Just driving home the fact that the President of the United States is a deranged lunatic with the emotional development of a toddler and an ego that’s so grossly inflated ¡that it’s stretched as thin and fragile as tissue.

No “probe” is even necessary. We watched (though only some of us paid attention) as, for instance, the tech moguls all lined up to give Trump money for his inauguration, then were immediately rewarded with beneficial rulings from newly DOGEified agencies. Or as CBS agreed to a “settlement” on a Trump suit that legal experts widely predicted would be summarily dismissed if it ever went to trial, and were immediately rewarded with approval for their Skydance merger.

Trump isn’t merely corrupt - he’s overtly and brazenly corrupt. He’s corrupt right out in the open, for all to see.

And as with everything else about this deranged lunatic who’s weaseled his way into American politics, the real question is whether anyone is going to do anything about it.

There are wind turbines off the coast of Trump’s Scottish golf course. He claimed they were an eyesore and tried to have them removed and failed, and has hated wind energy ever since.

I’m not kidding.

US policy is under the control of a dull-witted overgrown toddler.

History will record that the collapse of the US began in earnest when the Trump presidency reaulted in the rise to power of insane morons.

Surprising no one.

Yes. The partisan Republican justices are brazenly issuing not coincidentally generally unexplained rulings with little to no regard for established law, precedent or the Constitution, and by doing so, are clearly violating their oaths of office. That is an impeachable offense. They should be removed, and prosecuted.

I couldn’t say exactly why, but broadly it’s safe to assume that the answer could be found by the age-old method “follow the money.”

Cue the IDF targeting beehives in 5, 4, 3…

Cory Doctorow said in a recent essay that at this point, it would be cheaper to print something using Kentucky-Derby-winning stallion semen than HP ink.

Class war is already happening, and the ruling class is winning virtually unopposed.

Class war is happening right now, right before your eyes.

And wealthy and empowered psychopaths are winning and you and I and all the rest of us are losing.

It’s a thing I hadn’t really thought about before, but as I was writing that, I was thinking how many times I’d written similar things in the past - about heavy metal music, comic books, dungeons and dragons, violent video games…

And it struck me that that was too consistent to be coincidental - that there had to be some basic failure at work there.

And thinking sbout it more - it’s at least broadly the same dynamic as the endless loop of class- and race-based bigotry. Systems are established by which members of a particular class or race (or ethnic group or gender or sexual persuasion or…) are disadvantaged - poorer nutrition, less stable housing, poorer education, fewer opportunities, etc. - then point to the ignorance, frustration and antisocial tendencies that triggers as nominal evidence of their inherent inferiority, by which they’re rightly denied equal treatment.

I’m willing to bet that there’s a significant body of work out there on this topic

It’s always projection.

Of course. It was a given that that was what they were going to do, because they’re entirely corrupt and compromised, entirely without integrity, principles, honor or legitimacy and driven solely by a determination to serve the interests of Trump and the oligarchs.

I’m reasonably certain that it would be much more accurate to say that people who are prone to depression, paranoia, suicidal thoughts, self-injury and digital self-harm are more likely to use the dark web.

Broadly, this isn’t the first time that it’s struck me that pedantic moralizing often relies on reversing cause and effect…

I have to push back a bit that the core of the proper definition of libertarianism is freedom from the state.

I’m not sure why you feel a need to push back against something I didn’t say.

Depends on how it’s defined.

Current libertarianism is just rebranded reactionary conservatism.

Classically though, “libertarian” simply referred to someone who advocated for maximum individual liberty and minimum state intervention. The term first gained popularity in the US in the wake of the New Deal, when the term “liberal,” which had up until then referred to that position of maximum individual liberty and minimum state intervention, was coopted by leftist authoritarians. Since the classical liberals needed a new term, they shifted to “libertarian.” And notably, at that point, libertarians were at least as likely to be left-wing as right, with the two groups merely splitting on which specific government services should be counted among the minimum.

That started to go wrong when the Libertarian party was established, and finished going wrong when the Tea Party was transformed from a series of protests against the Wall Street bailouts to a traveling carnival of hate.

And there’s also the political compass sense of “libertarian” as simply the opposite of authoritarian, by which I’m as “libertarian” as it’s possible to be. It should be noted though that in recent years, mostly through meme communities, even that conception of “libertarian” has been increasingly characterized as more of an alternate authoritarianism.

So there’s a conception back behind each use of the term “libertarian” that is at least close to mine (I’m actually an anarchist). But IMO not coincidentally, the term has been in all cases warped to refer to some form of authoritarianism, which I unequivocally oppose.

People complain about the evil of landlords, but it’s nothing compared to companies like this.

Landlords at least nominally provide some sort of ongoing services. There are no necessary services a font company could possibly provide - there’s no maintenance, no upkeep, no ongoing costs at all. This is just pure, and purely evil, rent-seeking.

A federal judge ruled in October that the USDA could not deny SNAP funding to the states because of their failure to submit data.

This is how it works now - the Trump regime says it intends to do something, a court rules that it can’t, then the regime says, effectively, “Fuck you we’re going to do it anyway.”

At this point, Trump will go down in history either as the president who destroyed the US or as the president who was prevented from destroying the US. There is no third option.

Kristi Noem never outgrew being a 13 year old rodeo queen, so this was like a dream come true for her.

And if she can make millons off of it by abusing the national emergency declaration to award a no-bid contract to a business connected to her and her staff, all the better.