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An intriguing analysis has been circulating online regarding the psychological aspects of Zelensky's meeting with Trump and Vance, conducted using ChatGPT.
From this analysis, it becomes evident that we have witnessed a true masterclass in gaslighting, manipulation, and coercion on the part of Trump and his entourage. Let's break down the key points:
1. Blaming the victim for their own situation
Trump explicitly tells Zelensky: "You have allowed yourself to be in a very bad position." This is classic abuser rhetoric--blaming the victim for their suffering. The implication is that Ukraine itself is responsible for being occupied by Russia and for the deaths of its people.
2. Pressure and coercion into 'gratitude'
Vance demands that Zelensky say "thank you." This is an extremely toxic tactic--forcing the victim to express gratitude for the help they desperately need, only to later accuse them of ingratitude if they attempt to assert their rights.
3. Manipulating the concept of 'peace'
Trump claims that Zelensky is "not ready for peace." However, what he actually means is Ukraine's capitulation. This is a classic manipulation technique--substituting the idea of a just peace with the notion of surrender.
4. Refusing to acknowledge the reality of war
Trump repeatedly insists that Zelensky has "no cards to play" and that "without us, you have nothing." This is yet another abusive tactic--undermining the victim's efforts by asserting that they are powerless without the mercy of their 'saviour.'
5. Devaluing the victims of war
"If you get a ceasefire, you must accept it so that bullets stop flying and your people stop dying," Trump says. Yet, he ignores the fact that a ceasefire without guarantees is merely an opportunity for Russia to regroup and strike again.
6. Dominance tactics
Trump constantly interrupts Zelensky, cutting him off: "No, no, you've already said enough," and "You're not in a position to dictate to us." This is deliberate psychological pressure designed to establish a hierarchy in which Zelensky is the subordinate.
7. Forcing capitulation under the guise of 'diplomacy'
Vance asserts that "the path to peace lies through diplomacy." This is a classic strategy where the aggressor is given the opportunity to continue their aggression unchallenged.
8. Projection and distortion of reality
Trump declares: "You are playing with the lives of millions of people." Yet, in reality, it is he who is doing exactly that--shifting responsibility onto Zelensky.
9. Creating the illusion that Ukraine 'owes' the US
Yes, the US is assisting Ukraine, but presenting this aid as "you must obey, or you will receive nothing" is not a partnership--it is financial and military coercion.
10. Undermining Ukraine's resistance
Trump states that "if it weren't for our weapons, this war would have ended in two weeks." This is an attempt to erase Ukraine's achievements and portray its efforts as entirely dependent on US support.
Conclusion
Trump and his team employed the full spectrum of abusive tactics: gaslighting, victim-blaming, coercion into gratitude, and manipulation of the concepts of peace and diplomacy. This was not a negotiation--it was an attempt to force Zelensky into accepting terms beneficial to the US but potentially fatal for Ukraine.

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New-to-me music
5 star(!):
* Way Less Sad (AJR)
One of Wren's favorite songs. Great sample of "My Little Town"

4 star:
* Try a Little Tenderness (Otis Redding)
* Just A Closer Walk With Thee (Venice Beach Boys)
glad to see these guys in "White Man Can't Jump"

3 star:
* Stem Cells (Oak Felder)
* The Hook (Queen Latifah)
* Mars Is No Fun (Camille)
* The Air That I Breathe (The Hollies)
* The Seed (AURORA)
* Look At Me Now (DJ Kenni Starr Remix) (Degom)
* Your Body Is a Wonderland (John Mayer)
* Careless Whisper (Dj Ashes)

During the 2024 campaign, Trump said repeatedly that he would end the war in Ukraine. Shortly after the election, a newspaper reporter asked Nikolai Patrushev, who is close to Putin, if Trump's election would mean "positive changes from Russia's point of view." Patrushev answered: "To achieve success in the elections, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. And as a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them."

Today, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told a reporter: "The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely aligns with our vision."

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You would imagine that [books] are speaking as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to learn something about what they say, they always say only one and the same thing. And every written discourse is thus; once it is written, it rolls about everywhere, reaching alike those who understand and those whom it in no way concerns, and it does not know to whom it should speak and to whom not.

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good advice from wittyidiot Maybe I'm a bit too quick to admit my faults than, you know, try and fix them.

