What the fucking fuck?!

Those fucking psychopaths actually want to punish Mexico for experiencing a drought?

Ah - just went and read the article, and what it actually centers on is a sugar cane industry that's been wedged into south Texas (undoubtedly with big fat bribes paid to politicians).

Sugar cane is notoriously water-intensive, and likely should've never been grown in south Texas in the first place. It's near certain that the sugar cane industry is actually the most significant proximate cause of the very drought conditions that are now a problem. So in effect, it's the US, at the behest of Texas legislators and interests, wanting to punish Mexico because the Texas sugar cane industry wasted all of the available water and still wants more.

A similar entirely contrived "problem" exists in south Florida, in which the heavily subsidized sugar cane industry and their legion of wholly corrupt politicians are the proximate cause of the draining of the Everglades.

A gratuity is just a postdated bribe, and everybody including the Supreme Court knows it.

...a perfect, brilliant, beautiful statement that I make...

Doesn't anyone else notice how often he makes these cringily exaggerated statements, and more to the point, recognize how clearly they illustrate the staggering depths of his delusions?

That's still the thing I most notably don't get about Trump - the man is obviously profoundly mentally ill, so why and how is he even taken seriously? How in the world is it even possible for such a painfully obvious gibbering lunatic to not only run for public office, but quite possibly win?

There's another whole aspect to the recurring pushes to remove the dams that's pretty much always left out too.

Likely the biggest beneficiaries if the dams were removed would be power companies, who, even with the dams generally operating at a tiny fraction of capacity, are stuck having to sell cheap hydroelectric power at low rates.

If the dams were removed, they'd be able to justify contracting (often with their own subsidiaries) for the construction of expensive new power plants with lower capacity and higher operating costs and would then be able to convince the PUCs to grant them massive rate increases.

Ah, but I'm sure that has nothing to do with the mysteriously well-funded campaigns to remove the dams that get a new round of publicity every few years...

No - piracy, since it always carries at least some amount of difficulty and risk, is easy to compete against. And in fact, paid services, including Netflix, have proven that over and over. All it takes is to offer dependable convenience and quality and to treat customers well. People are always willing to pay a reasonable price for that.

The problem is that piracy becomes difficult to compete against when, as Netflix is currently doing, you shift from a business model of providing good service under fair terms for a reasonable price to a business model of providing crappy service under onerous terms for too much money, because the greedy, selfish, short-sighted sacks of shit at the top want to make even more obscene amounts of money. That's the point at which piracy gains enough of an advantage to outweigh its difficulties and risks.

And when that's the case, it's pretty obvious what the real problem is.

They're like five year olds...

They're sort of like the old Italian man in Catch-22:

"I was a fascist when Mussolini was on top, and I am an anti-fascist now that he has been deposed. I was fanatically pro-German when the Germans were here to protect us against the Americans, and now that the Americans are here to protect us against the Germans I am fanatically pro-American."

The only difference is that, as you note, NYT's focus is on their own gravitas. Their goal isn't merely survival, but to maintain their image as an authoritative voice in national affairs. And they do that in large part simply by currying favor with whoever currently has the biggest coattails.

Just another step toward making used-to-be-Twitter a safe space for cowardly fascists.

Imagine Israel, of all countries, crying to the UN, of all organizations, about a purported "flagrant violation of narional sovereignty, international law and Security Council resolutions."

I laughed out loud when I read that. As if that isn't exactly what Israel does virtually on a daily basis, and has done for decades now, and while thumbing their nose at the UN the entire time.

Setting aside constitutional issues, think about how insane and delusional you have to be to decide that the fact that a significant number of people are protesting your policies means that protesting needs to be prohibited punished.

I'm GenX. I've spent my entire life watching the Boomers fuck things up, then having to wade through the debris they leave in their wake.

I'm not expecting that to change now.

So... by my count, the board of directors actually outnumber the employees.

At a "non-profit" (until that was revoked) company that gets most of its funding through Patreon.

Years from now (and at this rate, not very many of them), when people wonder how it was that such a promising venture that championed decentralization turned into just another enshittified megacorporation squatting over a piece of internet real estate and extracting rent to pay obscene salaries to a handful of executives - this is how. We're watching as the foundation is being laid, right now.

How is anybody even surprised by this?

This is exactly the sort of thing Beth has been moving towards ever since their first ham-handed attempt to monetize mods deservedly blew up in their faces.

They didn't give up on the idea - they just shifted to a strategy of doing it incrementally.

