It’s withholding funds for refusing to grovel at the feet of the Toddler-in-chief.

Proving that the Netflix execs don’t have the foggiest fucking idea what they’re doing.

You gain viewers by engaging them - by giving them something so interesting that they can’t be distracted.

If you dumb everything down, the most likely outcome is that rather than looking at their phones in addition to your show, they look at their phones instead of your show.

To further punish Tim Walz for saying mean things about the Toddler-in-chief.

I see a good amount of idiocracy, but more what I see is… let’s call it “lunaticracy.” It’s not just that a significant number of powerful and influential people (and their sycophants) aren’t smart - they aren’t even sane.

On the first internet forum on which I spent time, in the mid- to late-90s, there was one poster who was egregiously intellectually dishonest - who regularly resorted to strawmen and ad hominems and non sequiturs and red herrings and so on, and essentially never engaged honestly. And it was so notable that his username became the forum slang term for those sorts of tactics.

Between then and now, those tactics have gone from the exception to the rule.

claims he never saw oppression

Of course he didn’t - the oppressors never do.

claims it will be a “very bad thing” if the US becomes a minority white country

Worst case scenario, it’ll only be a bad thing for the white minority, while the privileged majority will smugly proclaim that they see no oppression.

Grok - the AI for incels.

should ≠ would

Yes.

None of which alters the fact that he’s patently insane.

Though it does certainly call their mental health into question too.

And they can whisper in his ear successfully because he’s insane.

Time to 25th Amendment this fucking lunatic.

deleted by creator

This is class war.

The US is really in a timeline in which policy decisions that affect millions of people are made according to the whims of a petulant, vindictive manchild.

It’s as if I just woke up one morning to discover that while I was asleep, the world went insane.

That that’s a “guiding principle” doesn’t even begin to imply that it’s something in which people actually engage.

Now that you mention it though, I’d say that it’s plainly obvious that tankies fail specifically by not engaging in criticism and instead engaging in apologetics. They stubbornly and often even angrily avoid even facing, much less analyzing, the inherent issues with state “communism” and instead dedicate their time and effort to making excuses for and distracting from any and all examples of those inherent issues.

I think it’s also in large part due to the human tendency to simplify reality. Reality is often complex, but we prefer to thing in categories, like black and white. And so you often see people thinking in or blindly accepting false binaries. Side A bad, so side B bad.

Agreed.

Nuance is difficult, and arguably more to the point, it’s sort of vague and insubstantial, not least because an awful lot of it necessariky boils down to “I don’t know.” People generally prefer something more solid to which to cling, so tend toward absolutes and unjustified certainties. And the most attractive ones are binaristic, because then you don’t even have to provide support for your claimed position - all you have to do is find fault with the (generally falsely dichotomous) alternative.

As a couple of poster here are already demonstrating, they discover that western nations have lied about communist nations, but they don’t learn the more fundamental lesson that they shouldn’t trust everything a nation says. So instead of adopting a nuanced view, they just counter believing everything a western nation says with rejecting everything a western nation says and instead believing everything a communist nation says.

The CIA deals in narcotics

Ah.

It’s been apparent from the start that we weren’t getting the full story about what’s really going on with Venezuela, but I had a few theories about it.

The CIA’s involvement makes it likely that the correct one is that this war against drug traffickers is actually a turf war - that the US is not attacking Venezuelans in an attempt to stop the flow of narcotics (which is a fool’s errand anyway) but in order to seize control.

Just as the CIA did in the past with heroin in southeast Asia and cocaine in central America…