It’s safe to assume that the “uncomfortable” part is that he’s either going to have to admit to soliciting sex with minors or perjure himself, and neither one is going to end well for him.

“We do not currently assess” is ludicrously blatant mealy-mouthed misdirection.

Intelligence is a measure of reasoning ability. LLMs do not reason at all, and therefore cannot be categorized in terms of intelligence at all.

LLMs have been engineered such that they can generally produce content that bears a resemblance to products of reason, but the process by which that’s accomplished is a purely statistical one with zero awareness of the ideas communicated by the words they generate and therefore is not and cannot be reason. Reason is and will remain impossible at least until an AI possesses an understanding of the ideas represented by the words it generates.

It’s safe to assume at this point that delays and chaos (and the opportunities both will provide for fraud) are the exact point.

This time around, Georgia is going to be prepared to “find” Trump however many votes he needs.

Even as cynical as I am, it astonishes me that the Republicans have become entirely up-front about the fact that they don’t really give a shit about the American people and are only interested in how policy decisions affect them personally.

It’s not just the case that they’ll institute harmful policies if they can blame the Democrats for them or oppose beneficial policies that they can’t claim credit for themselves, but that they do it openly and obviously.

And their wholly emotion-driven supporters remain completely oblivious…

And here we have the root cause of every other problem that plagues the US - the entire nation, socially, politically and even psychologically, has been warped towards the sole purpose of pouring as much wealth as possible into the pockets of a relative few.

Like all conservatives, he wants to do unto others as he would not want done unto him.

And if the world were a just place instead of a twisted shithole designed to maximize the privilege of a relative few wealthy and empowered parasites, you could work fewer hours, make the same or even more money and afford a house.

But instead the system has been warped so that you have to work long hours for insufficient pay and still can’t afford a decent life, and all so that a relative few executives, board nembers, bankers, investors and politicians can siphon off the bulk of the wealth you generate so that they can buy more houses and bigger yachts.

No - actually I was talking worldwide. Russia’s just a notable example.

And I would say that all of the things you listed are, directly or indirectly, consequences of the fact that wealthy authoritarian parasites have warped societies to their benefit regardless of the harm done to others, so are actually examples of exactly what I’m talking about.

News flash for wealthy authoritarian parasites around the world, because you all seem ignorant of this fact:

Declining birthrates are a direct result of the simple fact that more people all the time decide that they have no desire to bring children into this world, and that in turn is a direct result of the fact that you’ve turned this world into a warped, corrupt, toxic, authoritarian shithole.

You have no one to blame but yourselves.

Nice.

I’ve been threatening off and on all day to make this exact point and have even started a couple of posts to that purpose, but it never quite came together.

Now I don’t need to - I can just agree.

More than anything else - more than an opportunist or a hypocrite or a liar or a fraud - Vance’s primary attribute and defining characteristic really is simply that he’s an asshole.

She’s bludgeoningly obviously compromised. All the way through, her rulings, and the timing and circumstances of them, have not been made in the service of enforcing law, but engineered to benefit Trump.

So really the only question is whether or not justice will prevail. If this is still in any sense a nation of laws, she’ll be removed (and hopefully sanctioned for her rather obvious bias and/or corruption).

But to all appearances, this is not a nation of law…

Yeah - I obviously don’t know, and it is possible that he’s just naturally and coincidentally so reminiscent of a tweaker, but still…

It just clicked when I thought of it. It’s all there - the constant effortless and entirely self-serving dishonesty and avarice, the revolving door of obsessions, the paranoia and the specific focus on (perceived) loyalty vs. (perceived) betrayal…

I’m not sure that it would be relevant anyway - the issue is who and what he is rather than how he ended up that way. Still though…

Mmm… possibly. Though I did know one flabby tweaker, years ago. I have no idea how he managed it - maybe he was just flabby instead of obese?

But yeah… as a general rule…

And it is possible I guess that Trump naturally developed a personality that just coincidentally is a spot-on match for a tweaker.

It’s just that thinking about Trump’s behavior of late, and particularly this thing with Loomer, put me so in mind of paranoid Hitler withdrawing to the bunker with Eva, and then it all just clicked.

As I’ve said a number of times now, I’m convinced that Trump can’t meaningfully recognize the difference between true and false and right and wrong. I think his mind has been so warped by his pathological and increasingly delusional narcissism that his standard for whether something is true or false or right or wrong is entirely subjective and entirely internalized - that, quite simply, if he believes it then it’s true and if he doesn’t believe it then it’s false, and if he wants it then it’s right and if he doesn’t want it then it’s wrong. That’s it - trapped in his self-serving delusions, he has no other basis on which to judge.

So of course he’s defending Loomer - she tells him things he wants to hear, so in his deranged view, she tells him the truth. And since he’s visibly coming apart at the seams and on track to lose the election, she’s likely one of the few who are telling him things he wants to hear, so one of the few he trusts to tell him the “truth.”

And it just now struck me, mostly because that all made me think of Hitler in his final days, and I have no idea now why it took so long because it suddenly seems so terribly obvious - Trump’s almost certainly a long time meth user, isn’t he?

Yeah - that fits. That absolutely fits.

I think you have forums confused with microblogs.

I presume I’m supposed to care, but I dont, and I don’t know why anyone would.

It still surprises me sometimes how stupid he is.

The donor class doesn’t really care about Trump’s mental (and psychological) issues, and really don’t even care much about Trump at all. They’re not actually supporting him - they’re supporting the handlers and advisers with which they intend to surround him, and the policies (and primarily Project 2025) that they intend to enact through him.

If anything, his incoherence is, to them, a benefit, since he’s just that much easier to manipulate. Since he can’t form a coherent thought on his own, he can be readily filled up with someone else’s ideas, just so long as they’re framed correctly.

He’s like a wind-up toy - all they have to do is feed him carefully crafted stories and get him wound up and pointed in the right direction, then just let him go.