What the fucking fuck?!

Those fucking psychopaths actually want to punish Mexico for experiencing a drought?

Ah - just went and read the article, and what it actually centers on is a sugar cane industry that’s been wedged into south Texas (undoubtedly with big fat bribes paid to politicians).

Sugar cane is notoriously water-intensive, and likely should’ve never been grown in south Texas in the first place. It’s near certain that the sugar cane industry is actually the most significant proximate cause of the very drought conditions that are now a problem. So in effect, it’s the US, at the behest of Texas legislators and interests, wanting to punish Mexico because the Texas sugar cane industry wasted all of the available water and still wants more.

A similar entirely contrived “problem” exists in south Florida, in which the heavily subsidized sugar cane industry and their legion of wholly corrupt politicians are the proximate cause of the draining of the Everglades.

A gratuity is just a postdated bribe, and everybody including the Supreme Court knows it.

There’s another whole aspect to the recurring pushes to remove the dams that’s pretty much always left out too.

Likely the biggest beneficiaries if the dams were removed would be power companies, who, even with the dams generally operating at a tiny fraction of capacity, are stuck having to sell cheap hydroelectric power at low rates.

If the dams were removed, they’d be able to justify contracting (often with their own subsidiaries) for the construction of expensive new power plants with lower capacity and higher operating costs and would then be able to convince the PUCs to grant them massive rate increases.

Ah, but I’m sure that has nothing to do with the mysteriously well-funded campaigns to remove the dams that get a new round of publicity every few years…

I knew when I first saw it that it was an unfamiliar version, bit I just assumed it was from one of the more modern versions of the Bible with which I’m not familiar.

In retrospect, I should’ve guessed that the version choice was a dog whistle. Fucking racists just can’t pass up an opportunity.

That’s more or less the theory I keep coming back to, but I can’t even entirely wrap my head around that one. It’s sort of like a really complex conspiracy theory in that it presumes a particular contrived course of action from seemingly too many people.

I can absolutely imagine some number of writers, editors and publishers self-servingly treating the obviously insane blathering of a lunatic as if it’s legitimate just to further their own careers, and I can absolutely imagine some additional (and likely greater) number of them doing so to protect themselves from retribution. I can even imagine some number who are themselves insane in a way that aligns enough with Trump’s insanity that they treat him seriously sincerely.

But all of that still doesn’t seem enough to account for the near-universal failure to even comment obliquely on how deeply mentally ill Trump so obviously is. Just as with a complex conspiracy theory, I can see the possibility on a limited scale, but it all seems to fall apart if one tries to expand it out to the scale that would seem to necessarily be the case.

And yeah - I keep ending up feeling like the only sane person in the asylum.

Well…

You’re absolutely right, and that was very well-written to boot. But it’s not the part that perplexes me. I likely just did a poor job of explaining myself.

I fully expect his intellectually and/or psychologically compromised supporters to fail or refuse to recognize his glaringly obvious insanity. As you note, he affirms their prejudices and tells them that the condemnation they so deservedly receive is actually some sort of evil conspiracy, and they grovel at his feet, lapping it up.

But that just accounts for a portion of his supporters and none of his opponents, and it’s that remainder I wonder about - all of the people who are certainly rational enough to recognize his glaringly obvious derangement for what it is, but somehow just don’t, or won’t.

I have this recurring experience in which I read an essay or article from some more or less neutral site or even an oppositional site in which someone relates something that Trump said, then parses and analyzes it, as if it’s a legitimate statement of supposed fact rather than the deranged ranting of someone who’s painfully obviously profoundly mentally ill, and I can’t even see how they managed to make it that far - how they didn’t just stop halfway through relating whatever it was he said and throw their hands up and say, “This guy is a fucking lunatic!” Because he so blatantly obviously is.

That’s what I don’t get.

…a perfect, brilliant, beautiful statement that I make…

Doesn’t anyone else notice how often he makes these cringily exaggerated statements, and more to the point, recognize how clearly they illustrate the staggering depths of his delusions?

