At least they are taking the masks off and revealing themselves, so there’s that.

I’d love for someone to go Miss Piggy on his ass.

The only thing that I can think of is that this is particularly personal to Trump and he doesn’t want his twisted private life getting out, regardless of how little it really matters to his base.

Yeah, this is absurd, who are all the accounts voting him up when the misinformation he posted isn’t correct and he isn’t even bothering to edit it? It’s would be so easy to correct to, he just needs to put notes on why they should be included. Here, I’ll do it for him:

Democrats who voted yes:

• Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.)
• Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.)
• Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.)
• Tim Kaine (D-Va.)
• Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.)
• Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.)
• Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.)

Additionally:

• Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) - Independent who caucuses with Democrats, voted yes.
• Schumer - Voted no but is getting blamed for being ineffective as Senate Democratic. He had dropped a counter-offer to Republicans to end the shutdown to get assurances regarding Obamacare which they rejected.

Completely wrong about Gillibrand, it’s simply a flat out lie that he voted yes. He joined in along with Schumer on the counter-offer, but the Republicans did not agree to that and this is not what this vote was. A lot of people are mad at their attempts to reach bipartisan compromise, but even though that’s probably where a lot of the claims that they negotiated a “yes” vote are coming from, that was still something that needed to make the rounds again back at the House and had nothing to do with this vote.

Personally, I think Schumer is getting blamed as a escape goat, he doesn’t hold a magic stick that can force other democrats to vote like they did. US parties are basically more of an alignment towards certain groups of lobbyists than what other countries would consider political parties. What likely did so was money, influence, and power, the US has been an oligarchy for quite some time now.

Ironically, this king was the one exception that was benevolent and fair. The knight, of course, was a member of MAGA - Make Arcadia Great Again.

To the Trump admin it won’t matter if the reason to invoke it is real or fake. The federal government is corrupt to the core and using the shutdown to prevent congress from losing the MAGA majority until the insurrection clause is invoked. There is no ideal solution, it’s just that if you aim for the king, you best not miss.

The MAGA base is not suddenly going to be turned around and convinced unless you are able to puncture their Sinclair echo chambers, the federal is increasingly going to deny funding to Democratic states, SCOTUS is still going to overturn any impediments federal judges try to throw at Trump, ICE is still going to be ignoring any and all laws since they know they get to eat pardon cake if it ever becomes an issue, ICE is still going to get the biggest slice of the federal budget … “Drawing first blood”, you lose. Hoping a system rotten to the core in all three branches of government turns around and becomes semifunctional when no matter what you will still have Republicans and MAGA at the end of whatever solution comes up, you don’t lose, but at a cost that’s going to be comparable or greater than losing.

Their incompetence is as mindboggling as how they are getting away with it.

Sheesh, stop putting all the responsibility onto Wikipedia and host it externally, there’s no shortage of hosts they can link to as a reference from there. F- ing hell, trying to lay shit onto one of the most open and needed sites on the Internet like if you were Elon Musk… they are already getting enough pressure from the US administration & associates.

Trump’s “plan” is too choose whatever is best for him psychotically and amorally. He’s not where he is right now because he had a plan, but because as you put it, the path was laid for him. It became clear with the drastic changes and statements he began his administration with. A destination was presented to him, and he’s tried to follow the path to it with the indications he has been given. Sometimes, he has even blurted out the “landmarks” prematurely, like his comments on Greenland and Canada.

He’s just at a point he realizes he can already exploit, which probably seems like a good option to him since some of the directions he has received aren’t working out that well for him.

People think he rambles a lot, but it has a purpose to it. What I’m worried about is that after meeting with the Project 2025 guy, that rambling might be receiving some calibration as well as a long series of other meetings to see if they go a new route.

I don’t think he is really that ill simply because JD Vance would have been picking up a lot more of the slack if that were the case to position himself as the new president.

Then there’s also the possibility that he is part of the caste of the country that does actually benefit from having no government oversight or presence during a shutdown. It makes people and groups that much more dependent on the private market alternatives these oligarchs own.

Maybe he isn’t making any comments because this is where he wants to be right now. He still controls ICE, the execute and the supreme court can still continue reshaping the US, and he’s in a point where he has essentially just hit the pause button on any changes in congress until he can decide how to revert and influence that. He’s at the point where people who protest the extended shutdown can be incarcerated as the “radical left” “homegrowns” for whom the shutdown helps prevent any recourse as well, he’s putting any loyalist he can into ICE and it has a bigger budget than the rest of the military, he’s plunging and farming the value of the US economy which he and his oligarch friends can weather and later buy up on the low. It seems like he might have settled for this as a win condition, so he’s no longer making appearances to push things into other agendas for now.

