ReallyActuallyFrankenstein

You both are right.

I managed to catch the end - amazing he was lucid and charismatic and compelling after doing that for 24 hours. I supported it symbolically but didn't guess at motives. But when I saw it, it came off as a sincere, genuinely convincing and energizing act.

“The American people deserve a judicial branch full of honest arbiters of the law who want to protect democracy, not subvert it,” Leavitt said. The Justice Department is an executive branch agency.

It's comedic (if physical revulsion can be comedic) how perfect this doublespeak is - straight out of 1984.

Genuinely confused - I never said or thought that we should placate anyone. Just advocating that we think through the methods we use when we communicate and the effect it will have.

Well, a single action is never going to de-program these people. You ask why any approach would make anything better or worse, but I noted why certain approaches make things worse. I don't know how to affirmatively convince these people, but I'd say a necessary (even if not sufficient) condition to making things better is not making them worse.

I mean, this is psychology, not politics or logic. When someone is told not to do something they feel they have the right to do, they are more likely to do it. When someone is told they're stupid when they have been trained to feel correct and logical, they are more likely to stand by that belief. If a figure that they have developed a vicarious, parasocial relationship with is validly criticized, they will denounce the critic as if it were an attack on the core of their being, rather than agree with the critique.

These right-wing beliefs are like psychological parasites, ticks. The only correct solutions are to remove it with surgical precision with a careful plan. Prodding it and squeezing it is what you instinctively want to do, but that just makes it dig in further.

Careful, this is bat country.

It was a poll conducted using the same process by which he declassified those documents in his bathroom at Mar-a-lago.

This absolutely is a reasonable explanation why Putin had such an easy time convincing him.

We always know when they are nearby - their pecking is surprisingly loud, like someone hammering wood very fast (inhumanly fast) with a mallet.

I'm increasingly seeing that as the point. I've believed since 2016 that he's either intentionally or being easily manipulated to serve Russia's interests and obviously I'm not alone here.

But at this point, dismantling US soft political power, military power, economic power - every action Trump is taking is directly damaging the US with no apparent self-interested payoff. Sure, it's plausibly deniable and just on the edge of conspiracy-sounding to the public and mainstream, but the theory that Trump acting to destroy the US on behalf of Russia is currently the best fit to the evidence.

I suppose because he can at a moment's notice gut the SEC and presumably now that X is incorporated in Texas and I have to assume xAI is as well(?) there's no federal or state fraud investigation likely.

Feels quaint that Trump in 2017 even went to the trouble of filling a table with blank papers to give the appearance of being concerned about conflicts of interest, and this outright self-dealing corruption is happening daily while nobody in power even talks about it.