Prelude to the Apocalypse

[Sengoku Strider]

Yeah, but there's no spot for my name.



Go get 'em, Emily.

With whatever you're holding on the right there.

[BryanM]

The "Both parties are the same" thing kinda falls apart once you compare the tone of the conversations their followers are having.

We think about the people in positions of power and what they choose to do with that power. Not what the little critters who think they're people at the bottom think.

There is a kind of... if it's true that electing one 96 year old man will transform our sham elections into fraud elections... If things are truly that bad, well. Maybe it is time. If a dog was that sick, you wouldn't want to watch it continue to suffer so much.

The reality is we're probably all chickens on Bill Gate's farm, waiting to get put into the fertilizer grinder. As they say, the president's function isn't to wield power. It's to distract people from those who do. The next five years will begin to show if neuromorphic architectures really can be used to replace everyone with a robot.

[Sengoku Strider]

The next five years will begin to show if neuromorphic architectures really can be used to replace everyone with a robot.

I have sent my consciousness back to this worldline, before Cambridge Analytica takes full control, to warn you of a dark and terrible irony to your statement.

[BulletMagnet]

So yeah -

Despite former President Donald Trump's dominant Iowa caucus victory, some supporters are spreading false claims of voter fraud because he lost a single county by a single vote.

I really, really wonder what it's going to take for the rest of the country to finally tell these people in no uncertain terms to fuck right off.

[BryanM]

I’ll never get over Bernie losing in 2016. That primary period was the most optimistic I’d ever felt in my entire life. I was a junior in college and felt like this was it. We were finally going to see real change after the bill of lies Obama sold us. I’ll never forgive Hillary primary voters. Never.

I commiserate with this guy. Feeling hope about the broader picture for the very first time in our lives, only to be crushed down into depression when Trump was definitely elected president in March 2016. And deeper depression when all the "Hillary cannot lose" gaslighting started effecting my brain, despite the no-tossup maps saying Trump was the likely winner going into the general for months and months.

Trump will probably win this year. (Things might shift to a coinflip, this far out no one is really thinking about the election.) Kamala Harris will be the nominee in 2028. Pete Buttigieg will be her running mate. They will lose. Or win, who gives a shit. Then Pete Buttigieg will succeed her and so on. Forever. That's what you have to look forward to the rest of your life, when it comes to politics.

Or you can ignore it all and be 10,000% happier, like normal people do.

In the meantime: replacing people with robots and geoengineering the sky like the Matrix movies will be things pursued in the material world. The Davos illuminati meeting, the people who actually matter as opposed to the sock puppets that do their bidding, is of infinitely more relevant import.

They're quite happy about how things are going. They just really hate having to still pay employees.

---

Oh, and the youtube comment was in response to a book that let us know that Bill Clinton thought his wife's campaign was very rubbish. We knew he felt like that I guess, but we didn't know know.

I really, really wonder what it's going to take for the rest of the country to finally tell these people in no uncertain terms to fuck right off.

Apparently building a time machine to undo the horrific irreparable damage they did by not voting for Sanders in the 2016 primary. A capitalism that is doing fine doesn't need fascism, BM. Sitting by and letting everyone get constant and massive paycuts, all of this is predictable.

Complaining about what other people aren't is something you can do all day. (Especially with the classic alignment postulations of "why are these chaotic evil people so chaotic evil??? Why is the party of whinge and do nothing and lose, doing nothing and losing???") We're at the threshold where boomers have ~12 years left of existing if the immortality serum doesn't get produced in time. Generation X is a thin sliver of the population. Texas is a swing state. Millenials and zoomers are now the vast bulk of the electorate.

... or they should be. But there's not a lot of hope and change on the menu when the options are only Citigroup or Goldman Sachs. Not a lot of motivation. A fair number have internalized the blame for their suffering, like all of our society tells them to do. And have literally killed themselves. If you don't know at least a few people who gave up, you're definitely blessed.

