The timing here is what makes this move particularly baffling…

It’s only baffling if you cling to the ever-more-laughable belief that the Democrats are any sort of meaningful opposition.

If you instead simply shift to the ever-more-supported belief that they are in fact essentially oligarchic co-conspirators, then the timing makes perfect sense.

That whole family is just rich white trash, aren’t they?

To paraphrase the Narcissist’s Prayer, he’s currently moving from “That won’t happen” to “And if it does, it won’t be that bad” and on to “And if it is, that’s not a big deal.”

So expect “And if it is, that’s not my fault” in the not terribly distant future.

Connolly is an accomplice in the coup d’etat.

And note this well - he means it.

This isn’t just rhetoric - if Muskntrump and their cronies and patrons have their way about it, Americans are going to start going to prison for criticizing them.

Something that’s been sort of tickling at my brain for a while now just came together with this headline.

Tate, Trump, Musk, Vance, Hegseth, Zuckerberg and a bunch of others of the hard right all share a distinctive personality type.

Essentially they’re incels who somehow managed to get laid.

If it weren’t for particular circumstances (most often undeserved wealth), they would’ve just been typical incels, sitting at home being bitter and hateful and insecure and self-absorbed. But because of those circumstances, they managed to get laid, so they ended up with more or less the same bitterness and hatefulness and desperate insecurity they would’ve had anyway, except it’s countered by a weird situational and entirely undeserved over-confidence, because after all, they’re special, because they can get laid.

That would also go some way toward explaining why they’re so often sexual predators. Essentially they’re bitter incels who don’t have to limit themselves to fantasies alone.

No - actually the west will only survive if we can get out from under the rule of self-absorbed, hate- and fear-mongering psychopaths and clowns.

And it’s not looking good.

Future histories of the collapse of the US will include a section on the utter failure of checks and balances.

Mmm… yes and no.

This is a trait that Trump shares (and in fact, Trump is pretty much the ultimate example of it).

And yes - it’s absolutely a strategic advantage to them to toss around accusations to which they themselves are justifiably subject, since that at least diverts some focus from, and potentially completely undermines, the accusations against them.

But I think that’s more in the nature of a fringe benefit that they (and again, especially Trump) have come to recognize over the years and that first and foremost, it’s just plain old psychological projection, and rooted simply in their profound mental illness.

In Trump’s case, look at things like his obsession with crowd size and his immediate rage against anything he considers a threat to his image, or in Musk’s case, look at his cringey edgelord posturing and his lies about video game high scores. Both of them are desperately insecure and overcompensating egomaniacs, and I presume that in both cases, that’s the real root of their projection - that essentially they’re telling themselves, “I know you are but what am I?” Not as a strategy but simply as a defense mechanism for their grossly inflated and fragile egos.

But yes - chicken or egg, it is also an effective strategy to deflect or divert from legitimate accusations against them.

https://psychopathsinlife.com/psychopaths-and-projection/

This isn’t even a political issue really.

Trump’s ENTIRE motivation is the prospect of his family making a fortune in Gaza waterfront real estate.

Musk wants in on the cascade of bribes settlements that Trump has been collecting.

This is a coup.

Bigotry is fundamental to fascism.

It’s not even enough that it has to be culturally acceptable for the in-group to hate and call for the oppression of out-groups - their right to that hatred and oppression has to be enshrined in law.

And that’s not coincidentally exactly what’s happening.

More Trump projection.

This has apparently become a new vector for transferring bribes - Trump files a suit, and then the corporation that wants influence pays a “settlement.”

In a way, doesn’t that mean that it would be more accurate to say that the bot stopped being rogue and went legit?

I’ve been waiting for this particular bit of brazen hypocrisy.

By ignoring precedent in order to issue rulings clearly intended to establish precedents, the wholly corrupt and compromised SC effectively guaranteed that sooner or later, they’d have to do this.

Outside of the warped context of a corrupt and compromised court, it’s actually very simple:

Either precedent matters, in which case their Roe ruling, their gratuity ruling, their immunity ruling and a number of others are self-evidently flawed, or precedent doesn’t matter, in which case no other court has any duty to consider anything the SC does.

One or the other.

I’ve never understood how or why this is an issue.

Shortly after Spez’s petulant AMA, I ran across a link for Lemmy. org. It looked interesting, so I followed it. I poked around a bit, and it still looked interesting, so I picked an instance and created an account. I played with it a bit, then I went back and found a different instance that looked interesting and created an account there too. And I just kept reading and posting, just like I’d done on Reddit (and half a dozen different sites before that). Some instances came and went and I lost some accounts and created others and eventually settled into a few that I like best, and just read and posted and didn’t leave. The end.

But it seems that every time I turn around, someone’s going on about the hardships of moving to a different site and all the difficulties to be overcome and yadda yadda yadda, and I just don’t get it. At all.

Graham in particular.

As far as I can see, he has no principles or ideas of his own. When they need a sound bite, whoever owns him (or maybe just whoever’s renting him this week) swaps his gimp suit for a three piece suit and takes the ball-gag out of his mouth, then trundles him out in front of the cameras to deliver a canned statement.