Semiquincentennial, Sestercentennial, Quarter Millennium or Bicenquinquagenary; whatever term you want…America, at 248 years, is not going to make it.
12:50 to 18:45
Hegseth has tattoos that white supremacists also favor. Nazis. He attained the rank of Major, which is between a Captain commanding about 200 and a Lieutenant Colonel commanding up to 3000. He was one of only 12 disqualified from guarding Bidens inauguration because of the tattoos. He was a fox news host.
Like Space Force, which has no combat jobs, a military service with nobody that fights, but enjoys all the prestige and benefits of the other services that send people in harm’s way, making Hegseth secretary of defense is Trump’s way of giving the middle finger to the military he despises as suckers and losers.
His other cabinet picks are equally disturbing. They signal Trumps total disdain for the government that placed limits on his narcissism in his first term. And these people also signal the end of America.
@garychurch9237 Terrifying….slash and burn the U.S. government and hand it all over to crony capitalists. When Trump is sworn in it will be the end of America. Nothing can save us now. The greatest nation in history destroyed by a con man and the price of eggs.
The truth in one minute from 20 years ago. Divide and conquer as old as Rome.
The only question in a democracy is how much a person gets to keep, which depends on how much the rest of us are empowered to keep other people from keeping everything.
Wealth concentrates upward slowly but surely and eventually a small group of people own everything and everyone. This has been going on for thousands of years. Only a few isolated examples of systems that countered this hierarchy exist…and they were almost all democracies.
In the ancient Greek city states the people took power from the rich by combining and making laws limiting the power of the rich to buy whatever and whoever they wanted. The rich had a habit of driving anyone who competed with them out of business and starting wars with other city states. This does not sound so terrible to moderns but in ancient Greece your unpaid debts were paid off by becoming a slave and wars were a flip of the coin if you would come back or not. Democracy was a form of limitarianism in that it kept the rich from enslaving everyone and destroying the state by war-making. It also taxed the rich to pay for public works projects that improved the lives of everyone and also increased prosperity for the rich, who normally worked against each other.
Representative democracy, the Republic, is the best form of government for the citizenry as it provides the greatest good for the greatest number. It is the worst form of the government for the rich and powerful as it necessarily limits their wealth and influence by taxation and regulation. It follows that the rich will never stop trying to evade and end taxation and regulation that limits their acquisition of ever more wealth and power. When they succeed, the Republic dies. If the rich oppress the people, then revolution is inevitable which also leads to destruction. This is the basic understanding of a Republic that needs to be understood by the public.
In America a Democratic party that worked for the interests of the working class, and a Republican party that worked for the interest of the rich, having no third Limitarian party that worked to limit the power of both meant that one would eventually end America.
It occurred to me that what has happened resembles, in some ways, the 30-year-old movie Jurassic Park. The movie’s central character is Alan Grant, who studies dinosaurs. In the story of the end of America, the central character represents the white male, 60 percent of whom voted for Trump. In the movie the rich guy John Hammond built Jurassic Park to resurrect dinosaurs. In the story of the end of America, the rich guy is a composite of several supreme court decisions handed down since the Reagan Revolution that enabled a new class of capitalist robber barons (the dinosaurs) to arise. The rich guy represents the rule of law. In the movie the character of mathematician Ian Malcolm is trying to warn everyone that the dinosaurs will get out of control. In the story of the end of America, it is democracy that is the mathematician telling us that the dinosaur robber barons are going to be a disaster.
In the movie the various supporting characters have various adventures, but they are all essentially representations interacting with the three main characters who themselves represent the citizenry (Alan Grant), democracy (Ian Malcolm), and capitalism (John Hammond).
Jurassic Park is America, the great experiment in democracy that ends with the election of Donald Trump. In the movie the computer programmers, one evil, one good, one representing Donald Trump, one representing Kamala Harris, both have bad endings. In the movie the greedy lawyer, representing the mainstream media, is devoured. And the park game warden, representing the U.S. government itself, is also killed. The only difference is in the true story of the end of America, Trump triumphs instead of failing to steal riches as in the movie.