This has always been a balancing mechanism for the powerful - those who society fails, die and get no say in what society should be like. The homeless certainly don't have the luxury of sitting around to figure out what random day of the calendar their state's primary is held. And 99.5% of the time, the only viable candidates are a bank, the same bank, the same bank with a little bit of a different bank, and a bank. (I'm kidding, you're lucky if there's two or three banks to choose from.)


When they double the prices for groceries again, I'm sure that'll help build up the resistance against the fash.

[Sengoku Strider]

I really, really wonder what it's going to take for the rest of the country to finally tell these people in no uncertain terms to fuck right off.

I mean any honest person paying attention has been since the beginning, but feeding off of persecution complexes is cult 101. Trump's whole deal is promising retribution for people who feel like everyone already looks down on them. All the fuck off contingent offers for agreeing with them is more of the same crappy feelings they already have.

A capitalism that is doing fine doesn't need fascism

I know you know this (and allude to as much in the rest of your post), but Capitalism is a society run by capital holders. Its very structure constantly funnels resources and control of domestic production decisions to the top. Its dirty secret has always been that it can't just do "fine," it's been a constant losing battle since the Guilded Age to stave off monopolization and concentration of resource and power. We just keep it around because that still turned out to be more fun than Stalinism. But fascism has always been a metastatized form of authoritarian capitalism masquerading as a return to tradition, fuelled by the very same popular resentment it created.

Complaining about what other people aren't is something you can do all day. (Especially with the classic alignment postulations of "why are these chaotic evil people so chaotic evil??? Why is the party of whinge and do nothing and lose, doing nothing and losing???") We're at the threshold where boomers have ~12 years left of existing if the immortality serum doesn't get produced in time. Generation X is a thin sliver of the population. Texas is a swing state. Millenials and zoomers are now the vast bulk of the electorate.

... or they should be. But there's not a lot of hope and change on the menu when the options are only Citigroup or Goldman Sachs. Not a lot of motivation. A fair number have internalized the blame for their suffering, like all of our society tells them to do. And have literally killed themselves. If you don't know at least a few people who gave up, you're definitely blessed.

FULL POSADISM NOW.



It is the only way.

[BulletMagnet]

I mean any honest person paying attention has been since the beginning, but feeding off of persecution complexes is cult 101.

I'm not talking about the Trumpskis themselves here, though I do, of course, question the wisdom of hitching one's working-class wagon to a candidate and party who have not only openly and loudly looked down upon the non-rich for their entire existence - it's literally their platform and/or "brand" - but taken unmistakably gleeful pride in repeatedly ripping them off down to this day. I guess pointing that out makes me a "hater" or whatever, but I would humbly submit that when looking for "haters" please note which one of us is trying to take away the other's right to participate in a democracy while their counterpart is trying to give the other health care.

Back on topic, as I mentioned in my post I'm talking about "the rest of the country", the ones who insist they're not Trump supporters but still, after all that's happened and continues to happen, refuse to rule him or the up-Trump's-ass GOP out come Election Day; again, I really don't know how loudly and repeatedly they can be openly insulted - if not outright threatened - before finally saying "ehhh, y'know, maybe not." To borrow your terminology, I can't fathom how anyone supposedly still "on the fence" can be labeled an "honest person paying attention" any more than the "Daddy can do no wrong" MAGA contingent.

[BryanM]

Aw, here's a heart-warming story of a pastor who helped some homeless people not freeze to death during the winter.

FULL POSADISM NOW.

Heh. It's literally our only hope for a better future, but it's just gonna turn into horrible techno feudalism. (I hope they do at least share power and cleave the world up into their personal territories - maybe a couple of them will be interesting enough to be better than a horrible torture chamber.)

From what I've read of the posadists, they just believed in UFO's and wanted to nuke everyone.

Cosmists' plan to resurrect everyone who had ever died always made me feel like I rather low-ball optimistic scenarios. But conversely, there's a huge problem with that: why stop there, the other people who don't exist deserve to exist, too! The number of coulda-beens and never-weres is infinite. Not just in animals, but any possible mind. Training runs of more powerful AI's that start to qualify as a mind would consign trillions and trillions of them into oblivion as they're discarded.

