6 ms·

There’s no plausible discussion of reducing spending when the added debt commensurate with that effort is as astronomical as it is. This is privatization and f

There’s no plausible discussion of reducing spending when the added debt commensurate with that effort is as astronomical as it is. This is privatization and federal dismantling, and it’s happening so fast and recklessly it will also show up as cultural and civil destruction too. He’s wrecking America so that technocrats can buy it all up. There’s no intended upside for citizens or for the society they make up. People die and his supporters shrug and defend. It’s Microsoft’s embrace, extend, extinguish as political policy, but reduced by hyperscaling to “eviscerate”.

tomrod 1y ago
Yep. It is so weird to live in a world where the progressive movement is a better supporter of Chesterton's fence than the allegedly conservative GOP and even the corporate/neoliberal wing of the controlled opposition.
- browningstreet 1y ago
  One reason I’m not especially hopeful is that the resistance is mostly still focused on highlighting the breaches with no actual follow-up. There’s no “Team Resistance”. The socials are replete with incremental accounting of how each step aligns with Project 2025. No shit. So, many of his voters didn’t read Project 2025, or if they did.. they’re not playing it forward to see what it looks like 10 years in the future. But what feels true, too, is that the DNC hasn’t read it either. Or if they have, they’re not working against it. I know there are efforts in courts to deny some of these things, and that’s commendable.. but there are no real social or political unities arising to play offense in the next political cycle. So we have very little defense, and almost no offense. And the referees are bought.
  - tomrod 1y ago
    Aye. Dominionism winning was not on my mid-2000s Bingo card. Maybe we have elections again and reject this march towards Gilead.
    - browningstreet 1y ago
      I earnestly believe the midterms are a significant barometer of how the next 20 years of America goes. We need change in the midterms and then the next Presidential election. They’re still going to work hard to bend that further to their advantage. Cue the “we’re barely 6 months in” violins… What’s especially alarming is that they’ve learned they don’t have to do anything in the dark. Epstein may be a small blip in that, but we’ll see how the story goes in the coming weeks.
      - slater 1y ago
        More like, “we’re barely 6 months in” and look at all the things they've fucked up. Like an ignorant, blind and deaf bull in a china shop
      - fakedang 1y ago
        What's the point though? Dems don't want to play the Reps game, even though the arena has changed. Dems are too dumb to realize that they're in a playing field that has no rules, where the referees in the judiciary are in the Rep camp, where some of the referees themselves (like Sam Alito) are treasonous Arnolds, while others (like Clarence Thomas) are corrupt af. The Dems have a very very slim chance of winning the Senate, zero chance of a supermajority in any future to bypass the filibuster and pass extensive reforms, and zero inclination to support wideranging policies instead of more identity politics. Yeah, it's not right to blame the Dems for this, but the Reps are responsible for this shitshow and far from redemption. The Dems are the only possible counterforce in the US (unlike most other countries), but they seem to be inclined to do jack shit to assume that role.
        efnx 1y ago
        Maybe you should run, then? It is a government of the people, as they say.
        fakedang 1y ago
        I'm a foreign national so can't exactly run. Fact of the matter is, I've profited quite a bit from Trump's shenanigans, but I can still see the disastrous longterm consequences of their policies, and as a foreign national who once contemplated moving to the US, won't be doing so at all. Instead, like all entities doing business in the US, foreign and otherwise, we'll just find novel ways to extract more from the US and send it elsewhere.
  - vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
    The DNC is busy thinking about candidates whose turn it is next time, gender ratios, trans representation and paying $20 million for studies why they don't appeal to young men. They don't have time to think about policies that may benefit voters.
    - politithunk 1y ago
      I think you've identified the symptom, but not the root cause. Democrats are inept. The party lost my vote recently. But it has nothing to do with trans support or gender support, and everything to do with they have calcified into "at least we're not the other guy." There is no platform except, "look at how bad the other party is!" My evidence for this is Mamdani. He won handily, and he crushed it with young men. And young people in general, but also among middle age people. Mandani is strongly pro trans. But he's also putting forward a platform of values that people actually care about. Housing, affordability, wages, access to food and healthcare. He's not just "not the other guy", he's focused on painting a picture that resonates with many people. And he didn't have to abandon trans people to do it.
