Sorry, they walked back the walkback of the walkback? Does anyone know what’s going on?

They have to be doing it deliberately. The aim is to destroy the USA.

I think that’s it, and they victimize LGBTQ+ people and immigrants because their supporters love it and it buys them time to implement their kleptocracy. Some of the Trump people are true-believer Nazis, but some of them are just greedy assholes who will throw anyone under the bus for their own gain.

Clearly it’s time to deport the majority of Americans to foreign prisons.

Your criteria exclude much that is useful. For example, scientific studies that confirm theoretical predictions or replicate previous results, which are both essential to good science. Your emphasis seems to be entirely on challenging established understandings and institutions and shaking things up, but if that’s the only thing you respect as not “drivel”, you just end up pushing contrarianism. Sometimes it’s valuable to agree, or to come to consensus. Sometimes it’s valuable to delve into the subtleties of an existing way of understanding the world. Sometimes it’s valuable to explore how others already understand the world, while keeping quiet and not asserting anything of your own until you are well steeped in it. Not everything needs to be shaken up or disrupted all the time - to look only for this is the unwisdom of hubristic tech bros and conspiracists.

You can’t generalize about public transport across the whole of the USA. It’s very variable between different cities, and some have pretty good systems.

They have played us for absolute fools.

It’s not that I feel any particular sympathy for Elon Musk. But I’m sure there are lots of people living with small dicks who don’t experience any need to become crazy Nazis, and lots of crazy Nazis with sizeable penises. I just feel this whole “a man needs a big dick to be secure, and any insecure man has a small dick” thing is a somewhat offensive outlook.

Would lying flat and wriggling your way to safety like a big wet human worm help? Or always traveling with a taller, damper friend?

This is just how he is. He did the same in his first term. If you took away anger and resentment, he wouldn’t have a lot else left in his life.

botched gender affirmation surgery that left him with a mangled useless sex organ

I keep hearing this around here. Is there any actual reason to think it’s true?

Even if the bit about the surgery is true, it’s a very reductive explanation of issues which clearly aren’t new in his life. He was brought up by far-right parents and his father apparently showed him no love. He has been poisonously insecure all his life, only now he has the power to inflict his psychological troubles on the world. Ever since he got financially lucky in the 1990s, he has had the money to buy influence and pay people to do what he wants, so he has never become equipped to deal with people as equals and has all kinds of issues and insecurities around power. He discovered early that, while he had trouble making friends, he could make an impression on people by being edgy and controversial, and has never managed to move beyond this into a more mature persona.

I feel like saying “it’s all because of his wonky penis” trivializes how profoundly this man’s life has messed him up, and how many complex factors are at work in his psyche. It also implicitly insults anyone else who doesn’t have “normal” genitalia.

No, I’m on Fastmail. It’s full-featured and has a slick web UI, but it’s not as good for privacy as Tuta, Proton, etc. Also, although Fastmail is Australian they apparently host their servers in the USA.

My email provider will auto-generate aliases with no limit, and I also subscribe to Mozilla Firefox Relay, which allows me to invent email addresses on the fly and have them relay emails to my inbox. The advantage of the Firefox Relay is that it isn’t tied to the email provider so if I switch provider the aliases can still work.

A leaked memo from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Research Service division revealed Sunday that the agency has banned some key language from its vocabulary, including the words “climate” and “vulnerable,” as well as the phrase “safe drinking water.”

Other baffling entries on the memo’s banned language list are “greenhouse gas emissions,” “methane emissions,” “sustainable construction,” “solar energy,” and “geothermal,” as well as “nuclear energy,” “diesel,” “affordable housing,” “prefabricated housing,” “runoff,” “microplastics,” “water pollution,” “soil pollution,” “groundwater pollution,” “sediment remediation,” “water collection,” “water treatment,” “rural water,” and “clean water,” among dozens of others.

So they’re not allowed to talk about reality, or how to make anything better. And the fascists in charge must know this is what they’re doing, but they don’t care.

I keep thinking of how the Buddha recognized three poisons of the mind: greed, hatred and ignorance. Right-wing politics is pure poison.

ICE are not taking any care about what the tattoos are. There was a story of someone being sent to prison in El Salvador because they had an autism awareness tattoo, which looked a bit pride-y because it was rainbow colored. If they don’t like the look of you they’ll find an excuse. Nazis are like that.

Meanwhile the utterly incompetent Secretary of Defense has white nationalist tattoos all over him and that’s just fine with them.

It’s real Nazi science, this identification of criminals by skin colour, tattoos, and gestures. Perhaps they should study head shape too. Anyway, trigger their Nazi spidey sense and you’ll be kidnapped and trafficked into permanent imprisonment and slavery in a foreign country where you have no legal rights. They don’t have to prove you did anything. And half the US population will cheer because they can’t imagine it will ever happen to them.

Deep down, he knows, and it torments him. Unfortunately he’s rich enough to take it out on the world.

“It is time to arrest those funding the attacks,” he wrote. “Arresting their puppets and paid foot-soldiers won’t stop the violence.”

How much funding does he think it takes to get people to protest against the world’s most publicly obnoxious Nazi?

This pattern of behaviour is why no country will consider any agreement with the USA to be trustworthy ever again.

So there was a deal with Iran which Trump ripped up, and now he’s threatening Iran with war if they don’t make a deal with him like the one he ripped up?