How do angry, hateful, vicious people like MTG convince themselves they’re Christian?

I don’t think it’s a pose - she appears to be entirely sincere about her claim to Christianity.

And I understand the basic mechanics of it - they pick and choose which parts of the Bible to highlight and which to ignore, and how to self-servingly interpret the ones they do pick.

But in a more fundamental sense, I still don’t understand how they do it. Are they really entirely devoid of self-awareness or conscience? How is that even possible? Or do they have at least some rudimentary self-awareness and conscience, but they just ignore it? How is that even possible?

More than anything else, to me this era is defined by the number of people in positions of power who are brutally obviously full-blown psychopaths.

It’s to the point that I’m not even sure if this is most accurately considered a political crisis. It seems more a mental health crisis, marked by the fact that so many positions of power are held by people who are so profoundly mentally ill that they likely shouldn’t even be allowed in public unsupervised, much less allowed to hold any sort of authority over anyone else.

Entirely regardless of the specifics, it’s unconstitutional anyway because it’s the exercise of a power the executive branch was never granted.

Or in other words, Trump reveals himself to be a lying sack of shit. Again.

Probably not even the first time today.

Radioland Murders (1994)

A frenetic comedy mystery set during the debut live broadcast of a radio station in 1939. More than anything else, it’s a terrific exercise in film and sound editing, as the programs and musical numbers being performed on stage intertwine with the action backstage. It can be sort of difficult to appreciate if you’re fixated on having a single, steadily unfolding narrative, since it constantly jumps around between different characters and different settings, but if you just relax and let it wash over you, you’ll discover that it is a single, steadily unfolding narrative - it was just assembled from a whole bunch of separate but oddly interlocking pieces.

More broadly, it’s how civilizations die.

Essentially, all of the scumbags are coming out of the woodwork to loot the civilization - getting theirs while the getting is good.

It’s all downhill from here.

So CBS is likely going to settle a lawsuit filed by Trump because they need approval for a merger and that approval comes from an agency overseen by Trump.

By any reasonable standard, that’s extortion, and a crime.

We live in such a foul and loathsome timeline.

No.

(A quick search later)… Ah… yeah A likely two-bit Babylonian copper hustler who through a quirk of fate is a sort of legendary historical figure almost four millennia later.

Yep - that has the same sort of appeal. Thanks for that.

It’s something about irony - the legendary nobody, famous for something mundane.

My username is actually from a side character in Terry Gilliam’s first non-Python movie - Jabberwocky.

The protagonist, Dennis, is a cooper - a barrelmaker (actually he’s a tedious putz who can’t even manage to make a barrel, but that’s another story). Early on, he goes to make his fortune in the big city, where he meets a legendary cooper - “The Wat Dabney?! The inventor of the inverted firkin?!” - who has been reduced to begging because all of the business in the city is controlled by the guilds and they’ve shut him out.

Curiously, many years later I ran across a somewhat similar character in an entirely different medium who appealed to me the same way. This one is in a manga - The Voynich Hotel, by Dowman Sayman. They have a serious problem with the boiler in the eponymous hotel, so the protagonist sets out on a quest to track down a hermit who’s reputed to be able to fix anything - Tepes, the legendary second-rate boiler engineer.

I’m not sure what appeals to me about second-rate legendary craftsmen, but…

It would be a good strategy to play dumb and essentially implement fascism as if by accident - “Well gee whiz… wouldja lookit that!”

But as far as I can tell, Noem really is that abysmally stupid.

That’d be about par for the course. When too much attention is focused on their abject evil in Gaza, one of their strategies is to suddenly go stir the shit in Iran or Lebanon or Syria and get attention focused there instead.

That’s undoubtedly a lot of it.

I even see a tendency among anarchists - especially young and obsessively online ones - to sort of default to authoritarianism. It’s as if authoritarian presumptions are so deeply engrained in their thinking that they can’t even conceive of any alternative. They essentially start with the (generally unstated) presumption that some group of people simply can and will decree what everyone must or must not do, say, think and believe - that that’s somehow just a fact of life - and that the only questions are who specifically gets to do it and what specifically they’ll impose, with one of the alternatives being “anarchism.”

A lot of what I see with tankies though seems to boil down to impatience. They can’t stand the thought of waiting around for the whole process to play out - for capitalism to so thoroughly and completely fail that virtually everyone sees it for what it is and willingly chooses to turn away from it.

Instead, they want to impose communism tomorrow, which means they’ll have to institutionalize the necessary authority both to impose it and to defend it once it’s in place.

