I sincerely think it's broadly accurate - that, for the Republicans and especially for Trump, (most) every accusation is a confession.

There's a simple psychological element to it, most often illustrated by moralists who rail against perversion of one form or another, only to be revealed to be perverts.

There's another aspect to it though, and I think this is more often the case with Trump specifically - it's a way to proactively undermine someone else's accusation against you. If you can get your accusation out there first, then they end up sounding sort of like a child saying, "I know you are but what am I?"

If we're going to go all conspiratorial, here's my theory:

Both campaigns are dealing with old men with diminished faculties.

There's some drug cocktail(s) that both campaigns have been using to pep the doddering old farts up for public appearances.

If you'll remember, very shortly before the debate, the accusation that "Biden's on drugs" made the rounds, and Trump made some noises about demanding a drug test.

For some reason - possibly fear, possibly determination in the face of a challenge, possibly a subtle communication that the Trump campaign had some hard evidence they would, if pushed, release publicly - that led to the Biden team withholding his customary drug cocktail.

Trump, meanwhile, was dosed to the eyeballs.

And that was the contrast we saw - Trump was on drugs, while Biden, for whatever reason, for that night alone, was not.

Remember - for the Republicans broadly and especially for Trump, every accusation is a confession.

It's really very, very simple.

Regulation of things like pollution serves the interests of the people broadly, but undermines the interests of a handful of obscenely wealthy sociopaths.

And much of the current Supreme Court explicitly works NOT to serve the interests of the people broadly, but to serve the interests of the obscenely wealthy sociopaths.

And that's it, right there. Just as has happened in numerous past civilizations, the power structure in the US has become so warped and corrupted - so entirely in the control of sociopaths - that it not only no longer even pretends to serve the interests of the people, but tends to explicitly work against their interests.

And the hell of it is that the ruling class is so far gone in corruption and shallow self-interest - so sincerely deeply mentally ill - that they don't recognize that ultimately they're working against their own interests - that serving the interests of the people maintains the health of the society from which they benefit, and that working against the interests of the people undermines that health. Like any other mindless parasite, they're going to destroy their host, and in so doing, ultimately destroy themselves.

And the US will just be added to the ever-growing list of societies destroyed through the machinations of a relative few profoundly mentally ill people granted undue wealth and power.

Mm... sort of.

The US had the enormous advantage of starting its life with material resources of which most can only dream, so it couldn't help but achieve some fairly significant success, and as long as things were relatively easy, it generally did. But it never quite managed to pull its head out of its ass. Its material advantages made it so that it generally managed to get by in spite of the fact that it's head was firmly lodged up its own ass, but that also meant that it never learned anything. So it just stayed in a diminishing circle of bad decisions until it reached a point at which smart decisions were necessary, and it revealed itself to be mostly incapable of making them.

And at the moment, it's actually subject to a mass movement that lauds the days of the bad decisions as the good old days, since the people still have their heads too far up their asses and can't recognize the reality that they were always bad decisions, that the prosperity that accompanied them was simply due to the US's enormous material advantages and in spite of, rather than because of, the bad decisions, and that a return to those bad decisions in an era in which those material advantages have been squandered is just going to make things even worse.

Which, granted, is still sort of a "good run" - much smarter people have still failed to do even close to as well, since they were stuck starting out with pretty much nothing but disadvantages.

But one can't help but wonder what could've been had we not had our heads so firmly lodged up our asses...

They know very well what they are doing. It’s just that their wealth isolates them from the consequences of it. They don’t care about healthcare, climate change, education, unemployment, because that’s for the 95% to worry about. They are rich enough to don’t give a fuck, and they feel safe doing so.

And that rather obviously describes someone who's rather obviously mentally ill.

Specifically, they lack empathy and have little to no conscience, so have little to no concern for the harm their decisions might cause to others. Those are the hallmarks of both antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy.

I pessimistically expected that.

If he bowed out and the Dems nominated a halfway decent candidate (which they likely wouldn't do, but that's a different subject), they'd demolish Trump. He'd lose so badly he couldn't even pretend it was fraudulent (though of course he'd claim that anyway, since he has the emotional maturity of a spoiled five-year-old). The race would instantly go from a terrifying risk to a complete rout.

But between Biden's ego and the DNC's determination to stick with a wholly-owned establishment neoliberal hack at all costs - even if it means losing - I expected that they wouldn't take this golden opportunity.

Literally, officially, it's now entirely legal under federal law for officials to accept and even solicit bribes for specific services rendered, just so long as they do it after, rather than before, the service is rendered.

They aren't even pretending to be a legitimate court of law any more - they're just a rubber-stamping service for the oligarchy.

The Supreme Court basically just ruled that it's perfectly acceptable for officials to accept and even ask for bribes, just so long as they wait a few weeks after the service for which the bribe is meant to pay.

Seriously. That's exactly what this ruling in effect says - that bribes are only bribes if they're paid before the service is rendered, and if they're paid after, that's perfectly fine.

And people still wonder why I'm such a cynic...