      - master_crab 1y ago
        100%. One clarifying viewpoint (does not counter what you have stated about Mamdani): I don’t believe the democrats were ever too focused on trans rights. The Republicans just do a better job selling woke criticisms and claiming all dems care about is LGBTQ rights. And the lack of a solution from the dems for all the problems Mamdani is addressing, fed that narrative.
        vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
        I don't believe either that they focused too much on trans rights. But they don't have a clear focus on anything so they are easy to attack on minor issues like trans rights (yes, it's a minor issue only a very small part of the population cares about). And they constantly fall for the bait. They should run on something like Medicare For All and stick to it. Seems whenever they face some resistance they drop the issue.
  - mandmandam 1y ago
    > But what feels true, too, is that the DNC hasn’t read it either. Or if they have, they’re not working against it The DNC are sheepdogs, at best. Their role is to shepherd any sort of leftist energy into safely neutered channels. And science in general has big 'leftist energy'. The campaign promises: "We'll end corporate donations! We'll end executive orders! We'll copper-fasten Roe! We'll end ICE! We'll stop the illegal forever wars! We'll legalize cannabis!" - have now devolved to, "vote for us and if you're lucky the Gestapo we funded won't raid your house in the middle of the night without a search warrant - or if they do, at least they won't be masked". So, no. We're not going to get much help from the guys that 'failed' [0] to stop a rapist insurrectionist con-man from taking the Presidency, and it's really pretty silly to have any hope in them whatsoever. 0 - https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/servants-of-the-mafia-state https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/servants-of-the-mafia-s...
    - galangalalgol 1y ago
      Honestly, it would be better if they take a cycle to clean house and dedicate themselves to a couple things only. No niche groups hijacking the whole party. Jobs, economy, healthcare, taxes, debt. Everone with a different pet cause off the island otherwise you'll lose. My pet cause included as it isn't on that list. The hilarity will be that when the dnc flubs another election cycle doing the cleaning out, the gop winner will be stuck with the debt bomb they expected the opposition to inherit...
      - politithunk 1y ago
        The party has been hijacked by capital. And has been since Clinton at least. As an ancient anarchist, I remember when the Dems held policy positions, but just barely. The party these days is just wealthy folks hoping they can hold norms stable long enough to cash out. I'm seeing the old party in folks like Mamdani, rallying around policies that actually help working class folks, even if it costs some money to do so.
        galangalalgol 1y ago
        Persistent anarchy is a utopia in both senses of the word. But "the land of do as you please" certainly would be nice if human nature allowed for it. My concerns with Mamdani and AOC is lots of promises without any plans on how to pass the taxes to pay for them. If we don't pass the taxes to support universal healthcare, but implement it anyway, life will be worse for workers than if we hadn't, eventually. Also, while I don't think US left wing populists are currently likely to turn into authoritarians, power is dangerous. The temptation to fix one more thing before relinquishing it turns into an addiction and you get a Chavez. Though he was a lot more obvious from the start. I always thought the democrats would produce our first autocrat, yet another race they lost.
  - overfeed 1y ago
    > the DNC hasn’t read it either Given the choice between losing their big-money donors or losing elections, the current Democratic party probably prefers to lose elections. The gap between party and/or party leadership and its voters has never been wider, no doubt in part due to Citizens United
  - madaxe_again 1y ago
    You cannot defend against it any more than you can joust with ghosts. Trump is a symptom, not a cause - the embodiment of the inexorable collective decay of the idea of “America”, set against the slow collapse of a global order built on forgotten consensuses. Empires and structures inevitably decay and ultimately fail in the same way - reification of that which was once novel, the pollution of minds with layers of abstraction so divorced from any objective reality that they find irreconcilable differences in the symbol maps they use to describe their world. Abstract, abstract, abstract, my hat is red, your hat is blue that is why - I hate you. Like with Newton, any force you exert against an object will be met with an exact opposing force. The net result is just the production of waste energy. The fight becomes the system. I earnestly think the best thing we can be doing with our time against this backdrop is preserving knowledge and building stable islands of coherency amidst the growing chaos. The dark ages are often blamed on Christianity, but the reality is more that they were a result of the might of Rome - people forgot how to do things, how to exist in a society, as rather than understanding these things themselves, they relied upon the map that was handed to them and took it as reality. That’s the risk we face now. Not Trump. Not whatever comes next - but the slow, uncomprehending loss of the ability to make sense of the world at all.
