent men into not being afraid of violent men.

If someone goes to jail for violence against me, I haven’t been protected from violence. That’s literally all I’m saying. Why are you putting random words in my mouth and asking me questions about that shit?

Yeah, that’s exactly what I said you fucking genius. Absolutely brilliant.

That’s some after the fact shit. After the commoners were already violated, because the cops won’t or can’t and definitely have no interest in protecting them.

How many are in prison for violence against the powerful?

Since when do cops protect anyone besides the already powerful?

As someone who’s lived in the southeastern US nearly all of my five decades on this earth (tho I admit… only a couple years in Mississippi, back in the eighties), I’m not sure they don’t think what’s happening in Gaza is a genocide. The counterprotests are less because they care about “antisemitism” and more they think peaceniks should shut up already, especially about dead Muslims. Like, this ain’t pro-Israel, it’s pro-genocide.

But yeah, they’ve failed a lot of tests.

American revolution didn’t successfully throw off colonizers. In any kind of way.

That’s not what racism is.

If they ain’t up to the task, then they could just quit. I don’t see the problem.

It is now

I stopped caring about Apple a few decades ago.

No, I don’t know any of that. Some of those words are familiar, tho. Sorry, I ain’t had a Windows partition on my own personal computer since… damn I forgot what the one before 7 was called - Vista! We still had the family gaming PC, and I stayed buying games during steam and gog sales (even tho I mostly played on consoles - Nintendos and PlayStations only, lol) but I guess I haven’t actually been on it since Windows 8 and I hated it so much! But it’s gone now anyway, cannibalized for parts. Only 1 kid left at home, he’s got his own PC, and I don’t even know what version of windows he’s running. It’s hilarious, go back a few decades and I was free windows tech support for everyone, but now I don’t even know how to Windows.

And look, I’m probably just a trash monster. Like, I’m playing Just Cause 4 on my PS4 right now. And I play plenty of other trash (but also some good games) on my Garuda (it’s based on arch, btw - installed by my husband who has only ever installed windows in his life, with very minimal input from me) gaming PC. I also have the steam deck, but once my son donated parts after his latest PC upgrade, the steam deck just mostly gets picked up to do a little update every so often - but I’m about to go on a trip (and the switch has already been claimed)! To be fair to the steam deck, I mostly don’t even power on my gaming PC, as I really love my PS4 (I can’t stand the PS5 and usually only get on it to help my grandson when he’s here) and my rarely-turned-off MX Linux PC (I don’t hate the KDE of Garuda, but there’s a reason I use an XFCE-based distro as my daily driver).

I might be a gaming addict. But Microsoft hasn’t had anything to offer me since like, George W Bush was president. And even then, it was steam then gog who really had stuff to offer me on the PC. And in the console department, they ain’t ever had anything I’ve wanted, maybe my hands are too small or something but I’ve always hated the Xbox controller.

I don’t get what the benefits of windows are supposed to be. I just want to play games and ride on the information superhighway. Why would I even want a… Cortana or paperclip or whatever?