And those are the people this whole thing is intended for.

You’ll note that none of the people involved responded to attempts to get further statements or clarifications from them. That’s because they know it’s indefensible bullshit. They said it just so that it would get out there so that the faithful would see it and add it to their credo, and now they’re going to ignore it.

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.

It’s become obvious over time that one of Trump’s primary strategies in life is assigning his failures and faults to other people. He lives in a sort of permanent fog of projection.

I wonder who he’s trying to fool though. It’s so constant and seemingly effortless that I suspect that it’s really mostly for his own benefit - that it’s not just the story he’s telling other people, but the story he’s telling himself.

Well… yeah. Brazil’s the B in BRICS and Russia’s the R, so Brazil is officially pro-Russia.

And by the bye - China’s the C.

These groups understand the Republican voters, many of whom are not inclined to rank candidates. Ranked-choice voting favors the more malleable Democrat voters who will do so.

Or in other words, Democrats are more likely to actually think about their votes and find things to appreciate in multiple candidates, while Republicans are more likely to just slavishly vote for whoever has an [R] after their name and disregard everything and everyone else.

And arguably more to the point, Republican politicians count on that.

Take note that this is from the government that the MAGA Republicans support.

This, to them, is honor and strength - to invade a sovereign nation, then threaten to drop nuclear bombs on them for daring to fight back.

That’s the world the MAGA Republicans want - one in which they and their allies are fully entitled to do whatever they want to whoever they want, and the only choices others are to be granted are to submit or die.

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.

Hexbear is sort of like a village of eldritch abomination worshippers in a Lovecraftian horror story - isolated, insular, entirely wrapped up in their own esoteric rituals and ideas and language, and immediately and collectively hostile to outsiders.

Love the responses from the influencers. They’re all silent about it until Johnson claims that he’s a “victim,” then there’s this sudden rush of “Yeah… yeah - that’s it. Me too! I’m a victim too!”

Uh huh…

Just be patient.

With all due respect, fuck the normies. The fediverse is better off without them.

People on every single relatively small forum ever in the history of the internet have gotten frustrated and angry when other people do that, because it’s spammy.

Do you not know the history of the term “spam?”

It’s from a Monty Python skit

That’s what the front page of a forum (or the inbox of an email account) looks like when someone “spams” it - like “spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam.”

The part that really gets me is the news media taking him seriously.

I keep waiting for a moment when some reporter is going to start talking about Trump’s latest, then just stop in the middle and say, “You know? That’s it. I just cant do it any more. This guy is a blithering lunatic and I’m done pretending he’s not.”

Not like I actually expect that - I’m much more cynical than that. Still though…

This is an example of a thing I’ve said repeatedly about Trump - I’m willing to bet that he’s 100% sincere about this. He’s not dissembling or diverting - he actually, sincerely believes that he had every right to interfere in whatever ways he wanted.

Why?

Because he’s a near-total sociopath. I don’t think that concepts of truth and falsehood or right and wrong are even coherent to him. I think his entire measure of everything is wholly personal - if he wants it, then it’s right and if he doesn’t, then it’s wrong, and if he believes it, then it’s true, and if he doesn’t, then it’s false. And it really is that simple. It’s not that he lies, but that he lives in a fantasy world in which whatever he believes is true and whatever he wants is right.

Just the opposite. I’m the one who goes off to do something else at family gatherings because they just talk and talk and talk.

Though it’s not so much that they talk so much as that it’s just the same stuff over and over - alternately, my brother slavishly regurgitating right-wing techbro quasi-libertarian bullshit and my mom reciting in excruciating detail some anecdote that’s maybe vaguely related to the topic at hand and that she’s told countless times already, because it’s her go-to every time something in that vicinity comes up.

And what I wouldn’t give to know them less well…

Why do you people RANDOMLY scatter ALL caps words through EVERYTHING you write?

Is it SOME sort of Pavlovian THING? Like you see a SENTENCE with a random assortment OF all caps words, and THAT says to you that IT’S the kind of FAKE truth you PREFER?

Late 2d - gen4 and gen5 - was the perfect balance IMO.

And speaking of bridges, compare a modern loading-zoned bridge with Skyarrow.

Airbnb is a fine example of a sort of variation on enshittification.

The way it works is a new company with a new and notably cost-effective way of doing things comes along and is unsurprisingly wildly successful. And then, inevitably, that leads to them hiring a whole raft of executive parasites who all have to be paid obscene salaries for doing nothing of any real value, which means the company needs to raise prices and cut back on services in order to generate more profit to pay those salaries. And meanwhile, the new executives, with nothing of any note that they actually need to or even can do, but with a need to create some illusion that they’re necessary, have pointless meetings in which they propose and wrangle about and eventually approve and implement new policies and new plans that are generally awful.

And pretty quickly and not coincidentally the new company ends up at least as bloated, mismanaged, overpriced and under-performing as the companies they so recently replaced.

See also: Uber, DoorDash and the entire streaming industry.

And by imposing the partition plan instead of holding a plebiscite, the UN overtly violated its own charter.

It strikes me that what we have here is basically the plot of Frankenstein, played out over 80 years of world history…