I don’t mean like, peer pressure shame. I mean inner shame, psychological shame. The angst of not being to internally reconcile opposing value systems. Like “I want to be treated fairly, but what if someone treats me badly the same way I treat others?” Cultists, narcissists, bullies, live in fear of the answer to this question, which forms the basis of their internal shame.

The cognitive dissonance that Trump voters have is like a debt that accrues interest, and shame is a measure of the total balance of debt. The way you pay down a debt starts by acknowledging the objective reality of having that debt, and giving something up in return.

A normal person, when faced with shame of a manageable scale, handles it by apologizing for wrongdoing, offering a conciliation gift, changing the way they behave and the values they believe in, that kind of thing. Trump voters are incapable of this, as they seemingly don’t acknowledge the debt in the first place. Which means their debt is always growing, the stakes are always rising. Eventually they pass an event horizon, where they believe reconciliation is no longer possible and the only two options are 1) cling tighter to the beliefs, or 2) end their lives, often violently, often with intentional collateral damage.

And we have no shortage of examples of the latter.

those who want you out of this country are using the exact same language

They’re blind to this because in their minds, the boundary in the social hierarchy for arrest and deportation (read: kidnapping and human trafficking), is somewhere below their current ranking. All those terrible things are only meant to happen to my lessers, not me. I’m one of the good ones.

I’m sorry to hear that you speak from experience, because I speak from experience too. There were many off-ramps from the highway of crazy, and I think with each passing one it becomes more difficult for cult followers to deal with the shame of admitting they were wrong. They’re in so deep now, I think they’ll go to their graves with it.

I tried to make sense of that, uh, word salad, and kinda boiled it down to this:

What the specific levers are … is less interesting than the fact that this entire structure of oppression can be shattered by simple, meaningful unjudgemental solidarity…

And if that’s OP’s point, well, I think the past year has proved that it’s not true. The system of fascism is not vulnerable to solidarity and tolerance. In 2024, vulnerable voters rejected the idea that they are vulnerable and did not vote accordingly. Instead they looked at even more vulnerable people and said “Well at least I’m not that guy! That’ll never happen to me because I’m not (insert prejudice here).”

We can blame the propaganda machines of Fox and Facebook and Joe Rogan, and they deserve their share of the blame, but I firmly don’t believe Trump voters were merely duped. I think they already believed in a social hierarchy where, among their few luxuries, they get to look down on other people. They came to America, in their eyes the most powerful country on the planet, so regardless of how they got there, they were already more special than their homeland counterparts. They carried with them their prejudices, their views on women, their views on crime, homelessness, and joblessness, and conservative media tapped into those beliefs to form the backbone of their disinformation campaign.

the rational reasons immigrants … might adopt rightwing/conservative beliefs

In short, they didn’t “adopt” anything, they brought their own nascent bigotry with them.

Compulsory and making Election Day a Federal Holiday but yeah agreed

NPVIC was a great idea to me in 2017, but less so in 2025.

Windows Explorer is set up to ALWAYS show full file extensions, that’s like a basic safety measure that really should be on by default but isn’t

Drives me MAD man. Absolutely MAD.

Take me with a grain of salt, but from what I understand Valve banned it when they received their evaluation build, and they found a scene of a child character “riding” on the back of an adult, naked, “horse” character, in the form of a human.

Developer immediately took to social media to whip up the current media frenzy you see now. Whether the developer simply didn’t realize the implications of what they made, or whether they did it purposely for “artistic license” or “anti-puritan shock value” I leave to you.

I hope the company was honest with them. Really, really honest with them.

We at Talen Energy are here to make what remains of your lives completely miserable. Your electricity bills will rise so much, you will only be able to afford electricity on weekdays. The water coming out of your faucet will cause blisters on your skin before we eventually reroute all potable water in your town to our data center. And despite our facility gobbling up hectares of your grandfather’s land for pennies on the dollar, we won’t even hire you to scrub toilets in it. Cry to Trump all you want, who do you think let us build our plant here?

No. AI cannot “get better,” that’s what techbros say so they don’t light a trillion dollars on fire. LLMs cannot avoid hallucinations and even now are being trained on their own excrement, human centipede style. They hope you tell yourself this lie so you don’t notice when they move on to the next hyped up pile of shit.

You wanna try out the new Soylent Green?

2022 was still not that good of a year for the internet guys.

I think about this comic often nowadays.

The real question is if Valve plans to swallow the jumps in price. They must have designed the machine before the price hikes, so I wonder if they already had a price in mind and whether they’re gonna stick to it.

Rich enough to do whatever means two things in MTG’s case:

1. funnel her ill-gotten wealth to other Republican candidates with “clean” records (i.e. no spats with the Dear Leader).
2. provide the GOP with a face of remorse that inattentive (dipshit) audiences can sympathize with.

Both are ploys to continue robbing and pillaging America for the rich by hoodwinking the gullible.

In her statement on Friday night, Greene wrote, “I … do not want my sweet district to have to endure a hurtful and hateful primary against me by the President we all fought for, only to fight and win my election while Republicans will likely lose the midterms.”

She still wants Republicans to win the midterms. MTG and people like her will never have a redemption arc, nor do they deserve one. Not by happenstance, nor by choice.

the next 1000x in 4-5 years

At the risk of stating the obvious, Ars is working backwards from this metric to get their headline “double every 6 months.” 2^10 = 1024, to get that number in 5 years means doubling every half-year.

But Google didn’t set incremental 6-month deadlines for 5 years straight, they set a single 5-year deadline. Because in 6 months shareholders can call their bluff quite easily, but in 5 years they’re hoping everyone is A) distracted by some new disaster, or B) there’s a new tech hype cycle they can push. They’re trying to stall the bubble popping by pointing to a nebulous future where they magically scale to infinity, and hoping we all forget that they ever made this claim.

She think she’s fooling anyone with those crocodile tears? Gear up Rambo, you finally get to have the fight you wanted.

Thank God for that, because after seeing it’s ventilation setup, I’m gonna have to drill holes in that front panel. XD

Unfortunately very expected. Italian Americans easily forget they used to be called guinea, dago, wop, when they go around calling other people towelheads. There’s no cognitive dissonance when they think they’ve figured out their position in the hierarchy.

And who knows, they might see the day where they help those words make a comeback.

Well hurry up then.