The ways that society has thought about and treated people on the spectrum as inferiors are completely wrong and long overdue to be discarded, but we shouldn’t go from there to another supremacist mode of thinking.

As a sincere, long-term ideal, yes - I agree.

As an immediately gratifying self-indulgence, fuck 'em. Way WAY too much stupidity and ugliness has come at the hands of people for whom deception and emotional manipulation are the norms and sincerity and emotional honesty are aberrant weaknesses. And I want to revel in some schadenfreude at their expense.

Since Trump appears to have no personal stake in this (as opposed to his attacks on the Justice Department, the FBI, the federal court system and so on), I have to assume that this is something he’s doing entirely for Putin’s benefit.

On another note, I wonder, as I generally do, how they define “autism.”

I wonder because my own opinion, quite seriously, is that an awful lot of what’s included in “the spectrum” is actually a superior way of seeing the world and of conducting human interactions - an evolutionary gain for humanity.

I think there’s no question that humans for whom the very idea of injecting unnecessary emotion into an interaction or hiding ones true motivations behind a screen of deception is entirely foreign are clearly superior to those who wallow in emotionalism and lies, and further, I think that at some level, the lying manipulators fear that that’s exactly the case. At the very least, they don’t know how to deal with us - they’re lying and manipulating for all they’re worth and we just insist on ignoring their emotionalism and rejecting their lies.

So again, as I generally do, I’m wondering how exactly these particular lying manipulators are defining “autism.”

Even if he has to make it up.

Granted that his word is worthless, the rest of that is part of why I expect that he’ll take bribes - because he doesn’t have an end game.

I think he got into this whole tariff thing in the first place because he saw them as leverage, and as a desperately insecure overgrown child focused entirely on manipulating people into feeding his unquenchable greed, lust and insecurity, he can’t pass up an opportunity for leverage.

Early on, he made a lot of noise about forcing foreign manufacturers to open American factories, but by capriciously proposing, delaying, enacting and rescinding tariffs, he’s already guaranteed that that’s not going to happen. So about all that’s left already as a practical benefit is the fact that they’re essentially a tax increase on consumers, and that might’ve been enough for him, since he needs to fund his cronyistic spending and his tax cuts for the 1%, but he’s discovering that policy decisions have economic consequences that he can’t avoid just by throwing a tantrum, so it’s looking like he’ll have to either let that go or get blamed for destroying the US economy.

So now he’s in a prime position - he needs to weasel out of this whole tariff thing, but his ego still demands that he has to win somehow, which means that a foreign country should be able to come over here, set up a meeting, kiss his stinky ass and slip him a few million dollars, and he’ll congratulate himself on using the leverage to his advantage and turn his attention somewhere else.

And while his word is worthless, that’s not really what it comes down to. It’s not that he’ll hold to a decision on tariffs because he gave his word, but that once he’s mollified, he’ll happily stop thinking about them entirely and just look for his next opportunity to apply leverage to feed his ego, greed and/or lust.

in response to overtures from dozens of countries

I expect that countries are going to end up avoiding tariffs by openly bribing Trump.

At this point I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised.

Weird that it seems every time I turn around I see one of two things - voters telling the Democrats that we want them to move back to the left or Democrats telling us that that’s not actually what we want.

I’d actually be a little more tolerant of that if the fuckwads would just come out and say that the truth is that they don’t care what we want - that their corporate donors want them to stay as far to the right as possible, and that that’s the only thing that matters.

I think it says everything that needs to be said that the left’s reaction to disputes is to protest and maybe set some cars on fire, and the right’s reaction is to (try to) kill people.

If Musk bought Planned Parenthood, he’d declare its new missions to be forced sterilization for undesirable races and forced pregnancies for pretty white teenagers (preferably with him as the father).

Then when people were unsurprisingly (at least to anyone with a working moral compass) offended by that and started boycotting companies that sponsored him, he’d cry and call it a conspiracy.

Then his mom or his dad or Trump would tell us to stop picking on him.

