I'll do a quick one, just to get it out of the way.

There was a lot of excitement in right-wing media, especially among its disinformation peddlers, over this so-called release of the "Epstein files".  These Qanon bitches keep rallying "fake news" unironically, and somehow fact-checking them makes us the oppressors violating their free speech.  Big surprise then that the release contained nothing new, even as these pseudojournalists made hay about the supposed abuses of the liberal elite (Trump's name was suspiciously omitted from the release).

All of which would be insulting enough if on the same day as this alleged exposure of some secret cabal of sexual abusers was revealed, that an actual sexual abuser who ran a criminal organization to abuse and coerce women into sex work was released into the US from Romania in what appears to be a very shady deal by the Trump administration.  The administration has not yet spoken on this issue, and the Romanian government has officially denied such a deal was made, although even the Tate brothers' lawyer is pretty blunt, "Do the math".  The Tates' crimes are hardly disputable, as they have made numerous videos, for their online "Hustlers University", where brother Andrew in particular has explicitly and meticulously explained and encouraged for his paid subscribers how to lure, seduce, manipulate, isolate and eventually coerce women into sex work on the man's behalf, even describing the numerous ways with which to control their income and shield it both from the women and from taxes.  This is in addition to the dozens of accusers, some 35 total, including 7 claiming human trafficking alone.

So how did these brothers manage to escape house arrest in Romania and show up yesterday in Florida.  "Do the math".  Andrew Tate perhaps said it best in a tweet after the election, "The Tates will be free, Trump is the president."  Andrew Tate has long maintained that the charges against him are a deep-state frame-up by the same people who were protecting Jeffery Epstein's activities.  Shortly after Trump named his goon, Ric Grenell, as "presidential envoy for special missions", Grenell headed to Romania, where he began tweeting on the Tates' behalf: "The USAid programs were weaponized against people and politicians who weren’t woke....Conservatives around the world were targeted. Romania is the latest example."  Hm, Romania would seem like a strange place to focus your anti-corruption efforts.  Considering that Grenell has spent much of the last few years in Serbia pushing pro-Putin propaganda about the illegitimacy of Kosovo's independence (and has resumed the efforts under Trump), which mirror the administration's new narrative toward Ukraine as well, we can probably expect to see Grenell's "special missions" around southeastern Europe in such places of interest as Georgia, Moldova, Montenegro, etc.  But for now, let's just welcome some internationally criminal rapists please.

The only question now is whether or not Trump will attempt to shield the Tates' from an extradition order from the UK, where the Tates were born and where they face additional accusers.  And, just because, isn't it also appropriate that one of Musk's DOGE dogs, Ed Corestine, is a paid member of Hustlers University.  Naturally.
 

Another installment in my thankless attempt to correct the false perjoration of "liberalism".

It should go without saying that I pretty much fully agree with this article's overall point about the failure of the mainstream corporate news media (they certainly deserve an enormous share of the blame), so I want to focus more on some specifics of their framing of the rest of us.

Political scientists describe [Trump supporters] as low information and low trust voters, and this isn’t an insult despite many high information and high trust partisan liberals seeing it as one. It is merely descriptive of their level of engagement in politics and how likely they are to innately trust our existing institutions. Liberals’ immense faith in our political institutions blinds them more than anyone else to what a majority of the electorate sees, and is at the root of the liberal/left divide in the Democratic Party, as well as the bewilderment over Trump winning two out of the last three elections.

This is typical of a lot of the post-election blather, attempting to excuse those "low information" voters while shifting the blame to those "high information" voters, or presumably voters who have a more factual understanding of the policies.  "High information" = "liberals, you see, and technically "liberal" is closely associated with "liberal arts" or higher literacy among other things.  As if "information" and "engagement" are arbitrary attributes which have no bearing whatsoever on civic responsibility or desired and relevant political outcomes.  Also, this assumption that "low information" and "high information" are somehow static qualities, as if "low information" voters have no options or ability to remedy this situation?  This attitude excuses the lack of engagement as an equally valid alternative to engagment, which is precisely anathema to democracy, which demands participation.  This is, in other words, another symptom of post-truth equivocation where those who know less facts are given equal weight to determine what the facts are.  "Low information" voters might want to ....start informing themselves?  Especially if they don't like the results of their vote?

