Imagine not recognizing that central authority is the problem.

That’s a seriously creepy face.

There’s a bubbling cauldron of naked rage not quite managing to hide behind those clamped-down features.

That’s always been the basic GOP agenda - they’re just more brazen about it now, since they have an unapologetic wannabe dictator taking the lead.

But particularly from Reagan on, their exact strategy has been to win angry, stupid people over with bigotry, fear and hatred, then spend their time in office fucking over the common people (including the angry, stupid ones who voted for them) in order to expand the privilege of the wealthiest few.

They - and the angry, stupid people who vote for them - are the reason we’re where we are today.

Never loan anyone anything unless you’re willing to give it to them, because that could well turn out to be exactly what you’re doing.

ETA another one that just came to me, that I’ve always liked because it’s a witty turn of phrase in addition to being useful:

If you’re doing something that leads you to wonder if you should have some safety gear (gloves, particle mask, hearing protection, etc.), then the answer is “Yes.”

I’ve been posting on internet forums for almost 30 years now. It’s just a thing I like doing.

I’m here now because it’s the best place I know of at the moment.

Huh.

I’ve been sort of idly wondering who was going to be the first “enemy” politician the Trump regime was going to kill.

I’d say McConnell just became the odds-on favorite.

It’s safe to assume that the “uncomfortable” part is that he’s either going to have to admit to soliciting sex with minors or perjure himself, and neither one is going to end well for him.

“We do not currently assess” is ludicrously blatant mealy-mouthed misdirection.

Intelligence is a measure of reasoning ability. LLMs do not reason at all, and therefore cannot be categorized in terms of intelligence at all.

LLMs have been engineered such that they can generally produce content that bears a resemblance to products of reason, but the process by which that’s accomplished is a purely statistical one with zero awareness of the ideas communicated by the words they generate and therefore is not and cannot be reason. Reason is and will remain impossible at least until an AI possesses an understanding of the ideas represented by the words it generates.

It’s safe to assume at this point that delays and chaos (and the opportunities both will provide for fraud) are the exact point.

This time around, Georgia is going to be prepared to “find” Trump however many votes he needs.

Even as cynical as I am, it astonishes me that the Republicans have become entirely up-front about the fact that they don’t really give a shit about the American people and are only interested in how policy decisions affect them personally.

It’s not just the case that they’ll institute harmful policies if they can blame the Democrats for them or oppose beneficial policies that they can’t claim credit for themselves, but that they do it openly and obviously.

And their wholly emotion-driven supporters remain completely oblivious…

Like all conservatives, he wants to do unto others as he would not want done unto him.

Nice.

I’ve been threatening off and on all day to make this exact point and have even started a couple of posts to that purpose, but it never quite came together.

Now I don’t need to - I can just agree.

More than anything else - more than an opportunist or a hypocrite or a liar or a fraud - Vance’s primary attribute and defining characteristic really is simply that he’s an asshole.

She’s bludgeoningly obviously compromised. All the way through, her rulings, and the timing and circumstances of them, have not been made in the service of enforcing law, but engineered to benefit Trump.

So really the only question is whether or not justice will prevail. If this is still in any sense a nation of laws, she’ll be removed (and hopefully sanctioned for her rather obvious bias and/or corruption).

But to all appearances, this is not a nation of law…

And I guarantee that billionaire Larry Ellison blithely believes that he’ll be exempt - that all of this surveillance will just be used against the little people. And he’s almost certainly right.

Yeah - I obviously don’t know, and it is possible that he’s just naturally and coincidentally so reminiscent of a tweaker, but still…

It just clicked when I thought of it. It’s all there - the constant effortless and entirely self-serving dishonesty and avarice, the revolving door of obsessions, the paranoia and the specific focus on (perceived) loyalty vs. (perceived) betrayal…

I’m not sure that it would be relevant anyway - the issue is who and what he is rather than how he ended up that way. Still though…

As I’ve said a number of times now, I’m convinced that Trump can’t meaningfully recognize the difference between true and false and right and wrong. I think his mind has been so warped by his pathological and increasingly delusional narcissism that his standard for whether something is true or false or right or wrong is entirely subjective and entirely internalized - that, quite simply, if he believes it then it’s true and if he doesn’t believe it then it’s false, and if he wants it then it’s right and if he doesn’t want it then it’s wrong. That’s it - trapped in his self-serving delusions, he has no other basis on which to judge.

So of course he’s defending Loomer - she tells him things he wants to hear, so in his deranged view, she tells him the truth. And since he’s visibly coming apart at the seams and on track to lose the election, she’s likely one of the few who are telling him things he wants to hear, so one of the few he trusts to tell him the “truth.”

And it just now struck me, mostly because that all made me think of Hitler in his final days, and I have no idea now why it took so long because it suddenly seems so terribly obvious - Trump’s almost certainly a long time meth user, isn’t he?

Yeah - that fits. That absolutely fits.

I think you have forums confused with microblogs.

I presume I’m supposed to care, but I dont, and I don’t know why anyone would.