I guess I should’ve been clearer.

He’s obviously both. He’s more of a lying sack of shit than he is an idiot.

And as I just tried to point out elsewhere, that’s not to say that he’s not an idiot - just that he’s even more of a liar.

I didn’t say he was smart - I said he’s even more a lying sack of shit than he is an idiot.

To be fairish, he’s more a lying sack of shit than an idiot, but that aside…

Oh boohoo - somebody maybe said mean things to him while he was using his daughter as a human shield (or maybe they didn’t and he’s lying).

And meanwhile, parents in Ukraine are digging their children’s corpses out from under rubble.

It’s so awesome to have a president who doesn’t just stop at being corrupt, but actually adds extra layers of corruption on top of the original ones.

He’s like the Monty Python spam skit - “Corruption, corruption, corruption, corruption, corruption, corruption, fascism, and corruption.”

Weird how he suddenly turns into a dove when it comes to Russia’s strongest ally in the Middle East.

Almost as if his actual loyalty isn’t to America at all, but to Russia.

Seems to be a lot of that going around lately.

I access lemmy through Firefox, and I just have bookmarks for all of my accounts and have whichever ones I’m using the most pinned. Switching from one to another is just a matter of clicking a link.

I don’t know of any way to combine everything into one feed, though I wouldn’t be surprised if one or more of the apps will do it. That’s exactly the opposite of what I value though - I don’t want just one feed - I want whichever feed I happen to be in the mood for at the moment.

Ah - I get a chance to preach.

I think it makes a lot of sense, and I’ve been trying to convince people of that since I’ve been here. It costs nothing and provides benefits, and what more could anyone want?

When I first came to Lemmy, I couldn’t figure out any reason to pick one specific instance, and I finally decided that the only way to know if it mattered was to create multiple accounts and compare them. So I did.

I sort of intended to eventually settle on one, but as it turned out, I never really did, and in fact have added a number of accounts since.

The first and most notable thing I discovered is that every instance is different. Unsurprisingly, specialty instances like ani.social and literature.cafe are different from the general instances, but even the general instances differ from each other just depending on which other instances they’re federated with and which communities they carry.

I default to All on most instances, and All on lemm.ee, for instance, is significantly different from All on Sopuli, or from All on dbzer0, or from All on Beehaw, and so on. So I can effectively tailor my experience simply by using different accounts.

I generally have about three general accounts that I cycle between, with another few specialty ones - either specialized by topic, like ani.social, or specialized by bias, like .ml. I find that’s enough so that pretty much no matter what I’m in the mood for, I have an account that fits.

Additionally, from a more simple practical perspective, instances change over time, and are sometimes shut down entirely. That’s never directly affected my experience, since I always have other accounts. So for instance, when .world started to decline, I just stopped using it, and when lemmy.ninja shut down (RIP), I just spent more time on other instances. And as new instances pop up, or just come to my attention, I just make an account, then take them for a test drive and see what I think. I’ve discovered a number of good instances that way.

So… yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense and it’s pretty much effortless and entirely free, so there’s no reason not to do it.

Deliberately.

The long-term goal is to make housing even less affordable, then criminalize homelessness, so that poor people can be fed into the prison-for-profit system and made into slaves.

My presumption is that the goal is to establish one homogeneously plutocratic and oligarchic landmass, broken up only by the Bering Strait, running all the way from Florida to Eastern Europe.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that the Democrats were being passively complicit in Trump’s fascist coup d’etat, now they’re being actively complicit in it.

It’s worth noting that they’re never talking about actual privatization, which is when a thing that was formerly a government service is turned over to private enterprise, but a grotesquely inefficient hybrid system in which the service is still funded by the government, and the only thing that changes is that rather than the budget being turned over to a government agency, it’s turned over to whichever private contractor offers the best bribe and kickback package.

Trump 2.0 is pay-to-win.

America in the 21st century - the Republicans are dismantling the government in order to make it even easier for the 1% to loot and pillage without consequence, and the Democrats are debating maybe disrupting a speech.

So it’s only barely March and Trump is already basically bent over on the front steps of the Kremlin with his butt cheeks spread, shouting, “Take me daddy!”

I expected him to bend over for Putin, but even cynical as I am, I didn’t expect him to do it so completely so quickly.

Undoubtedly sort of.

It’s not so much “closet homosexuality” as that sexuality is a spectrum, which means that most people have some greater-than-zero amount of attraction to their same sex, which is a problem for desperately insecure bigots, and he’s a desperately insecure bigot.

For the majority of people, the portion of their sexuality that’s focused on their same sex is not significant enough to justify defining themselves as anything other than heterosexual - it just is, or possibly just was, a source of occasional thoughts or fantasies or, in some cases, experimentation. In fact, it’s quite possible that, not particularly concerned about it, they’ve never even consciously realized that some portion of their sexual attention is drawn to their same sex.

However, for the “incel” personality type, like Tate, that amount greater-than-zero of attraction to their same sex can be a cause for overwhelming shame. It’s not enough for them to be heterosexual overall - their insecurity and self-doubt and need to puff themselves up demands that they be 100% straight manly men. And they aren’t. Never mind that that portion of their attention that’s focused on their same sex is near certainly insignificant in and of itself - to them its mere existence is an existential threat to their already shaky self-images, so they feel a need to, and often do, put an outsized focus on stamping it down and making every effort to pretend it doesn’t exist at all. Which ends up warping their personalities, and ironically enough making them even more focused on homosexuality than they would’ve been had they, as most people do, just not worried about it in the first place.

So yes, sort of.

I don’t pretend to know one way or the other.

He’s clearly working for the benefit of Russia, but “asset” implies an official, essentially employer/employee relationship, and there’s no knowing if that’s the case or not.

Not that it much matters really - whether he’s working for Russia’s benefit because they literally own him or working for Russia’s benefit because he’s a desperately insecure narcissist who idolizes Putin, it works out to pretty much the same thing in the long run.

Here’s the full text of what I said, including the part you inexplicably left out:

For the record, I do think that Putin manipulates Trump, and pretty brazenly at that, but I don’t think that he controls him. Trump’s ego is far too bloated for that.

And that’s specifically because, in point of fact, a bloated ego makes a person easier to manipulate, but not to “control.” They reflexively rebel against direct control, because it’s a threat to their ego, but they’re relatively easily manipulated, because all anyone has to do is frame things in a way that will appeal to their ego.

Did you really not grasp the distinction I was making there?

What the fuck are you on about?

For the record, I do think that Putin manipulates Trump, and pretty brazenly at that, but I don’t think that he controls him. Trump’s ego is far too bloated for that.

I meant pretty much exactly what my metaphor implies - Trump is weak and insecure and desperate for affirmation, and he idolizes Putin, so he wants his approval.

AND Trump is also greedy and self-absorbed and trying to please his greedy and self-absorbed cronies and patrons - that’s painfully obviously why he’s trying to swing this mineral rights deal alongside trying to effectively hand Ukraine to Putin.

It’s possible for more than one thing to be true at the same time.

The Toddler-in-chief hoping that daddy Putin will pat him on the head and tell him what a good boy he is.