But this is less of a distortion than the "trust" dynamic.  It is simply a false pretense to claim that "high information" voters are "high faith".  In what exactly?  The very reason that motivates people to consume "high information" is precisely because of a distrust, a need for more diverse outlets and perspectives, a need for deeper understanding before we can make a judgment on a given issue.  Indeed, any voter satisfied with the least amount of information before casting a consequential vote, must surely be far more trusting in those few outlets which they barely bother to pay attention to.  And in fact, if you were to read this entire article, all it includes are examples of these low information voters who voted for Trump because....they trusted the media about his policies rather than look deeper into them, rather than being skeptical of either the headlines or Trump's own statements.  It's almost as if the low information voters are exactly those who trust the headlines rather than read further into the actual details of the stories, who are far more trusting and likely to buy into the surface and simpliest media narratives.  Those who have an irrational faith in the frivolous whims of their Facebook feeds, rather than an interest in verification and corroboration.  This notion that "high information" correlates with "high trust" is simply an idiocy that only a poorly educated media blogger could possibly believe.

Personally, I am far more bewildered by those who still trust the establishment political media these days than those who voted for Trump and now regret it.

Another false and dishonest dichotomy.  The presumption here is that those who voted for Kamala Harris inherently "trust the establishment political media".  As can very easily be demonstrated, there are very many Harris voters who were quite disgusted with the corporate news media and their frequently distorted and stultifying coverage of the candidates and their policies.  And, guess what?  "High information" voters are not the ones tuning into cable news, folks.  Quite the opposite.  Maybe if the writer of this article was a little bit higher information themselves they would possibly be aware of the substantial news media critique that exists among liberals.

If high information, high trust liberals want to understand why their side keeps getting rebuked from both the right and left, they must understand how isolated they are—especially with the mainstream media who is basically only trusted by liberals and centrists in the Democratic Party.

Oh, I guess FOX News isn't "mainstream"?  Note the conflation between "liberals" and "centrists"?  This is a neat trick they pull to defame liberals, considering how "centrists" by definition tend to be neo-liberal.

Gee, I hope I don't come off as some kind of liberal elite snob, but, um.....Maybe people should want more information?  Far beyond the mainstream news media corporations (and, yes, including FOX, Daily Wire, Blaze, etc), there are options out there in our information ecosystem so that no one has to trust any single particular source.
 

I still haven't gotten around to going too deep on the fiasco with Zelensky(y), maybe because somewhere deep down I was hoping, praying, that Jon Stewart would come to the rescue with clarity.  And he did.  You may have to skip in a few minutes to get to the rundown, or further depending on your tolerance for pro wrestling metaphors.  But the metaphor is just as accurate today as it was a decade ago when I opened my "I'm starting to fear the inevitability of President Trump" thread by posting about Trump's time as a celebrity heel on WWE.  "It really is that simple".  Americans really are this simple.  For us, kayfabe really is the equivalent of three dimensional chess.



 

I didn't watch Trump's thing tonight, but I'm sure I'll read about it and see some clips later.

I went straight for the soup.




 

I think some of the motivation of his cronies is that devaluing the US dollar will result in crypto becoming more valuable.

I read that before, but because it's crypto, my eyes just glazed over and it didn't absorb.
Not that talk of general stocks doesn't do the same to me, but I at least have a basic working knowledge of what those are, and why rich assholes like them so much. So when the theory was discussed through that lens, I could at least vaguely follow it.
Basically, my concern just gets down to, oh, maybe this isn't an example of Trump being an idiot and not knowing what he's doing. Maybe reality isn't going to get him to course correct (the stock market being the only reality he ever seems to calibrate himself by). Maybe he's intentionally going to inflict as much damage on the world as possible, and no matter what happens, he's just going to keep barrelling everything down in his way.

I tihnk the only hope I still have at this point, and it's an absolutely faint and dismal hope, is there is a handful of elected Republicans who have a number in mind...that being a certain threshold of Trump's approval rating that if he begins to dip beneath, they may be open to either working with democrats to remove him, or at the very least, handcuff him some. Sadly, whatever that fictional number is will probably be too low for him to ever reasonably get to (25% maybe), and, who are we kidding, those spineless bastards have already tied themselves to the mast of the ship.

I dont' see how anything is improving over the next four years. And I'm suspicious that every year after that is just going to be more of the same, because how do you run free and fair elections once he has completely gutted the entire government of anyone but the worst kind of loyalists?


 

More fun....just notes on the daily events.

The Social Security Administration has prohibited its employees from reading "general news" on their computers while at work.  Which given the rationale that it takes focus away from their jobs is still interesting that no other agency received such an order?  At a time when there's growing news about imminent cuts to Social Security, and disinformation about non-existent zombies who might be receiving it?

....

