In a sense, none of them know what they’re doing.

Many of them just don’t know at all. They’ve believed the lies and don’t realize that they’ve just elected a psychopath who is going to at the very least do considerable harm.

Some of them think they do know. They’re self-serving sacks of shit who look forward to tyranny and the destruction of democratic institutions because they think they’re going to benefit and they dont give a shit about all of the people who are going to suffer. But they don’t realize that in the end, they’re going to suffer too.

We’re in a timeline now in which truth is entirely irrelevant.

Trump supporters are necessarily one of two things - deluded or dishonest. Either they’ve been manipulated into not seeing the plain fact that he’s a corrupt and self-serving autocrat and an existential threat to the US, or they know exactly what he is and just don’t admit it publicly.

In either case, truth and reality count for nothing.

That’s the deal.

Literally.

The most maddening, astonishing and discouraging part of the whole thing, for me, is that that isn’t even really debatable. From any reasonable, purely fact-based and unbiased viewpoint, Israel has been clearly maneuvering for decades now to conquer everything from the river to the sea, and to oppress, displace or kill as many Palestinians as it takes to do it.

The Gaza genocide isn’t an aberration - it’s the direct culmination of decades of very deliberate Israeli policy and strategy. It’s not a coincidence that they had exactly one Prime Minister who advocated for Palestinian statehood and they assassinated him - it’s because Palestinian statehood has never really been an option.

The plain fact is simply that the only reason there’s even any difference of opinion about the matter is that some number of assholes - power-hungry assholes and greedy assholes and hateful assholes and ignorant assholes - have a vested interest in lying about it or at the least promoting the lies that their fellow assholes tell.

I think the clearest indicator of the philosophical and moral bankruptcy of the entire matter is the fact that anyone believes for even a second that Israel has a meaningful opinion on whether or not a Palestinian state can or should exist.

In any sane and rarional world, Israel would not be seen to have the right to make that decision, or even to hold a meaningful opinion on the matter. It should be ENTIRELY a matter to be decided by the Palestinian people.

But this is not a sane or rational world.

So as is generally the case with this sort of story, I find myself wondering if he’s such a monster that they can’t sweep it under the rug or if he just happened to piss off the wrong people.

Sexual assault in the military - like church pedophilia, police brutality and political corruption - is one of those crimes that is deplorably common and almost always ignored. So when they do prosecute someone for it, there has to be something else to it. It can’t just be that he’s thought to be guilty of the crime, since hundreds or even thousands of others are at least as likely guilty of the same crime, and are not even under threat and quite likely never will be. So what’s special about him?

It’s not really relevant to anything, and it’s certainly not as if he should be spared just because so many others are allowed to get away with it (exactly the opposite in fact - each and every single one of them, without exception, should face the full force of the law, and the fact that so many don’t is a prime example of why and how this country is going to shit).

Still though, I find myself wondering, as I often do.

The next year or two is just going to be an orgy of face-eating leopards eating faces.

There was a time when I would’ve sympathized with and supported the Israelis.

But that was 40,000 murders ago.

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.

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.

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.

Gee whiz - who’d’ve thought that the woman who married a rich guy who looks (and notoriously smells) like a gigantic ambulatory drain clog would be so mercenary.