I’m pretty sure agreeing to the cameo feature was explicitly to find reasons to write a variation on this article. At that point, hey, she paid the price, can’t fault her for putting out the article which legitimately raise awareness how your identity will be misused.
I agree we jumped off the cliff. But since I’m not ready to smash against the rocks, I’m holding onto any rational hope, even if it’s akin to fashioning a parachute out of our shirts on the way down.
We don’t have 3.5 years, the midterms are all we have left.
In less than a year, the GOP has normalized complete fealty and disregard of the rule of law to Trump. Complete victory for fascism in the US right now is a matter of “when” and not “if.”
Which makes the midterms (ugh, once again, I’m getting so tired of this) the most important election of our lifetimes. Assuming we can still get free and fair elections in 2026 before total fascist takeover, re-elevating Congress to an equal branch of the government is literally the only legal move we have left.
Trump’s brain is trapped in the 1980s. Like his preoccupation with legacy network television, he’s always been inordinately fixated on the dominant news magazines and Time specifically. So I’m guessing he noticed and was monitoring the reaction to it, for self-gratification-purposes.
Like his unhinged reaction to his vagina neck photo recently (scroll down): https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/real-reason-trump-lost-over-020854953.html
I can’t find any link to a story where Bernie Sanders endorsed Tulsi Gabbard.
Yes, our elected democrats are incredible at planning ahe-
[ReallyActuallyFrankenstein died of sarcasm.]
They could. But Trump wants to falsely prosecute innocent political targets of the same charges he is guilty of, since he wins either way that way. His blatantly political prosecutions make the charge (and his own criminal conduct) seem political.
He is doing it so he can troll the libs who say he is trying to be king even harder! He is building it ironically!
Accusing gentle Elon of a misdeed?
Right, they have the key, and the lock, but the key isn’t in the lock, so it’s utterly impossible for them to access it.
The GOP has been looking for a truly empty vessel without standards to run their caucuses for decades, and each time they get a little closer. They may have succeeded at the worst possible moment with Johnson.
Just to save a re-reporting click, here is the original Lawfare story.
The embarrassing level of unprofessionalism isn’t surprising, but the only explanation for the reach-out to this reporter is the delusional-level of self-confidence that she could “play” the reporter against the NYT and WSJ to create a public narrative against James. When she couldn’t, she just immediately melts down.
Halligan’s real beef seemed to be with the Times, not me, though she wasn’t saying what was wrong with the Times’s story either. I brought this up in my response, pointing out that my post explicitly credited the Times story, not my own reporting. “Did they get something wrong?” I asked.
“Yes they did but you went with it!” she said. “Without even fact checking anything!!!”
And
“You don’t report fairly!” Halligan replied. Then she added: “I can’t discuss any potential charges with reporters. If evidence arises that warrants further charges, I’ll look into it!”
I was genuinely confused. Only the previous day, she had essentially invited me to fact-check other outlets’ reporting before tweeting about them. Now she was refusing to engage when I did exactly that. “I thought you said I was welcome to reach out to you about what other outlets are reporting,” I said.
She wrote back: “Why do you report on what other outlets are reporting? If I was you, I’d develop sources myself and out compete them all!”
I mean, at a basic level: who uses exclamation points like that in written professional communications? She just sounds like a whining teenager.
Like, we all saw Trump’s post directing political prosecution, she was then appointed, and she did exactly what he directed. Nobody with a triple-digit IQ is going to think this anything but a political prosecution. But they really are going out of their way to prove the Dunning-Kruger effect.
This is the exact thought that went through my mind after reading the story, before I clicked through to comments.
I’m sure this has nothing to do with the fact that outbursts of aggression are a symptom of dementia. Cool cool.
Honestly, this refinement seems like it’s gaming the metric a bit. I have no doubt there’s innovation here, don’t get me wrong, but the first two examples are not just retaining the character, they seem like overfitting.
The model in many of the images reproduces the exact same armor angle, shield angle, head/helmet angle, etc, without any modification - i.e., it isn’t learning how to reproduce a persistent character in multiple angles, scenes, etc, just the exact illustration fed into it, while changing the setting and positioning.
With Trump any apparent step forward inevitably turns out to be ten steps back.
I wouldn’t be surprised if literally Kid Rock was named and confirmed as the next Secretary of Defen- sorry, let me put on my 12-year-old edgelord voice- “War.”
“Those people are inherently bad and I’m inherently good, so it’s not ok when they do it and ok when I do it.”
That’s effectively it.
Essentialism is the philosophy that they themselves don’t know is driving their actions. Trump is good, so when he breaks the law, it’s immoral to punish him. Protestors are bad, so even when they follow the law they deserve punishment.
At their level of understanding, similarly guns and the second amendment are needed to defend goodness from badness. Therefore there’s no contradiction.
The sheer amount of people who don’t understand (a) Trump is a textbook malignant narcissist, and (b) those with malignant narcissism literally cannot recognize other valid interests except their own, is astounding.
Trump’s campaign to “Make American Great Again” was not for even one second him putting America first, it was merely adding “America” as a synonym for “Trump” to his personal lexicon.
Obviously the project is idiotic and hopefully as doomed as it now appears. But more interesting is what it reveals about Musk:
It seems Musk may have a grander plan than being a 90s edgelord troll. It’s looking like Grok is actually intended to be an all-purpose fascist translation layer and reality filter.
Compare this to the censors whose job is rewriting history in 1984, to update whether Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia. Based on reports, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is Grok just running with a variation of the prompt, “copy Wikipedia, but edit each article and history to align with conservative beliefs.” It may really be that simple and stupid. But thinking of Grok as 1984’s censor makes a lot of sense.
Twitter is the real-time arm of that, with Musk clearly directing it to inject right-wing distortion into the shared mass reality. This attempt to falsify history is the companion.