Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:05
VIEWED: 185382
PAGE 153 of 479
Quote:
SECOND
Signym, you have written Fuck Ukraine about a hundred times
No, I have not.
And since you keep accusing me, I challenge you to link where I posted that.
You'll be a long time looking, but maybe that'll keep you from posting so many lies.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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You spend an awful lot of time mind-reading... badly.
What Trump feels.
How Trumptards think.
What drives ("incel- adjacent" ... WTF is THAT??) right- wingers.
How they're all secretly Nazis.
Or misogynists.
Or unreformed Confederates.
Or dog- haters.
Or ... something!
If you have to resort to ad hominens, you really don't have much in your arsenal, do you?
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:The strange link between Trump’s tariffs and incel ideology
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Wow. Show me a picture of a wrinkly old ass woman and tell me she doesn't want me.
Oh no. My heart is broken dude.
I don't need money, and after 30 years old a woman has nothing to offer me.
Who do you think you're trying to shame?
Very much a v-cel over here.
I get to do whatever I want whenever I want because I didn't put myself into a one-sided financial contract for life.
Because I'm a lot smarter than you are.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
SECOND
Signym, you have written Fuck Ukraine about a hundred times
No, I have not.
And since you keep accusing me, I challenge you to link where I posted that.
You'll be a long time looking, but maybe that'll keep you from posting so many lies.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
It's never too late for me to say it for the thousandth time.
Fuck Ukraine.
--------------------------------------------------
"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:There is consensus on Trump supporters being unable to understand anything about unobservable mental states or even what it would mean to understand the concept of a 'mental state'.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
You spend an awful lot of time mind-reading... badly.
What Trump feels.
How Trumptards think.
What drives ("incel- adjacent" ... WTF is THAT??) right- wingers.
How they're all secretly Nazis.
Or misogynists.
Or unreformed Confederates.
Or dog- haters.
Or ... something!
If you have to resort to ad hominens, you really don't have much in your arsenal, do you?
Theory of mind in animals
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind_in_animals
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Trump Will Never Betray Putin (Again)
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
SECOND
Signym, you have written Fuck Ukraine about a hundred times
No, I have not.
And since you keep accusing me, I challenge you to link where I posted that.
You'll be a long time looking, but maybe that'll keep you from posting so many lies.
Phillips P. Obrien | Apr 13, 2025
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/i/161218499/trump-will-never-betr
ay-putin-again
It's in many ways rather bizarre that Trump feels the need to go through the motions, pretending that he is irritated with Putin and will come down hard on the Russian dictator for not agreeing to a cease-fire. Having said two weeks ago that he was really “pissed-off” at Putin for being recalcitrant, Trump showed how angry he really was by leaving Russia off the list of states to receive extra sanctions during his truly destructive sanctions fiasco of the last 10 days.
Ahh, but I hear MAGA say that they have justified this lack of Russia being on the sanctions list because they are doing almost no business with Russia due to the existing sanctions regime. The fact that this is taken seriously by MAGA shows how desperate they are to pretend that Trump is not completely in the bag with Putin. Trump’s great tariff list contained, for instance, the completely non-human populated, but penguin-filled, Heard and MacDonald Antarctic islands that do no trade with the USA.
The whole tariff performance was mostly performative—and even then, Trump could not bring himself to do anything to offend Putin.
So this week, in what can only be called the Groundhog-Day phase of the war, Trump once again expressed irritation with Russia (he never expresses anger at Putin).
Quote:Of course he quickly backed off—no new sanctions have been announced, and almost immediately after this, Trump’s personal envoy, Steve Witkoff, showed up at a meeting in St Petersburg and in a sign of devotion/fealty put his hand over his heart when he saw Putin.
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Russia has to get moving. Too many people are DYING, thousands a week, in a terrible and senseless war - A war that should have never happened, and wouldn't have happened, if I were President!!!
Apr 11, 2025, 2:35 PM
I released a piece yesterday pointing out that we need to adjust our language to understand these ridiculous pantomimes. Trump does not want “peace”—he wants to help Putin win. He is a pro-war president, and is maneuvering on Russia’s side.
Trump Is A War President. He Is Working For Putin's Victory And Using The Right Language Is Crucial
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/trump-is-a-war-president
I just really hope I don’t have to keep saying this every two weeks (which is about the cycle we are in for these performative moments.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump’s Obsession With “Manly Jobs” Ignores the Most Obvious One
Trump Is Actually Killing the Best Way to Bring Back Blue-Collar Jobs
If Americans must work with their hands, we could at least build something we need.
By Henry Grabar | April 14, 2025 12:24 PM
https://slate.com/business/2025/04/trump-news-blue-collar-jobs-housing
-construction-tariffs.html
What is the point of the Donald Trump Tariff Show? No one seems to know, not least the man himself. Are we trying to raise a bunch of new tax revenue? Reshore manufacturing? Are tariffs simply a pretense to negotiate better trade deals? Or must we treat the spiritual malaise that comes from dependence on an endless stream of disposable consumer goods? These aims are contradictory, but that hasn’t stopped Trump and his supporters from claiming all these justifications and more.