  - anigbrowl 1y ago
    Democrats and progressives believe that factual arguments are what wins elections, so they are tripping over themselves to present the lectorate with proof. this would be a winning strategy if the whole electorate were like Dems and progressives, but it's not. They need to develop parallel atavistic messaging that bypasses the prefrontal cortex and goes straight for the limbic system, but they're (mostly) terrible at this because they're so conflict averse. Democrats are the party that always wins gold stars at policy debate but can't figure out how to avoid getting shoved in a locker afterward.
- vkou 1y ago
  GOP-MAGA isn't conservative, it's reactionary, and the people running the corps will sell their own mothers for a broken penny and a half-percent tax reduction. Don't expect them to jump in and save you.
  - tomrod 1y ago
    No, it absolutely is conservative, just not the conservatives you might have hoped for (Frum, Reagan conservatives, etc.). Conservatives are not libertarian/classical liberal. They value strongmen and even go to the monoarchial extreme. They value hierarchy -- their full throated worship of the theory of military veterans (though typically failing in practice) is strong evidence, but also glorification of warmaking and foreign hawkish policy, their push for unitary executive, etc. Make no mistake, MAGA is exactly what the folks that felt they failed Nixon hoped for.
    - buu700 1y ago
      American conservatives in 2025 are liberal because liberalism is the current most recent stable status quo. American colonial conservatives in 1776 were monarchist because monarchism was the most recent stable status quo at that time. Conservatism isn't an ideology unto itself, but merely a pointer to some other ideology based on a prioritization of caution and stability over first-principles thinking. There's nothing wrong with that, per se; at an organizational or societal scale, more conservative influence just means higher activation energy to move forward with major decisions. Excess conservatism can ossify a suboptimal status quo, but too little can lead to major mistakes, regressions, or whiplash between governing philosophies and policies. Even if aspects of a particular status quo are obviously bad (e.g. slavery), there's a difference between defending such aspects on a first principles basis and doing so based on "tradition" or "this is how it's always been". Of course the latter can result in ordinary people staking out positions that look monstrous in hindsight, but on the flip side sometimes Chesterton's fence is there for a reason. For every good thing conservatives have opposed (e.g. American democracy and emancipation), one could just as easily rattle off a list of bad things they've opposed (e.g. French Revolution, end of the Weimar Republic, Cultural Revolution, Challenger launch, Arab Spring). We also have no idea how many other historical disasters simply never occurred as a result of conservative resistance. Of course, the modern popular bastardization of these terms into "whatever I think the [blue/red] guys support" would make my comment endlessly confusing to most Americans. It will never not be amusing to me that half the population of the land of freedom has somehow turned an etymological cousin of "liberty" into a dirty word.
microtonal 1y ago
It seems very similar to how a clique bought up a lot of Russia and became their oligarchs. It's another transfer of wealth to the rich and/or Trump's cronies. The destruction of public goods, research, education, and the climate is extremely sad.
- beezlewax 1y ago
  It's also hard to fathom. I don't believe these people believe what they're doing is for the greater good or that climate change is a hoax. They have children and want them to grow up to what exactly?
  - tremon 1y ago
    They believe their wealth can shield their chilren from the bad effects of climate change. They think there will be enough of the world left in a functioning state to retain their current level of luxury, and don't care about the rest.
