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

Can’t starve people to death if other people are allowed to give them food.

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.

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.

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.

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…

Mmm… possibly. Though I did know one flabby tweaker, years ago. I have no idea how he managed it - maybe he was just flabby instead of obese?

But yeah… as a general rule…

And it is possible I guess that Trump naturally developed a personality that just coincidentally is a spot-on match for a tweaker.

It’s just that thinking about Trump’s behavior of late, and particularly this thing with Loomer, put me so in mind of paranoid Hitler withdrawing to the bunker with Eva, and then it all just clicked.

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.

It still surprises me sometimes how stupid he is.

The donor class doesn’t really care about Trump’s mental (and psychological) issues, and really don’t even care much about Trump at all. They’re not actually supporting him - they’re supporting the handlers and advisers with which they intend to surround him, and the policies (and primarily Project 2025) that they intend to enact through him.

If anything, his incoherence is, to them, a benefit, since he’s just that much easier to manipulate. Since he can’t form a coherent thought on his own, he can be readily filled up with someone else’s ideas, just so long as they’re framed correctly.

He’s like a wind-up toy - all they have to do is feed him carefully crafted stories and get him wound up and pointed in the right direction, then just let him go.

It’s really very simple.

If Haley sucks up to Trump and he wins, she’ll likely be appointed to a sinecure.

Harris isnt going to appoint her to anything, no matter how hard she sucks up.

And that’s it right there. To Haley, that’s the entire difference.

No - I mean Trump personally. Not the Trump campaign, which is a separate thing.

Yeah - the campaign, between the cultish rank and file and the cynically power-hungry donors and operatives - still has a lot of energy.

But Trump the person is visibly coming apart at the seams.

At this point, we’re watching Trump disintegrate day by day and virtually minute by minute.

I’m not sure if he’s even going to make it to the election. It’s really starting to look like he’s going to come apart at the seams before that.

Trump is rather obviously profoundly mentally ill, and it’s long past time for that to be noted every single time he goes off on another of his delusional rants.

Exactly as noted in the article, it’s not even enough to fact check him (though that should be done as a matter of course) because it’s not just that so much of what he says is false. The much more significant fact is that so much of what he says is insane. It’s not ideas and beliefs shaped and presented by a rational mind, but the disjointed ravings of a lunatic, and that’s exactly how it should be treated.

So… Meta’s “plan” is to dodge responsibility?

Gee whiz… I sure never saw that coming…

If he’s trying to say “Biden wanted this but Trump already started it”

Which “he?”

Zuckerberg blames it exclusively and entirely on the Biden administration.

that tells me BOTH parties requested it. Hence, if you don’t like Biden because of this, you don’t want Trump either. And of course, vice versa. In short, this policy is not unique to either party or administration.

Exactly, but that’s explicitly not what Zuckerberg is saying. He’s saying that it was entirely and exclusively Biden, which is a lie.

Why did Zuckerberg choose now to make this announcement and publicly reveal the inside play?

There’s actually a tidbit that the author notes that points at the obvious reason for it.

In his letter to Congressional investigators, he flat-out said what everyone else has been saying for years now.

In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content…

The author then goes on to say though:

A few clarifications. The censorship began much earlier than that, from March 2020 at the very least if not earlier.

What’s significant about that? Trump was president then.

So Zuckerberg is rather obviously trying to pin entirely on the Biden administration a set of policies that were already in place under Trump.

To what end? Obviously to do the same thing he did in 2016 and 2020 - to overtly promote Trump.

This particular one certainly not coincidentally plays into the whole Republican narrative that the Democrats are oppressive and dishonest, which in turn is meant to provide a context for their intention to dispute the election results when Trump loses. Zuckerberg is simply doing his part to further that narrative.