States need to step up if the government remains shut down, this is the perfect opportunity and excuse for them.

You just need to identify where the edges are and step outside of your own bubble into the sort of echo chamber they exist in. Not that they deliberately avoid making it easy.

Then states should do their own power grab and remain functioning when their own federal government isn’t.

Technically, I can see where you are right, but in practice, you have one single party to choose from all the same, with a heavy cultural divided determining which party that is for you.

I would focus more criticism as to why there aren’t more than two parties in the US government than fighting over a word definition that just absconds the real problem.

Being able to choose between slave owners or the only other option is totally a real choice…

Both parties are not the same, but it is still a uniparty. Worst of all, it is one where the other side of the country has been conditioned for the same: choose what they believe to be the depravity and downfall of their way of life, or the only other option.

This is why in other countries we have more than two parties, and why the ones that are Heritage Foundation funded influence operations want to change this.

If only it were that. This is an evolution of what happened then, and even though the descent is less drastic it has far more downward momentum because of what’s involved. Given the most likely global victors this time around, the narrative shift that Europe is going to experience this time around is not going to look good.

People think this is going to be World War III when the reality might be closer to the silence following the height of extinct civilizations, except involving the whole world and with a pending environmental catastrophe to displace humanity to boot.

It means that they can now have posts like this: https://old.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/1nk8xm0/antifa_is_recognized_as_a_terrorist_group_in_the/

If your comment is called out as antifa, doesn’t matter if you have anything to do with supporting anti-fascists or not, it will add to a report count, one that can be made to be a very big number and has a pseudo legal premise Trump federal agencies WILL go after and which MAGA’s Supreme Court WILL back up. It is a Gleichschaltung moment.

Apparently they are saying that since he was close to a trans person (presumably the roommate who helped authorities identify his Discord messages) that it doesn’t matter. Just look at the conservative sub on reddit, the one moderated by the guy who enjoys running psyops with the most narcissistic psychopaths in Eve Online. I seriously believe idiots are deliberately being led by the most narcissistic psychopaths in the nation, and the reason Eve Online is such a tell is because it attracts them in droves, specially the ones who’ve made their leisure time be about moderating its material and enjoying carrying out psyops against people. It’s what money attracts because in their world view everything is arguable - it’s just a matter of skill, with objective facts being shit to them.

Don’t worry, reddit has made sure to hide their comment history and the subs they moderate, so hell if you will ever know or be able to verify.

They’ve been manipulated and have allowed it to be made a part of their core identity - so yes, from sunk cost fallacy, to stockholm syndrome, to abusive relationship, to personality cult, to just plain ignorance and proud of it, profiled by Big Data and fed and cordoned off to their particular slaughterhouse of a social network bubble, they will be increasingly easy to manipulate the more distance there is between reality and their perception of it.

Because it shifts from country to country no matter the scales you use. You could put dots on whatever imaginary axis you choose, and they would be unidentifiable across countries - about the only thing it could identify are the people who don’t have a clue about political environments elsewhere but think they do.

Your definition isn’t even correct, there are many “left” parties that want to concentrate power and even the most infamously “right” government of them all, that of the GQP in the US, have claimed things like wanting to “distribute” power from federal to state government. About the only universal single axial distinction between parties are those willing to operate and respect a system of governance, and those that only want to game it and change it to what they want, and even that is constantly shifting.

Right now a lot of our governments are democracies being divided up into the people who want to continue to operate within them being increasingly outnumbered by the people being hoodwinked into transitioning and increasingly operating outside of them. But even that isn’t left of right, and it is very dependent on the type of government it is being manifested in the first place - someone might want to play within the system in a high democracy high trust society yet would be willing to support those living in a dictatorship who work to game and change it.

Left and right is highly psychological. Venezuela’s dictator Maduro is placed in the “left” by those that like to criticize their own left parties, while Mile’s is “right” while Bukele, who has close links to Milei and Maduro, is not identified by either, having called himself a “man of the left” while increasingly prospering within the “right”. Why? Optics and psychology. “Left” and “right” is very easy to manipulate into a bipartisanship, and a bipartisanship can be worn down into an autocracy. The US is a prime example of this.

A party can be identified by two things: the ideology they say they will represent, of which things like “left”/“right” is the vaguest yet safest thing they can claim and easiest thing to divide society on, and what they actually can and will do, and to define either of these, you need far more labels than different ends of an axis. But people think the creation of the universe is detailed in a pocket book called the Bible, so it’s no surprise they think “left” and “right” is sufficient connotation.

It’s just another show for him.