There will be mass graves in the US if the oligarchs have their way about it.

It sucks to even be in partial agreement with the broligarchs, but as a rural American, I have zero sympathy for this fuckhead or anyone else involved in the broadband fund.

The government has been pouring money into broadband expansion for decades, and for decades, internet providers have been sopping up that money while doing exactly nothing to actually earn it.

There have been lots of comparisons between Trump’s administration and those of Nazi Germany and modern kleptocratic Russia, but lately I’ve been seeing an awful lot of North Korea.

Democratic leaders blearily looked up from their mid-afternoon cocktails on the decks of billionaire’s yachts and said, “They want us to what?”

Gotta love the unintentional irony of a bill that addresses the supposed mental illness of Trump opponents in such a way that it vividly illustrates the very real mental illness of Trump supporters.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I say that Americans are just taking it because while a few thousand people here and there are protesting the wanton destruction of everything of value in their country by a handful of fucking psychopaths, the other 340-some million are just letting it happen.

So that means another important threshold is coming.

Trump and Musk, being the psychopathic pieces of shit they are, are going to want to treat their growing unpopularity and ever-stronger opposition as some sort of conspiracy rather than an honest expression of popular opinion, and they’re going to try to clamp down on it - to start arresting and silencing people for the “crime” of opposing them.

And the question is going to be, will Americans again just roll over and take it as a couple of psychopathic dickweeds with daddy issues systematically destroy everything the US has ever stood for?

Even a year ago I would’ve said no, but now…

People who can and do actually think have been telling you that they’re a dumbass idea that’s ultimately only going to hurt consumers since the very first moment Trump started talking about them.

All you had to do was fucking listen.

This has nothing at all to do with cost cutting and everything to do with sucking up to Putin.

Dumb, sick, mean and scared = MAGA, so that tracks.

Moving closer to the mass arrests, concentration camps and mass graves stage every day.

He’s positioning himself as Fash-Lite, because that’s the kind of candidate the Democratic Party is interested in running.

Nailed it.

The Dems have clearly signaled that, in the face of a right-wing kleptocratic coup d’etat, they intend to keep doing exactly what they’ve been doing for decades - situationally register mild opposition but carefully manage to consistently fail to successfully oppose much of anything, then fundraise on “the Republicans have destroyed everything and we’re not the Republicans” and astroturf opposition to the inevitable observations that they’re only technically not the Republicans, and have just spent the last two/four years proving that they’re not really any sort of opposition either.

Oh yeah - and they’ll run some candidates too, but that’s really a secondary consideration. Fundraising is the important part. And to that end, the candidates they run will necessarily be corporate-friendly neoliberals with sufficient lack of integrity to be willing to position themselves just enough to the left of the current Republicans to barely manage to carry off the illusion of opposition.

And that last is the role Newsom is auditioning for.

I think a technocracy would initially be relatively better, but would rapidly decline and likely end up worse.

Initially, there would be some significant number of genuinely sincere people who would be well-positioned to move into the positions of power, and the requirement of technical expertise would eliminate a lot of the scumbags.

Over time though, the scumbags would figure out which hoops they needed to jump through in order to qualify for office, then they’d start co-opting that system, so that eventually, well-connected scumbags would, if anything, actually have an easier time of obtaining the necessary credentials than actual experts would.

I have no proposal for a non-hierarchical system because that’s the exact sort of collective thinking that leads to hierarchical systems.

A non-hierarchical system can’t be implemented. Rather, it can only be the result of all the paticipants in a system (or close enough as makes no meaningful difference) butting out of each other’s decisions.

At that point, it will and can only take whatever form it takes - whatever the manifestation of the unconstrained decisions of all of the participants might end up being.

There are two levels of problems with a technocracy.

The first is a problem that’s common to all hierarchical systems, entirely regardless of their specific nature. They will, each and all, sooner or later come to be dominated by people who hold the positions they hold solely because they most lust for those positions and are most willing to do absolutely whatever it takes to gain and hold them.

It makes no difference what sort of limitations or stipulations might be in place - if there is a position that holds authority over others, it will eventually come to be held by the most vicious and conniving bastard in the organization, because they will be willing and able to go to lengths to which nobody else will go.

The second problem with a technocracy is ancillary to the first, and common to all hierarchical systems that focus on some specific philosophy or identity. The positions of power will still come to be held by the most determined psychopaths, but unlike in a more general system, the abusers in power will have an additional claim to legitimacy by paying lip service to the ideal. They’re generally able to act even more destructively than other psychopaths, since they can hide their malevolence behind the philosophy or identity both before and after the fact.

Or more simply - problem 1 is that you end up with psychopathic assholes, and problem 2 is that you end up with psychopathic assholes who have even more power than your run-of-the-mill psychopathic assholes because, after all, they’re experts.

He’s also the junkie who robbed you.

Just your daily reminder that the President of the United States is a raving lunatic who, were it not for an accident of birth, would right now be sitting in the corner of a seedy bar somewhere mumbling toothlessly into a beer.

You would think that he’d be used to it by now, since he’s obviously had the same basic personality since middle school, and everyone undoubtedly hated him then too.

Mm… good point.

My rhetorical question aside, yes - it’s plain that what Zelenskyy’s actually doing is putting Trump on the spot.

But I hadn’t put together that the specific phrasing of it also strokes Trump’s ego - that’s a nice touch

No he doesn’t.

Does he?

No - he can’t possibly. He’s not that stupid. He knows just as well as anyone and better than most that Trump can never be trusted, and especially when it comes to his idol Putin.

So he has to know that Russia could methodically reject or violate every single aspect of this deal, and Trump will just smile and nod and say, “Whatever you want Vladdy!”

So this has to be just a bit of careful rhetoric - an attempt by Zelenskyy to make the responsibility the US necessarily has for this deal manifest, so that he’ll have something to point to later on, when Trump inevitably betrays him.

Fascism doesn’t have a uniquely distinctive economic system per se, but it does generally exhibit a handful of specific features, including private ownership of the means of production, the melding of political and business interests with the notion that support for (specified) domestic conpanies equates to patriotism and lack of support for them to treason, and a “revolving door” by which individuals can and do hold positions of power in business or in government alternately or even simultaneously.