The analogy of tossing newborn chickens into a grinder for fertilizer is actually rather conservative on the degree of horror - the chicks don't have as many faculties as developed as these poor hypothetical bastards.


... I do feel the navel gazing, though. Pretty much everyone believes that even if Sanders had been allowed to win somehow, he'd just be coup'd immediately. BM keeps asking what would it take to slide Trump off the spectrum? Easy: Trump would just have to try to give everyone healthcare. That would get rid of him real quick.

a candidate and party who have not only openly and loudly looked down upon the non-rich for their entire existence - it's literally their platform and/or "brand" - but taken unmistakably gleeful pride in repeatedly ripping them off down to this day.

This reminds me of their brethren on the other side. The liberals who claim there are "good" billionaires. Like Bill Gates. And oh god, the Elon Musk stans. (Some of whom are invested in his stonks, and therefore are participants in ripping people off by helping him pump up those numbers.)

I get it, it's the need for there to be hope. That someone up there, with some money and power, actually cares about them. To some total stranger toward the bottom of society.

A world where the people at Davos only care about themselves and the loyalty of their fellow pirates, well, that's a pretty bleak world to live in. Better to live in a comforting fantasy where there's some kind of battle that can be won. Than in a bleak reality where we're gonna block out the sky a little with particulates.

The best sells tactic is always telling people what they want to hear. Always a schmuck out there somewhere. How can you be so negative about the fascists, when they believe in capitalism more than anyone? When they believe in what we've all been told to believe all our lives?

[orange808]

BM keeps asking what would it take to slide Trump off the spectrum? Easy: Trump would just have to try to give everyone healthcare. That would get rid of him real quick.

That sums up America very well.

[BulletMagnet]

BM keeps asking what would it take to slide Trump off the spectrum? Easy: Trump would just have to try to give everyone healthcare. That would get rid of him real quick.

The thing is, though, he and the GOP constantly promise to do just that (though with the unspoken Fascist caveat, "healthcare for everyone...who actually matters, fuck everyone else"), despite having no intention whatsoever of actually delivering, and the same goes for nearly everything else on their platform (to the extent they actually have one), from infrastructure to national security to moral purity to Standing Up for the Working Class (seriously, did a single Trump voter take even a cursory look at the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act?).

Pretty much the only part of the bargain that Trump et al have unfailingly followed through on is making it increasingly acceptable, if not outright mandatory, to treat disempowered segments of society, from women to Latinos to Muslims to LGBTQ - like shit. It's no surprise that the base has stuck with the right despite all the broken promises literally everywhere else since they've made it abundantly clear that this is the only thing they actually care about, but the fact that the people who supposedly support Trump for more "palatable" reasons have taken exactly the same tack tells me that they simply aren't doing so for the reasons they say they are; if they still somehow truly believe they're "different" from the MAGA faithful, they're either profoundly ignorant (especially for people who like to brag about "doing my own research" ) or outright delusional.

[Sengoku Strider]

I guess pointing that out makes me a "hater" or whatever

You can break through low-to-mid-tier levels of cognitive dissonance by repeatedly posing reasonable questions based on factual propositions you can back up. Since dissonance uses a lot more mental resource, you can wear them down over time. But the upper echelon represents the iron man tier, semi-impervious to words in general.

Heh. It's literally our only hope for a better future, but it's just gonna turn into horrible techno feudalism. (I hope they do at least share power and cleave the world up into their personal territories - maybe a couple of them will be interesting enough to be better than a horrible torture chamber.)

From what I've read of the posadists, they just believed in UFO's and wanted to nuke everyone.

The Posadist Fourth International were Trotskyists with an accelerationist bent. The belief was that since capitalism's need for infinite economic expansion requires accumulation of infinite resources, it inevitably produces endless ongoing war and conflict since those are in limited supply. That's just orthodox Leninism. They took a rather unorthodox utilitarian stance that just getting it out of the way, nuking the capitalist world and building a worker's paradise out of the ashes was the most ethical decision in the grand scope of history.

