I have privately mused that Trump engaged in illegal sexual behavior, and that behavior is being used for blackmail.
I suspect it’s not just plain old hooker sex.
(If someone pays a woman for sex and doesn’t abuse her I won’t hold that against them… IFFFFFF she’s freely participating, 18+, and not related to you)
I think that if any of us wants to pay for sex we ought to be putting some level of effort in to make sure that the person we are paying is a non-coerced professional and not, say, the victim of human trafficking or someone being forced to work with threats of violence. And the richer the person doing the purchasing is, the less they can be forgiven for glossing over that step. Landing in Moscow and asking for some hookers to be sent to your hotel room is showing a marked indifference to the well-being of the women who arrive. A person can hardly be forgiven for not knowing the potential for abuse there.
That’s a really good point. It shows up clearly in how he talks about the impeachment process. He sees the House process as inherently biased, because they are saying negative things about him; likewise the Senate trial he perceives will be “fair” not because it will reveal the truth but because he thinks it will be biased in his favor.
A teenage sex scandal wouldn’t budge his approval ratings too much. We saw that with Roy Moore, how the right wing rationalized his behavior.
It’d have to be younger than a teen for his followers to turn on him. Or something I’ve said here before, which has been echoed in the Breitbart comments: A dude.
Or combination of that old quote; a dead boy.
That would probably do it.
What’s the line about “a dead girl or a live boy”? I am still not sure those would do it either. For starters, Fox and Breitbart would never cover the story, so the base would not hear about it. Advantage of epistemological closure, I guess.
Fox and Breitbart might not turn on him, but his rabid followers would turn on him in a second, despite the lip service they pay to loyalty.
I regularly stare into the abyss by reading the comments on Breitbart. It is instructive! On stories where Trump is suggesting even the smallest amount of gun control regulation, the folks in the comments completely lose their shit and call him a gun grabber, RINO, Democrat, etc. And all those negative comments get deleted. You can actually watch them get nuked in real time.
Trump’s popularity with his base is a mile wide, but mere inches deep. Something bad enough will flip them, but it’s got to be worse than shooting a guy on 5th avenue. It’s got to be something both undeniable and unpalatable to conservatives.
This is a bit of a long walk, but I was thinking about that recent BB article about failures with AI. One was “reward hacking,” where the AI responds to the reward function but not to the intended goals of the creators. The “reward function” is a metaphor for the “function that tells the AI whether it was right or not” (they project self-interest onto the AI just like they project it onto other people). So if I made an AI to play scrabble and gave it a reward function of maximizing it’s score, one way the AI could do that would be by altering the way it perceives the board to see every letter placed on the board as a J. Then it would get lots of points.
Thinking about Fox News simply not covering Trump-negative news, it occurs to me this problem isn’t unique to artificial intelligence.
Extremely Normal.
Interesting bits o’ news:
Let’s see.
Both are evil
Both are widely hated
Both have bad fashion sense
Both have the power to wipe out much of the population
Both cause no end of pain and suffering
Both are authoritarian leaders
Both are strangely colored
Both have weird daughter complexes
So are the Avengers supposed to be the Democrats?
Thread:
That’s a double-whammy: suppress progressive voices and provide a tool for Evangelical-backed deportation of Jews to Israel.
Does he really think it’s a good idea to piss off alienate an entire branch of law enforcement who could use their abilities to dig up yet more dirt on him?
The Trump stans aren’t taking the latest impeachment stuff too well
The funny part is the scene they photoshopped was the one where
–SPOILER–
Tony has swiped the stones and Thanos’ snap is impotent. Then “I am Iron Man.” Immediately afterward, he “dusts.” We can only hope that is accurate.
it looks like Omar was criticizing the state of israel’s political influence in the united states. not the loyalty of Jewish Americans. I think thats the issue with the executive order Trump is saying he’s gonna sign - that it conflates the state of Israel and its policies with people of jewish faith or decent. There are jewish people and Israelis that disagree with Israeli policy. There are many Israelis who aren’t jewish. The state of Israel is not a religion. its a government that does awful stuff to people sometimes that is rightly criticized.
