Slurp gobble.

Trump doesn’t have policies. He has whims, urges, compulsions, reflexes and tantrums.

pushing Democrats to the center

Because that worked out so well for them in 2024…

Anybody who’s surprised by this is part of the problem.

If an organization possesses influence or power that can be abused, then it inevitably will be abused. It doesn’t matter how conscientious people are or how many safeguards are put in place - loathsome, power-hungry pieces of shit will angle for position in the organization, and sooner or later some will get through, and they’ll immediately start shifting the organization to accommodate them, which is to say, to accommodate loathsome, power-hungry pieces of shit. And it’s all downhill from there.

I’m not an anarchist by accident.

All other considerations aside “Thiel-backed” guarantees all by itself that it’s technofascist bullshit explicitly intended to benefit the oligarchs at the expense of everyone else.

Weird how so many techbro ideas boil down to registering your identification with the tech oligarchs…

Right, but it’s also Trump’s personal philosophy.

I don’t think Trump is even capable of considering a coherent ideology - his mind is just too scattershot and too self-absorbed for that.

Rather, I think that what happened is that after his first term. actual fascists like Stephen Miller and Russell Vought and Elon Musk saw Trump as a tool through which they could get what they wanted. They feed his ego-driven tantrums and he demands things because he’s a giant overgrown toddler, and not coincidentally his demands and tantrums align with the fascist agenda that Miller, Vought et al are pursuing.

Weird though it is I sometimes suspect just that.

The sinplest explanation is simply that he’s oblivious to hypocrisy because he’s so narcissistic and so sociopathic that he can’t conceive of any conflicts between his desires since they are all his desires and thus inherently perfect and beautiful, and he conceive of any interpretation of events other than his own.

But there are times, and this is one of them, in which his hypocrisy os so obvious and so brazen that it does feelbaomost deliberately.

And I can actually see it from a warped paychological perspective - basically, he’s demonstrating that niceties like integrity and principles are for the small folk, but as an inherently superior member of the legitimate ruling class, he’s above such things, and entirely free to be just as capricious and self-serving as he pleases. It’s basically an ego flex.

Harmful either way.

Thereby neatly proving that his war-mongering in Venezuela and his hatred for Maduro have nothing at all to do with narcotics.

Well, y’know, except insofar as not providing it leads to death, which makes those other things irrelevant.

But other than that…

If they want to keep the government open, all they have to do is to agree not to take healthcare away from millions of poor Americans.

Yet they refuse.

We actually live in a world now in which the President of the United States explicitly states his intent to overtly violate the first amendment and the media just repeats it as if nothing of any note is going on.

I just think it’s funny that “AI” (which is “artificial intelligence” not in the sense of “human-made” but in the sense of “fake”) is contemperaneous with Trump.

This is going to go down in history (if humanity survives long enough) as the Idiot and Lunatic Age.

From what I’ve gleaned of the ravings of the angry stupid right blogosphere, a lot of people actually do think that only tree huggers want green energy.

And I have little doubt that that’s an opinion that Trump shares, but that’s not his main motivation in all of this. His main motivation is big fat bribes from the fossil fuel industry.

And thanks to Trump, the US is perfectly placed to be entirely left behind.

Spraking of cover-ups:

Someone Waived Ghislaine Maxwell’s Sex Offender Status to Move Her to a Minimum Security Camp in Texas

Yeaaaahhhh… no. I don’t think “stability” is really an accurate descriptor of what the Fed has done.

Their “stability” consists of following policies explicitly and deliberately designed to generate an ongoing transfer of wealth up the economic ladder, and using slanted and incomplete indicators like GDP to create the illusion that their policies are of benefit to the country as a whole.

I mean… yes, it is “stability” of a form- it’s akin to the stability necessary to build a house of cards.

But that stability is revealed to be a fleeting and ultimately ephemeral thing when the house of cards comes crashing down, as this one most assuredly will.

That said though, I do agree that this is theater.

Yes.

Data hoarders are going to really come into their own after the corporations start trying to paywall information - pretty much no matter what it is, there’s somebody out there who has it squirreled away on a drive.

This could get interesting.

Whether or not the Fed “operates successfully” is a matter of perspective - if you’re fabulously wealthy, and particularly if you’re a banker or investor or corporate executive, then yes, as a general rule it does. If you’re anything else, then not so much so.

And Trump’s relationship with bankers et al is difficult, since he’s never been able to browbeat them - he’s always had to lie and wheedle and beg to get money out of them, then when he doesn’t bother paying them back, they have the gall to come after him and try to force him to pay and even to drive him into bankruptcy. Again.

So on the one hand, he likely wants to stick it to them.

But on the other hand, when push comes to shove, they’re likely still more powerful than he is, even now.

On the first point, I’m not sure. I definitely agree that left to their own devices the AIbros would just keep expanding and battling each other and chasing ever more pie in the sky. But I don’t think they’ll be left to themselves. I think the MBAs will move in and take over, and it’ll shift to standard corporate tactics of buyouts and mergers and bankruptcies and liquidations, and inevitable consolidation.

On the second, I agree. I think the web is actually going to effectively split into a commercial system of monolithic corporations and subscriptions and fixed hardware and a much less formal true web of small servers and self hosting and ad hoc networks.