What this is actually about is revenge, it's revenge season.

Trump is buck breaking big pharma over the entire industry collectively not telling the truth about COVID, botching the response on purpose out of greed, as well as turning what he wanted to be a cornerstone of his career, the COVID vax, into one of the biggest question marks that gets aimed at him from his own base.

You can count on the fact that several appendages of big pharma *knew* it was a lab leak, *knew* it wasn't all that lethal to most of the citizenry, and *knew* that it wasn't a good idea to deploy an untested technology like mRNA vaccines to hundreds of millions+ of people.

The one thing you do *not* want to do to a guy like Trump is embarass him. Obama did that at the correspondents dinner, and look how that went for him and his legacy.

I think that's the reason behind a lot of the actions regarding Israel of the last few days as well. Israel snubbed Trump within 72 hours of the 2020 election despite all the support he extended them during his first term.

In response there's been rebuke after rebuke of Israel, motivated by past insults and fresh ones, like AIPAC bragging about their access to Tim Waltz, and the likelihood that SignalGate was orchestrated by them to discredit Hegseth.

All of these things inconvenienced and embarrassed Trump, and the only thing worse than that which you can do to him is not reciprocate gestures of loyalty or friendship which he has shown. "Project Warp Speed" will always be a controversy, the economy was rocked onto its heels by the COVID response that wasn't actually necessary, lives ruined, childhoods crushed, and the idea that people knew and not a single one was able to tell him the truth of the matter burns a guy like Donald to his core.

Trump tolerates some incompetence and even some collateral damage/embarrassment from his fellows (see Guiliani) if they are loyal. This is one of his traits that I don't particularly admire, but it's true.

But what I do admire is his capacity for revenge against those who engage in pettiness, betrayal, or disloyalty.

Let me clarify a bit about the vax.

Big Pharma lied about the efficacy trials and sued to hide the data to get the vaccine released, albeit after slow walking it to keep it from being released before the election.

Trump will never stop talking up project warp speed as being "stupendous" because Trump has gone on record saying *many* times not to admit mistakes, and even when you're losing to act like you are winning. He's never going to turn around and apologize, or admit something didn't work out as planned, or take fault/blame/responsibility for something bad. It just is what it is, it is his psychology.

But you can guarantee the fact that things didn't go the way he wanted *irks* the man incessantly. The same way what Israel did irks him. This is not a man who you want to dump a mess in the lap of (even if he makes tons of messes on his own that he tends not to clean up)

Donald Trump, for better or worse, is a man who *never* admits that he is wrong. If he has to, he fakes it till he makes it and will swear the sky is purple if need be.

Which seems to be a common trait in famous businessmen (see Elon etc)

So when you make something he is attached to go tits up, it pisses a guy like that off, because now he has to avoid admitting that something went tits up.

The only facts about the new Pope I've been able to glean thus far as a non catholic:

-He's American
-His timeline reads like leftist coal
-He's made statements disapproving of gays, gay marriage, and women in the clergy
-He's from Chicago (ick)
-He's publicly countersignaled JD Vance on ordo amoris and immigration but also vehemently stated the catholic church shouldn't be endorsing open borders and mass migration, but taking in refugees as they are able to

Some snippets of his:

My overall assessment from looking at a ton of other takes is that this guy appears to be a milquetoast moderate who leans left on immigration but leans right on some social issues like gays and abortions.

Feeling I'm getting is he will be a much less vocal pope than Francis overall

I think we're in the middle of the greatest epistemic re-sorting/unraveling of our lives right now. Shiloh Hendrix, Karmelo Anthony, Tariffs, the Civil Rights Act, White Guilt, TFR, WW2, it all ties together.

The death of boomer neuromythology: 🧵

There's been a lot of collected momentum over the last decade of people in the west realizing that things are *really* not ok, that the world doesn't work as it should. One of the most perturbing are many sets of punitive, unfair, illogical double standards.

Which is what the Shiloh Hendrix incident is really about, a refutation of one of those double standards. Don't focus too much on the event itself, the point is not to justify a mom calling some black kid the gamer word, it's not about what type of person she is or is not either.

"You missed the point of the movie" says the media literacy crowd

>fireman dad murdered by black guy while putting out a fire
>blacks try to break into his truck, shoots one and curb stomps the other, goes to jail
>makes a black friend and decides to reform and become antiracist
>gets out and his little brother is on the same path, tries to persuade him to stop hating black people
>little brother defends a smaller white kid getting beat up on by a ghetto black, gets shot and killed by him the next day
>original ending the director wanted was derek staring in the mirror, full of grief, and deciding to shave his head again
>Edward Norton pitched a fit and had it changed to Derek reciting the final stanza of abe lincolns inaugural address (Abe wanted to send all the blacks to Liberia/Haiti after the civil war was over, but was assassinated)

While I get that the point being made is something about the cycle of hatred repeating itself, at the end of the day it's black people who spend the whole film murdering people for petty reasons and engaging in theft by trying to break into Dereks truck.