That’s still the thing I most notably don’t get about Trump - the man is obviously profoundly mentally ill, so why and how is he even taken seriously? How in the world is it even possible for such a painfully obvious gibbering lunatic to not only run for public office, but quite possibly win?

No - I don’t agree that they’re completely different.

“Made by AI” would be completely different.

“Made with AI” actually means pretty much the exact same thing as “AI was used in this image” - it’s just that the former lays it out baldly and the latter softens the impact by using indirect language.

I can certainly see how “photographers” who use AI in their images would tend to prefer the latter, but bluntly, fuck 'em. If they can’t handle the shame of the fact that they did so they should stop doing it - get up off their asses and invest some time and effort into doing it all themselves. And if they can’t manage that, they should stop pretending to be artists.

Does somebody need a time-out?

No surprise there. Trump and his acolytes and sycophants have clearly signaled that they’re eager to be Putin’s lap dogs, so if Trump wins, Coke and the rest will have pulled out of Russia for nothing.

Even “the pot calling the kettle black” isn’t enough to sum this up.

It’s more like “the pot calling the salad bowl a pot.”

That said, it’s difficult to see people’s homes targeted by protests like this with the rise of the Neo-Nazi right as it is in America.

That sentence neatly sums up a whole raft of issues.

First - yes - this sort of protest is and always will be problematic at best. I understand the impetus (intellectually at least - I’n far too old and cynical to feel that sort of fervor, and I was never that reckless), but even though the cause is just, there’s a point beyond which protest becomes counter-productive, since it alienates people who would otherwise support it.

And there is a very real looming spectre of antisemitism in the US.

But the thing is that protesting the war in Gaza or zionism broadly is NOT part of that threat, and every bit of (self-serving) effort expended on that is diverted from the real threat, which comes from an ever-growing subculture of stock-standard (neo) nazi antisemites - people who are specifically targeting Jews, collectively and individually and even using much of the same rhetoric and stereotypes that the Third Reich used. And notably, that threat doesn’t come from the left, but from the right.

That said though there is a potential threat inherent in the (almost entirely left-wing) protests against the war - the risk that it could expand to a broader condemnation of Israelis in general, or even Jews in general. I’ve actually been sort of half-expecting to see someone try to make a case similar to ACAB regarding Israelis or even Jews - that they’re all [pejoratives] because they’re all, necessarily, either murderous xenophobes or at best enablers of the murderous xenophobes in their midst.

And that then leads back to where you started. That was actually part of the impetus for my first response, though I ended up spinning it a bit different way.

The ongoing efforts to conflate opposition to the war or to zionism with antisemitism are, and I would say rather obviously, not only simply dishonest, but actually a threat to Jews. They invite antisemitism, and to some degree actually are antisemitic, insofar as they assign a particular set of beliefs that many find noxious and worthy of hatred to Jews collectively and individually, entirely regardless of and in many cases directly contrary to the actual beliefs and preferences of individual Jews.

And… I’m yet again, as I am on pretty much a daily basis, reminded of the purported old Chinese curse - “May you live in interesting times.” We certainly do.

Thanks for the response.

Perhaps there is some context this article doesn’t touch on

There is.

This is the most concise and complete summation I could find of the (early) history of the protests against Brooklyn Museum and Anne Pasternak.

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/anne-pasternak-brooklyn-museum-interview-part-2-1409434

Note too that there’s another controversy - regarding the hiring of a white curator for African art - that likely provides the context for the “white supremacist” part of the graffito.

just because they’re Jewish

Actually, a bit of quick research reveals that Brooklyn Museum, and Anne Pasternak specifically, have been the targets of protests since at least 2016, when the museum, under her directorship, put on a show called “This Place” that purported to be an unbiased look at Israel and Palestine, but was backed by pro-occupation funders.

In fact, the group that was organized in response to that show, called “Decolonize This Place,” still exists and is still active.

So it’s exceedingly safe to assume that she wasn’t targeted “just because (she’s) Jewish” but because for at least the past eight years, she, and the museum more broadly, have been seen to be sympathetic to colonialism broadly, and zionism specifically - so much so that at least one organization was formed and still exists specifically to protest them.

