WatDabney

Oog.

Lovecraft was very imaginative, but he was a medocre writer at best, with prose that's alternately stilted and self-consciously purple.

Oddly, this sort of thing is the reason that I tend to think that MTG is not as stupid as she appears to be (and the reason I responded to an earlier thread on the subject to ask people what they thought her ratio of malicious to stupid was).

It actually all started with the Jewish space lasers thing, but this one reminded me of it.

She's clearly stupid (and angry - a common combination among her supporters too). But I just can't convince myself that she's so incredibly stupid that she actually believes this. I mean - there's stupid, but then there's so frighteningly stupid that she shouldn't have even been able to survive to adulthood, and this is much more toward the latter.

I guess anything's possible, but...

Let's not kid ourselves - Israel will target whatever and whoever the fuck it wants to, entirely regardless of possible consequences, and the US won't do anything meaningful about it, ever.

Well, he is the bestest and most smartest president in the whole history of ever.

For anyone who still has any doubts about who the real groomers and pedophiles are, the far right is now essentially putting up blinking neon signs announcing that it's them.

On a bit of a side note:

Dimon announced earlier this year he would not make an endorsement prior to the 2024 election.

In August, Dimon wrote in The Washington Post, “We live in a perilous time. Deeply divided, our nation now faces both challenging domestic issues and perhaps the most complicated geopolitical situation since World War II. We may be at an inflection point that will determine the fate of the free and democratic world for decades.”

Though my take on all of that is much more cynical than his, I agree in principle.

We need to elect a president who is dedicated to the ideals that define and unite us, and who is committed to restoring our faith in America and our indispensable role in the world.

And I can see why he won't endorse anyone - because that person isn't a candidate.

That was basically my view for a long time (though phrased much more entertainingly than I likely ever could have), but I've started to think that at least some portion of it is conscious malice - that she's not as stupid as she appears.

Boebert, by contrast, clearly is as stupid as she appears. Admittedly, MTG could just have better instincts (they couldn't hardly be worse), but I think it's more likely that there's at least some faint spark of intelligence there, such that she can at least sometimes recognize a particularly useful situation in which to unleash her anger and stupidity.

Or maybe not...

So what do you think MTG's stupidity to malice ratio is?

In a sense, everything she says and does is malicious, but I think an awful lot of it isn't technically motivated by malice - it's just that she's angry and stupid, so it just ends up also being malicious.

50/50? 60/40? 40/60?

I don't think it's any less than about 30% stupid, and I'd be surprised if it's even that low. Yes - it's certainly possible for a politician to cultivate an air of stupidity as a disarming cover for their malice, but I just don't think she has it in her, and particularly not for an extended period. She really has to be, at least to some notable degree, pretty much as angry and stupid as she appears.

Identity in general doesn't matter much on forums (as opposed to microblogs, like Twitter or Mastodon). Forums are focused on topics rather than people, and what is said is generally more important than who says it.

I keep wondering why we don't see more of this.

IMO, planting trees is the most obvious and basic response to climate change. Literally what they evolved to do is to remove carbon compounds from the atmosphere.

They're not going to solve the problem alone, but they're such an obvious benefit, and planting them is something every community and even every individual can do right now.

Yeah! It's obviously a deliberate manipulation when Google just links to negative stories about him instead of the positive ones, like... like... um... uh...

No, that's not smug elitism at all. Smug elitism was when the limousine liberals were jetting around the country to go to $10,000 a plate dinners and wring their hands over the fact that the ignorant hicks in flyover country wouldn't vote for them.

#Joy Genocide is realpolitik. It's the DNC and Harris trying to juggle the fact that they need to run on positives to counter Trump's negatives with the fact that if she makes even the tiniest hint that she'd cut off the flow of arms to Israel, a whole bunch of fabulously wealthy and influential individuals, corporations and lobbying groups who profit off of it would stop at nothing to utterly destroy her.

It has nothing at all to do with elitism and everything to do with the simple fact that the US federal government is wholly owned by special interests, and those involved in the Israeli military/industrial money laundering scam are among the most influential of them.