At the end of the movie the rich guy, who in the story of the end of America represents capitalism and the American neoliberal economy, is taken to the escape helicopter last, after the mathematician, who represents a badly injured democracy, and the heroine and two children, who represent the citizens. They fly away and that…is the end of the experiment. And the end of America.
Brooks is right about a few things….but he is not worried about Donald Trump’s fascism?
He thinks candidates like John Fetterman are the future?
He reduces the election to high school against college degrees?
This is the problem that ended America…being half right. We try to pick out the things that we personally “feel” are important in complex problems and end up failing.
Brooks states that “maybe” Bernie Sanders is right but leaves out everything important and turns it into a single class warfare issue….but barely mentions economic inequality.
What happened to critical thinking? To logic? We have the left and the right, and the interplay between scientific reductionism and chaos theory, and this mess has turned America into Jurassic Park.
America has ended….whatever is to come will not be what it was. If the fascist state now consolidating power falls, then what comes after will be “New America“… if it restores democracy. Accepted. Stage Five complete.
11:38 “He’ll implicitly say they want me to abuse my power, they’ve given me permission to do whatever I want…and I think it’s worth noting, for a whole lot of people, they just wanted him to make groceries cost less.”
13:17 “People who didn’t vote for Trump can get discouraged…and overwhelmed…and tell themselves, people who voted for him voted for everything he stands for, and what follows from that, is a sense of alienation (that) this is not my country, and I don’t understand what’s going on.”
16:03 “He doesn’t want James Mattis’s or Mark Milley’s or John Kelly’s, he wants absolute loyalists, either people who share his ideological world view or out of a sense of ambition or cravenness are willing to do exactly what he says without questioning it.”
And…it continues on with some grim things said. The most optimistic takeaway was- “- tell yourself, no, the voters did not give Donald Trump a mandate to do whatever he wants and carry out all of his policies; that is not what happened in the last election.”
There is some more….and it is important, but I am exhausted.
The avatar of self-interest is Donald Trump. With him as your hero there is no shame in anything you want for yourself. I am very familiar with this ideology after dealing with the Ayn-Rand-in-space-libertarians for the last 15 years. They are loud and proud about there being absolutely nothing having any meaning except money.
Trump is the model for millions of borderline and straight-up narcissist creeps who hold money as the god of this world. Almost anything goes in Mammon worship; lying, betrayal, bullying, intimidation, manipulation….only the amount of wealth amassed, which is power, has any real value. What does not go, what is heretical and blasphemous, is self-sacrifice. That is for the suckers and losers. While everything traditionally named as evils are just good business practices, what is shameful and evil to the materialist is the non-transaction. Everything must be traded up for profit in the great pyramid scheme of wealth. Only in this way can wealthy individuals exist. While the rest of us are taught that pyramid schemes are stealing, the wealthy smile knowingly and shrug. Society camouflages those that take the most and give the least. Extreme profit in business is all about deception.
Stealing makes the victim a sucker and a loser and is the ultimate materialist good because it is the most satisfying transaction of all; the risk is the only investment and is “free” so the pay-off is always something from nothing, ex nihilo. God-like. Who and what you are stealing from is simply the other person and, depending on how close to total psychopathy you lean, are not really people and do not matter. Only you matter and what you can get away with, without damage or loss. Simple, beautiful, and the sacred doctrine of the materialist.
