I get the impression that when he says “find your own way out,” he actually means “stop caring.”

And this is why SUDDENLY IRAN!

For some reason, he seems extra butthurt about getting caught lying this time.

Black Hole Sun.

It’s a tedious, grating and ridiculously repetitive dirge.

Is that cynical supposition or an actual event?

At this point in our history, the two are pretty much indistinguishable.

Oh look - a blatant quid pro quo.

Supreme Court apologists have weakly been trying to excuse the Court’s “gifts aren’t bribes” ruling by pointing out that it still counts as corruption if the thing of value is given in advance and if there’s an overt quid pro quo involved.

Both of those are the case here, so even by the Court’s new abysmally weak standards, this counts as official corruption.

So who thinks anything will come of it?

Yeah - me neither.

Radioland Murders (1994)

A frenetic comedy mystery set during the debut live broadcast of a radio station in 1939. More than anything else, it’s a terrific exercise in film and sound editing, as the programs and musical numbers being performed on stage intertwine with the action backstage. It can be sort of difficult to appreciate if you’re fixated on having a single, steadily unfolding narrative, since it constantly jumps around between different characters and different settings, but if you just relax and let it wash over you, you’ll discover that it is a single, steadily unfolding narrative - it was just assembled from a whole bunch of separate but oddly interlocking pieces.

That’d be about par for the course. When too much attention is focused on their abject evil in Gaza, one of their strategies is to suddenly go stir the shit in Iran or Lebanon or Syria and get attention focused there instead.

Presumably his advisors determined that he needed to Overton more and faster if he wanted to ensure that he’d be the neolib weasel the DNC shoves down our throats in 2028.

I think that the focus on the violation of the will of one by another defeats relativism.

The killer’s expression of his will is not simply something he is doing, but something he is doing to another, and the will of that other must have priority.

If the will of the person upon whom the act is committed isn’t held to be paramount, then the entire concept of interpersonal morality collapses. So an act that brings harm to another contrary to the will of that other must be seen to be wrong entirely regardless of one’s personal views on the matter

Note though that that’s subject to the essentially “mathematical” concept of morality I addressed elsewhere. That an act that brings harrm to another contrary to the will of that other is necessarily and without exception wrong does not preclude the possibility that it might be justified, if it serves to prevent a greater wrong or bring about a greater right - if it’s such that the negative value of the act in question is offset by a greater positive value, such that the “sum” of the specific “integers” that make up the entire course of action is positive.

That actially gets into the second thing I mentioned.

My view is that morality is best seen to function in a sort of math-like way - individual acts have a fixed moral value, and the moral value of an entire course of action is the “sum” of all of the relevant “integers” that make it up.

So, for instance taking the life of another contrary to their will has a negative moral value always. There are no exceptions - the value of that individual act is always negative.

However, protecting people from a known predator has a positive moral value, and similarly always has that value.

And depending on the severity of the threat and the severity of the response, it’s possible for the “sum” of those two acts to be positive, which is to say right, and even as the value of the individual act “taking the life of another contrary to their will” remains negative.

That’s not to say or imply that I believe that acts can be assigned actual numerical values - rather it’s just a way to conceptualize the matter - to hopefully provide the absolutism that morality needs to be even-handed while still allowing for the flexibility it needs to be useful.

So to your question - in and of itself, taking the life of another contrary to their will - even if that other is a serial killer - is wrong. However, protecting people from a known predator is in and of itself right. So the two need to be weighed against each other, and I would say that if the risk the killer poses is sufficiently great (certain or near enough to it to make no meaningful difference) and if there are no other at least equally certain methods to prevent future killing, then execution would be justifiable. Which is to say, executing him would have a positive moral vaue, in spite of the fact that taking the life of another contrary to their will always has a negative valie in and of itself.

There’s much more nuance to all of this - issues with the necessary unreliability and potential deliberate misrepresentation inherent in predicting the future, differences of opinion regarding the relative values of various acts and thus potentially the final value of the course of action as a whole, different methods for resolving disagreements on those things, and so on and on. But that’s grist for other mills.

Wrong, IMO, is defined by the violation of the will of another.

That’s the common element to all things that are broadly considered wrong.

For instance, if somebody chooses to give you something, that’s a gift and it’s fine. But if you take that same something from them against their will, that’s stealing, and wrong. In both cases, the exact same thing happened - a thing went from being their possession to being yours. The difference - the thing that separates the right act from the wrong one - is that one was done according to the will of the other person, while the other was done contrary to their will.

And the same holds true consistently - assault, kidnapping, rape, even murder - none of them are characterized by what happens, but by the fact that it happens contrary to the will of the “victim.” And in fact, that’s what defines a “victim” - whatever has been done to them was done against their will.

And it should be noted that there’s an odd sort of relative aspect to this, since the exception to the rule is the violation of the rule.

What I mean by that is that if one decides to violate the will of another, one is instantly wrong, which essentially negates the requirement that ones will not be violated. Your will to violate the will of another not only can be but should be itself violated.

I also have an idea for reconciling the need for an effectively absolute set of moral standards with the fact that morality is necessarily subjective and relative, but that’d require another, and likely even longer, essay.

Not necessarily.

Trump doing his thing 2016-2020 met with a lot of obstacles and pushback.

Then he was out of office for four years, and while he was crashing around spewing nonsense and vitriol, some very intelligent and very evil people were working behind the scenes to secure some significant Supreme Court rulings and to draw up a step-by-step plan for instituting fascism in the US.

And now Trump doing his thing is met with almost no obstacles or pushback - virtually the entire government is bending over backwards to enable him.

And it must be noted that he’s not particularly smart or sane, but he is a childishly greedy and selfish narcissist. That means he’s incredibly easy to manipulate. All anyone has to do is frame something in a way that appeals to his crippled emotions and drop a few hints to get him going in the right direction, then just stand back and let him do his thing.

Not saying that that’s certainly what is happening, but…

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“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard.” - H.L. Mencken

Yes.

Both before and after.

All of them, real or imagined.

No surprise there - Republicans have hated Wikipedia pretty much from the start, since they require valid attribution and constantly fact check, which means the Republicans can’t spin their lies.

Expect to see a lot more of that all around the world.

Trump can hide enough of his caprice and his pettiness and his self-absorption behind emotive rhetoric to fool the MAGAs, but none of that works on an international scale. The rest of the world just sees him, accurately, as a petulant, self-serving asshole and raving lunatic who can’t be trusted. Ever. And that’s the way they’re going to treat him, and the US by extension.

What era would you rather have been born in?

Why is there a watermelon there?

Subs or dubs?