If Musk bought Planned Parenthood, he’d declare its new missions to be forced sterilization for undesirable races and forced pregnancies for pretty white teenagers (preferably with him as the father).

Then when people were unsurprisingly (at least to anyone with a working moral compass) offended by that and started boycotting companies that sponsored him, he’d cry and call it a conspiracy.

Then his mom or his dad or Trump would tell us to stop picking on him.

It’s just one tantrum after another for the Toddler-in-chief.

They’re asked to choose to recuse themselves? As if they actually have even the tiniest speck of integrity?

I’m not even sure what the point is. It’s like asking a termite to not eat my house.

Those are some of the bits of structural violence with which they intend to kill people broadly.

I’m wondering more about the specific techniques they’re going to use for targeted killings - like, for instance, what they’re going to do when Trump decides he wants Tim Walz killed.

I wonder from time to timecwhat method the Trumpists are going to adopt for killing their opponents.

Defenestration is self-evidently effective, but it’s already Putin’s schtick. And while it might appeal to Trump to essentially pay tribute to his idol, I think it’s more likely that he’d want his own brand.

The US being what it is, some sort of handgun “suicide” would be on-brand, and courts have already shown that they’re willing to let things like “suicide” by gunshot to the back of the head or “suicide” by multiple gunshot slide.

I almost expect them to use concentration camps and gas chambers, counting on the media to refuse to cover it at all for fear that somebody might make a Nazi comparison.

We’ll see…

Ah… that makes sense.

Even with my fascination with character analysis and the rich vein of freakishness Trump provides, I generally can’t watch him - he’s just too creepy and unsettling.

Ooh… nicely spotted.

That’s a thing with his spoiled toddler emotional dysfunction that I’ve recognized but never really given a lot of thought to. He self-evidently has some seriously warped ideas regarding sex, but they don’t fit neatly into a toddler worldview, since toddlers are ignorant of sex. So I knew there was some way that he’d essentially adapted sexual desire to that extreme degree of emotional immaturity, but hadn’t sorted out exactly what it is.

And everything clicked with the idea of objectification. I have no doubt that that’s the link I hadn’t sussed out.

And it’s undoubtedly been recursive - like he started out objectifying women and thus treating their refusal to have sex with him the same way that another toddler would treat mom’s refusal to buy him a candy bar at the supermarket - but then over time developed a set of more specific ideas to better frame things - like “nasty” as a descriptor of someone who refuses his advances - which then melded back into his broader worldview.

When I wrote that last one, I had a hard time fitting “nasty” in. He’s obviously using it to represent bad/mean/awful, but the word has a specific spin that I couldn’t quite get a grip on, since it doesn’t seem to quite match up with any of the common usages I was considering.

And I have zero doubt that you’re right - that inside his own head, it’s playing the same role it would in the phrase “nasty whore.” And for the same reason - from his cripplingly self-absorbed viewpoint, he’s already recited the incantations about how beautiful she is and how cherished she’ll be, so it’s time for her to lie back and submit. And the nasty whore refuses…

Alternately:

“We wants it. We needs it. Must have the precious. They stole it from us. Nasty little Canadianses.”

This is a great example of what is, to me, the most bizarre part of this bizarre timeline - this stinky-assed overgrown toddler actually believes this.

The way it works in his warped mind:

• He wants to annex Canada, therefore annexing Canada is just and right and proper and smart and best, because everything he wants automatically is. (And a side note - his Kremlin handlers almost certainly planted the idea of annexing Canada in his mind in the first place, though it’s an open question whether he knows that or not).
• Canada unsurprisingly opposes annexation.
• But it’s his idea (not really, but that’s a distinction he’s not equipped to make), therefore it’s the bestest and beautifulest and perfectest idea ever in the history of ever, and Canada’s just being nasty and disagreeable about it.

And that’s it. That’s the extent of the thinking in his overgrown toddler mind - "I want and you won’t give so you’re mean.