The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles -- kingons, or possibly queons -- that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expanded because, at that point, the bar closed.

― Terry Pratchett, Mort

okay i've had a chance to sleep and reboot my operating system so let's look at this again, shall we?

"The far right is going to rally around Trump over this." The far right was already rallied around Trump. Nothing has changed here.

"This assassination attempt is going to hand the election to Trump." How? Trump stans always vote. They only won in 2016 because Trump took advantage of the republican party after they'd spent years rigging the system so Barack Obama or someone like him (black democrat) couldn't ever get voted into office again. He lost in 2020 because he poisoned the old-style conservatives against the republican party and they rallied around Biden instead. Nothing has changed here.

"Trump is a martyr now." Two things with that. 1, he's still alive, and you need to be dead to be a martyr. 2, what is he a martyr for? Fascism? The far right haven't needed a martyr so far. Nothing has changed here.

"Trump is going to use this assassination attempt to his advantage." To do what, exactly? Sell merchandise? There's basically no one "on the fence" about who to vote for, for him to win any sympathy votes. Nothing has changed here.

Also, there's still the bit where Trump is guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records and the ongoing investigation into mishandling of top-secret documents. Those aren't going away just because he might have lost an ear.

And, there's the bit where he's been in constant fear of assassination since 1981. Now that someone's actually tried it, he's probably going to be too afraid to make public appearances anymore, and if he does, he's likely going to require that people entering his white-power rallies leave their guns at the door, which might be a deal-breaker for some of his supporters.

The only thing that's changed is now he's gonna need a new toupee that covers up where his right ear used to be.

fujifilm jv300 my beloved