The only winners in this scenario are governments that want more control over their citizens' digital lives.

And that, as the saying goes, is not a bug. It's a feature.

They got 40 million people in that state and they voting these imbeciles in office, and they continue to do it.

Even in an era in which Republicans have come to be defined by psychological projection and unintentional irony, Tommy Tuberville calling someone else an imbecile stands out.

That's why homelessness is being criminalized.

The explicit goal is to recreate Victorian workhouses for the benefit of the new generation of robber barons.

Of a vividly disturbing person.

As a matter of fact, yes.

I didn't make all that up on the spot. I already had the visual image in mind because that really is how I visualize him.

And I didn't even try to do it. When he first bought Twitter and started trolling professionally, I just found myself visualizing him doing it, and before I knew it, I had this crystal clear image of him sitting in front of a desktop PC on a rickety particle board desk in a dank basement room with white paint over concrete and green shag carpeting, lit only by the glow from a cheap monitor, wearing gross stained sweats and a hoodie, hunched over a grimey keyboard and occasionally giggling to himself.

I keep trying to visualize the more likely reality for a billionaire of some sort of extremely custom multi-monitor setup in the center of a purpose-built room, but it just won't stick.

In his mom's basement, in cum-stained sweatpants, sitting hunched over in front of a cheap oversized monitor hooked up to an underpowered desktop PC with lots of LED, trolling on /b/ and /pol/ and jerking off to pokeporn.

Nexus Mods owner Robin Scott summed up the situation perfectly on Jan. 6, two days before the official statement went out on X, in the comments of a Reddit thread about “censorship” on his site:

We also removed the exact same mod with Joe Biden’s head at the same time (on the 2nd of January) to ensure there was no bias and because we don’t want to handle all the nutjobs that come out the woodwork whenever these mods get posted. Funny how the outrage-bait YouTubers don’t mention that, isn’t it?

Case in point, today, with all the nutjobs coming out of the woodwork sending us death threats, calling us pedos and all the other “wah wahs” that come with this ridiculous situation because some YouTuber told them we are only removing Trump mods.

It’s so dumb, and these people are so dumb, that I really cannot be fucked with it. I’m not expecting any of my staff to have to handle these whackjobs any more than showing them the door either. So we delete all the mods we see/that get reported to us on the topic, and all the people this upsets can trot-on because it’s really not worth our time or effort to care about.

I've criticized Dark0ne repeatedly over the years specifically because he tends to be an asshole, but this is one time I'm with him 100%.

Gotta love the irony of a song that condemns having to "pick a tribe and hate the other side" that still can't manage to refrain from doing exactly that.

If you think about it, Trump is really a sort of simple and easily understood person.

He has no firm foundation for his ego, but since he's been pampered and coddled all his life, it's never faced any significant challenges either. So he's ended up with this grossly overinflated and terribly fragile ego, and it's basically a full-time job just keeping it inflated and protecting it from harm.

It's going to be up to future generations to deliver the full weight of the condemnation those fucking animals deserve, because unfortunately, the positions of power in the West today are held almost exclusively by psychopathic fuckwads and craven cowards who don't have the integrity and/or courage to make a stand.

More than any other time in my life, I find myself wishing right now that Hell is a real place, because the entire IDF, virtually every Israeli politician, a terrifying percentage of Israeli citizens and damned near every western politician of any note deserves nothing more than to burn in it for all eternity. They are each and all unforgivably evil.

I don't have any expertise with which to answer your question definitively, but I wanted to chime in to say that my first thought was exactly this: "hands that are gripped together are unable to present a threat to you, so it is a signal of voluntary vulnerability."

And rather than vulnerability, it might be more accurate to say that it represents submission, which would tie in with your second question, so it's not so much that one is signaling that one is not a threat to the god(s), but that one submits.

And in that context, it's likely noteworthy that the most common example of clasped hands outside of prayer is when one is earnestly begging something of someone else, and especially a favor or a certain inconvenience.

If the US had a caste system, and it was a legitimate reflection of individual worth, drug company executives would be at the bottom.

Oh look - bullshit from the NYT.

There are no meaningful "hopes" for a cease-fire, because everyone who's actually involved or even just honestly paying attention knows full well that Israel is never going to agree to one - that their one and only goal from the beginning was and is the annexation of the entirety of Gaza, and they're not going to stop murdering Gazans until they achieve that goal (if they ever atop at all).

This is just shallow propaganda to try to distract from the fact of Israel's malevolence and the complicity of its western allies, and most notably of the US.

The death of a civilization is inevitable just as the death of an individual is inevitable. Just like individuals, civilizations have a life span - they're born, then they live, then they die.

And there's a significant fact about civilizations nearing collapse that the cited author apparently neglects to note, and that unfortunately completely negates the "we need dramatic social and technological changes" prescription: due to the concentration of wealth and power in a relatively few hands (which the author does note, though only in passing), the populations of terminally ill civilizations can be roughly divided into two groups - the poor and powerless many who would make changes but can't, and the rich and powerful few who could make changes but won't.

Yes.

The goal - and this was already obvious long before the election to anyone with a functioning brain and a speck of intellectual integrity - was and is to destroy the last vestiges of American representative democracy and institute a kleptocratic oligarchy.

Is NBC News actually just now catching on?

So my only question really is whether these people are deliberate agents provocateur who are now feebly trying to hide the fact that they were working for the benefit of Trump all along or if they're blithering idiots who are genuinely so fucking stupid that they didn't see this coming

I see no third option - it's one or the other

They're going to have to get in line.

At every level.

And even just a cursory examination of the history of civilizations would reveal that that's par for the course, and that the US is only really notable for the speed with which it's reached this point.

It means that either the test is flawed, the results are bogus or the report is a lie.

Intelligence is a measure of reasoning ability.

Current AIs have been designed to produce content that (optimally) mimics the products of reason, but they do not in fact reason at all, so they cannot possess measurable intelligence.

Much more to the point, current AIs have been designed to make enormous piles of money for corporations and venture capitalists, and I would pretty much guarantee that that has more to do with this story than anything else.

I really shouldn't like it, since games in which you die repeatedly generally just irritate me, but something about it keeps me coming back. And dying.