Here’s the most concise source for that - an interview with Pasternak from 2018

Funny thing:

The idea that protesting the slaughter of Palestinians equals antisemitism requires starting from the position that slaughtering Palestinians is a fundamental part of the Jewish identity.

There’s really no alternative way to interpret that. If slaughtering Palestinians is not a fundamental part of the Jewish identity, then protesting such slaughter has nothing to do with Judaism, and thus cannot be antisemitic. It’d be like trying to claim that protesting cars is anti-Amish.

So all these people quoted here are essentially saying that slaughtering Palestinians is not just fundamental to being Jewish, but so deeply and uniquely fundamental - so much a part of Jewishness - that opposing such slaughter automatically equals opposing Jews.

Doesn’t that sound sort of… antisemitic?

Of course they do.

That’s the central reason that bribes need to be kept out of politics (and don’t feed me any of that shit about lobbying as speech - they’re bribes obviously). It’s not simply that it’s dishonorable or dishonest to base government policy on bribes paid - much more importantly it’s that allowing bribes rewards and thus selects for people who are vile, self-serving scumbags.

It’s not an accident that the billionaires and the politicians are almost entirely foul pieces of shit - it’s because our corrupt political system actually rewards foul pieces of shit and penalizes anyone with actual morals or integrity. It’s not just that politicians can take bribes, but that they essentially have to, just to keep up with the other candidates who do. And similarly it’s not that the wealthy and the corporations can pay bribes, but that they essentially have to, just to compete against the other wealthy people and corporations who do.

Allowing bribes just creates a political system that’s effectively gatekept - “You have to be this corrupt to take part in this system.” And the people who aren’t that corrupt are locked out.

Trump is certainly the most foul, loathsome, corrupt piece of shit in this election (not that Biden isn’t one too - just that Trump has achieved depths virtually unheard of, even in the cesspool of US politics). So Trump is naturally the one who’s going to get the lion’s share of bribes from the foul, loathsome pieces of shit who pay the most and biggest ones.

How is anybody even surprised by this?

This is exactly the sort of thing Beth has been moving towards ever since their first ham-handed attempt to monetize mods deservedly blew up in their faces.

They didn’t give up on the idea - they just shifted to a strategy of doing it incrementally.

And this is just the latest step in that ongoing process.

Think about how bad it’s (very deliberately) going to be by the time TES 6 finally comes out…

I think it started in earnest the day of his AMA, whenever that was.

It actually started long before that. Fuck U Spez was already a meme when all of the API/third-party app stuff took off, but at that point, it was still mostly a holdover from previous examples of Spez being a shithead. The thing that really gave it (new) life was that AMA.

Well of course he wants to keep it in “vague terms” - he’s too canny of a politician to come right out and say that the plan is and always has been the conquest, occupation and eventual annexation of the whole of Gaza.

It strikes me that I went on at great length but didn’t directly answer your main question.

Targeted emotions felt via affective empathy (at least for me and presumably for others) aee generally either directed at the same target as they are for the source or untargeted. Though sometimes, they can end up being directed at the wrong target.

I think the way it generally works is that if I both feel affective empathy and experience cognitive empathy, then the emotion ends up aimed at the same target, since the cognitive empathy provides a framework for it. For instance, I feel someone else’s anger and understand who they’re angry at and why and agree that it’s justified, so I end up angry at that target too.

And yes - if I’m the target and I grasp the idea behind it, so experience cognitive empathy, then I do become my own target.

If I don’t have the context for cognitive empathy though, the emotion is just sort of there. I’m just aware that being in this place or around these people or whatever is putting me on edge. I don’t quite feel the full sense of the emotion then, presumably because it needs context and a target to fully manifest. Instead, I feel a vaguer, less directed form of it - like being around angry people without really focusing on it, so not getting cognitive empathy, just leaves me feeling unaccountably stressed and cranky. Or being around sad people makes me feel unaccountably melancholy.

And along with that, one thing it definitely does is prime me to find something to direct it at. It’s not just that I feel unaccountably cranky or melancholy or whatever, but that I’m likely going to (over)react to the first thing that happens that provides something like justification for the full-blown emotion. Like once it starts, it has to find a way to fully manifest.