But does that make Trump feel like the King of the world? I think not.

Scenes from a personalist regime

The perfect two sentence story.

Nicolás Maduro Charged With Felony Oil Possession

There is no reason to extend grace or benefit of the doubt on social media to belligerent people you don't know.

How is what Trump is doing in Venezuela any different than what Sadam Hussein did in Kuwait in 1990? Why should we expect a different reaction from the international community who depends on their oil supplies, just as the US depended on Kuwait's?

This is so pure and lovely.

Any nation that has actual elections and a more or less liberal framework of laws, rights and regulations needs to understand: if you don't defend what you have against the US, China and Russia, you're going to lose it. Don't let an American billionaire buy companies in Greenland, for example.

Right for him is simply what he feels like saying, doing or taking at any particular moment in time. Wrong is anything that tries to inhibit him from saying, doing or taking what he wants. Those things are “not fair.” It’s that simple.

And he recognizes no moral code. Christians view the Bible as our moral code. People of other faiths have other systems of belief. Atheists don’t believe in these but do have a general sense of moral right and wrong. Or at least legal and illegal. Trump recognizes none of these.

Trump’s basic intuition is that when he sees something he wants, regardless of who it belongs to, if he has any ability to take it, he just takes it. And it doesn’t matter whether the thing he wants to take is a foreign country, a U.S. election or a woman’s private parts.

Le Carré wrote about what you might argue is the central problem of humanity: that loyalty is the only thing that holds society together, and loyalty destroys you.

I'm big on pro-active blocking: I see someone behaving badly in any comments section I quickly add them to my list of people deemed "COMBATIVE" & block. I think of all the unpleasantness & wasted time I've protected myself from, & think "that's not how I wanna spend my one wild & precious life".

In 1999, John Peel made a list of 400 recorded musical tracks from the 20th century, four from each year. Here is track #117 (1929).

Not Iraq, not oil, not "distraction," none of that. This. You frame it like this. The money is here or there, in your pocket or not.

Pretty obvious that Trump has no geopolitical strategy whatsoever but in his kindergarten mind he simply wants to be able to bully other world leaders. There's no plan for Venezuela and there never has been. He just found a big boy who would listen to his orders and beat up the other kids for him.

The only real thing that's happening is that the vanity of a rapidly aging, elderly pedophile has become the most important thing in the nation and, thus, the entire world

Even if don't want to openly insult people, you could fix a lot by making everyone explicitly state what the stupid people think. No abstraction. You don't get to say, "parents concerned about library books." You have to say "parents concerned satanists are stealing kids' brain juice." Etc

And you really shouldn't argue with a just-showed-up-yesterday account with 100 posts. That is a troll or sockpuppet.

insecurity roars, confidence whispers

yep. i can identify any number of structural issues but at the end of the day the basic problem is the republican party. this has been apparent for at least 20 years. it is also an incredibly unpopular observation to make among “serious” people.

The end goal of Grok sexual harassment is to make women afraid to be visible. It’s a punishment for daring to exist in a way the perpetrators can’t control. There’s no one solution to this, because the problem isn’t just technological. It’s cultural. It’s misogyny. This is just one expression of it.

That’s the biggest reason they are against him. It’s not ideological. Their collaboration depends on no one stepping out of line to show how easy and righteous it is to stand up to the nazis.

The most effective way to resist this modern brand of fascism isn't to completely immerse yourself in its propaganda. You're actually helping their message spread. Go and make art or read a book or spend time with offline people. You can't marinate in the horror and emerge unscathed.

"People of other times were as smart as we are today. They were just working on different problems." -- John Fredericks

the administration wants to frame this (bizarrely) as law enforcement. but if law enforcement conducted a raid for a suspect and killed 40 people, including an unknown number of unarmed civilians, it would be treated as a clear disaster like Waco.

In 1999, John Peel made a list of 400 recorded musical tracks from the 20th century, four from each year. Here is track #116 (1928).

Watching Trump speak and justify why the US is entitled to invade another country and kidnap the president makes me think that when we started talking about the “post-truth” era, we had no idea of how deeply post-truth it’d become. Perception of reality is now random and optional.

In all of American history, I’m not sure there’s been a more logically incoherent pair of actions than Trump pardoning a drug trafficking head of state, and then months later ”justifying” a foreign invasion by going after a head of state for drug trafficking.

Quick update for US media: the story is not about Maduro or what’s going on in Venezuela. It’s about the massive rupture in US history where the country now stands for invading and occupying any country it likes. Trump in his press conference made it very clear this is a new age. Did you miss that?

It is frankly degrading, after pouring your heart out over someone you still love but never get to hold again, to have to endure the old condolence rigamarole from professional public figures

👀

I don't think there will be any Rally Round the Flag effect here either. This is a pointless and lawless exercise so Rubio can feel like a real man and Trump can watch things go boom on his teevee while looking at paint swatches

Whatever you might think of Maduro, the seizure and kidnapping of a head of state takes us to a very dark place. Vast, arbitrary, extra-legal power, which could be exercised almost anywhere, regardless of the character of the target government.

The Republicans giving up all oversight on everything is probably one of the most underreported stories of the Trump era. They wouldn't have stood for this a decade ago. They would have agreed to it, but demanded consultation at least. They don't even pretend now.

He legit just pardoned the president of Honduras for drug trafficking but now Maduro is going to stand trial for “narco terrorism.” This all makes a lot of sense and definitely isn’t about oil.

Congress could, and should, impeach, remove, and convict by the end of the day.

lol advocating for high school test to determine which faculty should be hired SCREAMS aggressive mediocrity.

Hold the phone, are you telling me that the guy on the right created a chatbot that is producing child pornography? And are you also telling me that the President whose campaign he funded and who was Jeffrey Epstein's "best friend" for a while wants to prevent any form of AI regulation? Weird.

Thread. One of the head fakes of selling genAI as “intelligent” is being able to lay agency on it and away from the humans who build and maintain the algorithms that drive it. It doesn’t “think”! It echoes. Which could be intermittently useful, but does not absolve its creators of responsibility.

there are endless headlines about "grok apologizes" or "grok says it will be fixed" after it generated CSAM using pictures of minors and zero headlines about "grok being shut down" or "musk and xAI in big legal trouble" and I think something fundamental has broken here

He was somebody they’d met, and therefore far more important than any of the people he hurt.

Because Bari Weiss is not an advocate. Because the billionaire corporate owners who installed her to curry favor with Trump are not elites. Its the people who actually spend their lives learning about a topic that you should distrust.

The billionaire President is mad that a member of Congress didn't help him enough with his pedophilia scandal, so rural Colorado has to keep drinking contaminated water.

I'm sorry I'm not talking about whatever your thing is right now. We can talk about that if you want, but I have to agree to it first, you know? You can't just derail a conversation and get mad at me when I don't happily follow along. That just isn't how this works.