And this is just the latest step in that ongoing process.

Think about how bad it's (very deliberately) going to be by the time TES 6 finally comes out...

In all seriousness, I sort of pity conservatives.

They're sort of like the one kid in kindergarten who could never manage to figure out which plastic peg went in which hole and would just get frustrated and throw things. Except that they never grew out of it. Here they are, twenty or thirty or sixty years later, still unable to grasp the simple fact that the world just is what it is and the round peg isn't going to go in the square hole no matter how much you pound on it, and still angry over it, as if it's some sort of vast conspiracy rather than just the fact that they're fucking morons.

That has to be an unpleasant way to live.

Of course, they're such vile and loathsome and destructive assholes that my pity is short-lived, but still...

Just makes me wonder how many Palestinians they've murdered in similar circumstances, and we just didn't hear about it because they weren't Israelis, so it was treated as if it didn't matter.

I sure hope so.

There's a significant number of Trumpers who are just itching to put on their brown shirts red hats and start wreaking violence.

At this point, it's not really a question of if they do it, but just of when. On that point at least, Trump is right. He just doesnt acknowledge the fact that the reason those people are reaching a breaking point is that he's self-servingly fed them a steady diet of propaganda and hatred.

So they're going to go off the rails - they're vtoo ignorant and too angry and too misled to do anything else.

The worst-case scenario would be that they do it after Trump has (god forbid) been elected. Because then they're going to get official sanction. They really will be the new brownshirts.

The best-case scenario is that they do it soon, and in response to Trump being rightfully sentenced for the crimes of which he has been rightfully convicted. In that case, they're going to have neither the illusion of legitimacy nor official sanction, and they'll just reveal themselves as the lawless, petulant, violent asshats they are.

Normal.

In fact, I don't think there's a single person on the entire planet who doesn't make that exact choice, with the only differences between individuals being which things go in which categories. And, I guess, how aware they are of the fact that that's what they do.

Of course they do.

That's the central reason that bribes need to be kept out of politics (and don't feed me any of that shit about lobbying as speech - they're bribes obviously). It's not simply that it's dishonorable or dishonest to base government policy on bribes paid - much more importantly it's that allowing bribes rewards and thus selects for people who are vile, self-serving scumbags.

It's not an accident that the billionaires and the politicians are almost entirely foul pieces of shit - it's because our corrupt political system actually rewards foul pieces of shit and penalizes anyone with actual morals or integrity. It's not just that politicians can take bribes, but that they essentially have to, just to keep up with the other candidates who do. And similarly it's not that the wealthy and the corporations can pay bribes, but that they essentially have to, just to compete against the other wealthy people and corporations who do.

Allowing bribes just creates a political system that's effectively gatekept - "You have to be this corrupt to take part in this system." And the people who aren't that corrupt are locked out.

Trump is certainly the most foul, loathsome, corrupt piece of shit in this election (not that Biden isn't one too - just that Trump has achieved depths virtually unheard of, even in the cesspool of US politics). So Trump is naturally the one who's going to get the lion's share of bribes from the foul, loathsome pieces of shit who pay the most and biggest ones.

No - I don't agree that they're completely different.

"Made by AI" would be completely different.

"Made with AI" actually means pretty much the exact same thing as "AI was used in this image" - it's just that the former lays it out baldly and the latter softens the impact by using indirect language.

I can certainly see how "photographers" who use AI in their images would tend to prefer the latter, but bluntly, fuck 'em. If they can't handle the shame of the fact that they did so they should stop doing it - get up off their asses and invest some time and effort into doing it all themselves. And if they can't manage that, they should stop pretending to be artists.

Fuck you I won't do what you tell me.

Literally shameless.

just because they’re Jewish

Actually, a bit of quick research reveals that Brooklyn Museum, and Anne Pasternak specifically, have been the targets of protests since at least 2016, when the museum, under her directorship, put on a show called "This Place" that purported to be an unbiased look at Israel and Palestine, but was backed by pro-occupation funders.

In fact, the group that was organized in response to that show, called "Decolonize This Place," still exists and is still active.

So it's exceedingly safe to assume that she wasn't targeted "just because (she's) Jewish" but because for at least the past eight years, she, and the museum more broadly, have been seen to be sympathetic to colonialism broadly, and zionism specifically - so much so that at least one organization was formed and still exists specifically to protest them.

Here's the most concise source for that - an interview with Pasternak from 2018

Oh look - more intellectually dishonest anti-vaping propaganda...