The closest thing to a through line is the GOP’s fixation on the righteousness of a certain type of old-fashioned factory work, the sort of thing that might be represented in the popular imagination by Rosie the Riveter, if she hadn’t been flagged for removal by the Pentagon’s anti-DEI team. Who are we kidding: Trump’s hard worker is a man. The work should be dirty, difficult, and dangerous. “They wanna mine,” POTUS said last week of coal miners, whose job is one of the country’s most dangerous, marred by both on-site injuries and lifelong health problems. “You give them a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and a different kind of job, and they’d be unhappy. They want to mine coal. That’s what they love to do.” Or as Elon Musk said this weekend, “We need to shift people from low- to negative-productivity jobs in government to high-productivity jobs in manufacturing (as well as mining and refining of materials).” Make America shower after work again.
Beneath all this A.I.-generated policymaking and culture-war posturing lies a real labor-market quandary: Men without college degrees have struggled to find good jobs or hold down any job at all, a phenomenon with some big downstream effects on politics and culture, up to and including the election of Donald Trump. Addressing this has become a cause célèbre on the right, though liberals have also recognized the problem. But it’s unlikely that Trump’s chaotic tariff moves will reindustrialize the United States in any meaningful way or put men back to work.
It’s all the sillier because—to risk taking the president’s goals at face value—there is a way to put lots of American men to work with their hands. It’s a field the president should know well: construction. A giant trade, made up mostly of men, doing work that can’t be outsourced, creating housing that the country desperately needs. Instead, the president is doing his best to crush construction—even as he tries to put the country to work in toaster factories.
Trump’s yearning for manual labor is fueled mostly by the nostalgia that constitutes his entire political reason for being, but there’s a reason people like the idea. Manufacturing jobs, though far outnumbered by hospitality jobs, still pay much more—in spite of the GOP’s efforts to crush unions, worker protections, and so on. Still, they’re distant enough from most Americans’ reality in 2025 that when Ron DeSantis ran for president, he identified not as the son of a steelworker but as the grandson of a steelworker. Surveys show everyone wants more factory jobs; few people want to give up their own job to work in a factory. (Like the old Onion headline: “98 Percent of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation for Others.”)
In the Washington Post this week, Rotimi Adeoye referred to Trump’s tariff philosophy as “MAGA Maoism”:
Like the Chinese Cultural Revolution, it glorifies physical labor as moral purification, only now the purification is from the supposed “wokeness” of desk work, filtered through TikTok, X and Twitch. It’s not about creating jobs. It’s about creating vibes: strong men doing hard things, reshared until they become ideology. As one MAGA influencer put it, “Men in America don’t need therapy
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Trump Is Running Economic Development In Reverse
The combination of tariffs and cuts to scientific research seems designed to move America down the value chain.
Jonathan Chait | April 14, 2025, 3:02 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/04/trump-tariffs-econ
omic-vision/682433/
The markets are going haywire, and consumer confidence is nosediving. You might be wondering why the Trump administration decided to burn down the healthy economy it inherited. Is it pure incompetence? Or is there a plan?
The answer to both questions appears to be yes. The incompetence is undeniable. But the administration does have a plan, or at least a vision, for what will spring up from the ashes. The trouble is that the long-term economic program is even worse than the short-term one.
The clearest picture of the new America that is meant to arise from the crash was provided by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in an interview last week with Tucker Carlson. Bessent acknowledged some short-term discomfort—the stock market plunged as he spoke—but in the service of something grand. “On one side, the president is reordering trade,” he said. “On the other side, we are shedding excess labor in the federal government and bringing down federal borrowings. And then on the other side of that, we will have the labor we need for new manufacturing.” Elon Musk shared the same idea on X: “We need to shift people from low to negative productivity jobs in government to high productivity jobs in manufacturing (as well as mining and refining of materials).” Think of the plan as a classic economic-development strategy, but run backwards.
The typical pattern for economic development involves moving a nation’s economy up the value chain. A poor country develops export markets by specializing in low-wage manufacturing. Eventually, these industries develop higher levels of sophistication, adding more intellectual value—first they build toasters and cameras, then cars, then robots. These industries generate tax revenue that can support better schools and other forms of public investment, feeding back into the developmental cycle. That’s how the “Asian tigers” (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan) enjoyed rapid economic growth over the past two generations, and it’s the pattern other developing countries are hoping to follow.
Donald Trump is basically running this play in reverse.
The tariffs, while putatively intended to promote industrialization, have the more direct impact of directing American production back into industrial inputs. Trump has raised tariffs on metals, which makes building things more expensive but creates an incentive to reshore the production of steel and aluminum. This moves the industrial economy down the value chain, rather than up, which makes sense only if the objective is to have an economy with more guys wearing hard hats.