    - gdbsjjdn 1y ago
      This happens at every level of society. It's over 100 degrees where I live today. That would have been exceptional 20 years ago, but now it's normal. I have air conditioning in my house, I have air conditioning in my car. The homeless guy on the corner? He's gonna die from heat stroke. He didn't contribute to global warming but he's going to pay the price, while I can afford to insulate myself
  - toss1 1y ago
    They want them to grow up in their privileged bubble, and that is all. They literally DGAF if the rest of of us, i.e., the NPCs, all starve. Does anyone think Russian oligarchs care about the Russian peasants or "meat cans" they send to the Ukranian front? And they've already got their bunkers in New Zealand, Hawaii, or wherever if it all goes really sideways. Musk, Theil, Vance, and the rest of them care about us less than the NPSs in their FPS games, and we should regard them exactly the same way.
  - 1y ago
bugglebeetle 1y ago
We’re watching the fire sale of America, like was imposed on Russia in the 90s, and resulted in one of the largest declines in life expectancy in the country’s history. I expect the same to happen here, including its eventual culmination in the rise of a Putin-like figure from the security state apparatus, after we similarly suffer a decade or more of internal collapse and humiliation.
- TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
  I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the people who promoted neoliberalism in Russia saw how it ended in authoritarian oligarchy- supported by a religious nationalism which displaced science and progressive democratic values - and decided same would be a good outcome for them personally if rolled out across the rest of the West. This is dense, but stunningly prescient. https://library.fes.de/libalt/journals/swetsfulltext/12303102.pdf https://library.fes.de/libalt/journals/swetsfulltext/1230310... While things are undoubtedly bad in the US, Trump's grip on everything - including personal health - is far more tenuous than Yeltsin's was. And (ironically) the US has more of a history of violent resistance and agitation for both worker rights and civil rights. The US has always been a soft economic dictatorship. But a lot of people still expect a functioning social contract, and they're going to become increasingly angry as that disappears. It's a much more complicated picture than the one in Russia, which has essentially been the same kind of violent autocratic monarchy for centuries, even as the set dressing around it changed.
  - chairmansteve 1y ago
    Your link looks very interesting. Thanks.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - lyu07282 1y ago
    > But a lot of people still expect a functioning social contract, and they're going to become increasingly angry as that disappears I would argue that was happening way before Trump, it's precisely why he was elected. He didn't just scapegoat but also pretended to take their economic grievances seriously and was the only permitted political outlet to people's grievances. I think what happens is just the natural course of neoliberalism in the west, not any conscious long term strategy. That's why you can see the far-right gaining ground in every western country.

tomrod 1y ago

Yep. It is so weird to live in a world where the progressive movement is a better supporter of Chesterton's fence than the allegedly conservative GOP and even the corporate/neoliberal wing of the controlled opposition.

browningstreet 1y ago
One reason I’m not especially hopeful is that the resistance is mostly still focused on highlighting the breaches with no actual follow-up. There’s no “Team Resistance”. The socials are replete with incremental accounting of how each step aligns with Project 2025. No shit. So, many of his voters didn’t read Project 2025, or if they did.. they’re not playing it forward to see what it looks like 10 years in the future. But what feels true, too, is that the DNC hasn’t read it either. Or if they have, they’re not working against it. I know there are efforts in courts to deny some of these things, and that’s commendable.. but there are no real social or political unities arising to play offense in the next political cycle. So we have very little defense, and almost no offense. And the referees are bought.
- tomrod 1y ago
  Aye. Dominionism winning was not on my mid-2000s Bingo card. Maybe we have elections again and reject this march towards Gilead.
  - browningstreet 1y ago
    I earnestly believe the midterms are a significant barometer of how the next 20 years of America goes. We need change in the midterms and then the next Presidential election. They’re still going to work hard to bend that further to their advantage. Cue the “we’re barely 6 months in” violins… What’s especially alarming is that they’ve learned they don’t have to do anything in the dark. Epstein may be a small blip in that, but we’ll see how the story goes in the coming weeks.
