WatDabney

I would count it as certain fact that every single society that’s ever hit any sort of national identity crisis point has spawned commentary from people insisting that the “problem” is that young people are no longer being indoctrinated with some set of ideas with which they used to be indoctrinated (and with which the commenter personally agrees), and that that has made it so that they can be and are instead indoctrinated with some other set of ideas (which the commenter personally opposes) instead.

I would say that the rather obvious problem is indoctrination in and of itself, though unfortunately the solution to that problem is almost certainly more evolutionary than societal, and it’s going to take at least one and likely a few more mass die-off events before humanity will have any hope of beating it.

For whatever any of that’s worth, to those of us on the wrong side of that event.

Just another day in the life of the Toddler-in-chief.

Notice how every time Musk is criticized for being a toxic piece of shit, one of his parents or some other authority figure sticks up for him?

Guaranteed that that’s the way it’s been his entire life, and that’s why he’s never outgrown being a petulant, reckless, self-absorbed, blameshifting teenage edgelord.

I’ve long assumed that many (most?) of the tankies, and of hexbear’s userbase in general, are teens.

So seriously - at what point do we collectively face the fact that the PotUS is a raving lunatic?

Yes - just as with the DEI controversy, the main point is just to fan the flames of racism.

The 1% understand that the US is approaching a breaking point. Things are going to shit, and people are going to start looking for someone to blame for the ugliness and horror and death to come.

And the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of the 1%.

And of course, they don’t want us to see that. So they’re doing everything they can to divide us against ourselves.

Yes, and his name is Todd Howard.

The irony is that Beth pretty much set the standard for ambitious, weird and unexpected with Morrowind, and have been backing away ever since.

As I’ve noted before, if you think of dialogue like a roleplaying video game in which you have labeled options - you can choose the “friendly” response or the “neutral” response or the “antagonistic” response or whatever - it’s as if, in every situation, Vance chooses the “asshole” response.

I think the right might have a point, and that Trump and his cronies and patrons aren’t instituting fascism

They’re instituting feudalism.

That’s what he’s always done.

He has the attention span of a toddler. He latches onto ideas, and specifically things that will satisfy his ego, his greed or his lust, with a laser focus, for exactly and only so long as they manage to hold his attention.

And at the same time, he has essentially no conception of objective truth. It’s not quite that he lives in a fantasy world as that his need to satisfy his ego, greed and/or lust is so much his focus that everything else pales in comparison, including truth.

So he essentially sincerely says whatever he thinks will serve to accomplish whatever it is that he’s focused on at the moment. It’s not so much that he lies as that he doesn’t really make a distinction between truth and lies. The only meaningful measure of a claim is whether or not it will serve his goals.

And all of that means that a smart, canny and manipulative man - Putin, for instance - can get him pointed in whatever direction he wants by feeding him the right bait and the right bullet points to go along with it.

He’s not “surrendering” to them - he’s actively working for their benefit, as it’s been clear all along he intended to do.

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.

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.

By design.

The wealthy, led by Trump and Musk and Zuckerberg, among many others, have entered into open warfare against the common people.

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.

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.

There’s a new game in town, and it’s called “don’t even pretend that ethics matter any more because they don’t.”

The only rule is that you have to let Trump and his cronies get away with anything.

The reward is that Trump’s criminal “justice” system will let you get away with anything too.

And most of Washington is already playing.

Citizens United was a death sentence for the ideal of the government representing the will of the people.

Trump’s election is the final nail in its coffin. He hasn’t even taken office yet and he’s already brazenly selling influence

And if he and the oligarchs have their way about it, it won’t he long before we won’t even be able to say things like that. Not because the oligarchy will do something so doomed to failure as trying to censor it themselves, but because sites that don’t “choose” to censor whatever they want censored will be banned.