“This bill is 100% supposed to scare you,” says Rick Roth, Florida State Representative

Absolutely they should (and not just them). It’s always strange to me though when people see the value in that, yet think that the country – you know, what state means in the rest of the world – doing the same would somehow be a terrible thing. As if there were there some magic line that changed the ethics, not even based on population or area, just what words are used for the political entity in question.

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Maybe.
But on one hand Trump, no stable genius, pretty frequently tended to couch sketchy requests with wording he believed would communicate his point while skirting the bounds of illegality. I credit DeSantis as being somewhat smarter, so he might have tried to find a few loopholes ahead of time.

On the other hand, even if DeSantis hasn’t really thought through all the consequences of his actions (other recent events seem to bear this out), there’s a whole right wing machine in place to try and generate more or less dubious excuses why it is different for him. It doesn’t really matter if the excuses are valid or not. Once given, they are assumed by supporters to be sufficient.

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Yeah… don’t. He’s not. Being a bully doesn’t take any amount of real intelligence. All it takes is being a violent asshole who targets people they perceive as “weaker” than them.

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Well, mainly in the sense that I tend to think it’s fairly difficult for most folks to be less intelligent than Trump. And on the surface at least, DeSantis education credentials seem more impressive than Trump’s.

Though, week by week, DeSantis is increasingly proving how inept he can manage to be.

Wonder if the difference is that Trump occasionally trusted experts (probably lawyers mainly) to reign in his terrible ideas slightly. While DeSantis, convinced he’s the smartest guy in the room, just plows ahead without waiting to hear about possible consequences.

What is intelligence anyway? What role does it actually play in people’s ability to function? And how does it relate to concepts like privilege and power, which people like Trump and Desantis have obviously benefited from?

There are millions, probably billions of human beings more intelligent than both of these scumbags, bu they are elite white men, so they end up matter more. Intelligence has nothing to do with anything, and the whole concept is a scam anyway, built by people trying to “prove” that white men are better than the rest of us. Fuck that. I’m sick of giving that shit any fucking moral credence.

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Are you kidding? He NEVER has trusted an “expert” on anything…

Which is no different than trump or any other bully on the planet…

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Nope. Trump always thinks he knows more than anyone else in the room.

That’s one reason his handlers have had (limited) success in manipulating him: because he thinks he’s too smart to be manipulated.

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I think it’s that he just doesn’t give a shit. He thinks that he’s entitled to more than the rest of us, and he can bully his way into keeping himself in power. Desantis is not much different. We all know these assholes, and have dealt with them.

It feels like we’re all overthinking all this… the best way to understand what’s happening is by looking at how bullies functions - it’s almost always rich white men, with power and privilege who get away with the most BS in our society. How is this any different? We believe that the people who run our society are somehow more privileged and worthy than the rest of us to run shit. They are not. We have to finally understand that they are not. They are not better, more entitled, more worthy of shaping our society than any of us. As long as we believe that some people are more “worthy” than others, more intelligent, more… whatever, the more we’re gonna give assholes like this pass. Neither of these fuckers are better than any of us… probably ANY of us would do a better job running things than either of these guys. Until we believe that, we’re fucked.

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If I ever won enough $$ in the Mega-Millions or Powerball, I’ll pay half of it to the hard working immigrants in Florida to sit on their asses at harvest time and the other half to publicize why they aren’t picking oranges/lettuce/radishes/etc. Money well spent against DeSantis, his fascist followers, and anyone else who thinks inexpensive fruit/vegetables are an American God-given right without acknowledging the positive role immigrants of any flavor play in our society.

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This is true, especially if people affected are seasonal workers in agricolture. When the harvest season ends they are more than happy than collect the paycheck and go back home. I know Albanians that are doing exactly this except when they’re stuck in bureocracy to enter in UE. This also make farmers unhappy because they can’t find people capable to do the work.

The “bad guys” are not migrant workers… Ever. The system that exploits people is the problem, always. Someone’s ethnicity has nothing to do with exploitative forms of labor.

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I listened to the indictment. And wow, no it turns out he doesn’t listen to lawyers unless they tell him what he wants them to. He had nooo trouble lying to them, for instance.

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I’m going to miss Florida Orange juice. Yes I know they have machines to shake the oranges off the trees and scoop them up but do you really think any decent grower is going to leave money hanging on a tree?

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That’s why he goes through them so damn quickly. It’s not that they are above working for a scumbag, or even that they are afraid they might not get paid. But no one wants to take on a client that constantly works to undermine the case they’re putting together.

I had a years-long legal standoff with a person who was a similarly narcissistic nutcase. Over the course of that case the person was represented by no fewer than five different lawyers, for similar reasons. Some attorney would try their best to salvage the terrible case only to find that their client had gone behind their back and done something incredibly stupid against their counsel, after which my lawyer would eat them alive. Wash, rinse, repeat.

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Which makes it even wilder that any legal firm is still willing. I try to imagine the mental calculus that goes on, “well, Jim, we’ll get our names on all the news outlets, we’ll be out there. It’ll be a few weeks of hell, he won’t take our advice, but we’ll get the publicity, then we dump him and get dragged through the mud and turned into targets for a bunch of RWNJs with nothing better to do than harass ‘his’ purported enemies. Oh, and we also won’t be paid for this.”

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I dunno, maybe some attorneys are just in denial about how severe the problem is going to be until they’re actually mixed up in it.

“I’ve had client control issues before, these greenhorns probably just don’t know how to properly coach a stubborn DEAR GOD DID HE JUST POST A NOTARIZED DOCUMENT DETAILING HIS MOST RECENT FELONY ON SOCIAL MEDIA?”

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Could be, in which case I wouldn’t even trust them to do the due diligence required to hire a plumber, let alone represent me in court.

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Yes. Yes, he did. And somehow has managed to also say that you told him to do it. You should answer the door, it’s the FBI coming to ask you some questions about that…

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