A gratuity is just a postdated bribe, and everybody including the Supreme Court knows it.

There’s another whole aspect to the recurring pushes to remove the dams that’s pretty much always left out too.

Likely the biggest beneficiaries if the dams were removed would be power companies, who, even with the dams generally operating at a tiny fraction of capacity, are stuck having to sell cheap hydroelectric power at low rates.

If the dams were removed, they’d be able to justify contracting (often with their own subsidiaries) for the construction of expensive new power plants with lower capacity and higher operating costs and would then be able to convince the PUCs to grant them massive rate increases.

Ah, but I’m sure that has nothing to do with the mysteriously well-funded campaigns to remove the dams that get a new round of publicity every few years…

That’s more or less the theory I keep coming back to, but I can’t even entirely wrap my head around that one. It’s sort of like a really complex conspiracy theory in that it presumes a particular contrived course of action from seemingly too many people.

I can absolutely imagine some number of writers, editors and publishers self-servingly treating the obviously insane blathering of a lunatic as if it’s legitimate just to further their own careers, and I can absolutely imagine some additional (and likely greater) number of them doing so to protect themselves from retribution. I can even imagine some number who are themselves insane in a way that aligns enough with Trump’s insanity that they treat him seriously sincerely.

But all of that still doesn’t seem enough to account for the near-universal failure to even comment obliquely on how deeply mentally ill Trump so obviously is. Just as with a complex conspiracy theory, I can see the possibility on a limited scale, but it all seems to fall apart if one tries to expand it out to the scale that would seem to necessarily be the case.

And yeah - I keep ending up feeling like the only sane person in the asylum.

Well…

You’re absolutely right, and that was very well-written to boot. But it’s not the part that perplexes me. I likely just did a poor job of explaining myself.

I fully expect his intellectually and/or psychologically compromised supporters to fail or refuse to recognize his glaringly obvious insanity. As you note, he affirms their prejudices and tells them that the condemnation they so deservedly receive is actually some sort of evil conspiracy, and they grovel at his feet, lapping it up.

But that just accounts for a portion of his supporters and none of his opponents, and it’s that remainder I wonder about - all of the people who are certainly rational enough to recognize his glaringly obvious derangement for what it is, but somehow just don’t, or won’t.

I have this recurring experience in which I read an essay or article from some more or less neutral site or even an oppositional site in which someone relates something that Trump said, then parses and analyzes it, as if it’s a legitimate statement of supposed fact rather than the deranged ranting of someone who’s painfully obviously profoundly mentally ill, and I can’t even see how they managed to make it that far - how they didn’t just stop halfway through relating whatever it was he said and throw their hands up and say, “This guy is a fucking lunatic!” Because he so blatantly obviously is.

That’s what I don’t get.

…a perfect, brilliant, beautiful statement that I make…

Doesn’t anyone else notice how often he makes these cringily exaggerated statements, and more to the point, recognize how clearly they illustrate the staggering depths of his delusions?

That’s still the thing I most notably don’t get about Trump - the man is obviously profoundly mentally ill, so why and how is he even taken seriously? How in the world is it even possible for such a painfully obvious gibbering lunatic to not only run for public office, but quite possibly win?

No - I don’t agree that they’re completely different.

“Made by AI” would be completely different.

“Made with AI” actually means pretty much the exact same thing as “AI was used in this image” - it’s just that the former lays it out baldly and the latter softens the impact by using indirect language.

I can certainly see how “photographers” who use AI in their images would tend to prefer the latter, but bluntly, fuck 'em. If they can’t handle the shame of the fact that they did so they should stop doing it - get up off their asses and invest some time and effort into doing it all themselves. And if they can’t manage that, they should stop pretending to be artists.

I’m roundaboutly reminded of one of my favorite novels - Greener Than You Think, by Ward Moore.

It’s a science fiction story about the end of the world that was written in the late 40s. The proximate cause of the end is all of the landmasses of Earth being smothered by a gigantic and very aggressive strain of Bermuda grass, but the real cause is the utter and complete failure, due to ignorance, greed, selfishness, short-sightedness, incompetence, arrogance and so on, of every attempt to combat it.

Another of the many things the current US shares with Ancien Régime France - then and there too, the richest paid little to nothing in taxes, even as the government served their interests almost exclusively.

Dredge.

A very simple concept and gameplay loop that expands out into the bizarre and fantastic.

Honorable mention: Ronin.

Bullet time, effectively turn-based ninja combat. Simple, regularly autosaved “go until you die, then try something different” gameplay loop and just a helluva lot of fun.

Honorable mention: Valley.

Smooth and thrilling first-person mechanically-enhanced parkouring along the way to investigating the mysteries - both ancient and more recent - of a unique and very picturesque valley.

No surprise there. Trump and his acolytes and sycophants have clearly signaled that they’re eager to be Putin’s lap dogs, so if Trump wins, Coke and the rest will have pulled out of Russia for nothing.

Even “the pot calling the kettle black” isn’t enough to sum this up.

It’s more like “the pot calling the salad bowl a pot.”

In a somewhat metaphorical but nonetheless very real sense - most politics is effectively snake oil.

There’s a set of people who exhibit a particular combination of mental illness and natural charisma, such that they feel an irrational urge to impose their wills on others, a lack of the necessary empathy to recognize the harm they do and the personal appeal necessary to convince others to let them do it.

There’s another set of people who feel an irrational sense of helplessness - who want to turn control of their lives and their decisions over to others, so they can just go along with a preordained set of values and beliefs and choices rather expending effort on, and taking the risk of, making their own.

