Candelestine

This is sensible in the current social climate.

I'm discussing the specific choice of what rhetoric they decide to use, not why they are using it. Why they are using it is fairly obvious at this point.

There are many different lines, arguments, whatever that could be employed, though. By paying attention to which ones are specifically chosen, you can learn more about their target audience, which is larger than simply fans of a white, ultra-nationalist ethno-state. Hence their need to continue to use rationalizations like this, instead of being forthright about their intentions.

This one in particular surprised me, as I didn't foresee it. They're usually more predictable than that.

It was kind of inevitable, unfortunately. After we impeach one of them for even legitimate wrongdoing, if they do not counter-impeach us, they lose perceived legitimacy, which weakens them.

They had no other strategically sound moves, when you consider their goal of hanging onto power regardless of the wishes of the voting public.

That's a clever line of attack, but having an opinion does not constitute a conflict of interest. Otherwise there would be a whole shit-ton of recusal happening every day.

A conflict of interest usually involves some form of monetary compensation or other fiscal benefit.

It's kinda hard to wrap your brain around sometimes, but bad people can be patriots too. When you have a proper, full-scale war going on, these people become a resource like any other.

Anti-corruption is great during peace time. Necessary, even. But it cannot always be the top priority in all situations, that's just not practical.

I would even argue that if you're not continually adjusting your priorities as situations develop, you're not a very good leader. So yeah, buy his guns now. Throw him in prison later. Can even confiscate back some of the money you paid. You have to win first though.

... they can't find someone to come up with trivia questions worded in reverse word order? That's really not that hard.

Ooh! They should use ChatGPT!

Yeah, all the time. It's the easiest way to identify a troll from a random idiot. I don't have a problem with random idiots, if someone genuinely likes Trump and believes in authoritarianism, that is fine by me. I don't like them, but at least they're engaging in good faith. I can understand and work with that.

But, when their comment history is full of pushing people's buttons or a wide, inconsistent variety of opinions, then it becomes pretty clear that being shocking is the goal itself. That's an obvious troll, and should be dealt with as one.

edit: Note, I don't bother voting while I'm there, so I answered inaccurately. I'm just sleuthing to find out if engaging at all is worth my time. If it is a troll, I actually don't downvote anything, as large downvote tallies amuse them. If it's probably not a troll, I don't downvote then either, but I know I can go back to the original comment and actually talk to this person like a human being without wasting my own time.

So, actually I don't downvote through people's comment history. I do skim quickly through them though, reading for good-faith engagement. Or a lack of it.

I don't upvote very often either, since I'm reading and scrolling too fast to bother. Unless I run into a really good post or something, enough to make me stop skimming for a second.

Naturally this kind of thing happens over tens or hundreds of thousands of years. So, even going back to BC times, we're still only a small fraction of how far we need to go back to find really major, long-term climatic shifts. These things are supposed to happen sloooowwwwllly, not really discernable as changing over the scale of a single human lifetime, which is just the blink of an eye in planetary time scales.

Can we though? Probably. We can certainly dam rivers and use irrigation to make the land more agriculturally productive. But we should have the technology currently to attempt more dramatic geoengineering projects if we wished.

The problem though, is unintended consequences, where you change one thing over here, and you didn't realize it was also controlling something else over there, and that thing changes too now, even though you didn't necessarily want it to.

Like, to make up a fictional example, say we engineered rainfall over the Sahara somehow. But we didn't know some of this moisture influences air currents, and now southern Europe and the Middle East are changing too somehow, by accident.

It's like when you're trying to untie a really tangled knot, and you pull on one part thinking its going to start undoing it, but it just tightens it somewhere else instead.

This comment is hilarious, and it being downvoted is sad.

I mean, yeah, that's pretty much what they do, isn't it?

If either of those figures is actually accurate from an end-user standpoint, then the entire downtime must be coming during my primary periods of usage.

Intelligent is where it goes wrong. They only claim to like intelligence, because that sounds good to claim. They're actually extremely anti-intellectual in basically every way you can be. Real jocks vs nerds stuff, for people who never outgrew a HS mentality.