Occam’s Razor says that if nothing notable has changed even under Trump, then it’s likely that the simple fact of the matter is that the allegations were mostly true and it’s just that the CIA, as opposed to Trump and his minions and lackeys, won’t lie on his behalf.

Regarding your tangent - I think that individual brains work in relatively fixed ways that are established early on - likely at least in part genetically, then refined mostly in infancy and early childhood. There’s a fairly wide range of things a brain can do, but even beyond likely genetic inclinations, there’s not enough available energy or time for individuals to develop all of them, or even generally most of them. And once established, I think they’re fairly fixed - the individual brain already has a number of set paths that it follows and specific regions that are most well-developed, and the body focuses on maintaining those rather than building new ones.

And a lot of the things that we recognize as distinct fields are actually comprised of multiple abilities.

So yeah - you end up with seeming oddities like mathematicians also generally having some artistic/creative ability and business majors generally not having any. The underlying abilities that make mathematics a rewarding field necessarily include abstract thinking, while those underlying business do not - business thinking is necessarily very concrete.

And it’s s perennial problem when people who are especially skilled in one particular type of thinking believe that that means they’re skilled in “thinking” in a broad sense, so able to meaningfully comment on things that are actually entirely outside of their skill set - like tech bros pontificating about art (or my personal biggest pet peeve - research scientists pontificating about philosophy).

I didn’t get it right off.

“National anthem of the internet” was the clue I needed.

That’s an entirely predictable move.

It’s all about incrementalism.

This whole “loneliness epidemic” thing is almost enough to make me feel sorry for extroverts.

Almost.

But you know - as an introvert, I’ve spent my entire life dealing with smugly well-meaning extrovert assholes who think my introversion is some sort of problem that needs to be fixed, so now that society is shifting in my direction - now that living my life without having to subject myself to a bunch of spiritual vampires demanding my attention is easier than it’s ever been - I just can’t really find it in myself to care that they aren’t coping so well with it. Almost, but not quite.

I’m sort of looking forward to a techbro trying to condescendingly tell me that Crime and Punishment is about a man who goes to prison or The Stranger is about a guy who randomly kills another guy or One Hundred Years of Solitude is about a Mexican family.or Moby Dick is about a whale.

Of course.

Every country that fancies itself a potential hegemon is going to sing the praises of the organizations of which it’s a part and demean and disparage competing organizations of which it’s not.

Which is why every individual should take whatever any government says about any such organizations with a grain of salt.

To be sort of fairish, I get the impression that anyone who would say that is the sort of person who could read a book cover to cover and manage to not get anything more than a rough outline of the plot out of it anyway.

Science in general for that matter.

It’s almost as if Trump and his cronies and sycophants looked around and picked out all of the rhings that were going to be most vital and significant in coming years, then said, “Okay, these are the things we’re not going to do.”

But here’s the thing: MAGA and the manosphere may hate clean energy, but they won’t be able to stop the rise of renewables. All they can do, possibly, is stop the rise of renewables in the United States.

That’s the most important (and most stultifyingly stupid) point. They’re acting as if they can stop the rise of alternative energy, and they quite simply can’t. It IS the future, and the only real question is whether the US is going to be an active part of that future or not. And for all intents and purposes Trump and his cadre of angry, shallow dipshits have chosen “not.”

All other considerations aside, that’s one of the most stupidly tone deaf things this stupidly tone deaf administration has done yet.

I think the oppression was sort of secondary and that the most important thing to keep was the corruption.

In fact, I think that that was exactly how they each sold the reforms to the rest of their respective governments - by convincing the politicians that they could implement some measure of capitalism without losing any of their privilege - that in fact, if they played it right, they could do even better collecting bribes from private business owners than they ever did siphoning off public funds.

Wow… people are turned off by genocide. Who’da thunk it?

Yes. That’s because they want people to die.

It’s not a coincidence that they first eliminated employment opportunities for minorities, are now cutting Medicaid, which is the only alternative to employee health insurance, and next want to implement job requirements for Medicaid. The goal is to make it so that “undesirables” cannot meet the employment requirements and are thus entirely denied health care and will die.

Unsurprisingly, it’s essentially replacement theory, but in reverse and very much for real. As is generally the case, Republicans project - they believe that there’s some sort of sinister plan to eliminate white people because they’re in the middle of their own sinister plan to eliminate non-white (non-cis, non-het, non- christian, etc.) people, and they just presume that we’re as evil as they are.

I think one of the most concise ways to conceptualize the current conservative project is that they looked at the French Revolution and the collapse of the Ancien Regime and drew the wrong conclusions.

Rather than seeing it as the inevitable result of the systemstic oppression of the majority for the obscene privilege of a select few, they see it as a failure of the select few to sufficiently protect their privilege. And their goal is to recreate the conditions of the Ancien Regime, but this time around to prevent the peasants from successfully rebelling.

Yes, though with a feudal system mixed in.

Corporations and wealthy individuals will be the sole property-owners and will play the roles of feudal lords, and the people will be serfs, allowed to live on the lords’ estates only if they serve the lords.

Since homelessness will be criminalized while all property will be owned by the feudal lords, those who won’t serve the lords “willingly” will be imprisoned, and yes, they will then be slaves.

And they put razor blades in Halloween candy too!

And further - the establishment of a single, fediverse-wide account for each user would make it far too easy for those so inclined to silence anyone they wanted merely by banning their one and only account.

It’s not a matter of how ones profile would be accessed, but how it would be created in the first place snd how it would be managed.

Necessarily, those who implement the creation of accounts have control over how they’re created, who is allowed to create them and how they will be handled after creation.

Any scheme to establish one “central” (your own term) account for the entire fediverse will necessarily be managed by one “central” service, which means one “central” authority over account creation and management

At this point, all it would take would be to successfully establish the precedent that legal citizens can have their citizenship revoked (which just requires a case getting to the Supreme Court, where the corrupt majority has already demonstrated that they’re going to just rubber-stamp whatever Trump wants), then to issue an executive order declaring that [whatever quality] is [whatever has been deemed to be acceptable grounds to have ones citizenship revoked]. It would undoubtedly be challenged, but again, it would wind up in front of the Supreme Court sooner or later, and they’d rubber-stamp it