Given the opportunity, no, he’s not going to prosecute his foes. He’s going to have them killed.

But until he can count on getting away with that, he’ll have to, and will, settle for just prosecuting them.

Exactly what he’s doing is pushing for them to protect the scumbags he intends to appoint from the scrutiny that’s sure to expose just how scummy they are.

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.

I hadn’t put it together before, but Israel is sort of an international case of affluenza - a spoiled, indulged rich kid who ends up a psychopath because daddy’s money has always given them whatever they want and shielded them from ever having to face the consequences of whatever they do.

It’s long past time to cut off their allowance.

And Netanyahu’s obvious provocation strategy is playing out exactly as intended.

Right. The country in which officials insist that soldiers should be entirely free to sexually abuse Palestinians can investigate itself.

Israel is a rogue state.

Israel is a rogue state.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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…

Write enormous screeds about how literally insane it is that the world is being actively destroyed at the behest of and for the benefit of a wealthy, powerful and profoundly mentally ill few.

Play video games and work in the garden.

The first likely accomplishes nothing of any note - even if other people recognize it, part of the insanity is that the psychopaths in power have arranged things so that nobody can stop them.

The second doesn’t accomplish much of anything either, but they’re at least situations in which my efforts aren’t systematically undermined and exploited for the benefit of psychopaths. Instead of being rigged so that whatever I do benefits the ruling class, they’re situations in which I can actually make choices solely based on what I think will work best in a given situation and reap the rewards if I choose correctly.

Passive genocide, according to plan and right on schedule.

I don’t believe that my approval or anyone else’s is at all relevant.

My position is that there’s only one person who has the right to decide whether or not it’s acceptable to trade sex for money, and that’s the person entering into the trade. Assuming that all other contractual requirements are met - they’re of legal age and acting of their own free will and so on - it’s just as much their right to trade sex for money as to trade ditch digging or code writing or coffee brewing or meeting taking for money.

(edited for clarity)

If “the blending of opinion with news and the promotion of… propaganda” was actually considered just cause for a low credibility rating, the Jerusalem Post would have one too.

Curiously enough though, it doesn’t.

One would suspect then that MBFC somehow fails to recognize Jerusalem Post’s brazen bias, but in fact they do recognize it, and point it out on their page, though they do notably only sort of mention it in passing, as if it’s not all that important. They also note two failed fact checks, yet still rate it High Credibility and Mostly Factual.

Mondoweiss, meanwhile, receives on its page a highly emotive and hectoring account of what only really amounts to the same bias as the Jerusalem Post but in the opposite direction - pro-Palestinian and anti-zionist instead of anti-Palestinian and pro-zionist - and in spite of no failed fact checks, is ranked as Low Credibility and Mixed Factual.

The only reasonable conclusion is that MBFC is itself biased. Which is, of course, the exact risk one invites when one entrusts a third party to purportedly rate bias.

I can of course block it and likely will, but that doesn’t really go far enough. A purported bias watchdog that is itself biased is rather obviously an abuse of the bot system, and should therefore be banned.