The only winners in this scenario are governments that want more control over their citizens’ digital lives.

And that, as the saying goes, is not a bug. It’s a feature.

Of a vividly disturbing person.

As a matter of fact, yes.

I didn’t make all that up on the spot. I already had the visual image in mind because that really is how I visualize him.

And I didn’t even try to do it. When he first bought Twitter and started trolling professionally, I just found myself visualizing him doing it, and before I knew it, I had this crystal clear image of him sitting in front of a desktop PC on a rickety particle board desk in a dank basement room with white paint over concrete and green shag carpeting, lit only by the glow from a cheap monitor, wearing gross stained sweats and a hoodie, hunched over a grimey keyboard and occasionally giggling to himself.

I keep trying to visualize the more likely reality for a billionaire of some sort of extremely custom multi-monitor setup in the center of a purpose-built room, but it just won’t stick.

In his mom’s basement, in cum-stained sweatpants, sitting hunched over in front of a cheap oversized monitor hooked up to an underpowered desktop PC with lots of LED, trolling on /b/ and /pol/ and jerking off to pokeporn.

It’s going to be up to future generations to deliver the full weight of the condemnation those fucking animals deserve, because unfortunately, the positions of power in the West today are held almost exclusively by psychopathic fuckwads and craven cowards who don’t have the integrity and/or courage to make a stand.

More than any other time in my life, I find myself wishing right now that Hell is a real place, because the entire IDF, virtually every Israeli politician, a terrifying percentage of Israeli citizens and damned near every western politician of any note deserves nothing more than to burn in it for all eternity. They are each and all unforgivably evil.

I don’t have any expertise with which to answer your question definitively, but I wanted to chime in to say that my first thought was exactly this: “hands that are gripped together are unable to present a threat to you, so it is a signal of voluntary vulnerability.”

And rather than vulnerability, it might be more accurate to say that it represents submission, which would tie in with your second question, so it’s not so much that one is signaling that one is not a threat to the god(s), but that one submits.

And in that context, it’s likely noteworthy that the most common example of clasped hands outside of prayer is when one is earnestly begging something of someone else, and especially a favor or a certain inconvenience.

They’re going to have to get in line.

Why would you think ideology is even relevant?

Much though the world would be instantly improved if that vile, racist piece of shit Pauline Hanson was dead, she’s under no real threat of being murdered by her political opponents - that’s just not the way that Australians do things.

And she knows that.

Isn’t accusing Marcos of corruption sort of like accusing the Pope of being Catholic?

I mean - he’s a Marcos. Corruption is all he knows.

And really, specifically what she did was threatened to have those people killed if they had her killed.

That seems to me to be a reasonable precaution, all things considered.

I’ve never been sure if it was a situational thing or a general thing, but years ago my then-girlfriend and I cleaned a suite of offices three nights a week, and I was surprised to discover that the women’s restroom was generally much worse than the men’s. And I don’t mean just messy - I mean foul and gross.

I never did figure out why that was, but the difference was undeniable.

I sincerely have no idea.

The narrative that a leftist couldn’t win is repeated so predictably and so often and by so many people that the whole idea has become sort of detached from reality, and there’s no telling what would happen if it was actually a possibility.

And particularly since the one thing I’d pretty much guarantee is that the concerted efforts on the part of the ruling class to prevent a leftist from running would be as nothing compared to what they’d do and say in order to prevent one from winning.

Because people are miserable and desperate and they want to blame someone or something, and bigotry is simple and superficially satisfying.

And because some number of those who actually are to blame for their misery and desperation have self-servingly encouraged them.

There was a time when I would’ve sympathized with and supported the Israelis.

But that was 40,000 murders ago.

Sort of, but not quite. I get where you’re going with that though, and it’s the right idea.

The explicit goal of Project 2025 is simply to make it easier for greedy and power-hungry privileged right-wing assholes to bring harm to people and to the nation as a whole for their own imnediate benefit. So yes - it actually serves as a sort of backhanded guide to what is of value in government.

It’s just that doing the opposite of what Project 2025 calls for would mean expanding agencies and regulations rather than reducing or eliminating them, and that’s likely not the best option, since it could just lead to governments run rampant instead of corporations run rampant.

As with most things, the optimum lies between the two extremes.

But yeah - at the very least, it can be taken as a rule of thumb that there’s a direct correspondence between the value a thing provides to the people and the nation as a whole and the degree to which Project 2025 opposes it and intends to destroy it.

Removed by mod

Removed by mod

Any ideology that bans books is self-evidently intellectually and philosophically bankrupt.

That word “overt” isn’t there by accident.

There’s a significant difference between an oligarchic kleptocracy that has to pretend to be a representative democracy and an oligarchic kleptocracy that doesn’t have to bother pretending to be anything else.

I assume it’s going to go until World War III, and until the US is an overt kleptocratic police state.

Really.

rogue state

noun

1. state or nation acting outside of the accepted international norms and policies.