This is fascism 101.

Fascism is at least as much an economic system as a political one, or more precisely, it’s more like an economic system hiding behind a political system.

And the way the economic system works is very simple - private ownership of the means of production combined with an overt and institutionalized revolving door between business and government, so that the end result is plutocratic oligarchy.

Basically, it’s taking the system that already existed in the US, by which the wealthy bought access to political power mostly surreptitiously and nominally illegally unless they followed specific restrictions, and legitimizes and formalizes and institutionalizes it and moves it right out into the open.

And behind all of the white supremacist and christian nationalist and reactionary conservative rhetoric, this was always the real goal.

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.

All I know is that Kagi triggered my scam alarms from the start, and moving into the browser market just made them ring even louder.

What “us?”

I’m going to be right there alongside her, on my way to an execution too.

And so are you.

I wonder how she’s going to feel about this choice a few years down the line, when President-for-life Trump orders her execution.

Very much so (and there’s at least one patient gamers community around, because I’ve posted to one).

The only advantage I can see to playing a game on release is taking part in that first rush of interest, but I’m antisocial enough that that doesn’t appeal to me anyway, so I’m not missing anything there.

Beyond that, I think playing a game at least a year or so after release has all of the advantages. The initial flurry of absolute love vs. absolute hate has died down so it’s easier to get a broad view of the quality, the game is more stable, the price is better, dlc and expansions are out and generally packaged with the game, and best of all, in this current era, I can most likely buy it from GOG and actually have the full game, DRM-free, on my system.

And there are a bajillion good games out there, just waiting for me to discover them.

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.

I’d say more the latter, but people are multifaceted, so it’s likely not quite the case that it’s people being their true inner selves as just indulging a part of their true inner selves.

Oddly, this sort of thing is the reason that I tend to think that MTG is not as stupid as she appears to be (and the reason I responded to an earlier thread on the subject to ask people what they thought her ratio of malicious to stupid was).

It actually all started with the Jewish space lasers thing, but this one reminded me of it.

She’s clearly stupid (and angry - a common combination among her supporters too). But I just can’t convince myself that she’s so incredibly stupid that she actually believes this. I mean - there’s stupid, but then there’s so frighteningly stupid that she shouldn’t have even been able to survive to adulthood, and this is much more toward the latter.

I guess anything’s possible, but…

Let’s not kid ourselves - Israel will target whatever and whoever the fuck it wants to, entirely regardless of possible consequences, and the US won’t do anything meaningful about it, ever.

That was basically my view for a long time (though phrased much more entertainingly than I likely ever could have), but I’ve started to think that at least some portion of it is conscious malice - that she’s not as stupid as she appears.

Boebert, by contrast, clearly is as stupid as she appears. Admittedly, MTG could just have better instincts (they couldn’t hardly be worse), but I think it’s more likely that there’s at least some faint spark of intelligence there, such that she can at least sometimes recognize a particularly useful situation in which to unleash her anger and stupidity.

Or maybe not…

So what do you think MTG’s stupidity to malice ratio is?

In a sense, everything she says and does is malicious, but I think an awful lot of it isn’t technically motivated by malice - it’s just that she’s angry and stupid, so it just ends up also being malicious.

50/50? 60/40? 40/60?

I don’t think it’s any less than about 30% stupid, and I’d be surprised if it’s even that low. Yes - it’s certainly possible for a politician to cultivate an air of stupidity as a disarming cover for their malice, but I just don’t think she has it in her, and particularly not for an extended period. She really has to be, at least to some notable degree, pretty much as angry and stupid as she appears.

Identity in general doesn’t matter much on forums (as opposed to microblogs, like Twitter or Mastodon). Forums are focused on topics rather than people, and what is said is generally more important than who says it.

I keep wondering why we don’t see more of this.

IMO, planting trees is the most obvious and basic response to climate change. Literally what they evolved to do is to remove carbon compounds from the atmosphere.

They’re not going to solve the problem alone, but they’re such an obvious benefit, and planting them is something every community and even every individual can do right now.

Yeah! It’s obviously a deliberate manipulation when Google just links to negative stories about him instead of the positive ones, like… like… um… uh…

No, that’s not smug elitism at all. Smug elitism was when the limousine liberals were jetting around the country to go to $10,000 a plate dinners and wring their hands over the fact that the ignorant hicks in flyover country wouldn’t vote for them.

#Joy Genocide is realpolitik. It’s the DNC and Harris trying to juggle the fact that they need to run on positives to counter Trump’s negatives with the fact that if she makes even the tiniest hint that she’d cut off the flow of arms to Israel, a whole bunch of fabulously wealthy and influential individuals, corporations and lobbying groups who profit off of it would stop at nothing to utterly destroy her.

It has nothing at all to do with elitism and everything to do with the simple fact that the US federal government is wholly owned by special interests, and those involved in the Israeli military/industrial money laundering scam are among the most influential of them.

WTF?

My work with Democrats started in high school, when I was an alternate-delegate for Hillary Clinton.

Then you just weren’t paying attention, because that was the peak of Democratic smug elitism. That was the period when it was just about impossible to read anything by or about any Democrats without seeing them making scoffing, condescending references to "flyover country " and “Jesusland.” The Democrats of the early 2000s weren’t just elitist, but overt about it - they didn’t just think they were better than everyone else (and particularly everyone outside of New England and Cascadia) - they told us so, on a virtually daily basis.

Either you’re shamefully ignorant or a fraud, because without a doubt the current Democrats are less - not more, but less - elitist than they’ve been at least since Bill Clinton.