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Nevilledog

(55,118 posts)
Sat May 2, 2026, 12:20 PM Saturday

The everything, everywhere, all at once corruption story.

https://www.readtangle.com/the-everything-everywhere-all-at-once-corruption-story/

My oldest brother has an incredible gift: He’s capable of saying the most incendiary, inappropriate things at the perfect moment and somehow getting a laugh regardless of who he’s in front of.

I’m not quite sure how he does it. But I’ve watched him perfect this art since I was a kid. It used to be most apparent with my parents, who’d sometimes have trouble disciplining him because he could essentially shit-talk his way out of any situation and earn a laugh. As we got older, it felt like this talent elevated to a new tier, like he’d beaten the “mom is mad” boss and moved onto “can I get the priest to crack a smile in the middle of the funeral?”

I’ve been thinking about this skill a lot recently. This innate ability some people have to do something in a particular way that disarms everyone around them, and then the way some people try to replicate that behavior in the exact same context, with the exact same approach, and get disastrous results (I think, often, about trying some of the jokes I’ve heard my brother make to my mom, knowing full well they would never quite land, though I can’t say exactly why).

Anyway, in April, The New York Times broke the story that President Donald Trump’s daughter and son-in-law are negotiating a luxury hotel with Syrian billionaires who are simultaneously lobbying the president to lift economic sanctions on their country. I’ll write that sentence again just in case it didn’t land the first time: President Donald Trump’s children are negotiating a luxury hotel with Syrian billionaires who are simultaneously lobbying the president to lift economic sanctions on their country.

I can’t explain why that story doesn’t have quite the same punch as, “According to The New York Times, Hunter Biden is negotiating a Biden-branded luxury hotel with Syrian billionaires; those Syrian billionaires are also lobbying President Joe Biden to lift economic sanctions on their country.” Yet I know that, for some reason, the real story we’re living through right now — the one where Trump’s kids are funneling money directly to their family fortune while the U.S. government hands out favors in return — just doesn’t seem to get any traction with the public.

*snip*
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The everything, everywhere, all at once corruption story. (Original Post) Nevilledog Saturday OP
I can explain it easily -misanthroptimist Saturday #1
Captured media Nevilledog Saturday #2
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