"President Trump said Thursday he’s looking at whether to revoke temporary protections for thousands of Ukrainians in the United States who fled that country’s war with Russia"  "The move would lay the groundwork for those individuals to be deported".  Compare this to Trump saying just last week that he welcomed Russian oligarchs who could afford to buy his newly announced "Gold Card".  And in addition to Trump suspending US military aid and intelligence cooperation in the past week, and saying that Ukraine "brought it on themselves".  Trump's special envoy to Ukraine, Keth Kellogg, described this tactic as "sort of like hitting a mule with a two-by-four across the nose, it gets their attention".  Again, no response to the ongoing Russian aggression in the form of regular air assaults on Ukraine.

crumbsroom wrote:

I hope they all get on a plane together and an inbred MAGA air traffic controller sends them straight into the fucking ocean.

One conspiracy that I have....maybe not entertained fully, but certainly haven't dismissed, is that someone is fucking with our airplane technology.  This uptick in air traffic "incidents" doesn't seem to me to be the result of incompetence, either in DEI hires or understaffing.  I think somebody's hacking the planes, hacking the radar systems.  The possible culprits have been more or less obvious.  Likely not Russia - their M.O. is simply blowing planes out of the sky.  China is a more intriguing candidate, as they have manufactured a number of components involved in these technological systems, possibly giving them an "in", backdoor access, etc.  But another interesting possibility would be....Elon Musk, who (reportedly) has been trying to get the FAA to replace its technology contract, currently with Verizon, with his own Starlink.  Maybe I lack generosity, but something tells me that Musk might be sociopathic enough to sacrifice a few dozen lives for his own business interests.  But just to remind, this is simply a conspiracy theory with only circumstantial evidence at the moment.  More substantially, was the incident last week, where the FAA in Washington DC saw multiple false alarms of mid-air collisions on their systems on a single day.  "Airplanes use alerts to warn of potential collisions, with pilots using various Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System alerts. The system functions independently of ground-based air traffic control."  The latter effectively means that any amount of ATC shortage or incompetence has zero bearing on these anomalies in the alert system.  Glitch?  I vote hack.  That's my gut.

......

Trump did finally threaten to escalate sanctions on Russia following a week of brutal air assaults on Ukraine, but it still has the flavor of something that someone probably told Trump he had to say, because his conspicuous silence was starting to become embarrassing.  Actions speak louder anyway, and Russia responded with another massive attack on Ukraine's electric grid within hours of Trump's post, effectively calling his bluff, and true to form Trump did nothing, except to continue primarially blaming Zelensky(y), or at least painting a false equivalence: "It takes two" (*actual quote*), and openly sympathizing with Putin: "I think probably anybody in that position would be doing that right now".  But the more disturbing quote, which seems to have gotten little media attention - it wasn't mentioned a single time on the Sunday morning news shows - reveals the truth of Trump's sentiments: "I’ve always had a good relationship with Putin.  He wants to end the war.  And I think he’s going to be more generous than he has to be."

.....

And, Canada?  I guess it's a drug war now!  Nevermind that no one mentioned this until, like, yesterday, and the previous excuses for tariffs ranged from lack of cooperation on immigration (which is not to be confused with "drugs") to some spiteful presumption of getting ripped off and taken advantage of.  Nope, now it's about Canadians killing Americans.  And Trump's people seem to think that Americans (who are probably too high on fentanyl) are dumb enough to believe any of that.  More accurately, Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly has described these tariffs as a "pretext" to annexation, or to try to economically cripple Canada enough to coerce annexation as a favorable alternative for Canada in the future.

I know how crazy that sounds, because it is, and because you Canadians are decent human beings.  You don't understand.  This is prison yard politics.  Out of our most loyal trading allies, Canada is,,,I won't say weakest (only strictly in a military sense) but the most convenient for Trump to make an example, to publically humiliate and bring to heel.  This is, after all, the exact way that Trump has treated all of his loyal underlings.  Your loyalty is only of value after and in the face of your public subjugation.  Trump wants the world to see and to know that if he's willing to treat our closest and most peaceful allies like this, god help the rest.  He honestly believes that these moves, to annex Canada and Greenland and Panama and take the Gulf of America, are the kinds of things which will sorely impress people like Xi, Putin, MBS and all of the other of his emulated autocrats.

I have to admit that I do not know Mark Carney, and am a little ashamed that when I first heard his name in passing, I thought, "Does he have a new stand-up special out?"

But I'm learning.  "He played ice hockey in college."  Well, I wasn't even going to say anything.
 

Jinnistan wrote:

I still haven't gotten around to going too deep on the fiasco with Zelensky(y)
 

Oh man, I strongly recommend watching the whole thing, there really isn't a dull moment. It is hardly the gross–out the media has portrayed it to be, and Zelenskyy comes across as nobody's victim; Zelenskyy made asses of everybody in the room. 