Where they deviated from the usual Metal Gear villain crowd was the UFO thing, which stems from that. No capitalist society could be truly advanced because of how fundamentally wasteful and internally combative it is, so of course the aliens won't make contact with us until we're sufficiently space Marxist. Also, dolphins are intelligent and learn to perform tricks for food, and thus are our proletarian comrades in the great global workers' struggle.



The irony that kills me with Posadism is that J. Posadas was a frumpy cult leader who hated humour. Like, you had the campiest form of doomsday politics imaginable, in the 1960s, the literal age of camp. You could have been huge but instead it was all "Jokes are counter-revolutionary bourgeois thought."

[BryanM]

https://i.postimg.cc/6pDXgRmV/What-is-w ... -smart.jpg

Urgh. This reminds me of the tons of professionals and engineers who are 100% GOP either because it represents their interests (a little more money for them), or that was just the culture they were raised in. One of the very disappointing and very predictable examples being one of the most ardent advocates for thorium - Kirk Sorensen. Can give very affable explanations about nuclear power that a layman can understand. His social media is basically the same as reading a conservative political cartoonist.

Intelligence doesn't mean much. Politics is 95% team sports, 5% terminal values and alignment. A guy making six figures should want to give himself a slight raise and kill the homeless, those are his incentives.

utilitarianism

It's kind of amazing we have any humans that approach any kind of objective utility. But the natural outcome of such rational ethics are rather unpalatable to normal human programming.

I do like our tech accelerationists who are like "if everyone dies or worse, but we create a machine race in exchange... that's quite excellent."

I find such people much more refreshingly honest than some guy who wants to give himself a tax cut who has to make up elaborate fantasy scenarios where he's a hero for wanting more for himself and not caring at all about strangers.

.... a lot of accel guys do seem to have that kind of star wars "me good, others bad" kind of mentality, but that might just be the nature of social media. The internet burns through conversations at light speed, and the only people left are bible thumpers yelling at each other like in that CGP Grey video about flowers and butterflies.

.... hah, conversations about how farm animals are treated have been in vogue lately. Dairy cows being knocked up, separated from their babies almost immediately, being butchered for meat once they stop producing as much milk... Cows are actually quite lovely animals who don't deserve that fate any more than a dog does, really.

Bringing up dolphins always carries along the topic of those experiments that inspired Ecco the Dolphin. Basically every single thing in the world is a horror story if you're willing to truly look at it.

they've made it abundantly clear that this is the only thing they actually care about

Well yeah, as our Emperor once said, we can't vote on material things so the culture war and our feelings is all we have left.

Politics is designed to appeal to symbol-minded idiots. It's all very deliberate - for people who like this sort of thing, here you go.

The thing is, though, he and the GOP constantly promise to do just that

lololol, I remember when he said "we're gonna take care of everyone." He says lots of things! He says all of the things. Both sides on every topic. Pick and choose what you want to believe - It's beautiful how good of a politician he is.

[Sima Tuna]

Intellect and morality have no inherent crossover. We like to pretend they do because liberal philosophy and capitalist propaganda try to push the idea that the future is progress, progress is always good, education is good/progress and so it naturally follows an intelligent person is "more good." Squint the eyes and "more good" becomes "more moral."

Of course, a kind-hearted person can be raised by assholes and decide to be kind-hearted anyway. Education may assist them in broadening their perspective. They may feel that education has been of benefit in developing their moral code. But the root remains: they were already kind. An asshole can enjoy all the knowledge of the ages, but still come out the other end a huge cunt.

I suppose it comes back to the question of nature vs nurture. Safe money seems to be "bit of both." Capitalism does morality no favors by providing profit motive for many immoral deeds. Those inclined to behave well might still opt to screw over their neighbors out of a feeling of necessity or fear of being replaced (by someone more ruthless.)

I have found no reliable measure for determining which people are assholes vs not. Well, nothing other than personal experience talking to them. But a person could still talk a good game one way (either pro-asshole or pro-kindness) and then show they're the complete opposite when the chips are down.

