No, that’s not smug elitism at all. Smug elitism was when the limousine liberals were jetting around the country to go to $10,000 a plate dinners and wring their hands over the fact that the ignorant hicks in flyover country wouldn’t vote for them.

#Joy Genocide is realpolitik. It’s the DNC and Harris trying to juggle the fact that they need to run on positives to counter Trump’s negatives with the fact that if she makes even the tiniest hint that she’d cut off the flow of arms to Israel, a whole bunch of fabulously wealthy and influential individuals, corporations and lobbying groups who profit off of it would stop at nothing to utterly destroy her.

It has nothing at all to do with elitism and everything to do with the simple fact that the US federal government is wholly owned by special interests, and those involved in the Israeli military/industrial money laundering scam are among the most influential of them.

WTF?

My work with Democrats started in high school, when I was an alternate-delegate for Hillary Clinton.

Then you just weren’t paying attention, because that was the peak of Democratic smug elitism. That was the period when it was just about impossible to read anything by or about any Democrats without seeing them making scoffing, condescending references to "flyover country " and “Jesusland.” The Democrats of the early 2000s weren’t just elitist, but overt about it - they didn’t just think they were better than everyone else (and particularly everyone outside of New England and Cascadia) - they told us so, on a virtually daily basis.

Either you’re shamefully ignorant or a fraud, because without a doubt the current Democrats are less - not more, but less - elitist than they’ve been at least since Bill Clinton.

It’s safe to assume that the “uncomfortable” part is that he’s either going to have to admit to soliciting sex with minors or perjure himself, and neither one is going to end well for him.

It’s not quite true that we “never” hear about Ukraine’s far right. We hear about them fairly regularly in fact - from Putin’s apologists and sycophants.

“We do not currently assess” is ludicrously blatant mealy-mouthed misdirection.

Ah… yes. A lot of things just clicked into place for me, and not just regarding Vance.

Most notably really - trying to grasp the idea of “TheoBros” broadly - I wondered how such a thing is even possible. How can any even moderately intelligent person spend a great deal of time online and cling to a Christian belief at all, and much less a conservative one? There’s just far too much information out there that contradicts that view. Granted, there is of course content tailored to affirm it, but it’s essentially a specialist thing - not just a bubble, but a very specific and limited bubble, surrounded by a sea of contrary views and contradicting facts.

And then it clicked - the way to maintain a conservative Christian viewpoint on the internet is to be an aggressively censorious conspiracy theorist.

The only way they can face the sea of contradictory information is to ascribe it to some sort of ridiculously massive conspiracy by the forces of evil - such that the vast majority of what exists on the internet is the lies of Satan’s minions - and to establish little, aggressively monitored and censored enclaves in which their views and only their views are allowed, and everything else is condemned and preferably censored.

Their whole cognitively dissonant view on “free speech” - in which they somehow simultaneously cry about being “censored” generally simply for being massively downvoted and even as they, in their own bubbles, overtly censor any and all contrary views - suddenly makes sense. They explain away the fact that the vast majority of people disagree with them and even condemn them as a conspiracy to silence them, and create the illusion that they’re not merely a noxious and irrational few by aggressively monitoring and controlling their walled gardens, so that opposition is at least underrepresented if not silenced entirely.

It also explains their slippery relationship with truth, and specifically things like Vance clinging to the Haitians eating pets myth even after it’s been proven false. For them, coming across information that proves them wrong has to be an essentially daily occurrence, so they undoubtedly work out an approach to it, such that they, exactly as he’s doing, just flatly ignore the necessary ramifications of the truth and instead just blithely cling to whatever myth affirms their beliefs.

Yeah… suddenly a whole lot of previously inexplicable behavior and beliefs are making sense to me…

And frankly, while it’s notably pathetic and cringily willfully ignorant, it’s also scary. More on that later maybe…

Right. The country in which officials insist that soldiers should be entirely free to sexually abuse Palestinians can investigate itself.

Israel is a rogue state.

I first read that headline as “is deranged.”

Same sentiment but more precise.

Israel is a rogue state.

Intelligence is a measure of reasoning ability. LLMs do not reason at all, and therefore cannot be categorized in terms of intelligence at all.

LLMs have been engineered such that they can generally produce content that bears a resemblance to products of reason, but the process by which that’s accomplished is a purely statistical one with zero awareness of the ideas communicated by the words they generate and therefore is not and cannot be reason. Reason is and will remain impossible at least until an AI possesses an understanding of the ideas represented by the words it generates.

The BitGenerations games on the GBA, and especially Orbital. They’re stylish but graphically simple arcade style games - generally some combination of puzzle-solving and action.

deleted by creator

It’s safe to assume at this point that delays and chaos (and the opportunities both will provide for fraud) are the exact point.

This time around, Georgia is going to be prepared to “find” Trump however many votes he needs.

Tyrants recognized centuries ago that the surest way to guarantee the enthusiasm and loyalty of their mercenary thugs was to let them loot their victims.

And nothing really has changed since then.

Even as cynical as I am, it astonishes me that the Republicans have become entirely up-front about the fact that they don’t really give a shit about the American people and are only interested in how policy decisions affect them personally.

It’s not just the case that they’ll institute harmful policies if they can blame the Democrats for them or oppose beneficial policies that they can’t claim credit for themselves, but that they do it openly and obviously.

And their wholly emotion-driven supporters remain completely oblivious…

And here we have the root cause of every other problem that plagues the US - the entire nation, socially, politically and even psychologically, has been warped towards the sole purpose of pouring as much wealth as possible into the pockets of a relative few.

What you need to know is that the government is corrupt and works almost exclusively for the benefit of the wealthy few, which has caused considerable problems for everyone else, which problems they want you to blame on someone other than them.

It’s the state of mind caused by simultaneously believing two (or more) things that conflict with each other.

Like all conservatives, he wants to do unto others as he would not want done unto him.