The whole broadcast was so obviously a staged beauty pageant for Trump, who clearly expected to pose for the cameras as the triumphant bacon–bringing hero to America and savior of the downtrodden Ukrainian damsel in distress, while his hand–picked "reporters" (meaning ass–sucking plants like pundit Brian Glenn, host of ultra–rightwing, COVID–misinformation–spreading, QAnon conspiracy–peddling, Trump–worshipping broadcast, Real America's Voice) tossed him softball questions that were blatant prompts for Trump to rehash his classic campaign–style self–glorifications, questions like, "What gave you the courage to succeed where past administrations have failed?" while real reporters from the English–speaking world like the AP were barred from the room. Glenn, who is also the girlfriend of Marjorie Taylor–Greene, is the asshole who tried to berate Zelenskyy as "disrespectful" by not wearing a suit to the Oval Office. Zelenskyy's reply was gold.

"I will wear a costume, after this war will finish. Maybe something like yours, yes?"

Daaaaaaaaaaamn! 😆

Not wise to roast a professional comic on camera, especially when he's at war.

Now I know that "kostum" is a Ukrainian word for "suit," but I also highly doubt it was an innocent mistake, because Zelenskyy is fluent in English, he had just heard the word "suit" uttered several times in the ridiculous question he was responding to, and it was surely far from the first time he had met with commentary about his signature attire. The fact that he's a former humorist suggests to me he knew how to use the wordplay to his advantage.

Regardless, Zelenskyy, the only vertebrate in the room, coolly pulled these mollusks apart one–by–one and had them in crybaby tantrums by the end. Really, it's worth watching just to see him talk over Trump in open disagreement (possibly the one time in history the press fell so silent in a WH press conference you could almost hear the sound of their assholes contracting), and also to see Zelenskyy shut that little sycophant Vance down by addressing him as "JD."

To be clear, Zelenskyy maintained a good–faith effort at diplomacy throughout the entire dialogue (even though I think he knew not to expect anything from it). The shouting only came at the very end when the manbabies threw their tantrums. He just politely coaxed the shouting out of them, and they dutifully obliged.

Trump was right about one thing, it made great television. No wonder he "paused" military intelligence–sharing with Ukraine, helping to enable one of the deadliest strikes on Kyiv civilians thus far. Yes, it was absolutely out of spite. Note, despite all their talk, intelligence–sharing has still not resumed. And Ukraine has still not given up fighting, having just launched their biggest–yet drone attack on Moscow in just the past 24 hours. 

My interpretation of the White House meeting differs from that of both the left and the right in American media and politics. The American Left cried "Shame on Trump; poor Zelenskyy," and the Right fumed, "Insolent Zelenskyy; poor Ukrainians!"

But I think Zelenskyy knew exactly what he was walking into, played the event to his advantage, and beat Trump at his own game. Trump seemed to have temporarily forgotten that he wasn't the only person in the room with a background in show business that day. 

I think Zelenskyy's main message was not for the Americans, it was for the people of Ukraine. What they surely saw back home was a president unwilling to sell them out, not after three years of terrible sacrifice, and certainly not on such unfavorable terms (Trump kept saying they needed a deal before they could talk about security guarantees; it really was the gangster–style "stop hitting yourself" extortion spiel). I rather suspect Zelenskyy drew courage from those photos he held in his hands. He showed his people he had the backbone to stand up to Trump's bullying, unwilling to be made a stage–prop for Trump's self–glorification, and caused everybody in that room to reveal their true colors.

And this move appears to have worked: while international politicians and media spun the incident predictably, Zelenskyy enjoyed a 20–point increase in favorability ratings back home. This provides at least some indication that Ukrainians are prepared to go on fighting and make Russia pay dearly for every inch of their homeland, with or without American support. After all, Ukraine had no guarantees of any international support back in 2022, when they first echoed in defiance, "Russian warship, go fuck yourself."

It appears plenty of Ukrainians still consider a future under Putin to be the less–desirable alternative.

Now as I'm writing this, fresh news is already coming off the press about Zelenskyy and Rubio in Saudi Arabia agreeing to a cease–fire framework, which they hope Putin will agree to (even though as Zelenskyy rightly pointed out, there's no reason to expect Putin will honor any kind of agreement), in a meeting brokered by none other than every president's favorite greaseball, Trump's pal and Putin's frequent guest of honor, Butcher–bin Salman of Saud. I can't help but wonder if somebody at that meeting might have shown Zelenskyy a framework for "Khashogginating" his wife and kids if he didn't play along.

Last edited by Rampop II (3/12/2025 8:00 am)