But they don’t seem able (or willing) to grasp the simple fact that the thing that’s going to end up being imposed by the institutionalized authority their impatince demands is not going to be anything close to the communism they envision - that with institutionalized authority, it will and can only end up yet another scheme by which the most greedy and power-hungry establish and maintain their own privilege.

That last bit is the part I don’t get though. How do they not see that? I mean - it’s so incredibly obvious that it’s the taken-for-granted first half of an aphorism - power corrupts. Not can corrupt or might corrupt or will corrupt unless X - it corrupts, full stop, inevitably.

Yet we have this group of people whose entire ideology hinges not only on pretending that this time it won’t, somehow, but that the multiple instances in which it’s already been proven that that’s exactly what will happen, even when the power is in the name of “communism,” don’t count, somehow.

I see that that’s the case, and I can sort of see why they do it, but I don’t have the foggiest idea how. I mean - I could no more believe that than I could believe that I could flap my arms and fly.

??

That’s one ofvthe best summations I’ve seen yet of the problem.

I can’t understand how tankies can’t see it. Granted that some of them are undoubtedly liars and they’re really just angling to be among the few who get to live privileged lives on the backs of the people, there are many who are more or less sincere. How? They see how it works in capitalism - you give a relative few people control over an outsized portion of the wealth and they use it to influence politics and ultimately to fuck the country up in pursuit of their own short-term self-interest. But somehow the same people who see that that’s how it works in capitalism seem to sincerely believe that you can give a relative few even more political power and even more control over even more wealth and just so long as you hang a different label on it and surround it with enough communist rhetoric, it’ll all work.

It’s as if they think that the rhetoric, or maybe even just the label, is the important bit, and the part where you give a relative few control of most of the wealth and most of the power is somehow irrelevant.

Celebrity rapists gotta stick together y’know.

Worse for everyone except for the greedy, power-hungry assholes who can’t stand the thought of people having anything resembling freedom and want everything to be a vector for their psychopathic desire to control everyone and everything.

Unfortunately, much of our government (and even more of its security state bureaucratic apparatus) is comprised of exactly those assholes.

the last scheduled argument of the court’s term.

So we can already predict that they’re going to overtly rule against precedent, the rule of law and the Constitution and in favor of Trump and the oligarchs. They save those rulings for last so that they can immediately disappear and avoid the condemnation they so richly deserve for their role in destroying the US.

Cutting taxes for the rich, raising taxes for the poor and increasing the national debt is an economic plan in the same sense that sitting on the couch eating frosting from a can is a diet and exercise plan.

I grow more convinced all the time that the Republicans and their wealthy cronies and patrons are actively and deliberately destroying the US.

The actual plan is to steal as much value as possible, ultimately triggering economic collapse, which they’ll ride out in security and privilege somewhere else (Greenland, for instance). Probably engineer a war or two along the way too. And between the economic collapse, the wars and the destruction of the healthcare system, they’ll cause the deaths of many millions of people.

Then, when things are at their worst, they’ll move back in, with mercenary armies, claim literally everything, and rebuild the US as essentially a feudal state, with the wealthy few owning everything and everyone else reduced to the status of serfs.

Presumably his advisors determined that he needed to Overton more and faster if he wanted to ensure that he’d be the neolib weasel the DNC shoves down our throats in 2028.

The DNC is a direct and explicit enemy of leftism and of we the people.

If we have elections in 2026 (I’m somewhat doubtful), it’s not going to be enough to vote against the Republicans. The first and arguably even more important step is going to be to primary every single one of the corrupt sacks of neolib shit that are enabling Trump and the Republicans.

Business as usual establishment Democrats possibly aren’t going to be enough to overcome the Republicans, and even if they win, certainly aren’t going to actually do anything to oppose them. We the people need real, honest, courageous populist leftsts - people who won’t just mouth leftist platitudes while gorging themselves at the corporate soft money trough, but who will actually stand up and fight to save this country from the greatest threat it’s faced in modern history.

I doubt that.

I expect that, if pressed, they’d register some mealy-mouthed quasi-criticism, simply because there’s no possible way to even convincingly pretend that it’s justifiable, let alone acceptable. But that’s just mouth noises - they’re never going to actually take a meaningful position against it or against anything elseTrump says or does, simply because, at this point, continuing to support Trump requires so much dishonesty and misrepresentation that if they start questioning any part of it, there’s too great a chance that the whole house of cards is going to come tumbling down, and they’ll be revealed as angry, toxic fools, and they can’t allow that.