I scanned a dissertation on Jim Jones for anecdotes and some things he did could definitely be described as dignity wraithing.
He didn't even use real Kool-aid. He killed people with generic shit.
I suddenly recall reading Ishmael by Daniel Quinn in middle school or earlier, and specifically the glorified hash it made of the end of Jonestown. Author definitely a fan.
A great deal of commentary on Trump reminds one of commentary on cult leaders insofar as it bespeaks the troubled spirits of journalists who were unpopular nerds in high school and/or college and wonder at length how and why other people are popular without questioning whether "popular" is a phenomenon with properties at all, much less whether it's worth their dignity to pursue it so doggedly.
Heavens, one does wax cynical this day.
I worry about the blasphemy and idolatry. I don't really know if it's nutpicking or common.
People don't worry about the cargo cults on the Pacific Islands because they don't have guns and they don't live near my house. But it's basically the same thing.
As I have observed before, court filings showed that Tucker Carlson and the Fox crew talked about the credibility and trust they lost when they correctly projected the result of the Arizona race and the election overall. "Truth" is not meaningless to Trump voters. It is a word with a consistent and clear meaning that is different from what it means to reasonable people.
Or at least somewhat different. Decent people nonetheless live in a universe that is resistant to human understanding, and humans often confabulate to fill in the blank spaces and call the result the Truth.
The guy who did the shooting bill was asking about yesterday was a sovereign citizen, but a Moorish one.
I was a bit confused on this because it seemed to differ from the crosstabs; but I see it is "Trump voters" which in this context I believe means those saying they will vote for him in R primary not who voted for him in 2020.
For likely '24 R primary voters overall the numbers are:
Trump: 53%
Friends and Family 58%
Conservative Media 50%
Religious Leaders 44%
Which If I am doing the math right for the non-Trump (in the primary) Rs:
Trump: 25%
Friends: 50%
CM: 42%
RL: 49%
Doing this all on the phone so could be wrong/misunderstanding something in the poll (scribd a mess on the phone).
Still on phone since still "traveling" as we delayed out flight back by 3 days due to our Covid follies. Leave tomorrow. I am pretty well over and testing negative, other 2 finally feeling a bit better today.
The thing about Trump vs general popularity is that Trump as a politician has never been popular in a majoritarian sense. Never won more votes, never been above 50% approval. No other president on this list has failed to be above 50%. He's not the popular kid, but he is a rich asshole with a large and enthusiastic following.
People don't worry about the cargo cults on the Pacific Islands because they don't have guns
Yet.
8: The Las Vegas shooter had sovereign citizen views if you dig beneath the "no political agenda" conclusions of the police and mainstream media.
And my interpretation of the crosstabs is that one of the main impetuses for Trump voters electability.And they may well be right sensing correctly that there will not be anything close to the enthusiasm/turnout for any other candidate. (Although same probably true for opposing voters.)
12: The guns are supposed to be in the cargo.
Do they really trust Trump all that much or is it just that they don't trust anybody, and they trust Trump slightly more? I want there to be a question about what would you trust more - Donald Trump or your own eyes? That's how we could tell how many are true believers.
They pushed back when Trump tried to claim credit for the vaccine.
I mean maybe my husband is a philandering used car dealer and my kids are all meth addicts, and the conservative media figures I can think of are Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, and my minister is always telling me if I just donate more money to his yacht fund then I'll be rich and go to heaven, so maybe Trump does seem relatively trustworthy.
20 is offensive and ignorant stereotyping. Please ignore.
19 is truly the great mystery of our times. Why is this the one issue that Trump is vulnerable on? It makes no fucking sense.
22: Are there other issues where Trump sides with the liberal establishment?
Medicare.
The Medicare Department keeps calling me.
Was at a beautiful place on the coast out here, and then noticed a short ways further down the coast is a Trump golf course. Had no idea he had any out hete.
I recently learned that my brother-and-law and sister-in-law live about 20 minutes from Mar-a-Lago. There's a lot of Trump-themed stuff near them as well.
Unrelated, Hawaii made a drawing of lightning bolt adorned Converse high top, and called it a David Bowie shoe, except that she pronounced Bowie the way that you would if you've sat through a lot more classes on Texas history than on 70s glam rock. I was amused.
