So by “fresh thinking” he actually means “sycophancy,” right?

That seems to be one of the defining traits of the Trump administration - be a malicious, incompetent, self-serving fuck-up, and fire anyone who won’t pretend that that’s not what you are.

No surprise there - Republicans have hated Wikipedia pretty much from the start, since they require valid attribution and constantly fact check, which means the Republicans can’t spin their lies.

Yes.

What era would you rather have been born in?

Why is there a watermelon there?

Subs or dubs?

Lemmy isn’t a site at all. It’s a piece of software.

There are few things more painfully stupid than a mass media version of a scientific take on a matter with strong philosophical elements.

I’m not clear on what it is.

Broadly, they seem to have just lost track of the fact that their privilege is paid for by other people’s labor. Yeah - I think that part of it is thinking that AI can pick up the slack, but I think a lot of it is just not really thinking much at all.

I really think a lot of it, especially for Trump specifically, is looking at the amount of money that’s spent on social programs and education and housing and environmental protection and workplace safety and so on, and just dreaming about all the things he could buy with that much money.

At this point, I’m assuming that “reforms” that are going to lead to deaths are a deliberate eugenic strategy - that the underlying idea is that the owner class will be able to deal with problems privately, so it will be the working class that will be disproportionately affected and will disproportionately die, and that’s actually part of the point.

The ways that society has thought about and treated people on the spectrum as inferiors are completely wrong and long overdue to be discarded, but we shouldn’t go from there to another supremacist mode of thinking.

As a sincere, long-term ideal, yes - I agree.

As an immediately gratifying self-indulgence, fuck 'em. Way WAY too much stupidity and ugliness has come at the hands of people for whom deception and emotional manipulation are the norms and sincerity and emotional honesty are aberrant weaknesses. And I want to revel in some schadenfreude at their expense.

Since Trump appears to have no personal stake in this (as opposed to his attacks on the Justice Department, the FBI, the federal court system and so on), I have to assume that this is something he’s doing entirely for Putin’s benefit.

On another note, I wonder, as I generally do, how they define “autism.”

I wonder because my own opinion, quite seriously, is that an awful lot of what’s included in “the spectrum” is actually a superior way of seeing the world and of conducting human interactions - an evolutionary gain for humanity.

I think there’s no question that humans for whom the very idea of injecting unnecessary emotion into an interaction or hiding ones true motivations behind a screen of deception is entirely foreign are clearly superior to those who wallow in emotionalism and lies, and further, I think that at some level, the lying manipulators fear that that’s exactly the case. At the very least, they don’t know how to deal with us - they’re lying and manipulating for all they’re worth and we just insist on ignoring their emotionalism and rejecting their lies.

So again, as I generally do, I’m wondering how exactly these particular lying manipulators are defining “autism.”

Even if he has to make it up.

Granted that his word is worthless, the rest of that is part of why I expect that he’ll take bribes - because he doesn’t have an end game.

I think he got into this whole tariff thing in the first place because he saw them as leverage, and as a desperately insecure overgrown child focused entirely on manipulating people into feeding his unquenchable greed, lust and insecurity, he can’t pass up an opportunity for leverage.

Early on, he made a lot of noise about forcing foreign manufacturers to open American factories, but by capriciously proposing, delaying, enacting and rescinding tariffs, he’s already guaranteed that that’s not going to happen. So about all that’s left already as a practical benefit is the fact that they’re essentially a tax increase on consumers, and that might’ve been enough for him, since he needs to fund his cronyistic spending and his tax cuts for the 1%, but he’s discovering that policy decisions have economic consequences that he can’t avoid just by throwing a tantrum, so it’s looking like he’ll have to either let that go or get blamed for destroying the US economy.

So now he’s in a prime position - he needs to weasel out of this whole tariff thing, but his ego still demands that he has to win somehow, which means that a foreign country should be able to come over here, set up a meeting, kiss his stinky ass and slip him a few million dollars, and he’ll congratulate himself on using the leverage to his advantage and turn his attention somewhere else.

And while his word is worthless, that’s not really what it comes down to. It’s not that he’ll hold to a decision on tariffs because he gave his word, but that once he’s mollified, he’ll happily stop thinking about them entirely and just look for his next opportunity to apply leverage to feed his ego, greed and/or lust.

in response to overtures from dozens of countries

I expect that countries are going to end up avoiding tariffs by openly bribing Trump.

At this point I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised.

I presume yes.

Trump’s US and Putin’s Russia are natural ideological allies - both oligarchic and autocratic kleptocracies dominated by quasi-religious moralism and repression, militaristic imperialism and white supremacism and both warped and corrupted to the benefit of the wealthiest few.

Western Europe, with a greater (if still less than optimum) focus on egalitarianism, social welfare, equality of justice, international cooperation and respect for the law, is the natural ideological enemy of both.

So yes - I believe the long term goal is for a US/Russia alliance to go to war against and devastate western Europe, to destroy the EU and NATO and essentially bring Europe into the fold, to build a globe-encircling empire of corruption, oppression and malfeasance -a modern-day feudal system with the wealthy few (individuals and corporations) as the new nobility and the people - American, Russian and European alike - reduced to the status of serfs.