Quite the opposite. I’m saying America is over and soon something new will be built in it’s place. And it’s up to us to make sure it is an improvement over what it replaces.

The bad news is that we’ve (the sane, the empathetic, the introspective, the curious) already lost what was America. Trump’s reelection is more like the rimshot following the actual punchline. So that battle is lost. It’s painful but we can’t dwell on it like a dog licking a hot spot. The good news is a new battle is brewing. I have no doubt that the current state of the government is unsustainable, wether by design or through incompetence. It’s a near certainty that major calamity is on the horizon. Illness, war, terrorism, climate, social upheaval, something catastrophic will happen. It is going to happen and it will demand leadership and governance to overcome, and the fourth reich will not be capable of rising to the occasion. They will botch it, and the nation will be shattered. Historic levels of national reorganization will need to occur. Implied rules will need to be made explicit. This is where the next fight really is. They got to play offense for as long as democrats were a boogie man. Well, they hold all the cards now, so they will be soley to blame for the trainwreck. They will try to weasel out of it, but we can’t let them. We need to keep them cornered, and we need to be ready to snatch back the tiller when the rough seas knock that fat bastard down onto the fucking deck. Then we need to bust out the plank and throw a going away party for his whole rogues gallery. Then we need to find shore again and fix our damaged ship.

Ideally, in the near future he will undergo some sort of transformation that would render a third term a physical impossibility rather than a legal one.

Well, even if defense spending were slashed, the current oligarchy is gutting health, education, environment, and occupational programs, so those “savings” won’t be reallocated to anything actually beneficial to society. We’ll be lucky if that money even stays in the country. We’re basically witnessing an estate sale for a deceased America.

Not enough typos.

Of course I condemn violence. But there is only one reliable cure for a dictator. If something tragic were to happen to a dictator, any dictator, the people would likely benefit and rejoice. It may not be polite, but it would be civilized. And for better or worse, the person hypothetically responsible would be immortalized in the annals of history.

It’s more like he’s setting many small fires. They need to be put out, but they keep growing in number and stretching our resources out. He can just casually walk from spot to spot and set a fire that continues to burn while he walks off to set another. He can set the fires faster than we can fight them. He can set them more easily than we can fight them. And if we don’t fight them they will grow out of control. He is truly malignant, both in the sense of malevolence, and as virulent.

Just for reference, thats like a $200K watch. Patek Nautilus, ref 5980.

Our schools have been under attack by the usual shitheads ever since we won to get them integrated.

Smart comfortable people don’t obey. Uneducated, poor people with two jobs and three kids don’t have any energy left over to crack a book and be disruptive.

Comparing “most people” to billionaires is ludicrous in terms of spreading the wealth. The average American makes between 1 and 2 million over the course of their entire life. So if you have 1 billion, you have 1000 lifetimes worth of money. Musk is worth 342 billion. The amount of wealth trapped in the 1% is absolutely preposterous.

As for your villainizing of “drug addicts”, try to tell me wealthy people don’t abuse alcohol and prescription drugs, and cocaine. The only difference is when they kill a cyclist while driving drunk they get a reduced sentence and it doesn’t ruin their lives.

I would argue there is no such thing as an ethical billionaire. So yes, above a certain point, all rich people are bad. They hold an unusably vast hoard of resources. They elect to retain these resources rather than help others. Granted this is a subjective argument, but a sound one.

As for not being able to prove the danger of poverty, and my statistics you can rrad the research paper I pulled them from ar you leisure: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2804032

We already have people without incentive, and who make everyone poorer as a result. They’re called billionaires. They have no incentive to improve the world, because it’s being broken is what they benefit most from. Bezos doesn’t benefit from happy healthy employees, he benefits from desperate, powerless employees. They can’t fight back if they’re terrified of losing their job.

The combined net worth of the 2020 class of the 400 richest Americans was $3.2 trillion, up from $2.7 trillion in 2017. As of March 2023, there were 735 billionaires in the United States.

Meanwhile, poverty is the 4th leading cause of death in the United States. Killing 10 times as many people as homicide in 2019.

As far as the evils of socialism, why is the life expectancy 7 years better for men and 5 years better for women in Canada vs the United States? Could it be socialized medicine and ready access to healthcare perhaps?

The world will guaranteed suffer. Not needlessly though, it is quite by design for the benefit of billionaires and their politician henchmen. While the rest of us grovel and die, and supplicate and debase ourselves for table scraps, they’ll be dynamiting the planet into their image.

Quit bitching

no u.

Civil discourse got us into this. Good faith got us into this. Civilized behavior got us into this. Meanwhile we’ve been outmaneuvered by people with more resources than scruples. If we can be saved, and that’s a big if for every day that passes, then it’s going to take sudden and drastic action. Otherwise privation may be all that can pry open the eyes of our deadweight brethren, and by then it will likely be too late.

There in lies the issue. Democracy is a numbers game. And the smarts seem to be outnumbered. If Trump doesn’t kill us, climate change will. Despite an abundance of frank, clear, damning information about the dangers of both. As for increasing the smarts ranks; the American people chose the guy who wants to dismantle the department of education over the guy who wanted student loan debt forgiveness. Meanwhile, we’re using what precious remaining time we have left to act on preventing global cataclysm to argue about what bathroom people use.

The paradox is that less intelligent people are more excitable. So what we get is smart, civilized peope with no balls, and dumb energetic people willing to kamikaze. You can’t reason with unreasonable people, and unreasonable people see no reason to reflect on their actions. It’s a dangerous feedback loop that has put us on a collision course with collapse.

Edit: long story short, hot take, the smart people need to figure out a way to attract more dumb people.

Huh?

Only just now?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_boarding_schools

We’ve had freedom of religion perhaps, but never freedom from religion. Christian gobbledygook is baked into America’s DNA, and deviation from that has always resulted in a paddling.

Take Trump for example. A dyed in the wool contrarian. The walking talking embodiment of cutting off ones nose to spite their face. Refuses to acknowledge any authority but his own, often at the hazard of himself and others. And even he feigns to bend the knee to religion, and play act at being a Christian. That’s how truly compulsory it is.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_affiliations_of_presidents_of_the_United_States#List_of_presidents_by_religious_affiliation

First off, absolutely. None of these CEOs got where they are by acts of kindness. But there in lies the rub. Musk is in the spotlight. In a very real way, with his purchase of Twitter, he has actually become the spotlight itself. And he is vocally championing hateful rhetoric, and he is bankrolling an existential threat to America/democracy/the planet. The icon that is Tesla is inexorably linked to Musk, and lately Musk is shaping up to be America’s Goebbels.