[BulletMagnet]

I have found no reliable measure for determining which people are assholes vs not.

Actually, you answer your own query here:

But a person could still talk a good game one way (either pro-asshole or pro-kindness) and then show they're the complete opposite when the chips are down.

To put it another way, actions speak louder than words. And to put it in the context of the current conversation, if you constantly say you're in favor of something (or various things) but repeatedly vote people into office who openly and fiercely work to prevent those things from happening, your words, and the inevitably-invoked "higher principles" supposedly driving them, are very much drowned out by your actions.

[Lemnear]

for those who live in America, don't vote "ordinary" people for president. We did it with the 5 Star Movement a few years ago and it was an irreparable disaster... (20% of the WORLD funds for the updating of buildings was lost here, 67 billion, of which less than 10% was actually used).

[Sima Tuna]

for those who live in America, don't vote "ordinary" people for president. We did it with the 5 Star Movement a few years ago and it was an irreparable disaster...

No need to worry about that happening. I've never been given the option in my entire life. And I suspect I never will be.

[BryanM]

One of the most important rules of M5S is that politics is a temporary service; no one who has already been elected twice at any level (local or national) can be a candidate again and has to return to their original job.

Always one of the worst ideas of all time. You just get a constant cycle of frauds like Fetterman.

It takes decades to build up trust and weeks to destroy it. Electing total strangers is not only anathema to our animal nature (95% of people vote on who their favorite imaginary friend is), but is also rationally stupid from a material perspective.

[Sengoku Strider]

Man, Dilbert got fucking dark.

[AGermanArtist]

https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad- ... usions.pdf

[Sengoku Strider]

Trump was just ordered to pay E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million for continuing to claim he didn't rape her (he went out of his way to deserve it, he literally didn't keep his mouth shut about her for 24 hours after the last judgement). I've been saying for a while now that the shine is secretly off Trump, but I think the wheels have really started to come off. His hard core will still run off the cliff after him, but there are too many deal breakers for your average right wing secret Clint Eastwood to be cool with. He's being shown as not in control of himself.

He's also about to receive the judgement this week in his fraud trial. He's about to lose his business tycoon status, which was revealed as a shell game all along.

He's been a colossal liability for anyone with any kind of profile who's gotten involved with him. Fox, Alex Jones, Tucker, his dozens of co-defendants, everyone involved with J6, even the My Pillow Guy's entire life and business was destroyed by going along with his dumb non-plans.

Which matters, because they're acutely aware he lost them the 2018 midterms. He made everyone who bought into his lies about 2020 look like an ass, while torpedoing the republican messaging establishment at Fox, Newsmax and OAN by painting massive lawsuit targets on their backs. They spent weeks crowing about the 'red wave' to come in 2022, but massively underperformed their projections.



Somehow.

I could go on, but the point is that his obvious flaws were always overlooked because of the belief that he was a winner who had the power to bend the world to his will. He obviously does not, and a lot of them know.

https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad- ... usions.pdf

Is there any particular context here? Chomsky published this in 1989.

[Rastan78]

Part of what's scary about Trump still is the potential he has to surround himself with ever nuttier loyalists. You've got a freak show like Steven Miller chomping at the bit to create concentration camps for Mexicans.

As much as I want to believe the spell is broken, if he does get reelected, the sycophants will be lined up around the block day one.

And let's not forget there were plenty of reasons to think the shiny orange sheen would wear thin back in 2016.

Never underestimate the powerful Republicans who are dissatisfied have already shown a staggering propensity to hold their nose and tow the line. What else do they have left?

[orange808]

Look, I wouldn't normally consider myself a member of the tin foil hat club, but there's no way I'm clicking on a PDF file at the CIA.

[Sengoku Strider]

Part of what's scary about Trump still is the potential he has to surround himself with ever nuttier loyalists. You've got a freak show like Steven Miller chomping at the bit to create concentration camps for Mexicans.

As much as I want to believe the spell is broken, if he does get reelected, the sycophants will be lined up around the block day one.