    - slater 1y ago
      More like, “we’re barely 6 months in” and look at all the things they've fucked up. Like an ignorant, blind and deaf bull in a china shop
    - fakedang 1y ago
      What's the point though? Dems don't want to play the Reps game, even though the arena has changed. Dems are too dumb to realize that they're in a playing field that has no rules, where the referees in the judiciary are in the Rep camp, where some of the referees themselves (like Sam Alito) are treasonous Arnolds, while others (like Clarence Thomas) are corrupt af. The Dems have a very very slim chance of winning the Senate, zero chance of a supermajority in any future to bypass the filibuster and pass extensive reforms, and zero inclination to support wideranging policies instead of more identity politics. Yeah, it's not right to blame the Dems for this, but the Reps are responsible for this shitshow and far from redemption. The Dems are the only possible counterforce in the US (unlike most other countries), but they seem to be inclined to do jack shit to assume that role.
      - efnx 1y ago
        Maybe you should run, then? It is a government of the people, as they say.
        fakedang 1y ago
        I'm a foreign national so can't exactly run. Fact of the matter is, I've profited quite a bit from Trump's shenanigans, but I can still see the disastrous longterm consequences of their policies, and as a foreign national who once contemplated moving to the US, won't be doing so at all. Instead, like all entities doing business in the US, foreign and otherwise, we'll just find novel ways to extract more from the US and send it elsewhere.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
  The DNC is busy thinking about candidates whose turn it is next time, gender ratios, trans representation and paying $20 million for studies why they don't appeal to young men. They don't have time to think about policies that may benefit voters.
  - politithunk 1y ago
    I think you've identified the symptom, but not the root cause. Democrats are inept. The party lost my vote recently. But it has nothing to do with trans support or gender support, and everything to do with they have calcified into "at least we're not the other guy." There is no platform except, "look at how bad the other party is!" My evidence for this is Mamdani. He won handily, and he crushed it with young men. And young people in general, but also among middle age people. Mandani is strongly pro trans. But he's also putting forward a platform of values that people actually care about. Housing, affordability, wages, access to food and healthcare. He's not just "not the other guy", he's focused on painting a picture that resonates with many people. And he didn't have to abandon trans people to do it.
    - master_crab 1y ago
      100%. One clarifying viewpoint (does not counter what you have stated about Mamdani): I don’t believe the democrats were ever too focused on trans rights. The Republicans just do a better job selling woke criticisms and claiming all dems care about is LGBTQ rights. And the lack of a solution from the dems for all the problems Mamdani is addressing, fed that narrative.
      - vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
        I don't believe either that they focused too much on trans rights. But they don't have a clear focus on anything so they are easy to attack on minor issues like trans rights (yes, it's a minor issue only a very small part of the population cares about). And they constantly fall for the bait. They should run on something like Medicare For All and stick to it. Seems whenever they face some resistance they drop the issue.
- mandmandam 1y ago
  > But what feels true, too, is that the DNC hasn’t read it either. Or if they have, they’re not working against it The DNC are sheepdogs, at best. Their role is to shepherd any sort of leftist energy into safely neutered channels. And science in general has big 'leftist energy'. The campaign promises: "We'll end corporate donations! We'll end executive orders! We'll copper-fasten Roe! We'll end ICE! We'll stop the illegal forever wars! We'll legalize cannabis!" - have now devolved to, "vote for us and if you're lucky the Gestapo we funded won't raid your house in the middle of the night without a search warrant - or if they do, at least they won't be masked". So, no. We're not going to get much help from the guys that 'failed' [0] to stop a rapist insurrectionist con-man from taking the Presidency, and it's really pretty silly to have any hope in them whatsoever. 0 - https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/servants-of-the-mafia-state https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/servants-of-the-mafia-s...
  - galangalalgol 1y ago
    Honestly, it would be better if they take a cycle to clean house and dedicate themselves to a couple things only. No niche groups hijacking the whole party. Jobs, economy, healthcare, taxes, debt. Everone with a different pet cause off the island otherwise you'll lose. My pet cause included as it isn't on that list. The hilarity will be that when the dnc flubs another election cycle doing the cleaning out, the gop winner will be stuck with the debt bomb they expected the opposition to inherit...
