If the US has free and fair and honest elections, the Republicans will lose their majorities, therefore Trump (with the brazenly dishonest support of the corrupt and compromised conservatives of the Supreme Court) will see to it that the US does not have free and fair and honest elections.

Nobody said he wasn’t.

I’m not even really talking about Trump per se - he’s just the inspiration. Reading the linked story, and with all of the past similarly insane things he’s said and done, it struck me that he almost doesn’t even exist as a person. Rather, he’s more like just a vehicle for his ego (and, now that you mention it, for his lusts and his delusions). As if, where other people have thoughts and ideas and beliefs, he just has the incessant yammering of his ego (etc.).

And then that in turn got me to wondering if that was part of the origin of myths of demonic possession - if people more or less like him in the past were seen by others the same basic way that I see him - as if whatever personality he should have had has been pushed aside by his overwhelming ego (etc.).

Or in their more primitive interpretation, by a demon.

So this makes me wonder about legends of demonic possession.

In a sense, it could be said that Donald Trump is not President of the United States, because Donald Trump in a sense doesn’t even exist as an individual. Instead, he’s essentially a vehicle for his gargantuan ego. He’s really just a sort of mindless zombie, lurching from one thing to another as his ego dictates.

Which makes me wonder if that was really the way he would’ve been seen in a more primitive past - as if the person who should be inside of him had somehow been pushed aside and he was possessed by a ravening demon. And if that’s the way that other delusional egomaniacs like him were seen in the past.

The correct answer to any question of the form, "I’m facing [this risk], so should I take [this safety precaution]? is always “Yes.”

Concern trolling about the fediverse or lemmy.

It seems like it shouldn’t even be possible to be that irrational and function - like a person whose brain is that broken could never even make it out of the house because they can’t figure out how to work a doorknob.

I’m not an anarchist by chance.

Thanks for the response.

So at the very least, one would think there would be some sort of consequences for the plain fact that Trump’s thugs keep blatantly lying.

Furure sociologists are going to be spending entire careers trying to sort out how the US went so badly wrong.

Oh gee - who would’ve guessed that that brazenly compromised piece of shit Aileen Cannon would issue yet another bullshit ruling to protect Trump from the justice he deserves and she’s sworn to uphold?

Let’s do a thought experiment here.

Pretend that the answer is no - they do not have that right.

Okay - now what? If they don’t have the right to do that, then that means… what exactly? Are they to be arrested if they try? Are you somehow granted the right to kill them if they try? Is there any reasonable method by which they can actually be denied that right?

Yes - all people have a right to feel however they feel and to voice their feelings. Or more precisely, nobody can possibly have the right to stop them.

The thing they don’t have a right to is your attention, concern, sympathy etc. You’re entirely free to grant or withhold those things as you prefer.

By design.

Those anti-features don’t exist in Lemmy

No, it in fact hasn’t. If anything, it’s been verified by them, because they generally start off by admitting that everything I said is true. It’s just that they then go on to say that it somehow doesn’t count because it’s possible to opt out of those anti-features.

Which misses both the point that the anti-features do exist (as opposed to Lemmy) and do exist because rimu stuck them in there, and that most of the reason it’s possible to opt out of them is because other people - notably wjs018 - added that functionality.

Gonna have to disagree with you on this one.

Much though one might criticize the lemmy devs for their politics, at least they keep it to their instance. They don’t bake it into the software.

And that’s very much as opposed to rimu, whose opinions are at the heart of Piefed and forced into virtually everything the software does from the moment you sign up for a piefed instance, from the preset subscriptions to the reputation tags and default hiding of downvoted content to the list of prohibited sources and banned domains.

All you have to do to avoid Dessalines and Nutonic’s opinions is to avoid their instance and federated ones. But it’s impossible to use Piefed and avoid rimu’s opinions, because they’re baked into the software.

Okay - here’s the moment again.

Frey could go down in history as a hero. All he needs to do is call a press conference and give a speech with a bit of background, then say something like, “So I would like to take this opportunity to, on behalf of the fine people of Minneapolis, say to Donald Trump (look straight at camera) ‘Go fuck yourself.’ Thank you very much.”

Somebody needs to do it, and very publicly. And the moment that someone does, the dam is going to break and "Go fuck yourself"s are going to start rolling in from all over the world.

The fact that he won’t be has no bearing at all on the fact that he should be.

The President of the United States is a deranged lunatic and needs to be removed from office per the 25th Amendment.

It would almost be better of Trump was a conscious agent deliberately working for the benefit of China, but he’s just an angry, petulant, bigoted moron whose rage and greed and stupidity have pretty much guaranteed that China is going to lead the world in pretty much everything in the coming years while the US clings increasingly desperately to a mostly illusory past.

I think it’s mostly pavlovian.

It’s not that they follow some chain of reasoning to arrive at opposition to bike infrastructure, but that the mere idea triggers anger, and the position follows the mindless emotional response

See also: pretty much everything that they consider “woke.”

Yes - this is not Reddit.

Which is exactly why I’m not going to stand for a poster trying to saddle me with some asinine strawman version of my actual points.

The other poster self-evidently believed that I was either so stupid that I actually believed that “this is all the fault of the Democrats” or that I was so stupid that I’d let that ridiculous strawman slide. And in either case fully deserved a verbal smack upside the head, and that specifically because this isn’t Reddit. Leave that sort of cheap, intellectually dishonest bullshit there.