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Social Security has never missed a payment. DOGE actions threaten 'interruption of benefits,' ex-agency head says anyone want to place bets? such scummy underhand ways of killing a program so many have paid into and are counting on Been a little behind in reading these days. A friend recommended "The Great Delusion" by John Mearsheimer. The basic idea is you got a balance a kind of liberalism (terms get fuzzy; he's talking like Clinton/Bush/Cheney "share our good values to the world" 'liberalism', something certain liberals would certainly condemn as a new flavor of colonialism) with nationalism and realism.

It mentioned Francis Fukuyama's famous article, "The End of History?" which I think a lot of us Gen Xers got introduced to via Jesus Jones' song "Right Here, Right Now"

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Trump and Musk are a revolution, alright, and no one will treat the USA as a reliable partner again. "And although one should hesitate before saying anything as pointed as describing president Trump and Vice-President as Russian assets, their conduct is indistinguishable from them being so."

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"They'll never cut Social Security" is the new "they'll never overturn Roe v Wade."

Trent: You know what you are? You're like a big bear with claws and with fangs...
Sue: ...big fucking teeth, man.
Trent: Yeah... big fuckin' teeth on ya'. And she's just like this little bunny, who's just kinda cowering in the corner.
Sue: Shivering.
Trent: Yeah, man just kinda... you know, you got these claws and you're staring at these claws and your thinking to yourself, and with these claws you're thinking, "How am I supposed to kill this bunny, how am I supposed to kill this bunny?"
Sue: And you're poking at it, you're poking at it...
Trent: Yeah, you're not hurting it. You're just kinda gently batting the bunny around, you know what I mean? And the bunny's scared Mike, the bunny's scared of you, shivering.
Sue: And you got these fucking claws and these fangs...
Trent: And you got these fucking claws and these fangs, man! And you're looking at your claws and you're looking at your fangs. And you're thinking to yourself, you don't know what to do, man. "I don't know how to kill the bunny." With *this* you don't know how to kill the bunny, do you know what I mean?
Sue: You're like a big bear, man.
Mike: So you're not just like fucking with me?
Trent: No I'm not fucking with you.
Sue: Honestly, man.

sometimes I feel like this when I have trouble getting started with a tech task

All Trump ever wanted to do was make engaging television, and by that standard it's been a wildly successful presidency.

This is going to be great television, I will say that.

"By one recent count, Trump has appointed 21 Fox News personalities to his staff--many, like Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, at the highest levels of his administration."

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The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation was awarded a huge research grant to design and produce synthetic personalities to order. The results were uniformly disastrous. All the 'people' and 'personalities' turned out to be amalgams of characteristics that simply could not co-exist in naturally occurring life forms. Most of them were just poor pathetic misfits, but some were deeply, deeply dangerous. Dangerous because they didn't ring alarm bells in other people. They could walk through situations the way that ghosts walk through walls, because no one spotted the danger

The most dangerous of all were three identical ones--they were put in this hold, to be blasted, with this ship, right out of this universe. They are not evil, in fact they are rather simple and charming. But they are the most dangerous creatures that ever lived because there is nothing they will not do if allowed, and nothing they will not be allowed to do...

BABAM @ Tesla Protests:

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For future reference GOP Rep. Schweikert talking about how deep hurtful cuts only take hours or days of a year's worth of debt spending. protestin' Tesla (March 1, photos by Henry B)

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Trump ❤️ Putin
Putin ❤️ Trump

2 RULERS
2-GETHER
4-EVA

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LOL, how to handle Trump: give him a shiny golden object / toy with moving parts to admire

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When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I'm basically the same. The temperament is not that different.

Seriously, wtf.
We never would have gotten free of leaded gas or paint if these were the assholes in charge.

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how senior engineers are made... Is Trump more serious about grabbing Canada than USAians assume??

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Trump fans, whats your excuse for this: USDA cancels $1B in local food purchasing for schools, food banks

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Today I am sort of full of stress and sadness.
Also full of vaccines for shingles and pneumonia.

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also, now a chicken burrito In honor of Ides of March I'm going to tell folks the incredibly geeky but literate way I remember my own phone number I invented 20 odd years ago. It involves stabbing!

(I'm not too worried about sharing my phone number, it seems instantly google-able)

Ok. The number is 617-501-8251.

So it starts 617, which is like THE canonical Boston phone number. (it's "617 Strong" not "781 Strong", haters)

Alright. Then it's "501", as in "Levi 501 Blues". Easy enough if you grew up with television in a certain decade.

