I assume people in the AVTF hate vigilantes and that's why they joined, but how can so many of them twist that philosophy into "okay let's kill a boat full of innocent workers we know aren't vigilantes."  Even in the face of *waves wildly all around*, I have to believe that most people are good and most people, no matter how much they might hate certain people, think that killing is wrong.  Even if they're okay with other people killing, they'd be hesitant to do it themselves.

All that is to say I'm hoping to see more defects from the AVTF.  I'm also not 100% sure I agree with recruitment staying high when the AVTF are actively being targeted by someone superpowered.  Do people like legally roughing up poor people enough to risk getting a fork thrown through their eyes?  I would assume once it got out that Bullseye was targeting officers, a bunch of people (especially the type of people ICE seems to be recruiting) would bail.  I would think they'd only be doing it because they feel like there would be no consequences, but Bullseye is dishing out a lot of consequences.  Throw in whatever Frank is doing and whatever Fisk says Daredevil is doing, and I can't imagine they'd be able to replace officers as quickly as Bullseye is dealing with them.  But again naive.

I do think the show is making super obvious parallels to Trump with Fisk, but I still think I'd prefer Fisk to Trump.  Fisk is a bad guy, but he's a bad guy who seems to care about people on some level.  I think Fisk is willing to work toward making things better with the intention of getting rich and powerful as a result.  I think Trump only cares about himself,  and he doesn't care on any level if things get better for people.  I think Trump might even make things intentionally worse sometimes just because he thinks its funny.  I legitimately think Trump is a worse supervillain that Fisk.

*******

So Trump's approval rating continues to plummet, and special elections keep going the Democrats' way.  I'm starting to get a little more optimistic that it could be a good midterms as long as Trump doesn't do anything totally crazy.

I've been a little relieved to see that Democrats aren't completely abandoning races in dark red areas like they have in the past. I'm hoping they're learning that they need to go after every race no matter how conservative or how small the race is, and I'm hoping they have some kind of plan to keep any of these gains they've gotten.  To recover from Trump, the Democratic party needs to be reaching out to disillusioned Trump voters and then they need to deliver for them.  I've said it before, but the Democratic Party needs to be able to transform itself into the party of the working class again, even if it means abandoning some really important stuff.  If there's a madman with a gun running around, you can't be too concerned with the fire code, even if the building is actively on fire.  Handle one issue at a time.  And right now, I think Democrats could do well with going all in on economic populism and saving social issues for a later day.

I don't know how likely it will be that the Democrats won't fumble this, but I'm using up what hope I have left that they can do it.

The second season of DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN is basically Daredevil vs. ICE. Daredevil has had one major fight scene per episode and beaten up about 10 ICE officers in each of the three episodes to date. (The story calls them the Anti-Vigilante Task Force, but they're all violent thugs assaulting and imprisoning people in off-the-books detainment facilities with no due process or oversight.) Daredevil has smashed their officers' faces into walls, hammered his club into their eyes, punched through their jaws and started holding them prisoner.

On one level, this is incredibly cathartic, and I can imagine Informant crying that Daredevil has become a mouthpiece for liberals followed by noting that Informant's white supremacists and misogynists and transphobes of choice have won the real world conflict while the left of center are hiding in fantasy fiction for relief. On another, this is not exactly a constructive fictional depiction.

Daredevil exists in a world where superheroes can administer severe beatings that don't kill anybody. Reality is more like that episode of THE FRESH PRINCE OF BEL-AIR where Will Smith killed a man who was mean to his uncle by yelling at him to drop dead at which point the man collapsed from a heart attack and died. We don't know everyone's medical situation. A punch to the face could be lethal and we don't have Matt Murdock's radar sense to know how hard to hit somebody. BORN AGAIN would be ill-advised to encourage civilians to take up arms against ICE.

As a result, by the third episode, DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN is forced to abruptly assure the audience that beating up ICE agents is not Matt and Karen's attitude going forward, instead clarifying that their goal is surveillance and information gathering with combat being incidental rather than planned. The show doesn't emphasize -- but I would -- that taking down 10 ICE agents a day is pointless: the recruitment numbers will ensure that any deficit via street vigilantism can be instantly filled by a new influx of people keen to terrorize civilians.

Due to actor unavailability, Frank Castle is not in BORN AGAIN and said to be missing from both the AVTF cells and from the narrative entirely. On one level, this is preferable: Frank's strategy would indeed be to simply shoot AVTF agents dead at a rate of 10 - 50 a day. But as BORN AGAIN tacitly points out: the officers are simply the lowest-ranked, most disposable parts of Wilson Fisk's machine. The machine behind them: the extrajudicial maneuvering, the federal and state and municipal bureaucracy enabling their actions; the way elections and the information ecosphere have been manipulated to put unstable people in positions of public service -- none of that would be addressed by Frank Castle gunning for AVTF agents, which is really Frank's only strategy for any problem ever anyway.

BORN AGAIN is at the edge of extremely dangerous political territory and is being extremely careful about it.

https://ew.com/jerry-o-connell-says-reb … s-11927062

Oh cool, so Trump and Ellison got to snatch up Warner Bros.  This will be great for everyone.

Trump mehh, but it's a continued problem that oligarchs like Ellison's family control more and more.  That said, beyond CNN and to some extent HBO, what even IS Warner Discovery anymore?  The studio is a wreck.  Discovery is just reality trash.

Oh cool, so Trump and Ellison got to snatch up Warner Bros.  This will be great for everyone.

Yeah, every time I saw this producer or that actor telling us how bad it would be for Netflix to buy Warners, I just wondered if they'd considered how bad it would be for Paramount to win. One MAGA techbro owning both CBS News and CNN. What's the worst that could happen? And if anyone bought that both studios would crank out more films per year than they currently are...

Will I get a refund from the old ones???

I wouldn't hole my breath.

In fact, polling suggests that Kamala Harris would be the frontrunner to win the 2028 nomination.  As happy as I was to vote for her in 2024, I think it would be a disaster if she were the nominee in 2028.  To me, the only candidate is Newsom because he's been the only one to stand up to Trump and beat him at his own game.  I think they'd have a real chance to pick up some of the apolitical people who voted for Trump.  Those people only care about Trump's "alpha male personality" and that's where Newsom has been hitting Trump.  Since those people don't care about issues, they should have no issue jumping from Trump to Newsom.  But they'd never vote for Harris.

Trump has historically low approval ratings.  The optics for all the stuff he's doing is failing except for his ultraloyal base.  JD Vance keeps embarrassing himself and fighting with MAGA people. The signs are there for this whole house of cards to collapse.  But with full control of the government, I think Trump has a thousand avenues to put his thumb on the scale, and I think he will use at least one of them.

I'm deeply distributed. By the apathy. Rationalizing. And excuses.

*disturbed

Autocorrect

In any case.  This whole thing has been hard.