sudo dpkg -r –force-depends

I have no idea why this is so hard to find – you could spend an hour reading the dpkg man page and never figure it out, and most posts on forums don’t seem to even understand this issue. There seems to be an attitude that you shouldn’t do this, as though you are morally bound to rules about what software you may and may not have on your own computer. I have on several occasions had to completely remove and reinstall corrupted files. The only logical way to do this is to ignore dependency warnings. Besides, I use Linux because I don’t like people making rules about what I ought to do with my own machine. I hope this post helps someone in the same fix as I am.