So as near as I can tell, the Supreme Court's goal is to create some vague illusion that corruption is not to be tolerated by making it a crime if and only if people with a specific interest in a specific ruling or piece of legislation offer a substantial amount of money or something of equivalent value while clearly communicating their intent to buy the influence of an official and said official then accepts the bribe, clearly announces their intent to act according to the bribe-payer's wishes solely because they've been paid to, then does so.

And in literally ALL other cases, it somehow won't count and will be entirely legal.

They called it a gratuity to try to divert attention from the bludgeoningly obvious fact that it's just a postdated bribe.

This is what this country has come to. In the face of an ever-growing failure of the government to represent the will of the people because their influence has been bought and paid for by moneyed interests, the Supreme Court is legalizing bribery.

Of course, it's certainly not a coincidence that one of the institutions that's been bought and paid for is the Supreme Court itself.

Transparent astroturfing.

The staff is laying a foundation so that when Trump - an arrogant, oblivious nitwit with the attention span of a five-year-old - inevitably comes out of it the obvious loser - they will already have the base primed to believe that that somehow reflects poorly on... Biden.

Already did, though instead of the bot, I blocked the entire instance.

Yes - it's pretty much a given, cynically, that a corrupt court is going to rule that corruption is legal.

As I often do, I wonder if this is going to be one of the things that future historians will point to as a notable event in the days leading up to the collapse of the US.

Right. Go back and reread it - that's what I said.

I don't see any possible way it couldn't. Every official is going to expect a "gratuity" in exchange for approving a contract, and every contractor who expects to succeed is going to go into every deal with the understanding that they're going to be expected to pay a "gratuity" after the deal is finalized.

The upshot of it all can only be wholly institutionalized pay-to-play, with only the ultimately entirely meaningless requirement that the payment has to be deferred instead of up front.

Bezos isn't going to miss a chance to dick people over. Because apparently he's not rich enough yet.

Imagine what the world would be like if we treated sociopathy as the vividly destructive mental illness it so obviously is, rather than rewarding sociopaths with wealth and power.

How deliciously ironic that this is paywalled.

And like virtually every one of the similar complaints, this comes from someone who isn't otherwise active, so basically boils down to "I've noticed that other people aren't providing me with enough content. What can we do to get other people to provide me with more content?"

If you want to get more activity in niche communities, POST! And not just once - do it again and again, day in and day out.

The communities that you appreciate didn't just spring into being - they grew, over time, because people did exactly that.

On brand.

Gotta love the irony of Gaetz condemning McCarthy for not being "a team player."

It's so perfectly appropriate that that abusive piece of shit Steven Crowder opposes no-fault divorce. He's just such a vivid example of the sort of emotionally stunted manchild who opposes it and of why they oppose it, and thus of why it has to continue to exist.

Actually, I think it's amusingly perfect that the tankies were hyperfocused on conjectural threats posed by capitalists and entirely missed the much more imminent threat posed by a government.

So basically the corporate equivalent of slipping a traffic cop a $100, then him conveniently deciding that you're free to go.

Everybody else doing it.

Imagine a world in which the people who were most well-known and respected for their political commentary were thoughtful, intelligent, rational people with actual integrity instead of a motley assortment of amoral grifters spewing cheap provocation for profit and painfully obvious lunatics barking at the moon.

Seriously - how can any person be so brazenly and thoroughly warped?

I can only assume that, like so many of the fabulously wealthy, she's profoundly mentally ill, such that she really can't grasp the enormous human cost that fulfilling her petty, selfish and ultimately pointless desires would entail. It can only be the case that she genuinely can't grasp the fact that the millions of people who would be made to suffer or die for this are actual people - actual beings with lives and loved ones who are every bit as important to them as hers are to her.

It's either that or she's genuinely evil, in the purest sense of the word, and on a scale the world has rarely seen.

So which is it Ms. Adelson? Are you insane or simply evil? There's absolutely no doubt - none at all - that it's one or the other.

My first reaction when I saw it was that it appears to be the case that the justices are not only corrupt, but stupid. Or pathological. Or both.

It's not just that it's unenforceable - even though it's unenforceable, it also goes out of its way to be weak and mealy-mouthed. They couldn't even manage to make any clear statements - it's all vaguely non-specific gestures that boil down to "we sort of think that justices maybe oughta not do things that might look bad to other people." As if the whole notion of judicial ethics is so far outside of their awareness that they not only can't impose any, but can't even manage to put together a passable pretense.

Presumably it was supposed to help - to make it look as if they do actually have some ethics. And it resoundingly failed.

What it did for me was move me from reasonably sure that at least some of them are corrupt to dead certain that they all are, and not only corrupt but so grossly corrupt that they don't even know how to pretend otherwise.

Years ago, there was a poster that would periodically pop up on the IMDb boards and post a bunch of really bizarre paranoid delusions in a few hours, then vanish again. The story around the boards was that she was a mental patient, and she'd slip away from her institution for a while and post, then they'd take her back.

I'm reminded of her every time I read one of Trump's rants, because they sound exactly the same.

Of course he wants immunity for cops - he dreams of the day when he'll have his own murder squads and be able to simply have anyone who might dare to oppose him killed.

And so do his supporters.

And so do cops.