But now, I think about Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar. "501" is transformed into a stage - 0 is Caesar in the middle, 5 and 1 are senators. And the senators stab him! And Caesar says "8 2 Brute?" ("et tu?") and dies, leaving the senators "5 1"

So... 617...501... 8 2? ... 5 1

Easy!

(So weird that most of us have semi-permanent phone numbers now. Back in the day kids, it was like your house that had the number.)

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I just mistyped console.log to console.lol and now I wish console.log was a thing.

Heh - Corey came up with an implementation and I put it online.

I'm not saying it's appropriate for all or even many organizations, but damn: buildless/evergreen/"throw crap on your VPS" is a helluva drug.

(For better or worse it reminds me of the trojan horse mentioned in I'm harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from your site. Here's how.)

JSON is just 3D text

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Xitter bands Dropkick Murphys account.

LOLOLOLOL at my friends who tried to convince me Musk buying Twitter was "good for free speech"
Yeah, the world's richest man worming his way into government to dismantle it for tax breaks after buy the previous most important town square and now banning critical voices of him in music... totally normal stuff.

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Oops, spoke to soon. let this me a lesson to me At work, Corey G mentioned how sometimes he'll do a demo for a client and make sure EVERYTHING is a single file (like include Base64'ig images if need be) That vibe reminded me of how I like "everything in one file" for p5.js, and how it harkens back to the old days of computer magazine type-in programs, and this comic.

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LOL on TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome)

Take nobody's word for it.

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A society that could mobilize for total war was defined as one that could mobilize for social welfare. Thus it was the actual performance of the central government during the war that was crucial in the thrust toward a welfare state. In essence, the political elites gained the knowledge and the confidence that they could manage the welfare state.

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The first problem with liberalism is that it wrongly assumes that humans are fundamentally solitary individuals, when in fact they are social beings at their core. This commitment to far-reaching individualism leads political liberals to downplay nationalism, which is an especially powerful political ideology with profound influence inside every country in the world. Liberalism's fate is therefore bound up with nationalism.

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[For liberals] war is either a crime or a crusade. There is no half-way house.

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No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

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Worst of all, these interventions were unnecessary. The domino theory did not describe any serious threat: it assumed that universalist ideologies like Marxism would dominate local identities and desire for self-determination. They do not. Proponents of the domino theory failed to understand that nationalism is a far more powerful ideology than communism, just as it is far more powerful than liberalism.

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To make their case, restrainers should emphasize three points. First, the United States is the most secure great power in recorded history and thus does not need to interfere in the politics of every country on the planet. It is a hegemon in the Western Hemisphere, and it is separated from East Asia and Europe--the regions where other great powers have historically been located--by two giant moats, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It has thousands of nuclear weapons, and in the scenario we are considering here, it is the only great power in the international system.

Second, liberal hegemony simply does not work. It was tried for twenty-five years and left a legacy of futile wars, failed diplomacy, and diminished prestige.

Finally, liberal hegemony involves significant costs for the American people, in both lives and money.

But no matter how skilled you are and how good you are with a knife fight the No. 1 rule of knife fighting is don't be in a knife fight.

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I switched to Mac about a decade ago. For a while I thought Windows' "one task bar item per window" was smarter than Mac's "one Dock item per application". Now I'm not sure (and I noticed Windows has drifted to Mac's approach) but I do know I tend to have too many windows open.

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So, if it's not "just" tax breaks for billionaires, this probably explains Musk's real goals: to remold the USA as an authoritarian state w/ tech bros at the top, akin to a model Singapore is following....

Dark Enlightenment Rising: The Billionaire Experiment to Kill Democracy

MAGA=>MAS (Make America Singapore)

See also: Tech bro fascism looks like a lot like old-fashioned fascism

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I'm not sure if this is the map I was thinking of that showed how you could get across a surprising amount of the country on trolleys/light railway, but here is some information on the NE interurbans

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I used to do the MIT Mystery Hunt, but realized that the toughest puzzle hunt designed for placing no resource restrictions on the puzzle loving subset of some of the cleverest folk in the world is not the place for a guy who low key hates puzzles...

Every year the Hunt is set up by the team that won the previous year... Years ago I would be on Team LAAEFTR (Left As an Exercise For The Reader) a little team that punched above its weight (the competition is dominated by these MASSIVE teams spanning the globe)

We used to joke about the teams humble-ish ambitions "the only thing worse than coming in last is coming in first" (where we'd be on the hook to construct next years puzzle) but sometime in the COVID/quarantine era Sarah, the team's stalwart leader, starting working with a larger team that won! She talks about her time building puzzles here

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RIP George Foreman! I was just thinking if I should get a Lean Mean Grilling Machine....