    - politithunk 1y ago
      The party has been hijacked by capital. And has been since Clinton at least. As an ancient anarchist, I remember when the Dems held policy positions, but just barely. The party these days is just wealthy folks hoping they can hold norms stable long enough to cash out. I'm seeing the old party in folks like Mamdani, rallying around policies that actually help working class folks, even if it costs some money to do so.
      - galangalalgol 1y ago
        Persistent anarchy is a utopia in both senses of the word. But "the land of do as you please" certainly would be nice if human nature allowed for it. My concerns with Mamdani and AOC is lots of promises without any plans on how to pass the taxes to pay for them. If we don't pass the taxes to support universal healthcare, but implement it anyway, life will be worse for workers than if we hadn't, eventually. Also, while I don't think US left wing populists are currently likely to turn into authoritarians, power is dangerous. The temptation to fix one more thing before relinquishing it turns into an addiction and you get a Chavez. Though he was a lot more obvious from the start. I always thought the democrats would produce our first autocrat, yet another race they lost.
- overfeed 1y ago
  > the DNC hasn’t read it either Given the choice between losing their big-money donors or losing elections, the current Democratic party probably prefers to lose elections. The gap between party and/or party leadership and its voters has never been wider, no doubt in part due to Citizens United
- madaxe_again 1y ago
  You cannot defend against it any more than you can joust with ghosts. Trump is a symptom, not a cause - the embodiment of the inexorable collective decay of the idea of “America”, set against the slow collapse of a global order built on forgotten consensuses. Empires and structures inevitably decay and ultimately fail in the same way - reification of that which was once novel, the pollution of minds with layers of abstraction so divorced from any objective reality that they find irreconcilable differences in the symbol maps they use to describe their world. Abstract, abstract, abstract, my hat is red, your hat is blue that is why - I hate you. Like with Newton, any force you exert against an object will be met with an exact opposing force. The net result is just the production of waste energy. The fight becomes the system. I earnestly think the best thing we can be doing with our time against this backdrop is preserving knowledge and building stable islands of coherency amidst the growing chaos. The dark ages are often blamed on Christianity, but the reality is more that they were a result of the might of Rome - people forgot how to do things, how to exist in a society, as rather than understanding these things themselves, they relied upon the map that was handed to them and took it as reality. That’s the risk we face now. Not Trump. Not whatever comes next - but the slow, uncomprehending loss of the ability to make sense of the world at all.
- anigbrowl 1y ago
  Democrats and progressives believe that factual arguments are what wins elections, so they are tripping over themselves to present the lectorate with proof. this would be a winning strategy if the whole electorate were like Dems and progressives, but it's not. They need to develop parallel atavistic messaging that bypasses the prefrontal cortex and goes straight for the limbic system, but they're (mostly) terrible at this because they're so conflict averse. Democrats are the party that always wins gold stars at policy debate but can't figure out how to avoid getting shoved in a locker afterward.
vkou 1y ago
GOP-MAGA isn't conservative, it's reactionary, and the people running the corps will sell their own mothers for a broken penny and a half-percent tax reduction. Don't expect them to jump in and save you.
- tomrod 1y ago
  No, it absolutely is conservative, just not the conservatives you might have hoped for (Frum, Reagan conservatives, etc.). Conservatives are not libertarian/classical liberal. They value strongmen and even go to the monoarchial extreme. They value hierarchy -- their full throated worship of the theory of military veterans (though typically failing in practice) is strong evidence, but also glorification of warmaking and foreign hawkish policy, their push for unitary executive, etc. Make no mistake, MAGA is exactly what the folks that felt they failed Nixon hoped for.