That entire article is nauseating.

A fucking group of psychopaths spending hundreds of millions of dollars in order to try to skew the elections so that they can more comfortably pursue their preferred pastimes of murdering Palestinian civilians, stealing their land and slurping up US taxpayer money.

How does anyone even live like that? Seriously - that's the thing I most don't get. How could any human being be such a reprehensible piece of shit that they can actually get up in the morning and spend their day trying to manipulate an election because they don't want the person who criticizes them for murdering civilians to win - they want to be able to murder civilians in peace? How do these people even live with themselves?

Yes and no.

My parents are thankfully at the age at which they just don't give much of a shit. They think that there was a lot of shady political shenanigans surrounding the whole thing (and I'd say they're objectively correct about that), but they cynically expect that and mostly ignore it. They talked to their doctors and came to understand that covid is real, and dangerous, and that the vaccines do have some risks, but the benefits outweigh the risks, and that was enough for them to take it seriously and take proper precautions.

My brothers on the other hand...

I'm the oldest of three, and they're both... well... angry, spiteful, delusional, Fox News and talk radio consuming, gun-toting, Trump-voting, road-raging reactionaries. So they both lined right up and marched in lockstep with the expected dogma, to my complete lack of surprise.

So yes - our relations have been strained over it, but really it's not quite accurate to say that it's because of that, since that's just one of the many, many MANY things on which we disagree.

Which "US pressure" was that? When they vetoed the UN resolution? Or when they bypassed Congress to hand the IDF even more munitions with which to murder even more Palestinians? Or when they did it again, because apparently the IDF wasn't able to murder enough Palestinians with the arms they'd already gotten?

Sort of like applying "pressure" to a friend to diet by taking them to a buffet and saying, "Eat up! It's on me!"

And not coincidentally, exactly as effective.

The media need to stop feeding the troll.

Russia is seeking to subvert Western support for Ukraine and disrupt the domestic politics of the United States and European countries, through propaganda campaigns supporting isolationist and extremist policies...

And it's certainly not a coincidence that those isolationist and extremist policies are being actively promoted by the MAGA Republicans.

The whole "politically motivated" complaint is such a brazenly dishonest diversion that it just astonishes me that people use it, much less get away with it.

Alito told a filmmaker posing as a conservative activist that ProPublica “gets a lot of money” to dig up “any little thing they can find,” suggesting the reporting was politically motivated.

How does that even matter?

The simple fact of the matter is that, whatever their motivations might be, people either are or are not going to find evidence of corruption, and the one and only thing that determines that is whether or not such evidence exists.

Alito, were he so inclined, could've very easily have made it so that nobody, no matter how determined or for what reason, could've uncovered evidence of his corruption. All he had to do was not be corrupt.

If there was no corruption there could be no evidence of corruption, and then even the most sinister and underhanded attempt to make him look bad would fail.

On the other hand, if there is evidence there to be found, then the motivations of the people who uncover it are entirely irrelevant - the ONLY thing that matters is what they uncovered.

Seriously, how does the assertion that something like this is "politically motivated" even have the illusion of credence? How is it met with anything other than a blank look and a "So what?"

Wow... Maher on Rogan.

That's such a mass of overconfidence bias in one place that it seems like they should've collapsed into some sort of Dunning-Kruger singularity.

No surprise there.

Israel's actions in Gaza are morally indefensible.

So its defenders cannot, and for the most part don't even bother to try to, sincerely engage with criticism.

Instead, they rely on diversions, misrepresentations, character assassination, censorship, intimidation, harassment and violence, simply because that's all they have.

Neurotypical does mean pretty much exactly that, with only the clarification that while communication is significant, it extends beyond that.

That's a lot of why the terminology "neurotypical" and "neurodivergent" exists in the first place - because at this point, it doesn't even pretend to be an objective measure of mental health, but simply a pair of labels with which to describe the degrees to which people do or do not accord to current societal standards.

For example - posit a society in which it has become socially acceptable and even expected, when you meet someone, to punch them in the face.

If one were to ask a person how they feel about punching other people in the face, it's fairly obvious that the objectively psychologically sound view is that that's a thing they would not and likely could not do.

But to actually act in that way - to be unwilling or even unable to do it in a society in which it's the norm and thus the expected and sanctioned behavior - would be "neurodivergent." The conclusion would be that one must suffer from some psychological or physiological affliction that makes it so that one is unwilling or unable to act in a way that accords with expected behavior or societal norms. That one is "neurodivergent" instead of "neurotypical."

I can't imagine what it must be like to be so morally bankrupt.

Clearly, they know that what they're doing in Gaza is evil, and they know that the only hope they have of evading the entirely justified condemnation of the rest of the world is to hide it.

History will not judge them kindly. No matter what they do, they're not going to be able to hide the evidence of their evil forever.

It's so bizarre to me that a politician saying that the grotesquely corrupt psychopath in charge of an apartheid nation that's carrying out a genocide on one front and an incremental land grab on another while they also try to provoke yet another nation into attacking so they can play the victim as they continue their egregious crimes "should resign" is a newsworthy event.

The world is in the hands of insane monsters.