And let's not forget there were plenty of reasons to think the shiny orange sheen would wear thin back in 2016.

Never underestimate the powerful Republicans who are dissatisfied have already shown a staggering propensity to hold their nose and tow the line. What else do they have left?

His true believers aren't going anywhere, and guaranteed there will be violence. But all it takes is 5% of republican voters being fed up for it to be a landslide. Trump was ranting about any big donors who don't donate to him to him being banned from MAGA world for all time, because he's sweating all the DeSantis money and independent voters shifting to Haley now that she's the only one still running against him. Not that he can't beat her, but because he's already walking a tightrope while Biden's quietly raising a ton of money.

Plus now that his NY holdings are in receivership he needs a piggy bank to pretend to still be mega rich off of. Apparently part of Giuliani's bankruptcy claim was unpaid legal fees from when he represented Trump.

[BulletMagnet]

His hard core will still run off the cliff after him, but there are too many deal breakers for your average right wing secret Clint Eastwood to be cool with.

For the millionth and first time, I really, really really want to believe this, but literally everything I see coming from both the right and the center (with Biden bleeding support on the left, while he's at it) tells me that Bill Barr still speaks for an utterly terrifying percentage of voters: "Sure, he's incompetent, a criminal, and a danger to democracy, but I'm still voting for him, because fuck you."

[Sima Tuna]

because fuck you."

Years of being told "this candidate is awful and we know they are awful, but you better vote for them anyway because you have no choices" have engendered a reactionary "fuck you" mindset from voters. The establishment corporate puppeteers can only blame themselves for causing this problem. Hillary and Biden were both awful candidates, and each time the liberal voters were told "hahaha, you're going to vote for them anyway, bitches!"

Play stupid games...

[BryanM]

One thing I'm curious about is if Trump is keeping the GOP alive in Texas. There's only been one outfit that bothered polling a non-Trump general election matchup, that suggests the enthusiasm for Nikki Haley is much less. If it was Biden versus a Mitt Romney type, it's likely it would have been more likely this is the year that the state finally flips. Only four years later than projected, which is pretty good accuracy for something that was estimated twenty years ago.

Which deflates the whole "Trump is electoral poison! Mark my words!" thing. Maybe for other less known critters, but not himself. And if he's the only path that holds Texas for another year, and therefore the only chance the GOP has to seat another president in our lifetimes, how can you say that he's not effective, strategically?

----

Back in the real world, these first person view consumer drones really are suited to the whole "war as a live action movie" thing. There's something really grim about seeing some poor doomed bastard try to knock it away with a stick and run away. It's no wonder it goes viral on twitter and the tiktok.

A commentator says the first military that goes all-in on drones would suffer a catastrophe, since yeah you need people to hold ground. But when I think of the natural endpoint of this thing: drone swarms with small ~$15 drones, controlled by AI... I don't see how that doesn't eventually replace artillery and tanks. A net or a closed window is a shield against one big drone. Not so much against a swarm.

... the Slaughterbots film is a lot shorter than I thought, only eight minutes.

[BulletMagnet]

Years of being told "this candidate is awful and we know they are awful, but you better vote for them anyway because you have no choices" have engendered a reactionary "fuck you" mindset from voters.

You're perhaps half right: it has provoked that reaction in (comparatively) leftist voters, and in most cases, at least I would argue, the end result is "I'm staying home" rather than "I'm switching parties". This is not even remotely the case in the center, and even less so on the right.

The most striking exhibits, of course, are religious voters: you literally could not put forward a candidate (or party, for that matter...everyone knows how much time Jesus spent scolding poor people about how much they suck, right?) that better embodies the literal opposite of everything the "moral majority" claims to stand for, but it's tough to think of a bloc that's been more slavishly devoted to Trump even as the so-called "character counts" case against him gets stronger by the day. And they don't even try to defend it; when asked how they could so eagerly endorse someone who not only never goes to church but built his entire image on sin and excess, they sneer, without hesitation, "because he gives us what we want". (I can't help but recall the crowd that got Jesus crucified shouting "we have no king but Caesar" to get Pilate to relent.) And what they want, as Trump himself has very eagerly embraced, is retribution.

