I’m just a few short years away, myself. Woof, hadn’t realized that.

Sean Connery and Patrick Stewart looked like they were 55 between the ages of 25 and 85. Conversely, Paul Rudd and Joseph Gordon-Levitt looked like they were 15 between the ages of 15 and 40.

Aging is weird.

Does that make it better or worse that he’s a rube instead of a grifter? I can’t figure that out, tbh. Probably one of those two, yeah.

To his (very, very faint) credit, he did do the right thing when it mattered: he certified the election, even when a mob had threatened his life previously.

I think, in contrast to a lot of other republicans in office today, Pence actually believes all the stupid stuff he says. The end result is mostly the same (regression, a rise in fascism, etc); but I think he somehow managed to come by it honestly.

But that’s what I’m saying. 20 years ago, those people were at least somewhat fringe; I was pretty closely adjacent to them geographically. The shifting of the Overton Window has led to them seeming somewhat reasonable to a decent chunk of people.

I mean “just enough” in terms of uncertainty, not in terms of the number of news organizations.

Though I also think that there’s a matter of degrees here. Some news orgs are doing some heavy water-carrying, normalizing a lot of really non-normal stuff. Some are definitely trying to hedge their bets, being as deferential to the regime as they reasonably can in hopes that they can fly under the radar. And some of them are actually doing really good and unbiased reporting work, but not rising to the occasion of providing the necessary context required to show how much of a crisis this administration is.

And of course there are full-blown propaganda factories, and fully-independent news sources doing great reporting with great context. But both of those are pretty uncommon.

Whoa, this is like…real-time archaeology of my own brain. I know for sure I’ve read this tweet before (when I was writing it, I was about to write “New Jersey” but that didn’t sound right so I left the state off entirely). I bet I probably have also heard the Italian grandma story, and mixed them both in my head because what are the odds that there are three such stories? (including the one I posted originally about the mafia front that went legit because the pizza biz was better).

There’s a long history of people misunderstanding the purpose of quotation marks and using them for emphasis. It’s not quite to the point where the misunderstanding has taken over, and at this point it is unlikely given the fact that asterisks seem to have overtaken that role, but I remember memes about this from twenty years ago or so.

It’s even more pronounced in countries where English is not a primary language, which is likely where most silica gel packets are packed.

The movement of the Overton Window has caused some significant issues, that’s for sure.

I think your original estimate is correct, but the problem is that they’ve captured enough media outlets that sow doubt about right-wingers’ true natures to make another 20-30% just uncertain enough to vote for the nazis.

Agree with your remediation, though. Confederates, Nazis, and J6ers are enemies of the state and should be forever barred from holding public office.

Your story is so familiar, I wonder if maybe I misremembered that one.

Local places are always one or the other: either they’re the best thing you’ve ever eaten and you can’t wait to get back there and have it again, or they’re just the worst. I guess that applies to mafia fronts, too.

A maybe-related but maybe-not story: I heard someone talk about walking into an out-of-the-way pizza place. Inside, there were no customers, but there was one employee and there seemed to be a few guys in suits just standing around talking to him. Everyone there was surprised to see anyone walking in, and even more surprised when he ordered a pizza. The pizza took ages to make, like over a half hour, but he did get a pizza; they handed it to him and hustled him out the door without even taking his money. I think they might’ve even locked the door behind him, I don’t remember.

The way the story goes, he took it home and ate it, and it was the absolute best pizza he’d ever had in his life. But every time he tried to go back after that, the place was closed.

I keep thinking about the pizza store that was opened as a front for the mafia but did such good business that they quit doing the mafia thing and just sold pizzas full-time

He did not have any concrete plans for the economy. And, in fact, Harris pointed this out at pretty much every opportunity.

It’s not all about him, no; but my understanding is that conservatives in Canada massively underperformed yesterday, and the analysis seems to point to mobilization against Trumpism.

I mean, it depends on whether you mean “can say some words” or “can actually carry on a conversation.” The speech thing can vary pretty widely; I’ve got an 8-year-old who was speaking in complete sentences by, like, 20 months, and an almost-3-year-old who was speech delayed and is really only just grasping the idea of expressing his preferences to us with words. Our other two were in between those two extremes.

You’re not wrong, though. In any case, he is not fully-developed as a human adult.

I don’t think Trump ever developed a theory of mind when he was a child.

“Theory of Mind” is the developmental change where you realize that other people know things that you don’t know, and you know things that other people don’t know. It usually shows up before you turn five, kind of concurrent with a solid grasp on language. But I don’t think he ever got it.

So he doesn’t understand how people could know words that he doesn’t know (“groceries”), he doesn’t understand how people could understand the importance of things he doesn’t understand the importance of (pretty much every government agency), he doesn’t see any reason for social supports (because, see, he doesn’t need them). And, paired with his obvious narcissism, since he loves himself, he is psychologically unable to conceive of the idea that other people could exist who don’t love him.

Under this framework, he can never be wrong, because he literally knows all the things (the hurricane path map). He can never have done anything wrong, because he knows what’s best. And he can never have broken any promises, because he knew what would happen and made the choice on purpose.

But he’s also been around for long enough to prove all of that untrue, so he’s had to carve out little exceptions for himself: specifically, that (1) everyone who doesn’t like him isn’t really a person, they’re actually evil and bad and nobody likes them (because he doesn’t); (2) everyone who knows something he doesn’t is either keeping secrets or a super-genius, depending on whether he likes that thing or not; and (3) when his actions have negative consequences that actually affect him, it’s because of one of those evil not-people plotting against him.

So, anyway, when you call Trump a toddler, you’re actually giving him a few extra years of credit that he hasn’t earned.

It’s not thinking. It’s just spicy autocomplete; having ingested most of the web, it “knows” that what follows a question about the meaning of a phrase is usually the definition and etymology of that phrase; there aren’t many examples online of anyone asking for the definition of a phrase and being told “that doesn’t exist, it’s not a real thing.” So it does some frequency analysis (actually it’s probably more correct to say that it is frequency analysis) and decides what the most likely words to come after your question are, based on everything it’s been trained on.

But it doesn’t actually know or think anything. It just keeps giving you the next expected word until it meets its parameters.

There are plenty of communities for that. I like those too. But sometimes you just need to do bits on stupid AI slop.