Trump: Impeach is the new Orange

[Stormbringer]

Psi-ops and creating "truth" is big business, a new era of slavery is upon us.

100%

[eny]

Trump 1 was enabled by Prigozhin IRA bot farms, this term the bots are inside the US. Remember Cambridge Analytica? Lots of lessons were learned, manipulation of the psychology of large groups has metastasised... and not for the good.

[Animalmother]

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czrp6p5mj3zo
NATO I'm sure is painfully aware that Article 5 isn't worth a fuck if the US isn't involved, which it won't be under Trump. Russia is also very aware of this and is taking the piss. I honestly don't think they'll try anything as it's military isn't exactly having a stellar time in the Ukraine. Might be hoping to divert weapons from going to Ukraine.

Be nice if everything would just calm the fuck down for a bit.

[Raid]

We've been escorting long-range Russian bombers out of British airspace (where they can't possibly be operating legally) for well over a decade, this isn't really a new thing. They just know that they won't be shot down, at least not by the UK, because we're not going to escalate things, and it won't be any different with NATO forces. There's a bit of posturing, maybe a bit of intelligence gathering, but I don't think it's a prelude to anything more serious.

I agree Article 5 is far less valuable without the US, but I'm also less convinced than I was a few months back that the US wouldn't take part. Trump is absolutely obsessed with looking like a strong man, and sabre-rattling against Russia is about as strong as he's likely to look. Even if he was at some point a Russian plant, he's now got the backing of tech billionaires and a demonstrated stranglehold on the media - he doesn't need Putin any more.

[Hatredsheart]

https://bsky.app/profile/calltoactivism ... 5uud44oc2x

[Raid]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c7vln6qv12et

Interesting. It's difficult to praise Disney for seeing sense given this was as transparent a bending of the knee to Trump as you could possibly have had, but I understand that the page you use to unsubscribe from Disney Plus crashed over the weekend due to being inundated by people cancelling their subscriptions. I wonder whether someone ran the numbers and realised they were due to lose more money from this than gain through the merger that I think is one of the big reasons for it happening in the first place. Either way it's an embarrassment for Trump given how much he's said over this.

[Wrathbone]

Quite. I’ve no doubt that this came down purely to money and how much of it Disney stood to lose, rather than any surge of common sense prevailing. I didn’t have an active subscription to cancel sadly, but I had intended to sub for a month to watch The Thunderbolts, which I’ll now delay until Fantastic Four appears. Take that, Michael Mouse.

[Raid]

Hold the presses everyone, Donny T and his crew of expert Witch Doctors have dropped the real cause of autism: Tylenol. I saw this headline yesterday and didn't really think much of it, assuming Tylenol was some sort of horse tranquiliser or an opioid, given the epidemic of opioid over-use in the US.

Tylenol is the US brand name for paracetamol.

Famed raw sewage enthusiast and man-who-definitely-didn't-have-his-frontal-lobe-consumed-by-a-worm Robert F Kennedy Jr. has come to the conclusion that the most common painkiller in the US and Europe causes autism. If I'm to give them the absolute, most-genuine benefit of the doubt, and imagine that they've actually glanced at patients' medical histories at some point in this "study", they'll have seen that pregnant mothers take paracetamol at some point. Because it's almost impossible not to take paracetamol at some point, given that, again, it is the most common pain relief in the western hemisphere. Christ, it's the active ingredient in the Calpol that we give to actual babies because of how safe it is.

If I'm not going to give them the benefit of the doubt, and I'm not, I'd have said that the CEO of the company that owns the brand said something critical about Trump.

[eny]

Don't worry! Dr. Oz has a medication that can help! It just so happens he has a company that is the majority supplier of it! How fortunate......

[Stormbringer]

Man, that reminds me of the tale of how 'hydrogen dioxide' has been present in the bodies of every serial killer in the United States in the 20th century.

A colleague of mine told this to another (a man particularly prone to believing any old theory he read on the internet) some years ago and the guy actually bought it. He didn't believe me when I explained to him what 'hydrogen dioxide' actually was.

[Raid]

Don't worry! Dr. Oz has a medication that can help! It just so happens he has a company that is the majority supplier of it! How fortunate......

Damn, I'm usually so good at the game of "guess the blatant corruption" too.

[Wrathbone]

As an autistic person, I'm not sure whether to be more dismayed by the laughable medical claims which are rightfully dismissed by medical science, or by the fact that Trump and RFK see autism as something that needs to be 'cured'. It isn't a disease - an autistic brain is physically structured differently to a neurotypical brain, which can present in a variety of ways often classed as medical disorders, though in some cases I think the term disorder unfairly characterises traits as negative when the person in question might not see them as such. The point is, I don't need curing. I don't want to be neurotypical.

I do struggle with certain things, but only because the world around me has been primarily built by and for neurotypical people. Basic adjustments in the modern age like remote working do make things much easier to deal with. The fact that I find things like lengthy, pointless in-person meetings incredibly stressful (to the point where they can give me panic attacks) doesn't mean I'm ill, it means I place value in meetings that are brief and purposeful and I get stressed being in rooms full of people where I have to regulate my physical behaviour in a formal setting.

None of this matters, though, because Trump and RFK have no interest in helping anyone, autistic or not. Autism is a convenient bogeyman for them and claiming they can 'fix' it by denying pregnant women one of the only pain relief medicines they can have is outright monstrous. Absolute Edwins.

[Animalmother]

It just proves that no matter what insane or gobsmackingly stupid thing Trump and his cronies do, there's always something worse just around the corner. This little act will definitely start to hurt somebodies profits and thats when we see push back. I imagine Johnson & Johnson have some political clout in the US.

[Wrathbone]

It'll demonise autism substantially more than it already has been. It's no different to saying they can 'cure' someone's race in the womb so that they don't suffer social disadvantages.

[Raid]

I guess the other side of this is that demonising an entirely safe painkiller will drive more people towards opioids, which are a huge problem in the US and the thing that Trump claims Mexico and Canada are flooding the US with (rather than their being driven by US companies in a particularly egregious demonstration of rampant capitalism without sufficient oversight) and the original basis for the tariffs against those countries. I wouldn't be surprised if the Sackler family or others of their ilk have links to Trump.