Why are so many different politicians and officials in so many different countries so keen to enable the mass murder of Gazans?

I mean - yeah - military/industrial complex and Israeli lobbying and disinformation and Middle East destabilization and even that screechingly insane christian zionist armageddon thing - there are lots of ways that Israel coerces support for its patent evil. But even all of them added together don't seem enough to explain the scale on which they've managed it, nor the range of different countries they've done it in.

It's as if we have a worldwide epidemic of contagious psychopathy, with Israel as the reservoir.

Well of course he doesn't - he's a psychopath. A complete lack of concern for others is one of his defining characteristics.

And even beyond that, Biden's a special case.

Another aspect of Trump's mental illness is his entirely self-absorbed conception of reality. For instance, he wanted to win in 2020; and he believes he deserved to win in 2020, therefore, from his delusional point of view, the only possible reality is that he did win, but somebody stole it from him.

And that somebody is Biden, and since another aspect of his mental illness is to childishly cling to grudges over perceived wrongs, he has it in for Biden specifically.

How do angry, hateful, vicious people like MTG convince themselves they're Christian?

I don't think it's a pose - she appears to be entirely sincere about her claim to Christianity.

And I understand the basic mechanics of it - they pick and choose which parts of the Bible to highlight and which to ignore, and how to self-servingly interpret the ones they do pick.

But in a more fundamental sense, I still don't understand how they do it. Are they really entirely devoid of self-awareness or conscience? How is that even possible? Or do they have at least some rudimentary self-awareness and conscience, but they just ignore it? How is that even possible?

Cutting taxes for the rich, raising taxes for the poor and increasing the national debt is an economic plan in the same sense that sitting on the couch eating frosting from a can is a diet and exercise plan.

I grow more convinced all the time that the Republicans and their wealthy cronies and patrons are actively and deliberately destroying the US.

The actual plan is to steal as much value as possible, ultimately triggering economic collapse, which they'll ride out in security and privilege somewhere else (Greenland, for instance). Probably engineer a war or two along the way too. And between the economic collapse, the wars and the destruction of the healthcare system, they'll cause the deaths of many millions of people.

Then, when things are at their worst, they'll move back in, with mercenary armies, claim literally everything, and rebuild the US as essentially a feudal state, with the wealthy few owning everything and everyone else reduced to the status of serfs.

I see no possibility that the EU will, if forced to choose, choose anyone other than China.

Russia and the US have both clearly signaled to the EU that they cannot be trusted. I see no reason why the EU would do anything other than believe them.

At this point, I'm assuming that "reforms" that are going to lead to deaths are a deliberate eugenic strategy - that the underlying idea is that the owner class will be able to deal with problems privately, so it will be the working class that will be disproportionately affected and will disproportionately die, and that's actually part of the point.

That pretty well sums it up.

I think the combination of losing the 2020 election, being hit with a slew of unflattering analyses and criminal convictions, then winning the 2024 election finally completely broke his brain, but it's a path he started down probably from pretty much his first day of conscious life.

There will be mass graves in the US if the oligarchs have their way about it.

They must've misread "peace prize" as "piece-of-shit prize."

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.

I love everything about this story.

At this point, he doesn't even bother to try to make sense. He just lets whatever words might serve his purposes fall out of his mouth, and counts on the loyalty of his sycophants to do the rest.