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Trump replaces 50 year old ivy on mantle with gold tchotkes
Small potatoes compared to all the other shit, but so fucking onbrand for this tasteless moron (Sort of like how FIFA President Infantino distracted him with a big shiny gold moving trophy)
I remember a circa-2015 or earlier era John Stewart line about how if Trump got the white house he'd paint in gold to "class up the joint" and god damn if it that isn't spot on.

WaPo(sigh) gift link with more info https://wapo.st/4huEdeE

So many of we fools long for physical immortality when we can't even remember what we had for lunch last week...

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The signal thread outlining the attack on the Houthis and the "Atlantic" editor they forgot to remove from it It's funny thinking abut this along with those clips where Trump said the differentiator for his administration was going to be "competence"

So I[...] You're talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist whose made a profession of peddling hoax in this time and time again. To include the, I don't know, the hopes of Russia, Russia, Russia, or the fine people on both sides hopes or suckers and losers hopes. This is the guy that peddles in garbage. This is what he does.

It's always ad hominem w/ these guys. (he says, ironically)

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Tracking Trump: Lest We Forget the Horrors: An Unending Catalog of Trump's Cruelties, Collusions, Corruptions, and Crimes

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Write an OpEd, get abducted by dudes in masks.



video here

Fascist state shit.

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remember, if they don't need a trial for non-citizens, you don't get a trial to prove you're a citizen :-D

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Here's the OpEd Fullbright scholar Rumeysa Ozturk was kidnapped by masked agents (and then illegally sent to Louisiana) for co-authoring.


Sorry, but saying Israel has been extraordinarily cruel against the Palestinians is not "activities in support of Hamas."

This country is slip-sliding into fascism.

Oh don't worry guys, our top intelligence official is just casually boosting Russian state media, but it's fine because it's her personal account. Totally normal.

Rest of conversation -

HIMES: Do you think it's responsible for you, as head of the intelligence community, to retweet posts from individuals affiliated with Russian state media?

GABBARD: That retweet came from my personal account.

HIMES: Personal account? You're the Director of National Intelligence, not an Instagram influencer. There's no such thing as "personal" when you're elevating Kremlin propaganda.

GABBARD: I have the right to share information--

HIMES: Information? You mean Russian disinformation. You sit in high-level intelligence briefings, then turn around and boost the same narratives Moscow is pushing. Should we just CC the Kremlin on your next meeting and cut out the middleman?

GABBARD: This is just an attempt to smear me--

HIMES: Smear you? You lied under oath in a Senate hearing yesterday, claiming you knew nothing about classified information, while sitting in Signal chats where war plans were discussed. You retweet Kremlin-backed sources, then act shocked when people question your loyalties.

GABBARD: I'm focused on national security--

HIMES: National security? While pushing Russian propaganda and pretending you're clueless about intelligence leaks? If a Democrat had done half of this, you'd be screaming treason on national TV.

GABBARD: This is about free speech--

HIMES: Free speech? You're the President's top intelligence advisor, not some random guy on Twitter. Every word you amplify has consequences. And right now, you're handing America's enemies exactly what they want--straight from your "personal account."

https://x.com/Acyn/status/1904907517261705605

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The computer language Forth - best hope for after-collapse technological rebuild? (missed a day again... maybe it's the proximity to my birthday that makes this day more miss-able?) I've been thinking about curating emotions again. Sure it's well worn territory for me, but just been on my mind this week - this idea that we don't really have a moral obligation to live in stress and worry. I mean, to some extent we usually don't have a much of a choice - and we definitely don't want to start a snowball of self-recrimination for feeling worried. But more so than many people I seem to have an ability to shift my mood-focus a bit, at least temporarily, and most often it doesn't seem like worrying about something is getting me to be more proactive about trying to materially improve the situation. But sometimes I feel guilty about that - like I'm obliged to feel worried. That I'd just be a grinning idiot if I focused on all the OK and good and seemingly stable things, rather than thinking how things may go from middling to worse. And/Or that I'll just become to blasé about the world, but I don't think that's too likely an outcome.

Being born on the 31st, or even 30th is rarer than being born on any other day of a month.

Only those Feb 29th-ers have it weirder.

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