I spent a lot of my childhood in Arizona, and we did field trips in school to ‘ghost towns’ (e: the old west towns), Montezuma’s Castle (back when you could actually walk through it before vandals ruined it for everyone), and Pueblo ruins with indigenous living history reenactors.
I never even saw a modern gun in person until I was 16. It just wasn’t a thing. And yet we managed to survive.
The amazing thing about that idiocy mostly flew under the radar at the time:
According to neurologists, in the test he was bragging about (aside from being extremely easy because it’s meant to screen for dementia), those would not have been the words.
The point of the 5 words portion is that the words are never related, because that would defeat the purpose of the memory test. They’re always carefully selected unrelated words, like daisy clock giraffe piano door.
He very obviously did not remember the words and was just naming things he could literally see at the time.
His niece, Mary Trump, knows him well and is a licensed clinical psychologist. She’s spoken and written extensively on his mental disorders (normally a psychologist won’t do that publicly, but she’s said he’s such a danger to the nation, she feels she has no choice).
She’s well worth reading and listening to.
This is the inevitable outcome of the combination of the proliferation of guns in the US + the over-the-top fearmongering of certain high-profile personalities (specifically on the right). It was never going to end any other way.
Scare people into thinking everyone is out to get them and tell them they have to arm themselves, and you get tragedies like this: the guy that shot a teenaged girl through his front door when she was looking for help. This kid shot in the face looking for a place to take pictures.
People like Tucker Carlson and all similar scaremongers (too many to name) are partly to blame for this. I’m old enough to remember the red scare, where average people thought communists were hiding in every suburban neighbourhood, and also the satanic panic – this is all that but on steroids.
Everyone isn’t out to get you. They never were. But people are becoming millionaires by riling people into killing each other *for no reason *, and unlike back then, now everyone is armed and convinced to shoot first like every place is the fucking OK Corral.
e: and to add a layer of irony, yes, Wild West high-noon shootouts are the same kind of myth-sayings as boiling frogs – pretty much all old west towns required you to surrender your guns to the sheriff on entry. Things were actually safer back then.
Many other comments here have a share in the reasons, but a huge reason is he’s looking at more state and federal charges, and more lawsuits (which haven’t going well for him).
He NEEDS to run and WIN so he can make all these cases go away for good.
Did you miss this recent news?
Justice Department Disrupts Covert Russian Government-Sponsored Foreign Malign Influence Operation Targeting Audiences in the United States and Elsewhere
Influence Operation Relied on Influencers, AI-Generated Content, Paid Social Media Advertisements, and Social Media Accounts to Drive Internet Traffic to Cybersquatted and Other Domains
e: or was that /s? Poe’s law broke my sarcasm detector years ago
Family/close friends/doctors: 95% (I only don’t if I’m in the toilet, at the doctor, or etc).
Unknown/unsolicited: 0%. If it’s important, leave a message or fuck right off.
Nearly 98% of my calls come from that last group, though, so basically never.
Teenaged boys, unfortunately.
Sadly, no amount of liquor has been able to erase live-action Smurf porn from my brain.
Whoever invents the ‘unsee’ pill will become richer than god.
Well, narcissistic idiots who’ve built their empires on lies and exploitation flock together.
I think Harris may be neglecting a key part of necessary prep. She should spend some time at the zoo outside the monkey enclosure dodging their flung shit, or I fear she might lose.
And it’s like friends of mine that are like English professors, they say: ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen,’”
Meanwhile, back here in reality, one of his actual professors at Wharton repeatedly referred to Trump as the dumbest student he’d ever had:
according to attorney Frank DiPrima, who was close friends with professor William T. Kelley for 47 years, […] I remember the inflection of his voice when he said it: ‘Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had!’
e: source
IIRC, they declared bankruptcy then went back to business as usual.
How many in that statistic are men being killed by women? How many of those murders are the result of gang violence that’s predominantly committed against men by other men?
I assume you’re referring to this stat:
In 2022, the FBI reported that 14,441 men and 4,251 women were murdered in the United States.
… which equates to about 79% of all murders.
There’s a lot of nuance in that broad, sweeping statistic, but here are some statistics that are more clear:
In the same year, there were 15,094 male murder offenders and 2,107 female murder offenders.
… so the problem isn’t that more men are being murdered in general, but that an overwhelmingly larger number of men are murderers, and they target each other quite a bit. Gang violence stats are wrapped up in that 79%, and most gang violence is male-on-male.
Here’s another:
Among homicides in the United States, intimate partners kill almost 50% of female and 10% of male victims.
Many of these stats are situational, making that overly-broad figure misleading.
Also, the likelihood of being murdered increases quite a bit when a woman is pregnant:
In 2020, the homicide rate for pregnant or postpartum women was 5.23 per 100,000 live births, which is 35% higher than the rate for non-pregnant and non-postpartum women.
And that doesn’t include all the violent sexual crimes against women and girls, that are also committed at a far higher rate than against men and boys.
The overarching fact seems to be that men kill men a lot, and they also kill women an order of magnitude more often than women kill men, so maybe the problem here is men’s propensity for violence.
e: If that’s what you meant, I agree, we should be finding and implementing ways to reduce male toxicity in general, which includes many things like supporting mental health care and opposing norms (mostly within the online ‘manosphere’) that promote and foster toxic rather than healthy masculinity.
This is the culmination of unchecked capitalism having full control of the media. The truth hasn’t mattered for a really long time – only which words are most profitable.
They should. It’s nuts this motherfucker has the influence he does. He’s an actual dipshit who’s only able to do this because he was born into money and failed upwards. He’s a moron with outsized influence. Hold him to account, please.
I’m tired of people making light of this, I’m tired of people being passive about this,
Hey man, so am I. We’re on the same page. I’ve spent the last 10 years trying to get people to take this threat seriously. That’s why I bring up what’s happened in Europe and how the far right has been piloting their ideas there. They’ve been planning this and working out the details for decades, but they’ve also lost during some of that. My point is maybe we can look at those losses and learn some things.
Many people in the US are totally unaware of that history and haven’t seen where they’ve been stomped back down. I’m saying we can look at their losses and learn something. Chest-thumping does nothing. We should be learning.
They’ve got an advantage because whilst most democratic leaders have been trying to govern and deal with crises, they’ve been systematically testing the fences. Like velociraptors, they’ll eat everyone’s faces at the first opportunity.
You’re right – we can’t make light of this or be passive. I’ve been trying to figure out how we can collectively resist for a decade. I didn’t want Biden to step down *because the threat is so dire, I thought the antifascist coalition needed the incumbent advantage (I now think I was wrong, and the timing was perfect, putting the fascists on their back foot with very little time to turn the their titanic campaign), and even though I don’t personally like Biden, I never said that because we can’t be divided and he was better than the Nazis on the porch. But now he has and this is where we are.
I’ve been downvoted for years for saying the things you’re saying – again, I don’t get why you’re angry at me. I’ve tried to get people to see the real state of things, and I’ll not stop doing that. All I can do now is convince people to vote, because that’s the only play we have left, but I’d like even more for people to understand the real threat. And I still don’t get why you seem angry at me when we’re on the same side.
It’s pretty naive to think there is any other country on the planet that could cause the world more damage if turned fascist.
I never said that, and I’m confused how you got that from my comment.
In fact, if you look through my history, you’ll see I’ve said if the US goes fascist, that will be a huge problem for the whole world.
I’m not downplaying the threat at all – quite the opposite. We’re on the same side, and I’m not sure why you’re attacking me here.
5/7 with rice.