They got 40 million people in that state and they voting these imbeciles in office, and they continue to do it.

Even in an era in which Republicans have come to be defined by psychological projection and unintentional irony, Tommy Tuberville calling someone else an imbecile stands out.

Of a vividly disturbing person.

As a matter of fact, yes.

I didn’t make all that up on the spot. I already had the visual image in mind because that really is how I visualize him.

And I didn’t even try to do it. When he first bought Twitter and started trolling professionally, I just found myself visualizing him doing it, and before I knew it, I had this crystal clear image of him sitting in front of a desktop PC on a rickety particle board desk in a dank basement room with white paint over concrete and green shag carpeting, lit only by the glow from a cheap monitor, wearing gross stained sweats and a hoodie, hunched over a grimey keyboard and occasionally giggling to himself.

I keep trying to visualize the more likely reality for a billionaire of some sort of extremely custom multi-monitor setup in the center of a purpose-built room, but it just won’t stick.

In his mom’s basement, in cum-stained sweatpants, sitting hunched over in front of a cheap oversized monitor hooked up to an underpowered desktop PC with lots of LED, trolling on /b/ and /pol/ and jerking off to pokeporn.

If you think about it, Trump is really a sort of simple and easily understood person.

He has no firm foundation for his ego, but since he’s been pampered and coddled all his life, it’s never faced any significant challenges either. So he’s ended up with this grossly overinflated and terribly fragile ego, and it’s basically a full-time job just keeping it inflated and protecting it from harm.

It’s going to be up to future generations to deliver the full weight of the condemnation those fucking animals deserve, because unfortunately, the positions of power in the West today are held almost exclusively by psychopathic fuckwads and craven cowards who don’t have the integrity and/or courage to make a stand.

More than any other time in my life, I find myself wishing right now that Hell is a real place, because the entire IDF, virtually every Israeli politician, a terrifying percentage of Israeli citizens and damned near every western politician of any note deserves nothing more than to burn in it for all eternity. They are each and all unforgivably evil.

I don’t have any expertise with which to answer your question definitively, but I wanted to chime in to say that my first thought was exactly this: “hands that are gripped together are unable to present a threat to you, so it is a signal of voluntary vulnerability.”

And rather than vulnerability, it might be more accurate to say that it represents submission, which would tie in with your second question, so it’s not so much that one is signaling that one is not a threat to the god(s), but that one submits.

And in that context, it’s likely noteworthy that the most common example of clasped hands outside of prayer is when one is earnestly begging something of someone else, and especially a favor or a certain inconvenience.

Yes.

The goal - and this was already obvious long before the election to anyone with a functioning brain and a speck of intellectual integrity - was and is to destroy the last vestiges of American representative democracy and institute a kleptocratic oligarchy.

Is NBC News actually just now catching on?

At every level.

And even just a cursory examination of the history of civilizations would reveal that that’s par for the course, and that the US is only really notable for the speed with which it’s reached this point.

The DNC and the rest of the Dem establishment would rather lose than adopt any meaningful progressivism or allow for a progressive candidate.

Their primary motivation, and quite possibly their only motivation, is collecting as much soft money as possible.

And that interest is actually well served by losing, and in fact, that appears to be their preference. If they lose, then they don’t need to run in the next election on any platform other than stopping the Republicans from causing even more harm, which saves them having to promise their supporters things that they’ll then have to arrange to somehow fail to deliver even if they have a majority. It’s easier just to lose, then to run merely on being “not Republicans.”

And the one thing that would upset that gravy train is ending up with an actual progressive in a powerful position. A progressive would not only promise things the establishment democrats would prefer to not even mention, but would mean it. And even worse yet, they’d then try to actually deliver on their promises. And that would alienate the big money, which pays for policies that favor themselves, and most assuredly NOT policies that favor the common people.

So yes - if the Democrats want to win, they self-evidently need to appeal to progressives. But that’s been the case since 2016, and it’s made zero difference and it’s going to continue to make zero difference, because they’d rather lose than adopt any meaningful progressivism.

We’re really speedrunning this whole autocracy thing, aren’t we?

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.” - Frank Zappa

One would think they’d at least wait until the planned concentration camps are built.

This isn’t analysis - it’s craven blame-shifting.

Trump already has a blank check to issue pardons and already intends to abuse the power in ways never before seen, and it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference what Biden or anyone else does or doesn’t do.

Why would you think ideology is even relevant?

Much though the world would be instantly improved if that vile, racist piece of shit Pauline Hanson was dead, she’s under no real threat of being murdered by her political opponents - that’s just not the way that Australians do things.

And she knows that.

Isn’t accusing Marcos of corruption sort of like accusing the Pope of being Catholic?

I mean - he’s a Marcos. Corruption is all he knows.

And really, specifically what she did was threatened to have those people killed if they had her killed.

That seems to me to be a reasonable precaution, all things considered.

I’ve never been sure if it was a situational thing or a general thing, but years ago my then-girlfriend and I cleaned a suite of offices three nights a week, and I was surprised to discover that the women’s restroom was generally much worse than the men’s. And I don’t mean just messy - I mean foul and gross.

I never did figure out why that was, but the difference was undeniable.

Hmm…

I actually hadn’t thought about it that way - to the degree that I thought about it at all, I guess I pretty much assumed that opportunistic sycophancy was just his nature.

But yeah - now that I am thinking about it, it is quite likely that to the degree that it’s not his own nature, it’s a role he has to play at the behest of and on the behalf of his patrons.

And the only other thing I’ve really noticed about Graham is that pretty much no matter what he’s doing or saying, there’s this ongoing low level sense of sleaze that just sort of emanates from him. He just seems like the sort of “conservative” with a sex dungeon in his basement and a bunch of highly specialized escort services on speed-dial.

Which ties in neatly.

Sorry - I edited that because I could just see some tight-assed mod getting all twisted up over it, and I wanted the underlying message to not get deleted, and only saw your response after the fact.

But now that you mention it…

Lindsey Graham can always be counted on to suck up to whichever Republican is currently getting the most headlines.

I sincerely have no idea.

The narrative that a leftist couldn’t win is repeated so predictably and so often and by so many people that the whole idea has become sort of detached from reality, and there’s no telling what would happen if it was actually a possibility.

And particularly since the one thing I’d pretty much guarantee is that the concerted efforts on the part of the ruling class to prevent a leftist from running would be as nothing compared to what they’d do and say in order to prevent one from winning.