While the decision to stop publishing the six books was made by Dr. Seuss Enterprises, right-wing outlets like Fox News mischaracterized it as a book ban.

Unsurprisingly, it has actually been Republican-backed laws like Tennessee’s that have resulted in the banning of Dr. Seuss books from schools.

And that’s the way it works pretty much without exception - private individuals and businesses and such make independent decisions and the Republicans scream that they’re being oppressed, then they pass laws in the name of freedom.

Even with as insane as the Republican agenda is, and as deluded as their supporters necessarily must be, that particular aspect of it really stands out to me. It’s just so perfectly Orwellian.

Exactly - that belief is not supported by the evidence

Yet they continue to call for increasingly punitive punishments anyway.

Why?

Certainly there are some who are just parrots (and they might even be the majority), but I don’t think that’s generally the case with those who are out there competing with each other to call for the most egregious possible punishments. I think the parrots tend more to be relatively passive consumers of that content rather than active participants. The ones who are actually in there competing to be the most vindictive are self-evidently more motivated than the passive consumers, and I think that that additional motivation comes from an overt pleasure taken in the suffering of others.

Yes, I’ve noticed that. It’s hard to miss really.

I assume it is, exactly as you say, virtue signaling.

Virtue signaling isn’t just an end in itself. It’s often (generally?) a feedback loop - the person is not just trying to demonstrate that they’re virtuous, but to reassure themselves that the standards upon which they’re measuring their nominal virtue are legitimate.

So calling for ever more draconian punishment is not so much the point - more, the point is to call for draconian punishment, then have somebody else applaud and even amplify that call. That helps to solidify the sense of moral superiority since it’s not just that I believe that I’m morally superior because [X], but other people do as well. We all agree that this is the morally superior position, so we must be right.

But underneath it all, what it really is is just foul, vindictive, hateful assholes who enjoy the thought of people suffering, and try to excuse it with the belief that, by whatever standard, this person deserves it.

Though they’d be the last to admit it, the nominal crime isn’t the point. They just get off on the suffering of others, and the nominal crime is just an excuse.

And since their whole position is a lie - because their real motivation is just a sick pleasure in the suffering of others and their moral posturing is just cover for their loathsomeness - they need constant feedback to convince themselves that they’re in the right. And conveniently enough, there are plenty of other people in the same situation, so they can, and do, reassure each other.

What he’s actually saying is that Trump intends to ally with Russia against Ukraine and, if necessary, against Europe as a whole.

And he’s right.

Trump, and more to the point, his handlers, intend to turn the US into an openly corrupt and oppressive oligarchy (that’s rather obviously the explicit point of Project 2025) , and they’re going to ally with the world’s other openly corrupt and oppressive oligarchies, including Russia and Hungary.

I’ll never stop being cynically amused by the fact that the self-styled American patriots are letting the Russian government tell them how to vote.

Setting aside the anti-health and anti-sanity aspects of this, the thing that gets me is that Republicans somehow continue to believe that they’re the party of freedom when everything they do involves ever more regulation.

They frame things as if the Democrats are oppressing people and the Republicans are fighting for their freedom, but the exact opposite is actually true - the way that things actually work, consistently, is that Democrats want to give people the freedom to do things and Republicans are fighting to destroy those freedoms. Their reaction to every single thing they encounter is to pass a law against it, which is literally the exact opposite of freedom.

Now granted - most of their positions are insane, so it’s not as if rationality should be expected, but this just seems to be something so simple and so obvious that they can’t possibly miss it. Yet somehow they do.

Do people just not know who and what Chris Roberts is?

This is what he’s done throughout his career - the only thing that’s notable about Star Citizen really is the scale of it and thus the opportunities he has to find ever more things to obsessively tinker with.

It’s entirely possible that if Microsoft hadn’t bought out Digital Anvil and given him the boot, this wouldn’t even be Star Citizen - it would be Freelancer, coming into its 25th year of delays.

There’s undoubtedly at least a bit of projection there, but I think more what it is is just that tankies are driven almost entirely by righteous indignation, and they’ll take pretty much any chance they get to indulge in it. They don’t really stop and think about things - they just see something that could serve as a basis for a nice, satisfying righteously indignant screed and off they go.

And that leaves them susceptible to, among other things, hypocrisy.

Sort of, but not quite. I get where you’re going with that though, and it’s the right idea.

The explicit goal of Project 2025 is simply to make it easier for greedy and power-hungry privileged right-wing assholes to bring harm to people and to the nation as a whole for their own imnediate benefit. So yes - it actually serves as a sort of backhanded guide to what is of value in government.

It’s just that doing the opposite of what Project 2025 calls for would mean expanding agencies and regulations rather than reducing or eliminating them, and that’s likely not the best option, since it could just lead to governments run rampant instead of corporations run rampant.

As with most things, the optimum lies between the two extremes.

But yeah - at the very least, it can be taken as a rule of thumb that there’s a direct correspondence between the value a thing provides to the people and the nation as a whole and the degree to which Project 2025 opposes it and intends to destroy it.

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Any ideology that bans books is self-evidently intellectually and philosophically bankrupt.

I don’t think I’ve seen anything that so neatly sums up the blithering insanity of the MAGA right than them politicizing a hurricane and issuing death threats to meteorologists.

Yes - that is a huge part of it, and dating all the way back at least to the CIA-backed overthrow of Mosaddegh.

Middle Eastern oil wealth administered by stable and rational governments would be a direct threat to western hegemony so the US has long had a vested interest in destabiliziing the Middle East, and has long pursued that exact goal.

And yes - Israel is key to that.

None of which makes any of it any less insane.

Nearly every day, I’m astonished yet again by how blatantly insane this timeline is.

Think about it - US taxpayers have paid over $20 billion so that a rogue state can massacre tens of thousands of people and displace millions, so that a corrupt psychopath can stay in office and out of prison, so that some other psychopaths can sate their bloodlust, and so that a relative handful of defense contractors and politicians can finance their lives of wholly unearned and undeserved privilege.

There isn’t even the faintest vestige of sense to any of that. It’s wholly and completely insane. And yet it’s reality.

How is that even possible?

That word “overt” isn’t there by accident.

There’s a significant difference between an oligarchic kleptocracy that has to pretend to be a representative democracy and an oligarchic kleptocracy that doesn’t have to bother pretending to be anything else.

I assume it’s going to go until World War III, and until the US is an overt kleptocratic police state.

Really.

rogue state

noun

1. state or nation acting outside of the accepted international norms and policies.

Israel is a rogue state.