General Discussion

I am not American, but some of the people closest to me are..

Or no…wait..they are in an undisclosed location in uhhh Australia.

The truth is that I have stopped contacting people I know who live over there - white, nonwhite, even republican (I have Republican friends! Well not quite, but I know some irl decent humans who were at least honest conservatives) or democrat.

Seeing as they are across the board honest, I can’t see them appealing to Trump once any confusion is out of the way.

People can be so daft over politics - parroting the rubbish that is mainstream. I wish we could pressure Jon Stewart into running. That would be kinda mean to Stewart since well-meaning leaders are hated as much the assholes. And no one will be able to fix the mess these assholes leave behind and our ahistorical society will blame whoever gets handed this mess. But someone has to take a hit for team humanity and a little too much agreeability aside, Stewart is trustworthy as Nathan Robinson pointed out.

Sleazy grifters/sellouts/sycophants/bullies of some kind or another are the only people Trump appeals to on a long enough timeline. No Kings is a very appropriate slogan that way.

Hell..I am a rubbish scientist. But today if I turned on academia and enthusiastically championed the GOP (Beaglegate!!!), I would probably find it easy enough to ..actually no..I would have to be a totally different human.

Even bullshit grift and hustle take more energy than I have. One of my main complaints with these out of control surveillance and bs economies is that absent the motivation required for truly worthwhile, non-performative work sans creepy drivel and panopticons run by sleazy morons, I give up entirely. It takes so much concentration to do real work that it is way harder for any but the apolitical. And it worries me if scientists who do worthwhile work now have to drop that and protest all the time. At least I was a lousy scientist no one wil miss. That is not true of the scientists I valued most.

No political party is any sort of path to science. But since Colbert’s reality’s liberal bias thing (that too in such a right shifted world) is true I do come out as left of centre. Jon Stewart’s Al Sharpton thing I suppose. Only someone with no prospects can. And if I ever have any, as much as I avoid realpolitik close to my actual life, I have to file some complaints.

The Republican-Democrat dichotomy alone is out of touch with these times imo. Oligarchy is a close partner to fascism and this article does not really address that. Probably because
Esquire is owned by Hearst. That writer is only allowed to go so far in the truth to power stuff.

The business class of a player type does not like instability to the point where their profits are affected. And that Upton Sinclair quote pretty much nailed it - the disingenuousness of the person whose livelihood depends on promoting drivel as meaningful work.

Which is why the business class routinely trashes the public sector and wants to dispense with the kind of regulation Lina Khan and the Warren wing of the party (the one I am sympathetic to aside from the Bernie faction) was bringing in and absent that it truly is a bandaid.

My sole overlap with any GOP adjacent headspace is sardonically eying even a rattlesnake like Hawley and wondering if he could have a stopped clock, pest control function wrt the mercenaries of Google, Palantir, Microsoft, Musk etc..probably for the worst reasons, but I have scant sympathy for mercenary Perilaus types like Shyam Sankar and Sundar Pichai. Anyway he is one of Thiel’s so that is unlikely.

Anyway…

It does alarm me that I do avoid people I know by now - some of the most respectable people in society by even the most exacting standards I kid you not. That cannot possibly be right…

This is fucked up. Thanks The Prole. Good article. I do not know about footsteps, but definitely serious accountability and for the tech overlords who are gaming democracy as well.

A significant failure of the Obama administration was entertaining people like Larry Summers and the creepy technocrats from Google/Facebook etc.

Without holding the oligarchs and corporate overlords of Musk Inc/Google/Facebook/Palantir/Microsoft/Oracle/Hollywood/ some of the press accountable it will all be more kayfabe and rearranging deckchairs.

Things have been rotten a lot longer than Trump and it is sourced to a private sector coup of the state dating back to the Obama era.

I myself am gearing up to file complaints in my country about appalling rot.

I was a publicly funded scientist and never had a problem with the normal NIH. I had many problems with Google and this permacrisis has made it impossible to avoid this low effort stuff I am dubious about. But the high effort stuff needs checks against this to work.

I have contacted a few left leaning journalists I can trust to not turn things into a spectacle. What I cannot allow is my being used for what happened to Dr Fauci. I am a complainant, but not stupid.