27.2 Since David took his name from Jim, there's an argument to be made that Hawaii is pronouncing it correctly and everyone else is saying it wrong.
Jim is pronounced different from David? I did not know that. Does the first syllable rhyme with cow rather than with show?
Jim is pronounced different from David?
Yes. One rhymes with "him" and the other with "havid".
So it's Jim Bouy like the thing that marks a navigational channel? I did not know that.
Hoo-ee, he'd be muy buoyed to hear "Bowie" like kerblooey.
Have any of you ever met a person you would describe as a Trump "true believer"? What are the tells?
Some local tells: he sells MAGA flags on the side of the road on my way to work. Or the guy with the giant Fuck Biden flag in his yard that I pass on my way to work.
But I'm marvelously skilled at not having actual conversations with these people, so.
More seriously, I sometimes can't tell, and then my well-connected local friends will tell me so-n-so is a rabid MAGA nut.
I can remember my dad talking about how he had to keep his mouth shut if he didn't want to argue all the time when he was hanging out with his cronies. But I didn't keep in touch with my dad's cronies. I hid so many people on Facebook, but before I did, none of them were pro-Trump. They just hated Clinton with a burning passion.
39: My dad just argues with, well, maybe not his cronies, but people who hang out in the same places. I come by my blogging and commenting tendencies the old-fashioned way.
19 is truly the great mystery of our times. Why is this the one issue that Trump is vulnerable on? It makes no fucking sense.
I think it's in the context of a constant interplay with his audience at his absurdly long rallies, like a standup comic refining a routine on tour. He's always being meandering and repetitive, trying out new things or new ways of saying old things, seeing what gets the most applause and excitement and shuffling it in. I think at some level the audience realize he's courting them and feeling them out, so they will put their oar in via crowd response. So booing when he mentioned vaccines was just one end of that continuum of feedback.
Or to summarize 42: turning a big dial taht says "Racism" on it and constantly looking back at the audience for approval like a contestant on the price is right
Bob wasn't racist that I ever heard. Sexual harasser though.
So it's Jim Bouy like the thing that marks a navigational channel? "
This is why it's important to watch 1990s action films. I know from The Abyss that Americans rhyme buoy with hooey and Dewey and kablooie rather than with, well, boy. (Though they don't talk about buoyancy as booieancy, at least I think not).
You'd be surprised how little it comes up either way.
The whole point of buoyancy is for it to come up.
45: Didn't we get it from Dutch? Which pronounces it the same as us Americans, now at least.
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I'm watching the procession of SUVs to take Trump to his booking.
Apparently a local bail bonds company is letting him put down the usual 10%.
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51 lol. They're going to have to write off that $180,000
CNN has the mugshot up.
Not just political junkies. I went to a Twitch streamer, who like most of them is determinedly apolitical. The mugshot was up on screen when I joined, although it didn't stay up for long.
I just like the headline "Trump Surrenders".
The streamer also said something about the picture so striking I rolled the tape back and transcribed it, but it was so foul and in the end hard to extract a point from that I decided it was better to refrain from putting it here. It's clipped on my Bluesky though.
If we can't extract points from foul things what's even the point of this place?
OK, don't say I didn't warn you.
"Bro, I live under a rock, I'm not going to lie, I don't know much about the current political climate, but I will say... [mugshot is brought back as background] President Trump is serving some nasty fucking fresh tilapia. Fucking sloppy tilapia cunt. This picture is stone fucking cold, iced out."
It means that streamer thinks orange roughy are called tilapia.
Today I learned roughy doesn't rhyme with Texas Bowie.
Apparently a local bail bonds company is letting him put down the usual 10%.
BECAUSE MAMA WANTS YOU HOME
57: It's a refernce, bro. "A fish rots from the head down." Streamers can do intertextuality too.
57: I'm confused, because I can't tell if the fish is fresh or frozen.
Is a streamer just a podcaster with video?
Animation rather than video in this case, even.
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Our new more progressive DA is under fire. I'm likely to keep voting for her against the old guard, but man, I am concerned about her judgment if she thought it made sense to justify an action, in public, with "the county of A. does not have a nepotism policy."
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"My mom says we can do the nepotism."