I smoked for thirty years before I discovered vaping and switched. My lungs feel better now than they have at any other point within my memory.

But if whichever lying shitstains are responsible for this clearly deliberate propaganda campaign had their way about it, I would've never gotten that chance, and I'd still be smoking, and dying or dead.

And why? What's their goal? Why are they trying so hard, and so brazeny dishonestly, to undermine a thing that can save lives? What's their interest in making it impossible for people like me to have an alternative that's undeniably at the very least MUCH less of a health risk? Why do they want smokers to keep smoking, and keep dying?

I'm roundaboutly reminded of one of my favorite novels - Greener Than You Think, by Ward Moore.

It's a science fiction story about the end of the world that was written in the late 40s. The proximate cause of the end is all of the landmasses of Earth being smothered by a gigantic and very aggressive strain of Bermuda grass, but the real cause is the utter and complete failure, due to ignorance, greed, selfishness, short-sightedness, incompetence, arrogance and so on, of every attempt to combat it.

Funny thing:

The idea that protesting the slaughter of Palestinians equals antisemitism requires starting from the position that slaughtering Palestinians is a fundamental part of the Jewish identity.

There's really no alternative way to interpret that. If slaughtering Palestinians is not a fundamental part of the Jewish identity, then protesting such slaughter has nothing to do with Judaism, and thus cannot be antisemitic. It'd be like trying to claim that protesting cars is anti-Amish.

So all these people quoted here are essentially saying that slaughtering Palestinians is not just fundamental to being Jewish, but so deeply and uniquely fundamental - so much a part of Jewishness - that opposing such slaughter automatically equals opposing Jews.

Doesn't that sound sort of... antisemitic?

I think it started in earnest the day of his AMA, whenever that was.

It actually started long before that. Fuck U Spez was already a meme when all of the API/third-party app stuff took off, but at that point, it was still mostly a holdover from previous examples of Spez being a shithead. The thing that really gave it (new) life was that AMA.

Candidates for public office should be required to undergo a mental health assessment as part of the process of getting on the ballot, and those who score beyond (above or below, as may be relevant) particular thresholds are barred from seeking office.

I sincerely believe that there's no single thing we could do that would provide more benefit to the world than to get sociopaths and narcissists and megalomaniacs out of positions of power. Each and every one of the most notable and contentious politicians in the world today is, if you just take a step back and look at them honestly, blatantly profoundly mentally ill. Enough is enough.

They like the idea of somebody they think is on their side not giving a shit about the law, and they're too dull-witted and emotionally invested to recognize the simple fact that somebody who doesn't give a shit about the law doesn't give a shit about them either, and will betray them to get what he wants exactly as easily as he broke the law to get what he wants.

That's the thing with tyrants. They pretty much never come to power entirely on their own. It's nearly always the case that they come to power because some significant number of people ignored the clear warning signs and supported them anyway - actually believed that supporting this transparently power-hungry lying sack of shit was a good thing.

And then by the time those people figure out the score, it's too late.

For myself, other people's anger makes me really uncomfortable, and I avoid it as much as possible, in part specifically because if I don't, I end up sharing in it, but without a reason or a target. It's really unpleasant because in a sense, it's not real.

Real anger - my own anger - feels complete. Not that it's pleasant or anything - it's still anger. But in a way, it's a sort of relief to feel it, since it at least makes sense. I have a reason for it and a target for it, so it fits. Empathetic anger is weird and unsettling, since it's just there, but it's not a complete, sensible thing.

And you're right about targeted emotions, at least in my experience, and while anger is a good example, it's not the worst.

Grief is awful, because it's such a horrible, desolate feeling, and just that much worse when it doesn't even really mean anything.

Jealousy is another bad one - in fact, thinking about it, I'm tempted to say it's the worst of them all, because it's so unpleasant, and in multiple ways, and it's so entirely pointless without an actual reason or target (it's arguably fairly pointless even with both).

On a somewhat different note, just because I'm thinking about the trials and tribulations of affective empathy - embarrassment is weirdly bad. Partly it's that it's unpleasant, but more it's that it's such a common aspect of other people's enjoyment - there's a great deal of comedy that hinges on laughing at other people's embarrassment, and it's all completely lost on me, because I'm stuck just feeling pointlessly vicariously embarrassed.