War, as some anthropologists have noted…is theft. It is stealing by investing in violence. Materialists in the 21st century do not generally like war for several reasons. The main one being the more violence, the more expense. It is not ex nihilo and requires risk and an investment. Most, like Trump, would rather steal without the expense. There is also the uncomfortable necessity for soldiers, who Trump called “suckers and losers.” These beings willing to die fighting for their nation, which they think they have some kind of ownership of…are dangerous. No telling what they will do. Why will soldiers die defending their country? For their loved ones. For the collective state that sustains and protects their people, not the individual. For individuals who only exist across the narcissist-psychopath spectrum, there is no love for anyone because there is no one person…. there is just one person. So, they do not really understand soldiers. This is the difference between a warrior and a soldier. The warrior-psychopath is a well-known character often used to raise morale and entertain, but they are very rare and extreme examples, and mostly fiction. The warrior seeks self-aggrandizement while the soldier sacrifices for others. Soldiers and not warriors are why we have Veterans Day.
Having been a soldier and many other things, I have more to say on this, but I have to go to work right now.
“Strongmen rewrite history to justify their abuses of power and they depend on fear to control their followers.”
But…
“He does not have unlimited power.”
“(America) -has a history of more than 250 years in which power has been systematically dispersed throughout society.”
“-so, there is (an) enormous reservoir of resistance and authority that we need to now activate-”
It all sounds good, but the white supremacists are out there…and they know this is the only chance they will EVER have to start a race war and pursue genocide. Whatever they are going to do, they are going to do it fast and try to ride this wave of fear of confusion.
I had that awful feeling Trump would win and the reason it was awful was because of a million closet nazis that just might “ignite.”
Look for signs of them organizing…of the FBI arresting large numbers of them.
It is Sunday morning….and the sadness is not overwhelming like it was Wednesday, when I woke up to the end of America. Profound confusion is more the ground I walk on now. It occurred to me after I woke up that in the weeks leading up to the election, I was building up my excitement level for after the victory. That all would be right in the world, and I could get on with my life. That victory would be the mythic starting gun signaling real progress on all the projects I was working on. With that thought I now realize how damaged the future now is. The VA called last night with good and bad news. What could end my life in a year will not this year, but the other thing that definitely will end my life, perhaps in not very many years… is progressing.
It started going bad for me on September 10th with the Polaris Dawn billionaut mission. I thought that was rock bottom…for Human Space Flight anyway. Then lying in bed with Covid I watched the chopsticks catch the shiny and called that the new rock bottom not only for Human Space Flight. Now….as I reflect on stage four of the grieving process, depression, I believe today has to be all the way down to rock bottom. Nihilism is eating away at my soul, and I feel zero hope for the future.
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It is noon and I am arguing with myself about what to do next. What is there to do? Listen to a comedian.
So… to go along with Stage Four, Al has a depressing one for a change.
This started well and relit some hope of progressing to stage five (acceptance). The first bit of knowledge leading to processing what has happened being Norm citing the main factor as Covid. Every developed country, conservative or liberal, experienced inflation from the Covid supply chain breakdown and suffered a popular backlash.
Family hardship bred the sense that the government was indifferent to the plight of the “working people”, and this led to a distrust of “elites.” Populist backlash against experts and elites goes back to the Tea Party and after Covid those intent on dividing and conquering portrayed Trump as the anti-elitist and opposite of those who seemed to have disdain and condescension for the citizenry. The price of eggs ended America.
With the exception of Jews and black women, every group moved to the right. Over half of Latino males, at least in Michigan, ignored the racist Madison Square Garden rally and voted for Trump. The media kept treating Trump like he was not what he is and only became super-critical at the very end when it was too late. The sane-washing of Trump by the media took him to victory.
So… essentially, something we knew was going to happen eventually, a pandemic, raised consumer prices and this inconvenience enabled the neoliberals to drive our consumer-programmed democracy to suicide, aided by a profit-driven “free press.”
What will happen now is preordained.
“Well, one of the ways that I fear Trump will act is -to do what Orban did in Hungary…to get states and the courts and maybe even the congress to do a set of things that will turn our elections into, you know, turn our elections into a farce – where – they’re tilted so they win no matter what.”
Ice on the Moon 