  - buu700 1y ago
    American conservatives in 2025 are liberal because liberalism is the current most recent stable status quo. American colonial conservatives in 1776 were monarchist because monarchism was the most recent stable status quo at that time. Conservatism isn't an ideology unto itself, but merely a pointer to some other ideology based on a prioritization of caution and stability over first-principles thinking. There's nothing wrong with that, per se; at an organizational or societal scale, more conservative influence just means higher activation energy to move forward with major decisions. Excess conservatism can ossify a suboptimal status quo, but too little can lead to major mistakes, regressions, or whiplash between governing philosophies and policies. Even if aspects of a particular status quo are obviously bad (e.g. slavery), there's a difference between defending such aspects on a first principles basis and doing so based on "tradition" or "this is how it's always been". Of course the latter can result in ordinary people staking out positions that look monstrous in hindsight, but on the flip side sometimes Chesterton's fence is there for a reason. For every good thing conservatives have opposed (e.g. American democracy and emancipation), one could just as easily rattle off a list of bad things they've opposed (e.g. French Revolution, end of the Weimar Republic, Cultural Revolution, Challenger launch, Arab Spring). We also have no idea how many other historical disasters simply never occurred as a result of conservative resistance. Of course, the modern popular bastardization of these terms into "whatever I think the [blue/red] guys support" would make my comment endlessly confusing to most Americans. It will never not be amusing to me that half the population of the land of freedom has somehow turned an etymological cousin of "liberty" into a dirty word.

microtonal 1y ago

It seems very similar to how a clique bought up a lot of Russia and became their oligarchs. It's another transfer of wealth to the rich and/or Trump's cronies. The destruction of public goods, research, education, and the climate is extremely sad.

beezlewax 1y ago
It's also hard to fathom. I don't believe these people believe what they're doing is for the greater good or that climate change is a hoax. They have children and want them to grow up to what exactly?
- tremon 1y ago
  They believe their wealth can shield their chilren from the bad effects of climate change. They think there will be enough of the world left in a functioning state to retain their current level of luxury, and don't care about the rest.
  - gdbsjjdn 1y ago
    This happens at every level of society. It's over 100 degrees where I live today. That would have been exceptional 20 years ago, but now it's normal. I have air conditioning in my house, I have air conditioning in my car. The homeless guy on the corner? He's gonna die from heat stroke. He didn't contribute to global warming but he's going to pay the price, while I can afford to insulate myself
- toss1 1y ago
  They want them to grow up in their privileged bubble, and that is all. They literally DGAF if the rest of of us, i.e., the NPCs, all starve. Does anyone think Russian oligarchs care about the Russian peasants or "meat cans" they send to the Ukranian front? And they've already got their bunkers in New Zealand, Hawaii, or wherever if it all goes really sideways. Musk, Theil, Vance, and the rest of them care about us less than the NPSs in their FPS games, and we should regard them exactly the same way.
- 1y ago

bugglebeetle 1y ago

We’re watching the fire sale of America, like was imposed on Russia in the 90s, and resulted in one of the largest declines in life expectancy in the country’s history. I expect the same to happen here, including its eventual culmination in the rise of a Putin-like figure from the security state apparatus, after we similarly suffer a decade or more of internal collapse and humiliation.

TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the people who promoted neoliberalism in Russia saw how it ended in authoritarian oligarchy- supported by a religious nationalism which displaced science and progressive democratic values - and decided same would be a good outcome for them personally if rolled out across the rest of the West. This is dense, but stunningly prescient. https://library.fes.de/libalt/journals/swetsfulltext/12303102.pdf https://library.fes.de/libalt/journals/swetsfulltext/1230310... While things are undoubtedly bad in the US, Trump's grip on everything - including personal health - is far more tenuous than Yeltsin's was. And (ironically) the US has more of a history of violent resistance and agitation for both worker rights and civil rights. The US has always been a soft economic dictatorship. But a lot of people still expect a functioning social contract, and they're going to become increasingly angry as that disappears. It's a much more complicated picture than the one in Russia, which has essentially been the same kind of violent autocratic monarchy for centuries, even as the set dressing around it changed.
- chairmansteve 1y ago
  Your link looks very interesting. Thanks.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- lyu07282 1y ago
  > But a lot of people still expect a functioning social contract, and they're going to become increasingly angry as that disappears I would argue that was happening way before Trump, it's precisely why he was elected. He didn't just scapegoat but also pretended to take their economic grievances seriously and was the only permitted political outlet to people's grievances. I think what happens is just the natural course of neoliberalism in the west, not any conscious long term strategy. That's why you can see the far-right gaining ground in every western country.