Broadly, the way I have to deal with all of it is to try to avoid situations in which I'm going to be subjected to other people's unpleasant emotions, and if I find myself in one, to try to shut myself off from whatever they're feeling. I'm okay up to a point, but I can feel it coming if I'm getting to the point that it's going to suck me in, and pretty much all I can do then is resign myself to it or throw up a barricade and just shut it out. Which sort of ironically makes me come across as aloof - as if I'm insensitive rather than overly sensitive. That gnaws at me, but there really isn't much I can do about it, since I already have enough to deal with with my own emotions, and just don't have the fortitude to deal with everyone else's as well.

And yet again it cynically amuses me that AI has become "artificial" intelligence in the sense of "fake."

It's a shabby substitute for real intelligence, used by people who don't possess any of their own to impress other people who don't possess any of their own.

Well...

You're absolutely right, and that was very well-written to boot. But it's not the part that perplexes me. I likely just did a poor job of explaining myself.

I fully expect his intellectually and/or psychologically compromised supporters to fail or refuse to recognize his glaringly obvious insanity. As you note, he affirms their prejudices and tells them that the condemnation they so deservedly receive is actually some sort of evil conspiracy, and they grovel at his feet, lapping it up.

But that just accounts for a portion of his supporters and none of his opponents, and it's that remainder I wonder about - all of the people who are certainly rational enough to recognize his glaringly obvious derangement for what it is, but somehow just don't, or won't.

I have this recurring experience in which I read an essay or article from some more or less neutral site or even an oppositional site in which someone relates something that Trump said, then parses and analyzes it, as if it's a legitimate statement of supposed fact rather than the deranged ranting of someone who's painfully obviously profoundly mentally ill, and I can't even see how they managed to make it that far - how they didn't just stop halfway through relating whatever it was he said and throw their hands up and say, "This guy is a fucking lunatic!" Because he so blatantly obviously is.

That's what I don't get.

Dredge.

A very simple concept and gameplay loop that expands out into the bizarre and fantastic.

Honorable mention: Ronin.

Bullet time, effectively turn-based ninja combat. Simple, regularly autosaved "go until you die, then try something different" gameplay loop and just a helluva lot of fun.

Honorable mention: Valley.

Smooth and thrilling first-person mechanically-enhanced parkouring along the way to investigating the mysteries - both ancient and more recent - of a unique and very picturesque valley.

Israel has been trying to provoke Lebanon into a war for decades now. They're not going to stop.

In a somewhat metaphorical but nonetheless very real sense - most politics is effectively snake oil.

There's a set of people who exhibit a particular combination of mental illness and natural charisma, such that they feel an irrational urge to impose their wills on others, a lack of the necessary empathy to recognize the harm they do and the personal appeal necessary to convince others to let them do it.

There's another set of people who feel an irrational sense of helplessness - who want to turn control of their lives and their decisions over to others, so they can just go along with a preordained set of values and beliefs and choices rather expending effort on, and taking the risk of, making their own.

And just as in any more standard "snake oil" dynamic, the first group, exclusively for its own benefit, preys upon the weakness and hope of the second. Just as in any other such dynamic, the people of the first group make promises they have no intention of keeping ultimately just so that they can benefit, and the people of the second group continue, irratiomally, to believe those promises, even as all of the available evidence demonstrates that the promises are empty.

Maybe you can answer a question for me.

Why do shit-stirrers immediately rush off to start separate shit-stirring threads if a mod accuses them of being shit-stirrers?

Do they - you - really not grasp the painfully obvious fact that by starting threads like this, all they - you - manage to do is demonstrate that the mod was probably right?

No.

I self-evidently have a consciousness (cogito ergo sum), but logic, reason and the available evidence all point to that consciousness being a manifestation of brain activity and shaped by my genetics, environment and experiences, as opposed to an entity unto itself.

Perhaps there is some context this article doesn’t touch on

There is.

This is the most concise and complete summation I could find of the (early) history of the protests against Brooklyn Museum and Anne Pasternak.

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/anne-pasternak-brooklyn-museum-interview-part-2-1409434

Note too that there's another controversy - regarding the hiring of a white curator for African art - that likely provides the context for the "white supremacist" part of the graffito.

And tomorrow, they're going to drop a bomb on her.

I've sometimes compared politics to professional wrestling, in the sense of "faces and heels in mostly staged battles to entertain the masses."

This is the first time I've been tempted to compare it to professional wrestling in the sense of "heavily made-up freaks shouting threats into microphones."

No surprise there. Trump and his acolytes and sycophants have clearly signaled that they're eager to be Putin's lap dogs, so if Trump wins, Coke and the rest will have pulled out of Russia for nothing.