This doesn’t contradict what I’m saying, but maybe you didn’t intend to. The person I knew well and was describing would be described even worse by his own teachers - in fact his teachers insisted he go into classes catering to kids with severe learning disabilities. Which he was beaten for at home, and caused him huge unanswered shame.

But again, he could basically instantly understand the motivations of a room full of strangers, it was uncanny. Even other people I know who are good at it, not like this. And he would get bored and put people in weird situations to entertain himself, using this power. They never saw what he was doing.

Trump is fucking horrible at almost everything. He’s not quite dumb though, really clearly not. He’s unable and unwilling to direct his mind toward anything other than a specific narrow set of goals, and this person I knew was exactly that way.

But pursuit of one of his goals? He’d fucking get there. He would get there. And it was sometimes horrifying, and often base and mean, but it could just be a lot of egregious flattery too - whatever the situation called for. Scary stuff.

Ah, thank you, beautiful. So much of that passage amounts to “for real y’all, you could tell by looking, this dude was a jerk” lol

The statue’s features “tell” that the sculptor read those “passions” (the cold sneer, etc.) in the monarch’s face, his general mood and way of treating the world. And in doing, those passions survive and appear in this statue.

I don’t really understand “the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed”.

I’ve known someone else a bit like this, where he seemed “stupid” - found it very difficult to learn traditional academic subjects - but he was top notch at manipulation, and had an uncanny knack for guessing what people wanted in any given scenario.

You can’t be truly dumb and successfully manipulate the majority of people you meet. Put another way, people who are as limited as he seems - find it very difficult to understand people and get what they want/need from them.

In my experience, economists are not serious people and generally do not address serious concerns.

I acknowledge there are some exceptions.

I never felt attacked by you. I’ve got a family of folks I’m trying to bring along with me here, wish us luck!

[Edit: and cheers, torch the slaughterhouses, I sincerely wish you and your efforts well - material realities force change to a degree that can never be matched by the very “choose your own ethics” (AKA commitment-level) moralizing and minor harm reduction to which I’m annoyingly subscribed]

I get it. In the end it’s a half measure that allows lots of suffering and may keep folks comfortable with that in a way that a stricter commitment doesn’t risk.

For me it kind of “unlocked” a focus toward harm reduction rather than promises to try hard someday, and allowed us to begin on the path. I’m not sure where we will stop, but we weren’t on it before.

This mentality has me and my family eating dramatically less meat than we otherwise would and I hope to continue that slide, I think it’s a great strategy most folks who want to try can use to get started.

Huh? I thought it was the baby from the hokey 90s show Dinosaurs, all grown up??

It’s fine, we’re just over here producing the same absurdities that (much) later result in clumsy-sounding stories like “and then the question became, to whom goes the bigger portion of the baby being split? jk what does the posing and response to the question itself reveal? for fucks sake how bad does this have to be, to stir us or anyone to do differently?”

I guess I added the bit on at the end.

Yeah how bout we switch away from this rapist pedo loser, too

If everyone but you agrees…

…in this case, you simply need to expand your definition of “everyone”.

Roughly everyone in the US is conditioned to see our tiny slice of the political spectrum this way, as you’re describing. Democrats left, Republicans right, the precise middle between them being…what? “Moderate”?

US politics sits within several broader contexts - it is not some magical thing with the power to redefine global and historical political thought. We simply grew up thinking it’s mostly all there was and probably the ~best out of other worse sets of ideas.

And all of us suffer for that, you help us all suffer for that, by simply accepting (defending!) the self-defeating idea that Democrats are as far left as one should go. While Republicans just sprint further right, without penalty. And complicit orgs like the New York Times “report” like everything is mostly normal, instead of a goddamn historic, violent assertion of all the worst fucking things that basically NO ONE agrees with, going on today.

Okay. Democrats are left-wing. How?

New York Times is precisely as left wing as liberalism. You’ve been raised to implicitly think of liberalism as the “normal amount of left”, and that is not accurate. That’s my assumption at any rate, because I was raised that way and carried around a similar misconception.

I know about this as a phenomena, but even with already knowing, the specific comparison stories are always so wtffff…. So sorry you/y’all experience that, it’s hot trash.