Meanwhile, Trump is laying waste to basic scientific research. The administration has frozen or canceled billions of dollars in funds to the National Institutes of Health, slashed National Science Foundation grants, and canceled or threatened to cancel billions of dollars in research funding to elite universities (putatively in response to their handling of anti-Semitism).
This has had a catastrophic effect on a wide array of high-tech fields. A group of medical-innovation investors took the immense risk of putting their names on a letter to the administration warning that the research cuts “are an assault on the foundation of biomedical and technological progress.”
The cuts to the bureaucracy imposed by the Department of Government Efficiency have likewise targeted the government’s most specialized experts, whose work maintains the economy’s place at the technological frontier. Trump and Musk are slashing staff at the FDA, a regulatory body that allows new drugs to enter the market, and are reportedly planning to fire half of the Energy Department’s loan officers, who are needed to approve nuclear facilities.
The combination of tariffs and the mass cancellat
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Happy Tax Evasion Day!
DOGE is stealing your tax revenue and giving it to rich cheaters
By Paul Krugman | Apr 15, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/happy-tax-evasion-day
One agency that has been singled out for especially severe cuts is the Internal Revenue Service, which has already laid off thousands of employees. And that’s just the beginning: The Trump administration is reportedly seeking to cut the IRS workforce in half. This would cripple the agency’s ability to conduct audits and discover fraud.
And preliminary indications are that widespread belief that a damaged IRS won’t be able to police tax evasion is already undermining federal revenue.
Last month the Washington Post reported that
Quote:That’s a gigantic number. If it’s right, surging tax evasion may do as much or more to add to the national debt as the huge tax cuts Republicans are trying to ram through Congress.
Senior tax officials are bracing for a sharp drop in revenue collected this spring, as an increasing number of individuals and businesses spurn filing their taxes or attempt to skip paying balances owed to the Internal Revenue Service, according to three people with knowledge of tax projections.
Treasury Department and IRS officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic data. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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(Trump is murdering civilians and gloating about it)
Pete Hegseth Is Gutting Pentagon Programs to Reduce Civilian Casualties
The defense secretary’s focus on “lethality” could lead to “wanton killing and wholesale destruction and disregard for law,” one Pentagon official said.
By Nick Turse | April 15 2025, 7:00 a.m.
https://theintercept.com/2025/04/15/pete-hegseth-pentagon-civilian-cas
ualties-harm/
The Pentagon had been slowly dedicating more resources to killing fewer civilians in recent years, following a long drumbeat of damning investigations of civilian casualties by the press, nongovernmental organizations, government-supported think tanks, and even the U.S. military itself.
But now, under the control of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the Department of Defense is reversing course.
The Intercept spoke with five current and former Defense Department officials familiar with its Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, or CHMR, efforts, who say that the Pentagon is in the process of eliminating or downsizing offices, programs, and positions focused on preventing civilian casualties during U.S. combat operations.
On the chopping block are the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response office, which handles policies that reduce dangers to noncombatants, and the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, which is focused on training and tools for preventing civilian casualties.
The Army also recently announced it will make law of war training — which covers basic battlefield ethics, prohibited acts, and rules of engagement — optional, in an effort to remove “unnecessary distractions” and increase focus on “decisive action in combat.”
This comes as Hegseth trumpets an overwhelming emphasis on “lethality” and cuts to programs that run afoul of Trump administration priorities. Hegseth also reportedly plans to overhaul the entire JAG Corps, which is essential to ensuring adherence to the rule of law and upholding the Uniform Code of Military Justice, after firing the judge advocates general of the Army, Navy, and Air Force.
Trump has also rolled back constraints on American commanders to authorize airstrikes and Special Operations raids outside conventional battlefields, broadening the range of people who can be targeted. After Trump relaxed targeting principles during his first term, attacks and reports of civilian casualties in war zones like Somalia and Yemen spiked.
“There is an overt and ongoing effort to completely shut the Center down and to remove CHMR across all the commands,” said Wes Bryant, who until recently served as the chief of civilian harm assessments and senior analyst and adviser on precision warfare, targeting, and civilian harm mitigation at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence. “Basically, they are wiping DoD of anything related to Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response.”
The four other officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution or to preserve their ability to lobby behind the scenes, expressed varying levels of concern over how the demise of CHMR would affect combat operations and what Hegseth’s priorities might mean for the world. One of them mused that “lethality” might prove to be only meaningless jargon, but worried that it could indicate something far worse: eschewing military professionalism in favor of “wanton killing and wholesale destruction and disregard for law.”
CHMR-oriented personnel at combatant commands around the world will be shuffled into new roles, according to some of the officials. Central Command, or CENTCOM, which oversees military operations across the Middle East, pushed back on this when contacted by The Intercept, stating that the “CHMR team at CENTCOM will continue to provide civilian harm mitigation and assessment support to the command for the foreseeable future.”
Several officials were hopeful that a concerted effort by advocates to preserve some CHMR work at the Pentagon and at combatant commands would allow harm mitigation efforts to endure within different structures and under
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