I can see that as a reasonable thing to say in a fuller context. This action is substantively fine because of X, Y, and Z, and it's not even a technical violation of the nepotism policy because there is no policy for it to be a technical violation of. You need the substantive defense as well, but if you have that it's all right to make the nitpicky point.
This sort of thing came up with Hilary's emails -- there were a lot of people who were outraged about them as a matter of rulebreaking, even if nothing substantively bad happened. And it was reasonable to point out (even if it wasn't politically effective in the end) that there were not in fact actually existing rules that she was violating.
Not clear that there is any defense of the hire on the merits, she jumped straight to that. At least if the reporter isn't cutting anything out, which I don't trust him not to do. Independent substacker who thinks he's a lot more savvy than he really is.
Reminded of what always seemed to me like the most outrageous case of nepotism in US history.
According to Bobby Baker, the Senate majority secretary and a protégé of Lyndon Johnson, president-elect Kennedy did not want to name his brother attorney general, but their father overruled him. At the behest of vice president-elect Johnson, Baker persuaded the influential Southern senator Richard Russell to allow a voice vote to confirm the president's brother in January 1961, as Kennedy "would have been lucky to get 40 votes" on a roll-call vote.
I have consulted my Bay Area journalist source, and she doesn't have an opinion on the defensibility of Price hiring her boyfriend yet. If she comes up with some insight, I'll pass it along.
Technically, it's not nepotism if they aren't married. It's "sparkling favoritism."
It's important to pronounce buoy distinctly from boy because otherwise, when you're marking a temporary navigation channel such that you need to rent buoys, your motives will be questioned.
I've used a brand of sailing life jacket called "buoy-o-buoy" and wondered what their marketing team would think of places where it's pronounced booey.
Nothing looks as rented as a rented bouy.
Also it seems like political malpractice even if it's justified on the merits. As I also said elsewhere, she was elected to office 6 months after Boudin was recalled, so she should have worked on the assumption she'd be under a microscope, fair or not. (She advanced to the general the same day he was recalled! And she was giving this defense last night at a panel by his side.)
80: This thread is about to take a tern.
57 is obviously just a, uh, riff on "serving cunt", but tbh I've never been able to figure out what that phrase is supposed to mean.
IMO the mugshot is pure Rorschach: if you hate him, he looks ridiculous/oathetic, if you love him, he looks like a gangster. And if you don't follow politics, he looks like a sloppy tilapia.
Or you have a really bad recipe for tilapia.
I know I'm supposed to be taking a break from doomism but holy shit did that motorcade give me the heebie-geebies (and not the good kind).
Security forces at various levels will continue to work in aiding the diminishment of American democracy hand-in-hand with the political wing of MAGA.
FBI and Secret Service responses to 1/6 (before and well after) are pretty telling for instance.
There seems to be a rumor going around that Smith actually has the deleted Secret Service texts - specifically Mueller She Wrote gave my mother that idea - though I haven't seen it from any reputable sources. That would be something, and not inconsistent with the prowess Smith has shown so far.
87: What's most disconcerting is that there seems to be little appetite for facing it. Defund/ACAB frankly glosses over it (if all cops are bastards, then who cares if some are specifically SD-type bastards?), MAGA obviously endorses it, and I don't think mainstream Dems can handle it at all.
Caving into RW faux outrage when the FBI published their "RW Domestic Extremism" report 10+ years ago was a HUGE mistake. Back then, at least, Americans were largely sane about who the FBI is and always has been; now 1/3 of the country is committed to the idea that it's basically the paramilitary arm of Berkeley.
88 would be cause for hope. A smoking gun like that could be cause for serious purge/reform, which in turn could lead to a wider discussion of "what are all these Nazis doing in my police forces?"
88: They got lots of Secret Service emails. I saw some conflate those with texts; the latter would have been better of course, but the emails certainly will tell some things.
88: Are you saying your mother is unreliable?
The Thin Yellow Line (commonly confused with the Thin Gold Line) is representative of Security Guards and Tow Truck Drivers.
80: Just mind the staid lions if transporting either for immortal porpoises.
93 -- and released felons.
Neatly isn't drinking enough water.
"Don't draw a thin yellow line on my leg and tell me it's raining."