About the only thing Derek did that was legally wrong was curb stomping the second thief. But on the other hand we've got the utterly senseless murder of his father and brother by black people with zero impulse control, and yet the theme of the movie is that it's Derek who shouldn't have felt the way that he did.

The film casts essentially no critical judgement on the black people murdering white people, and spends all its time addressing how Derek feels about it.

For all the talk of "dereks dad planting the seeds of racism in him"

Was he really wrong about black people considering he was murdered while putting out a house fire for no particular reason by a black guy?

Making a black friend might show that yeah, not every person of a certain race is a caricature. But stereotypes still exist because they are found to be true often enough to be a good compass to run off of in the macro, if not the micro.

There is something bizarre going on that I can't quite put my finger on, but it can be seen in the replies to this guys post. This guy has been poking around in DMs and replies of lots of RW twitter constantly asking for followbacks.

As I alluded to in another thread, there is something strange going on. Weird influencer accounts in "MAGAville" that have followings relative to exposure that make very little sense.

Couple that with what I saw earlier, why are large "normie" themed MAGA accounts creating "twin brothers" that they are boosting? These accounts are obviously not being accused of impersonation, they are sanctioned, because the "brothers" are mutuals.

Are they using their platforms to boost and create high follower alts to sell? What I have heard goes on is that people will create accounts and use this followback strategy until they reach a certain size, unfollow everyone they follow, change to a blank slate name and PFP, and then sell off the account. People buy these blank slate, high follower count accounts in order to immediately jump into things like monetization and begin to engagement bait.

But there is a certain and very similar "vibe" to all the accounts here. They are all congratulating Dustin here, but despite their followings only getting double digit views and 1 or no likes for the most part. Though there are a few accounts in the replies I know are organic.

Additionally, this huge "knot" of accounts retweet each other constantly, but there is very little actual engagement in their posts compared to a typical 50k+ follower account.

I think the reality of what this guy is talking about is that antipathy towards blacks *from* most whites in this era was more or less gone. That doesn't mean it was reciprocated the other way.

These men are models of what we wanted blacks to be like, not how most of them actually are. Most racial discourse in the US amounts to white people wishing black people would stop doing hood rat shit all the time.

The left thinks this is because they're poor, or grow up without enough government services, which wouldn't explain the fact that poor whites of the same income bracket as poor blacks don't commit nearly as many crimes despite there being way more of them than blacks.

So when libs worship them like cows in India, what they're really saying is "Please see the light and act civilized we will do literally anything other than face the truth of the matter!"

And the traditional white conservative position essentially hinges on the police handling the problem and just throwing them in jail when they break the law while still more or less ignoring the racial element as best as they can.

The only thing that (privately) your average white american on the left or right would agree on if they took a moment to be intellectually honest is that they don't like most of the stereotypical "black" things that exist.

From stochastic irrational violent crime like Karmelo Anthony stabbing a kid for telling him he wasn't where he was supposed to be to black women being rude and disagreeable, whites really hate this shit and wish blacks would just act like Bill Cosby or Will Smith.

The real crime is that they taught an entire generation of white kids to treat blacks like they *were* Bill Cosby and Will Smith, when they are actually models of what white people wish black people were actually like.

The problem is that when anyone tries to confront this problem, the top 20-25 percentile of black america gets held up as an example that stereotyping is wrong and they aren't all like that. This is really just copium to the tune of "But they can change! Look at my black friend who went to college and has a mortgage and a family!"

And good for them, but there's a reason the first thing black people with the ambition for upward mobility do is move away from all the other black people. The problem is that an entire generation was shown an aspirational version of black people and told "See? They're just like you and me!" while most of the black community hadn't changed at all.

So racism wasn't gone, white kids were just shown black people as we wish they were and nobody gave us the memo that this wasn't really true if you lived in a major city. I'm sure all these dudes live in neighborhoods that are majority white.

I had the viewpoint of the OP when I was younger, because there weren't really very many black people where I grew up. So my opinion was largely based on what I saw on TV or online.

But I've been stationed in Biloxi MS.. I've lived in Houston for 10 years now.. Not reality.

That's the other thing.. The Japanese in california had a generation where they were poor, new to the US, and picked our fruit. Next generation they took over landscaping across the state, all gardeners were japanese.

Their kids are now all dentists.

https://x.com/SmorglesBord/status/1910356166711926829