If America is going to continue to be not Trump, it’s going to have to move fast.
With Musk threatening 60 Minutes staffers with prison and Trump taking over the FCC, it’s already moving into the official government-controlled media stage, and when (if) significant protests start happening, it’s going to quickly move into the gulags and mass graves stage.
And then, for all intents and purposes, the US will be Trump, like it or not.
I quite sincerely believe that the long term goal is for the US to formally ally with Russia in a war against the EU.
I’m not kidding.
Of course it won’t, but they’re incapable of thinking it through that clearly.
Hierarchical systems like capitalism effectively reward and thus select for psychopaths who are laser-focused on their short-term, shallow self-interest, since they have the fewest constraints on the choices they’re willing to make. Anyone else might refrain from an otherwise effective course of action if they recognize that it’s ultimately destructive or self-defeating or immoral or unethical, but the psychopaths who only think in the short term won’t, so all other things being more or less equal, they have an advantage.
That’s a lot of what we’re seeing right now. Trump and Musk are making so much headway toward destroying the United States in large part because people are having a hard time working out how to even respond, since their actions are so corrupt and so destructive and so self-serving. They’ve jumped right past any ordinary notion of corrupt and self-serving and destructive to a brazen and egregious level that for many really is, in a simple, practical sense of the term, “unthinkable.”
And yes - crushing the common people in order to maximize the wealth that can be extracted from them and the privilege granted to the wealthy few is self-defeating in the long term, since the common people are the ultimate source of that wealth. But that won’t stop people like Musk and Trump, because they’re quite simply neither sane nor rational enough to let it.
I liken it to people living in penthouses in apartment buildings cannibalizing the lower floors to expand their penthouses. Not only are the buildings eventually going to collapse under the weight of the penthouses, but they’re actually hastening that by weakening the lower floors.
But Musk and Trump and the like just aren’t equipped to see that, or to restrain themselves if they do. So that’s not only what they will do, but what they are doing, right now, this minute.
By design.
The wealthy, led by Trump and Musk and Zuckerberg, among many others, have entered into open warfare against the common people.
Note this well - this isn’t just rhetoric. He truly and sincerely believes that people should go to prison for the “crime” of criticising him.
The US is on the path to gulags and mass graves.
They say that as if destroying programs that benefit the common people and instituting policies that benefit the 1% are some sort of unexpected consequences rather than the exact and explicit point.
It’s not an accident that I download epubs and read them on Moon+.
Amazon signaled clearly years ago that their goal wasn’t to make a convenient ebook reader, but to create an entire proprietary e-reading system designed solely to extract as much money as possible for as little value as possible. And this is just another step in that ongoing process.
Broadly, it’s because Musk and Trump are both psychopaths. That’s the real foundation for everything else - the simple fact that we’ve allowed ourselves to be ruled by people who are obviously profoundly mentally ill.
As a direct consequence of their profound mental illness, they have no honor, no integrity, no principles, no morals, no ethics and no comcern for anyone or anything other than themselves.
So the only thing that could possibly stop them is force, and the federal courts have no way of applying that force.
Inevitably, all hierarchical organizations end up on the wrong side of history.
In hierarchies, people compete for position.
People with principles, morals, integrity and/or empathy will have choices that they simply will not make.
People without those things are not constrained. They can and will make whatever choices might benefit them, with no regard for the consequences to others.
So all other things being more or less equal, psychopaths actually have a competitive advantage in hierarchies, and hierarchies end up effectively rewarding and thus selecting for psychopathy.
If he was going to, he’d do it, then brag about it.
The fact that he went out of his way to proactively say he would means that he most certainly will not.
They didn’t make that DEI accusation because they expected it to be true, so the fact that it’s so patemtly false doesn’t matter.
They made the accusation just because they’re hateful, bigoted pieces of shit trying to appeal to other hateful, bigoted pieces of shit.
Truth means nothing. Hate and greed are the only things that matter to them.
“Dark times” is putting it mildly.
I expect they’re going to be digging mass graves before this is all over, and Trump is going to be added to the list of worst mass murderers in history.
I wish I was kidding.
No surprise there.
Establishment Democrats would rather have power held by Republicans than by progressive Democrats.
I assumed that they were at least anarchism-adjacent - it’s pretty much a prerequisite for the bulk of their focus.
I hadn’t really looked into their political posting much though, and yeah - even with just a cursory glance, it’s promising.
And I hadn’t thought about that distinction between people who simply hold a position and people who “officially” wear the label in the context of anarchism (though I’ve noted it often with atheists), but yeah, there’s undoubtedly some truth there.
Thanks for the heads-up.
i’d like a stronger anarchist/libertarian community on lemmy.
That’s one thing that I’ve been both disappointed and surprised to not see.
The anarchist community on Reddit is fairly large, but not very anarchist. There’s a very strong authoritarian bent to their claimed anarchism. I had hopes that the nature of this place would invite a community that was anarchist not only in name but in spirit, but I’ve seen surprisingly little sign of that, or even really of anarchism at all.
I guess it could be counted as a weakness as far as attracting new users go, but I think it’s a strength overall.
It would be sort of nice if there was a stronger right-wing presence here, but at this point in our history, the right is overtly toxic. They’ve completely lost touch with honesty, empathy, integrity and simple human decency. Their entire identity at this point is built on hatred, bigotry and callous disregard for anyone other than themselves. They poison everything they touch, so the fact that they can’t gain a foothold here is very much to our benefit.
If we survive this era of Trump/Putin/Netanyahu/Polievre/Le Pen/Modi/Meloni/Hanson/etc., then hopefully the right will reconnect with reality, integrity and simple decency enough that they can take part in a community without turning it into a cesspool of hatred and lies, but unless and until that happens, this place is absolutely better off without them.
Antisemitism gets harder to resist every day.
That was my exact response - he’s right in a very limited sense, and notably a sense that hinges on the sad fact that too many Americans are dumbasses who thought that Trump’s signature over a check drawn on the US Treasury meant something, and therefore the absence of Biden’s also did.
The growth stage of a civilization is marked in large part by the fact that people pursue wealth and power by effectively creating it - by recognizing needs and the resources that can be tasked to serve them and arranging the systems by which the needs will be served.
The maturity of a civilization is marked in large part by the mere rearrangement and refinement of the sources of wealth and power that were established in the growth stage.
The decline of a civilization is marked in large part by the cannibalization of those established sources of wealth and power - by an increasingly desperate and ethically and intellectually bankrupt scramble by the most determined rats to steal as much as possible while they can.
The US is well along the way to that third stage, and pretty much the entire point of the Trump presidency and particularly of Project 2025 is to facilitate it.
As I’ve said many times, Trump and Musk and so much of the American right are pro-Russia largely because they have so many shared values.
MAGA republicans are looking forward to the time when they too will be able to torture and strip female prisoners and parade them around naked.