Oh, and considering what transpired this past week, I'd be remiss not to mention the "securing the border is an existential emergency that needs solving right now" crowd...how many of them do you think will be changing their votes? To speak nothing of the "Law and Order" and "we [heart] the Constitution so much" preening peacocks as the indictments and outright appeals to authoritarianism pile up. And the list goes on.

To put it bluntly, "our guy sucks, too bad, vote for him anyway" seems to work just fine for a whole lot of voters, because it comes with the barely-concealed addendum of "...because it will really piss off Those People".

[BryanM]

You're perhaps half right: it has provoked that reaction in (comparatively) leftist voters, and in most cases, at least I would argue, the end result is "I'm staying home" rather than "I'm switching parties". This is not even remotely the case in the center, and even less so on the right.

Eh? Are you saying rightwing people don't get disillusioned with their guy and stay home? If you are, I present Mitt Romney.

Trump is what the base wants. He gives them the reward they get out of being GOP. Romney is what elites want. He gives them the reward they get out of being GOP.

As for the religious base, this Youtuber called Moon talks about it a lot. (I got into his channel through his "Why aren't there any good girl's games?" video. His channel has a much higher ratio of female viewers than the norm.) I just watched a video of his yesterday that touched on the roots of our protestant ideology.

(It's weird how twisted things are, where the catholic churches tend to be more humble and organic while the protestant ones are often more along the lines of FUCK YOU WE GOT MONEY BITCHES!!! I always shake my head at people going to a church that's way, way nicer than their house. Like, if your house is crumbling, maybe the mega church doesn't need your money. It's the same energy as some nerd giving all their money to collect waifus in a gacha game or some lady putting herself into prostitution to support a host. Some kind of mania about living vicariously through some avatar's success...)

The pilgrims were the kind of people who chose to uproot their entire community and risk certain death on the ocean, and certain death in the barren wilds, than allow their children to grow up as cloggers. I'm sure they would have loved Trump.

The stick up the bum isn't the point, being miserable is the point. Don't mistake instrumental goals for terminal goals.

[AGermanArtist]

Look, I wouldn't normally consider myself a member of the tin foil hat club, but there's no way I'm clicking on a PDF file at the CIA.

Maybe you'll wind up on a list of really cool people...

It's just PDF files of a book by one of the most cited authors in graduate politics courses and a man regarded as the world's preeminent public intellectual who would deserve a Nobel for Linguistics should one exist, in which he discusses the problems with Liberal Democracy, the public's understanding of it, the difference between Liberal Democracy and Democracy, Western propaganda and thought control, and the fact most Westerners don't know they're subjected to it. I read it and the rest of his work on the advisement of heroes of mine (Robert Anton Wilson and Bill Hicks) in my late teens. And it may go some way to explaining where we are today and why. Quite a lot of his work has been bastardised by charlatans/grifters like Icke and Alex Jones who've gone some way to discredit the themes within his work just by their association with it. Things like the "business plot" where a cartel of business interests headed by Prescott Bush (GHW/GW Bush's father/grandfather) conspired to stage a coup d'état in an effort to install a Fascist dictator in the Whitehouse, is dismissed as a conspiracy theory despite being a matter of historical record.

[BulletMagnet]

Are you saying rightwing people don't get disillusioned with their guy and stay home? If you are, I present Mitt Romney.

I'm curious what kind of data exists attempting to determine how much of Romney's loss was due to his own potential voters not bothering versus how comparatively effective Obama was at getting his own voters out despite their misgivings (kind of slicing the deli meat rather thin, I acknowledge, but...); to repeat a point I've made before, for all the hemming and hawing about how "moderate" and "traditional conservative" voters were going to abandon Trump in 2020, he got more votes from them then than he did in 2016, and was only defeated because Biden managed to turn out even more people than that. There's a reason for the axiom that, when it comes to candidates, the left falls in love while the right falls in line.