Brave Little Hitachi Wand

It still is a right wing position, but the trouble is not right or left specifically, it’s that the empire is overextended with its military obligations, the dollar has been badly debased, the US pays more in debt than its GDP, and despite all our spending, the US couldn’t possibly meet all of its military obligations if more than one big thing happened at a time. The dollar is still the world reserve currency, but only because there’s not yet a credible replacement.

The sad fact is that instead of minding our business, America wanted to be an empire - and empires have a pretty standard lifecycle. I don’t think it’s a question of if, but when, it goes the way of Spain and GB.

My sincerest wish is that you’re correct. And to see it come true, of course.

We Americans used to at least try not to look for “foreign monsters abroad”. I was raised on that sort of old fashioned idea. Do you ever feel like an impossible person from a land that never existed?

He’s reaching LLM levels of sentience in this pic

Right - I won’t call it a good thing to let people de-skill on reading comprehension skills, but they’re donating their labour to a public benefit! I’m hardly going to scold them as if I was their professor.

Speaking very generally, it’s still conceding an amount of human intelligence and there are problems with it that are worth talking about, but it’s a use of AI that at least defers to human judgment, and as long as users are still personally researching and writing their own edits I honestly don’t hate it. Much.

Custard’s last stand

The idea of cyber/hybrid warfare against Russia is pretty interesting. Would be interesting at any rate to see how they like having a troll brigade stirring up their populace.

Ready to fight to the last

Gaslighting

Pointless to sign anything

Obstructing

Ukraine’s government is illegitimate

Projecting

… Where do I know this playbook from?

“It’s a dangerous world out there,” America grinned, “a lot of nutters.”

It is largely unpleasant, deliberately unrewarding yet addictive, occasionally punished, politically slanted towards billionaires, and a privacy nightmare. If anything it’s a testament to the human desire for connection that we’ve used it this long.

Just fuck a dude already, stop making it our problem!

I read the “eith” typo as either. I think if there was real footage of Hillary pegging the shit out of Trump, it would make up for about 10 percent of the last decade. Which is nothing to sneeze at, if I’m being real.

Valid points, with love to George. But there’s a bit missing from that pithy take. The reasons you don’t see enough “good politicians” are the same systemic reasons we say “all cops are bastards”.

The carrots and sticks in the system are all lined up to weed out a certain kind of person, and to give another kind as much help as they need. The carrots I’m thinking of are campaign finance and the sticks are corporate media.

The American political system loves people who are cynical mercenaries, vituperative demogoues, or any alloy of those traits flexible enough to find a lasting niche. The exceptions prove the rule, to my mind.

You will own no libs, and you will be happy

Exactly. He needs people across the globe to condemn this plan. He’s a comedian, he knows how to deal with shabby hecklers.

The point of this sort of overt evil is to get caught, and get away with it anyway. It’s a display of power.

People who pay little attention but enjoy cruelty and see lots of political memes. Just guessing.

They are morons for following illegal orders. Modern GPS can practically tell when you leaned over to fart, we cannot assume this was accidental.