theres a time and place for comedy but for a scifi should be kept to a minimum.
I think of all things The Orville demonstrates that on both sides - for a show whose premise is "Seth MacFarlane wants to be a TNG-era Star Trek captain" you can see more of his comedy at the start than afterward, presumably because it needed to be a Seth MacFarlane comedy to get funded and then not so much once the funding was secure.
You say that like 3rd parties being created and taking federal offices happens all the time.
They aren't, and that's kinda the point. People grossly underestimate how hard it is to do this (pretending it's some great unknown and not something that's been tried and failed literally dozens of times), and what game theory regarding FPTP elections means for the rise of one.
We haven’t had a serious 3rd party, let alone one that takes federal office, for well over 100 years.
We had a few elected to Congress in the last hundred years, even if you don't count ones who changed party at some point. Mostly Farmer-Labor Party between the late 20s and end of WW2. We also had a Conservative Party of New York candidate in Congress in the 70s. And a Libertarian if you do count people who convert while in office. Hell, Trump once tried to run for POTUS as a third party candidate in 2000 for the Reform Party, but failed miserably and didn't win a single state during the primaries.
Don’t pretend you know what it takes, because we haven’t even fucking tried. It’s uncharted water!
How many parties do you think we have that are large enough they operate in multiple states and have ballot access right now? The answer is a dozen. All of which have hopes of eventually getting someone in federal office, you know aside from the Dems and GOP who already do that. Of those twelve, 9 ran a presidential candidate in 2024. You've probably only even heard of 4 of those at most (Harris, Trump, Stein and maybe Chase Oliver [Libertarian]).
What it takes at a minimum is getting a majority of a state or House district on board with you and willing to vote for you rather than a major party, knowing that if enough other people don't buy in it's going to let the candidate farthest from them win instead. If you're pushing for POTUS, then it means getting about 78M people on board in the same way, distributed across most of the country.
Third parties running for federal office isn't untested water, it's just extremely difficult to succeed at. Again, that's why the Tea Party operated as a reform movement within the GOP rather than being an actual third party - it let them hijack the political machinery of the party from within, instead of having to fight against it in a battle that would at most likely cause both to lose if it did anything at all. Literally, had the Tea Party been an actual third party then instead of gaining massive influence they would have at their most powerful caused Democrats to win by splitting the GOP vote.
To quote LazyTown: Yar har, fiddle de dee...
Did you literally wake up from a coma the day Biden's cancer diagnosis was announced or something? Or are you the rare person who isn't part of Trump's cult but also only watches right wing news sources?
"President Trump shits on Constitution in novel way!" could paraphrase a headline from literally any week this year after 1/20. And only after 1/20 because before then he was merely President-Elect Trump.
Beyond that, the news cycle is pretty short - for example, unless we have revelations about Trump sexually assaulting a woman we didn't already know about or some movement in an existing court case, it's not going to continue to be litigated in the news media because there's nothing new to say.
No different than European tourists "traveling the US" visiting a couple of big cities and maybe the Grand Canyon on a stop in between.
Choose people by being popular and saying the right things and you get salesmen types rather than experts.
I have a saying: "You can never trust salesmen or politicians, and to be fair politicians are just salesmen selling that they should be in charge."
That’s why I never believed in the rhetoric of “it’s too late to consider 3rd party!” before the elections. Here it is just 6 months later and “we don’t have time for that”. Is it disingenuous then to just say there will never be time for that, like it is being implied here?
It takes years to get a new party off the ground and in a meaningful position to take federal offices at any significant rate. During that time, you are mostly helping your farthest opposition of the main parties win by splitting the vote.
This is literally why the Tea Party operated by internal change of the GOP and not by starting a third party. And love them or hate them, they were effective at shifting the GOP.
This case really isn't. This is due to terrible Georgia state law, not a Trump EO. Every Republican in Georgia voted for precisely this to happen. Trump had no say.
They don’t campaign for child marriage in secret,
Wait, who is actively campaigning for child marriage? I mean, "child marriage" is already legal in a bunch of states (as in a large majority of them) so long as you understand we're generally talking about 16 or 17 year olds marrying with consent of their parents, a court or both (depending on the state). The term tends to evoke imagery of kids much younger than that, which is why I'm clarifying. Why would they need to campaign for something that's already legal in most of the country?
It does seem weird to blame Republicans for this one though, since the states with the broadest child marriage laws have been solidly blue states (Massachusetts eliminated under-18 marriage entirely in 2022, but prior to that had no hard minimum age of marriage with parental and judicial consent, and California still to date has no hard minimum marriage age but requires judicial consent for under-18s). I don't think anyone is going to claim that California is a state controlled by Republicans.
It's not like for example fucking animals where it's only legal in one state, and that one state is a red state. Specifically: Fucking animals isn't illegal in WV because WV repealed their "crimes against nature"-style law in 1976 for LGBT related reasons (and it wasn't really enforced much anyways, 4 prosecutions in 46 years on the books, 3 of those overturned on appeal), and WV has just never passed a replacement ban on fucking animals. It typically gets proposed in the legislature every year, and typically never goes any farther than being proposed because the legislature usually has more important things to do than pass an embarrassing bill to legislate against a vanishingly small number of perverts who on the whole aren't really hurting anyone (and if they were could be prosecuted under regular animal abuse laws).
It usually requires a competent and well-known politician storming out of their party for ideological differences, but being locally popular enough to win their seat as an independent or new party.
It also usually causes the party they broke off from to lose higher offices a few times because the two sides of the schism don't have enough power individually to win the bigger contests. Until one of them swallows the other.
The right avoided this by doing their "reform" from within, aka the Tea Party.
Prior to 1974, it was legal for banks to require a man’s signature for a woman to open a credit card, and many banks chose to require this.
The requirement for women to provide a male co-sign for lines of credit was one of the last vestiges of coverture (the notion of the household as the primary legal unit, with the husband/father as the one ultimately responsible for the household owning all the assets but also holding all the debts and in some cases responsible for crimes done by family members) to go. Because under coverture, the only women who owned their own assets and were responsible for their own debts were femme sole (single women who are not under their father's household, typically orphans, widows or spinsters) which meant loaning money to a woman who was or might feasibly become married within the terms of the loan created a scenario where the debt had to be collected from someone who was not a party to the debt being created which made things more difficult for the lender. The whole point of requiring a male co-sign was that way they had someone they could more easily enforce collection against than the debtors potential future husband who wasn't himself a party to the loan. Once we tossed coverture, it took a bit for policy at private institutions to catch up unless/until they actually needed to.
I agree that the facts are very frequently misrepresented.
There's a dichotomy to it you see in descriptions of other things, where unless all women could do the thing nationwide without exception then women couldn't do the thing but if any men could do the thing, then men could do the thing. For example, some women in the US could vote since the founding, because voting rights were determined at the state level and not all of them restricted it by sex. At the same time, most men couldn't vote either in most states until the mid-19th century with the push for so-called Jacksonian Democracy (ironically, women actually lost the right to vote in New Jersey when voting rights were expanded - the previous wealth requirement was not restricted by sex).
Usually this is because the capital doesn't generally change over time while the relative size of cities often does, especially on the scale of a century or more.