The only winners in this scenario are governments that want more control over their citizens’ digital lives.

And that, as the saying goes, is not a bug. It’s a feature.

They got 40 million people in that state and they voting these imbeciles in office, and they continue to do it.

Even in an era in which Repiblicans have come to be defined by psychological projection and unintentional irony, Tommy Tuberville calling someone else an imbecile stands out.

That’s why homelessness is being criminalized.

The explicit goal is to recreate Victorian workhouses for the benefit of the new generation of robber barons.

Of a vividly disturbing person.

As a matter of fact, yes.

I didn’t make all that up on the spot. I already had the visual image in mind because that really is how I visualize him.

And I didn’t even try to do it. When he first bought Twitter and started trolling professionally, I just found myself visualizing him doing it, and before I knew it, I had this crystal clear image of him sitting in front of a desktop PC on a rickety particle board desk in a dank basement room with white paint over concrete and green shag carpeting, lit only by the glow from a cheap monitor, wearing gross stained sweats and a hoodie, hunched over a grimey keyboard and occasionally giggling to himself.

I keep trying to visualize the more likely reality for a billionaire of some sort of extremely custom multi-monitor setup in the center of a purpose-built room, but it just won’t stick.

In his mom’s basement, in cum-stained sweatpants, sitting hunched over in front of a cheap oversized monitor hooked up to an underpowered desktop PC with lots of LED, trolling on /b/ and /pol/ and jerking off to pokeporn.

Lining up to buy a piece of the action.

We the people are completely and totally fucked.

Nexus Mods owner Robin Scott summed up the situation perfectly on Jan. 6, two days before the official statement went out on X, in the comments of a Reddit thread about “censorship” on his site:

We also removed the exact same mod with Joe Biden’s head at the same time (on the 2nd of January) to ensure there was no bias and because we don’t want to handle all the nutjobs that come out the woodwork whenever these mods get posted. Funny how the outrage-bait YouTubers don’t mention that, isn’t it?

Case in point, today, with all the nutjobs coming out of the woodwork sending us death threats, calling us pedos and all the other “wah wahs” that come with this ridiculous situation because some YouTuber told them we are only removing Trump mods.

It’s so dumb, and these people are so dumb, that I really cannot be fucked with it. I’m not expecting any of my staff to have to handle these whackjobs any more than showing them the door either. So we delete all the mods we see/that get reported to us on the topic, and all the people this upsets can trot-on because it’s really not worth our time or effort to care about.

I’ve criticized Dark0ne repeatedly over the years specifically because he tends to be an asshole, but this is one time I’m with him 100%.

If you think about it, Trump is really a sort of simple and easily understood person.

He has no firm foundation for his ego, but since he’s been pampered and coddled all his life, it’s never faced any significant challenges either. So he’s ended up with this grossly overinflated and terribly fragile ego, and it’s basically a full-time job just keeping it inflated and protecting it from harm.

I don’t have any expertise with which to answer your question definitively, but I wanted to chime in to say that my first thought was exactly this: “hands that are gripped together are unable to present a threat to you, so it is a signal of voluntary vulnerability.”

And rather than vulnerability, it might be more accurate to say that it represents submission, which would tie in with your second question, so it’s not so much that one is signaling that one is not a threat to the god(s), but that one submits.

And in that context, it’s likely noteworthy that the most common example of clasped hands oitside of prayer is when one is earnestly begging something of someone else, and especially a favor or a certain inconvenience.