Never been one to let the carrier drop

“My friend Kira always said that life is like an extremely difficult, horribly unbalanced videogame. When you’re born, you’re given a randomly generated character, with a randomly determined name, race, face, and social class. Your body is your avatar, and you spawn in a random geographic location, at a random moment in human history, surrounded by a random group of people, and then you have to try to survive for as long as you can. Sometimes the game might seem easy. Even fun. Other times it might be so difficult you want to give up and quit. But unfortunately, in this game you only get one life. When your body grows too hungry or thirsty or ill or injured or old, your health meter runs out and then it’s Game Over. Some people play the game for a hundred years without ever figuring out that it’s a game, or that there is a way to win it. To win the videogame of life you just have to try to make the experience of being forced to play it as pleasant as possible, for yourself, and for all of the other players you encounter in your travels. Kira says that if everyone played the game to win, it’d be a lot more fun for everyone. —Anorak’s Almanac, chapter 77, verses 11–20”
― Ernest Cline, Ready Player Two

So, over in Trump-land, despite having lost by 7+ million votes in the popular election, and many states in the electoral collage, Trump is trying to overturn those results so he can continue being dictator.

I guess first I’m curious about who the deplorables.. and I think that word really does fit .. who are okay with the fact that Fearless Leader clearly lost but is trying to cheat his way to a victory are. I know part of what’s going on there is that their news sources are lying to them – as they have been this entire time – and they still keep patting themselves on the back about how the ‘lamestream media’ is lying and Fearless Leader is telling the truth, despite all kinds of data to the contrary.

Beyond that, I’m curious what Trump thinks will happen if he does cheat himself to victory? Does he think the American people, who just voted him out rather decisively, will not use stronger means of persuasion if he decides to refuse to leave and order us all to yell “Heil Trump!”. I mean, we’ve seen recently – as Trump lied about Antifa – that many, many Americans are not okay with cops murdering citizens. I think Trump would discover that even more Americans are not okay with being led by a fascist dictator.

I also still have hope that at some point those who enabled this catastrophe will feel shame – and I would *like* to think that them as voted in the people who are currently supporting Trump in his attempt to subvert fair and free elections will be voted out, but I’ve come to accept that people on the right are about as smart as Charlie Brown expecting Lucy not to pull the football away. After all, they fell for the Laffer curve again. And they fell for WMDs. And they’ve fallen for many, many things. They still think money is the value, rather than a pointer to it, and they can’t understand why them Democrats “Stealing money from my wallet!” actually makes everyone including them richer because they can’t understand that wealth is about resource flows, not about money. So they probably won’t realize they elected someone with the morals of hitler combined with the IQ of Amazon Alexa. But maybe their children will.

Anyway, as I said, even if Trump manages to cheat his way past this defeat by invalidating the votes of hundreds of thousands of people, I don’t see the endgame working out well for him.