NOBULL

Image containing the fictitious poem by Donald Trump titled "ODE TO ME PART ONE MILLION." ODE TO ME Part One Million by Donald J. Trump If I had a ballroom my life would be so grand! All my tinpot pals would sway to the toots of my brass band! Everyone would call me “Sir” with uppermost esteem. “Outstanding, Sir!”, they’d say en masse, “of the crop, you are the cream!” “You are the best …”, but I digress. But they would say that, mark my word: I’d never boast in jest. I do this for America, which I am making great. You’d think I’d win a prize for that, but all I get is hate. Hate and money, truth be told, and plenty of it, too. Plus I get to smirk a lot and make up all the rules, much like my friend Vladdy Poo. It’s lucky I’m a peaceful dude, worth a Nobel Prize or two, when faced with such ingratitude. So anyway my ballroom, I’m sure you understand, requires the choicest plot in town, a first-class patch of land. This town is full of real estate that doesn’t turn a buck. House of this, Department that? Come on, who really gives a fuck? What luck they have that I can see, beyond their gripes and posturing, the benefits of pleasing me. I am a selfless president. I give so much just being myself, I should actually charge rent.

Everyone would call me “Sir” with uppermost esteem.
“Outstanding, Sir!”, they’d say en masse,
“of the crop, you are the cream!”

“You are the best …”, but I digress.
But they would say that, mark my word:
I’d never boast in jest.

#poetry #Trump #ballroom

He's a particular kind of liar. Trump is just a mendacious bastard who doesn't care. Johnson feels /entitled/ to lie because the people he is lying to are satanic while he is anointed by god to defeat the wicked. That's where his shit-eating christian smirk comes from.

THE WHITE HOUSE AIN’T YOUR HOUSE, MOFO The White House is no precious thing for me, but Trump’s destruction of it to build a damn 250,000,000-dollar ballroom is an outrage to me because it doesn’t belong to him.

Trump’s open sense of entitlement to rule like an unquestioned monarch and his supporters’ willingness to accept it as long as they think it’s for their benefit represent the abandonment of the grubby yet powerful American social contract.

nobullprize.substack.com/p/the-white-...

Daß es nur ein Schritt ist von der Kultur zur Barbarei, hat Victor Klemperer am 9. Oktober 1936 am eigenen Leib erfahren. Am „wohl bösesten Geburtstag meines Lebens“ teilte man ihm „schonend“ mit, daß er als Nichtarier den Lesesaal nicht mehr benutzen dürfe. #Stadtbild

Correct about the validation and supply of rationales but underemphasizes deliberate brainwashing. Much of what people find "validating" is only because it is the viewpoint they have invested themselves in even if it does not in any way serve their actual interests.

All these guys' goal, which also makes sense of their willingness to incinerate US influence in the world, is to control the US internally. They always want to empower the unit-size (family in personal sphere, nation in political sphere) that they can control. Globalization disempowers them.

So exhausting..

Not only that, but Klein also commits the classic blunder of failing to define what the line even is. Trump voters live in a curated unreality and are blissfully unaware of countless events, so what are they even endorsing? This is an unseen blindness of US punditry that falsifies everything.

The point is that prayer is an abdication of responsibility if you are simultaneously refusing to do what is in your power. It has nothing to do with believing in prayer or not.

The targeting of Lisa Cook is the latest example of how selective enforcement is the linchpin of the American racial hierarchy. Accused of a triviality by a major criminal who is White, she becomes the criminal and he remains "law-abiding." It is the main mechanism of modern American racism.

The problem is that they value their guns more than they care about YOUR children. They don't expect their own kids to be affected.

It also perfectly illustrates how selective enforcement is the modern linchpin of maintaining the American racist hierarchy and people still fall for it all the time. A crime that’s not a crime if you’re White gets discovered by aggressive searching and presto, Black criminal / White law-abiders.

Not only that, but more and more people make themselves complicit and thereby align their interests with regime’s even if they are not otherwise aligned with it. The lukewarm and even opponents can gradually become its supporters and even its henchmen as their self-image becomes entwined with it.

Simple: It was the argument that allowed them to square their selling-out to stay relevant under a new regime with their self-image as morally unimpeachable guardians of civilization.

Trump forces people to compromise themselves to get/keep what they want and then they do his work for him.

The only comfort in this image is the body posture of the troops: casual and disorganized, a candid reflection of their and everyone else's knowledge that they are not needed. It's frightening because they're there all the same, but still reminds us of the limits of Trump's lies.

The social approval factor is true but there is also a strategic aspect that explains why demonizing others is as important as positioning themselves. They want to define themselves as the default because that is the way to have advantages while claiming only to want fairness. Zero-cost privilege.

He's Hambo, the Sandwich Rambo.

It makes sense that they sent 20 paramilitary goons to ambush Hambo, the sandwich Rambo, at home in the middle of the night – they had to assume he had a whole picnic's worth of ammo in there and that he wouldn't be afraid to use it.

It absolutely is a vital feature because the alternative is a free-for-all that dominated by power. Expertise is an alternate, more accessible system that limits the scope of influence of other forms of power and legitimacy. These guys just want to eliminate forms of power that they can’t control.

It goes hand-in-hand with the equally unexamined fact that Trumpism is based on co-optation. Like the general public, the more the media acquiesce to Trump out of self-interest/to maintain access to their own power, the more they find self-legitimizing rationales to explain it.

Human intelligence is just embellishing mimicry of human intelligence. Instead of denying/being disgusted that machines are increasingly good at such mimicry, we should disabuse ourselves of our self-aggrandizing view of our own minds and feel at peace with what we are good at, which is synthesis.

People recoil at the downgrading of their human specialness but then frame the offending assertion as saying that “machines have the special sauce” instead of the more accurate “the special sauce isn’t really special.” We humans also just mimic human intelligence. It doesn’t hurt to accept that.

The question measures how socially acceptable it is for them to admit it (high and rising – notable in itself). But the true number is 99%.

The arbitrariness also implicitly removes the promise of protection that the law engenders. Having lived his life in a bubble of protection and impunity created by wealth and celebrity, Trump regards rules as just a nuisance; for us, the intact rule of law is the only means of enforcing our rights.

Unbelievably foolish in countless ways. Stephen Miller is no juggernaut but a third-rate shit-stirrer who can only thrive in the ecosystem of lies and elevated incompetence created by 40 years of relentless brainwashing. Democrats (big and small D) must redefine the context, not seek models in MAGA.

The quasi-rational part is that they are disempowering the people whose competence threatens their power. The stupid part is that they have brainwashed themselves into believing that what they are destroying is frivolous nonsense rather than systemically important to their own prosperity.

Their destruction /seems/ stupid (and much of it is totally ignorant) but it serves their purpose of disempowering their internal opposition. They don't want a "strong" US – they want a US that they control. Making the US a weaker pariah degrades US power, but increases their internal power.

There’s a reason racists work so hard to establish themselves as the norm and everything else as /tolerated/ at best: because being the norm means that their privilege is invisible and thereby defensible without having to make obviously self-serving arguments. They are just preserving tradition.

There’s a reason racists work so hard to establish themselves as the norm and everything else as /tolerated/ at best: because being the norm means that their privilege is invisible and thereby defensible without having to make obviously self-serving arguments. They are just preserving tradition.

It's foolish to base any proposition on the idea that they have any principle but self-interest. Stop wasting energy expecting them to pay lip service to values they have never had. Change the situation so that their grubby self-interest is aligned with democracy and the rule of law.