Meaning is subjective and not intrinsic, so there can be no such thing as “the” meaning of anything.

The artist can have an intended meaning, but the audience not only can but will find their own meaning in it. It might be the case that the audience gets the same meaning from it that the creator intended, but it might just as easily be the case that they get some entirely different meaning from it.

None of them are right or wrong - that’s not even a coherent concept in that context. They just are whatever they are.

And this is why SUDDENLY IRAN!

For some reason, he seems extra butthurt about getting caught lying this time.

No.

(A quick search later)… Ah… yeah A likely two-bit Babylonian copper hustler who through a quirk of fate is a sort of legendary historical figure almost four millennia later.

Yep - that has the same sort of appeal. Thanks for that.

It’s something about irony - the legendary nobody, famous for something mundane.

My username is actually from a side character in Terry Gilliam’s first non-Python movie - Jabberwocky.

The protagonist, Dennis, is a cooper - a barrelmaker (actually he’s a tedious putz who can’t even manage to make a barrel, but that’s another story). Early on, he goes to make his fortune in the big city, where he meets a legendary cooper - “The Wat Dabney?! The inventor of the inverted firkin?!” - who has been reduced to begging because all of the business in the city is controlled by the guilds and they’ve shut him out.

Curiously, many years later I ran across a somewhat similar character in an entirely different medium who appealed to me the same way. This one is in a manga - The Voynich Hotel, by Dowman Sayman. They have a serious problem with the boiler in the eponymous hotel, so the protagonist sets out on a quest to track down a hermit who’s reputed to be able to fix anything - Tepes, the legendary second-rate boiler engineer.

I’m not sure what appeals to me about second-rate legendary craftsmen, but…

That’d be about par for the course. When too much attention is focused on their abject evil in Gaza, one of their strategies is to suddenly go stir the shit in Iran or Lebanon or Syria and get attention focused there instead.

I’m guessing you think

You don’t have the foggiest idea what I think, so don’t you fucking dare mansplain it to me.

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard.” - H.L. Mencken

Expect to see a lot more of that all around the world.

Trump can hide enough of his caprice and his pettiness and his self-absorption behind emotive rhetoric to fool the MAGAs, but none of that works on an international scale. The rest of the world just sees him, accurately, as a petulant, self-serving asshole and raving lunatic who can’t be trusted. Ever. And that’s the way they’re going to treat him, and the US by extension.

Government by a delusional malignant idiot clown.

An entire administration of delusional malignant idiot clowns in fact…

This is why there’s such a determined focus on crushing criticism entirely - because Israel’s actions are literally indefensible.

psychopath /sī′kə-păth″/

noun

1. A person who engages repeatedly in criminal and antisocial behavior without remorse or empathy for those victimized.

2. A person with a personality disorder indicated by a pattern of lying, cunning, manipulating, glibness, exploiting, heedlessness, arrogance, delusions of grandeur, sexual promiscuity, low self-control, disregard for morality, lack of acceptance of responsibility, callousness, and lack of empathy and remorse.