Its also audience capture. Like he knows very well that the liberal USA destroyed Nazism because he wrote a book about how it happened. But being Online means you have to pretend that liberalism is the worst thing that ever happened

has anyone tried restarting America in safe mode and seeing if we can just uninstall "degenerate bandit kingdom on a literally demented rampage" ? who even downloaded that was it you craig i bet it was craig fucking craig

i just looked over at my kitchen table where i've set up my printer, i swear to god, inside my head, my inner voice referred to it as "the nerve center of this entire operation"

kind of darkly funny that "gender studies" is the stereotypical "useless degree" because gender studies will help you understand a large and important chunk of the current psychosis in american life

sure sure you can have hegemony by trade, ideology and cultural influence, but does that make your dick hard?

I am genuinely at a loss for a precedent here. Very, very few states in history ever enjoyed the success of the USA even on a regional level and I just can’t think of any of them dynamiting it all for absolutely no gain

It’s genuinely wild that the United States spent decades building an elaborate rules-based international order which de facto cemented its permanent status as the dominant global hegemon, sustained by ideology rather than might, and now is just blowing it all up for literally no reason

anxiety dream I'm walking one of the dogs. I hear both dogs are barking in the house. What dog am I walking? WHAT DOG AM I WALKING? wake up

you treat politics like consumerism and your vote reflects your brand and is therefore best used as validation that you are a Good Person it is egotistical and arrogant and self-centered and puts your own warm fuzzies over the wellbeing of other human beings.

"Donald Trump" was a folklore character of the late years of the Atomic Age, intended to teach Northamericans the dangers of hucksters.

We could've hired the exterminator back in November but we signed the roaches instead.

to sum up, we snatched maduro as part of a scripted play with his VP, sold it to the military as a law enforcement thing like noriega, still killed forty random people, and then Trump blew up the entire global world order since 1945 by ranting about stealing the oil and taking over the country...?

again, a lot of our current problems are downstream of the gradual self-abolition of congress

what happened is a bunch of very stupid people pulled a lot of little levers last year to make this start. now we can mostly only directionally scream, which can be useful, but is definitely not as good as the magic fantastical lever that makes this stop

Yes! He clearly does think this! His understanding of the world is not any more sophisticated than a board game. He has captured the Venezuelan territory a la Risk so now their oil, which is just sitting around, belongs to us. Why didn't anyone else think of this? Well they lack his genius, clearly.

what the fuck are you talking about 'denazification succeeded in east germany.'

one reason people are already talking themselves into dumb conspiracies about why this is happening is because the actual reality is extremely hard to wrap your brain around

trump *explicitly saying* it's About The Oil does not actually signify that it is about the oil, it signifies that Trump's brain is leaking out of his fucking ears and he genuinely believes it's about the oil because someone juiced it to him that way to get him to support a coup they wanted btw

trump: "hahahahah yeah were gonna steal their oil :D :D :D" every single oil expert: "lmao venezuelan oil sucks butt why in god's name would you want that" people on this website: "it's all exactly like it was in the oughts when I started paying attention!" reality: worse than all three options!

The skeleton key to unlock the Trump administration is to understand that everything it does is for the sake of posting. It wants to get likes and shares. And it is specifically captured by a neo-Nazi, fascist audience that wants images of torture, violence, and murder, especially of minorities.

today has been a functional existence proof of this statement

we have gone through to a mirror universe where instead of the government not caring about twitter because it isn’t real life, it doesn’t care about real life because it isn’t twitter

The GOP is dominated by gutter trash bigots.

Their messaging is so fucking incoherent. Maduro was an illegitimate leader who lost in 2024, which is why we're replacing him with his VP instead of the person who won in 2024. We did this to stop fentanyl, which is why he's indicted for cocaine. We're also occupying Venezuela via Zoom call.

America, 2015-2026, is like a James Ellroy novel as adapted by the Coen Brothers. Scratch the surface of anyone powerful and you get grotesque corruption but also, everyone is dumb as shit.

After a year of Trump II, the refrain that this is only happening because Trump's insane masks the reality that it's going to be a recurring part of American governance until underlying structures change

Congress is a dead letter.

Yeah at some level we’ve gone from “wars for oil that we pretend have other reasons” to “wars not for oil that we pretend is for oil, so dementia grandpa can feel like a pirate”

they gave a guy with rapidly advancing cognitive decline and narcissistic personality disorder total legal immunity and access to the strongest military in the history of human kind, I’m not sure what else they expected

I do have a litmus test for my candidates now and it's that I want them to be genuinely pissed off, not pretend pissed off

i think there's a decent chance the admin is full of dipshits who think it's actually possible to do a war "for oil" in the plunder sense fill up a bunch of cartoon money bags with oil and skedaddle there are 1991 ant-gulf war t-shirts with a more coherent theory of a "war for oil"

I feel like I haven’t even been properly lied to about the purposes of this war

To sum up, a US president is going to war without congressional authorization against a sovereign nation that has not attacked or threatened it, and is doing so like a thief in the night, with no explanation for the American people or the world. It is all so unimaginable that it strains credulity.

"i've got eight slugs in me, one's lead and the rest are bourbon" is one of the all-time greatest noir lines in history

Modernism gets a bad reputation and it's possible to take it too far, certainly, but one of the things it gets right is that certain things are not contingent. CAR T-cell therapy works regardless of where you are from and what traditions you hold to. Human rights are the same way.

stop handing the mantle of Real Americans to these traitorous dipshits this is our country too and we have much more respect for it than they do they don’t get the concept of patriotism, they don’t get the flag (they revere a traitor flag anyway), let ‘em move to Hungary if they love Orban so much

And I think liberals should stop taking the bait and ceding ground on immigration. Immigration is good. Multiculturalism is good. Free trade is good. Stop being embarrassed to say so.

Democracies cannot function like this. The President is a public servant of the people, not a diety who doles out government services based on perceived personal slights.

is this the year i finally forgive shrimp cocktail for The Incident?

if people on the other site think Obama was mean, i don't think they're ready for Reconstruction 2

the lie i'm going to tell myself most in 2026 is that I will rigidly follow a policy of reading all unread acquired books before new books can be acquired

getting back into physical books rather than an endlessly sprawling ebook library it's nice. easier to concentrate. tactile sensation. book gets beat up as you read it and becomes a material testimony to the fact that yeah I cracked this sucker open

[screaming at the top of my lungs, once again] the fundamental technology of humanity is care

We didn't survive and thrive as a species because we had warriors or hunters - pretty much every omnivore can manage that. We did so because we developed Grandmothers, and domesticated Dogs. Community is what defines us as a species, and every "self-reliant" libertarian shitweasel be damned.

oh man, someone mentioned dead space 2, then the dead space 2 alarm went off, now i have to replay dead space 2

Small cities and towns that build their economy around modernity (colleges, healthcare, tourism, green energy), improve density, and welcome diversity are likely to do just fine. Asheville isn't huge but it's absolutely a success story. It's places that refuse modernity that are fucked.