And just as in any more standard “snake oil” dynamic, the first group, exclusively for its own benefit, preys upon the weakness and hope of the second. Just as in any other such dynamic, the people of the first group make promises they have no intention of keeping ultimately just so that they can benefit, and the people of the second group continue, irratiomally, to believe those promises, even as all of the available evidence demonstrates that the promises are empty.

Candidates for public office should be required to undergo a mental health assessment as part of the process of getting on the ballot, and those who score beyond (above or below, as may be relevant) particular thresholds are barred from seeking office.

I sincerely believe that there’s no single thing we could do that would provide more benefit to the world than to get sociopaths and narcissists and megalomaniacs out of positions of power. Each and every one of the most notable and contentious politicians in the world today is, if you just take a step back and look at them honestly, blatantly profoundly mentally ill. Enough is enough.

That just says to me that no near future Monster Hunter game is going to be worth playing, since that focus just means that gameplay and story are going to be sacrificed in favor of graphics and gimmicks.

That said, it’s difficult to see people’s homes targeted by protests like this with the rise of the Neo-Nazi right as it is in America.

That sentence neatly sums up a whole raft of issues.

First - yes - this sort of protest is and always will be problematic at best. I understand the impetus (intellectually at least - I’n far too old and cynical to feel that sort of fervor, and I was never that reckless), but even though the cause is just, there’s a point beyond which protest becomes counter-productive, since it alienates people who would otherwise support it.

And there is a very real looming spectre of antisemitism in the US.

But the thing is that protesting the war in Gaza or zionism broadly is NOT part of that threat, and every bit of (self-serving) effort expended on that is diverted from the real threat, which comes from an ever-growing subculture of stock-standard (neo) nazi antisemites - people who are specifically targeting Jews, collectively and individually and even using much of the same rhetoric and stereotypes that the Third Reich used. And notably, that threat doesn’t come from the left, but from the right.

That said though there is a potential threat inherent in the (almost entirely left-wing) protests against the war - the risk that it could expand to a broader condemnation of Israelis in general, or even Jews in general. I’ve actually been sort of half-expecting to see someone try to make a case similar to ACAB regarding Israelis or even Jews - that they’re all [pejoratives] because they’re all, necessarily, either murderous xenophobes or at best enablers of the murderous xenophobes in their midst.

And that then leads back to where you started. That was actually part of the impetus for my first response, though I ended up spinning it a bit different way.

The ongoing efforts to conflate opposition to the war or to zionism with antisemitism are, and I would say rather obviously, not only simply dishonest, but actually a threat to Jews. They invite antisemitism, and to some degree actually are antisemitic, insofar as they assign a particular set of beliefs that many find noxious and worthy of hatred to Jews collectively and individually, entirely regardless of and in many cases directly contrary to the actual beliefs and preferences of individual Jews.

And… I’m yet again, as I am on pretty much a daily basis, reminded of the purported old Chinese curse - “May you live in interesting times.” We certainly do.

Thanks for the response.

Perhaps there is some context this article doesn’t touch on

There is.

This is the most concise and complete summation I could find of the (early) history of the protests against Brooklyn Museum and Anne Pasternak.

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/anne-pasternak-brooklyn-museum-interview-part-2-1409434

Note too that there’s another controversy - regarding the hiring of a white curator for African art - that likely provides the context for the “white supremacist” part of the graffito.

just because they’re Jewish

Actually, a bit of quick research reveals that Brooklyn Museum, and Anne Pasternak specifically, have been the targets of protests since at least 2016, when the museum, under her directorship, put on a show called “This Place” that purported to be an unbiased look at Israel and Palestine, but was backed by pro-occupation funders.

In fact, the group that was organized in response to that show, called “Decolonize This Place,” still exists and is still active.

So it’s exceedingly safe to assume that she wasn’t targeted “just because (she’s) Jewish” but because for at least the past eight years, she, and the museum more broadly, have been seen to be sympathetic to colonialism broadly, and zionism specifically - so much so that at least one organization was formed and still exists specifically to protest them.

Here’s the most concise source for that - an interview with Pasternak from 2018

Funny thing:

The idea that protesting the slaughter of Palestinians equals antisemitism requires starting from the position that slaughtering Palestinians is a fundamental part of the Jewish identity.

There’s really no alternative way to interpret that. If slaughtering Palestinians is not a fundamental part of the Jewish identity, then protesting such slaughter has nothing to do with Judaism, and thus cannot be antisemitic. It’d be like trying to claim that protesting cars is anti-Amish.

So all these people quoted here are essentially saying that slaughtering Palestinians is not just fundamental to being Jewish, but so deeply and uniquely fundamental - so much a part of Jewishness - that opposing such slaughter automatically equals opposing Jews.

Doesn’t that sound sort of… antisemitic?

Well damn.

No - I very deliberately used round peg in the square hole, initially just to avoid the cliche, but the more I thought about it, the more I liked it.

Conservatives pound on round/natural/organic/smooth pegs to try to force them into square/artificial/contrived/rigid holes.

I liked it anyway…

In all seriousness, I sort of pity conservatives.

They’re sort of like the one kid in kindergarten who could never manage to figure out which plastic peg went in which hole and would just get frustrated and throw things. Except that they never grew out of it. Here they are, twenty or thirty or sixty years later, still unable to grasp the simple fact that the world just is what it is and the round peg isn’t going to go in the square hole no matter how much you pound on it, and still angry over it, as if it’s some sort of vast conspiracy rather than just the fact that they’re fucking morons.

That has to be an unpleasant way to live.

Of course, they’re such vile and loathsome and destructive assholes that my pity is short-lived, but still…