WatDabney

No

Really, he’s barely even a person at all. Mostly he’s just a vehicle for his massive ego.

Shapiro is one of the best examples (alongside Paul Krugman until he recently went rogue) of what I think of as an unconscious volunteer tool.

That is to say, I don’t think he consistently spews rhetoric that benefits the oligarchs as some sort of deliberately self-serving scheme (as opposed to for instance Jesse Watters).

I think he spews rhetoric consistently beneficial to the oligarchs because some among the oligarchy told him how much of a genius he was when he first started spewing it, and now his ego won’t allow him to do anything else, no matter the bizarre quasi-logical contortions he has to go through.

In the same sense that chlamydia is much better than syphilis.

And all because a bunch of psychopathic, quasi-religious asswipes won’t stop murdering people until they rule everything from the river to the sea, and they managed to browbeat and/or con a deranged kiddy-diddlsr into doing the bulk of their dirty work for them.

No matter where you go, there you are.

Trump claims massive welfare fraud in Maryland and sends in ICE in 3, 2, 1…

This has been the plan from the beginning, as I’ve noted repeatedly - to kill as many Palestinians as it takes to terrorize the survivors into either fleeing or submitting to direct Israeli rule.

At this point I just wonder what their angle is.

I don’t credit the possibility that they’re sincere. They didn’t just spontaneously grow empathy and principles and integrity and ethics, and if they’d possessed any of those qualities in the past, they would’ve been reporting the truth then.

So there’s something else going on here.

Cynically, I expect that factions in the government are moving against a few key players specifically - most notably Netanyahu - and that the goal is to make a big show of removing them, then stop reporting on the suffering and go back to all propaganda all the time in order to hopefully head off the growing threat of internal opposition by throwing a few of the grosser right-wingers under the bus, but to not fundamentally change anything about the situation or in any way even slow down the genocide.

Thanks for the clarification - I sort of suspected that, but all of my first-hand knowledge of it is 10+ years out of date.

I’m pretty sure that a bit of investigation would reveal a correspondence between Loomer influencing Trump and Loomer visiting him for private “meetings.”

Really.

Yes. That’s why they call it a “spectrum.”

Last I knew, the accepted term was “high-functioning autism.”

The last chapter was already great, but seeing it all from Akira’s perspective just made it all that much better

Emulated on a PC.

In about '98, I discovered SNES9x. I had an SNES hooked up to my TV at the time, but as soon as I discovered how convenient it was to play on a PC instead, I just stopped using it and eventually boxed it up and put it away. And I haven’t looked back.

Snowflake.

Huh… they just did Yemen the other day and they’re already back to Syria. So Lebanon can expect their turn… sometime this weekend?

At this point, every attempt at this ludicrously dishonest spin can and should be met with the same one-word response - “Mamdani.”

There is no rule of law under the Trump regime.

It strikes me that it might actually be a bit of plain, old-fashioned trolling - deliberstely poor but with no signal that it’s satire, just to draw more or less the response I posted, or more broadly to reflect poorly on the point it claims to be making.

It’s strange, whatever it is.

Is this some sort of joke or did somebody actually unironically do a vividly piss-poor job of writing an essay attempting to make the case that writing with AI is not shameful?

Of course he was briefed - he undoubtedly ordered it.

He’s surrounded himself with cringing, amoral and generally stupid sycophants who, even if they had the brains and initiative to implement something of their own volition, wouldn’t dare do it anyway for fear that it might invite daddy’s wrath. So broadly, if it happened it’s because he told them to do it.

Now that said, there are at least two provisos:

1. He likely didn’t know any specifics, because he can’t be bothered to pay attention to things like that, and his initial order consisted of something like “I want you to go over there and stick it to that son of a bitch Bolton!” and that was the extent of his interest in it.

2. It’s possible that he was briefed and either didn’t realize it because he wasn’t paying attention or immediately forgot about it because he’s increasingly senile.

Like they’re going to actually admit that they’re corrupt, dishonest and blinkered by ideology and bias.