“When a state has weathered many great perils and subsequently attains to supremacy and uncontested sovereignty, it is evident that under the influence of long established prosperity, life will become more extravagant and the citizens more fierce in their rivalry regarding office and other objects than they ought to be. As these defects go on increasing, the beginning of the change for the worse will be due to love of office and the disgrace entailed by obscurity, as well as to extravagance and purse-proud display; and for this change the populace will be responsible when on the one hand they think they have a grievance against certain people who have shown themselves grasping, and when, on the other hand, they are puffed up by the flattery of others who aspire to office. For now, stirred to fury and swayed by passion in all their counsels, they will no longer consent to obey or even to be the equals of the ruling caste, but will demand the lion’s share for themselves. When this happens, the state will change its name to the finest sounding of all, freedom and democracy, but will change its nature to the worst thing of all, mob-rule” - Polybius
Doge won't defund NSA domestic spying
When you have money-men masquerading as engineers, your stock market loses a trillion dollars in value when real engineers do their thing.
They use the word “egalitarianism” in their critiques of democracy because they know most Americans don’t understand it means they’re angry about women and non-white people having any measurable amount of equality with white men.
An Adolf Eichmann in every seat
The GOP may "save" TikTok at the 11th hour. It'll be neutered and more tightly-controlled than it was before. Then the mainstream media outlets (Rogan, Carlson, et al) will trumpet what a great bipartisan move it was. Fascism unfailingly creates faux problems out of nothing to take credit for fixing them so it doesn't ever have to actually fix real problems.
Meta will either backdoor their own encryption for users or eliminate it altogether.
I’m not so sure folks are fully grasping why Donny is threatening the rest of the world with tariffs. Or what it means, really. American consumption and wendigo capitalism are what drive the global economy. Millionaires line up for the chance to catch a bit of that unhinged, never-sated, American public consumption of their products. It’s what generates vast wealth that allows middling entrepreneurs to pay for their grandchildren to never work a day in their lives. Americans are cattle and the whole world is either suffering from American consumption of natural resources or they’re fully relying on it to sustain their own existence. And without American consumption, a lot of globalized economic value craters instantly. So when Donny tells foreign corporations he is going to impose tariffs, he is threatening to cut them off from the faucet. To limit their ability to exploit American citizens. And that’s it. Foreign corporations are not scared of the tariffs because they know that domestic American corporations will just raise their own prices to match it anyway because greed is king. There won’t be some big gap in price between imported and domestic products. Logically, this sounds absurd. But if you think it won’t unfold like that, then you just don’t really grasp the USA or what actually happens in the markets over here. Covid was a perfect demonstration of how it will play out IF any tariffs ever land at all as Donny claims. All companies will see that consumers have no other choice and they will all raise the price on everything so it’s more or less in the ballpark with the competition. Sure, it might be a few dollars cheaper than the imported competitor, but both will be 30% more expensive than they were the year before.
Grammatically correct but semantically meaningless: the Jordan Peterson story.
If a news outlet or politician talks about drones right now being something of note then they’re not reliable or serious people. They’re grifting in character. 100% of the time. No exceptions.
Project 2025 demanded and voters delivered an Adolf Eichmann in every seat possible.
They'll test Elon Musk's neural implants and space travel calamities on prisoners and people slated for deportation. It'll be the 21st century rhyme of Nazis testing drugs and hypothermia treatments on prisoners.
Media outlets unironically focusing on the public reaction to the assassination of Brian Thompson instead of the context and cause of the murder really just diminishes their own credibility. They’re saying this is a sign post of our national demoralization or uncivilization. They said the same hogwash about the submarine full of liquified billionaires. For them, it isn’t the school shootings or the neo-Nazis marching with tiki torches that indicates a crumbling of decorum and civility. It’s the end of a demon who worked to eliminate culpability and enforced a policy of practicing medicine without a license.
Walking around talking to an LLM on your cell phone is the 2024 equivalent to the bluetooth earpiece.
The normalization of face masks in the USA is THE silver lining of the COVID pandemic.
Every company with a streaming platform trying to shove poorly-made and unoriginal as fuck spy thriller series in everyone’s face for Christmas.
If a news outlet doesn't have an RSS feed then they're not doing serious business.
If X owns all accounts on its platform then it is solely responsible, legally and morally, for all the content on it. Pretty sure CSAM is a felony.
Do social media users really think they own their account?
Only a boot licker would insist an invaded country should not fight back.
Americans by and large don’t care about Palestinian genocide. Just like they largely didn’t care about the European purge of Jews in the 1930’s and 1940’s. The idea that anyone who voted for Trump did so because they believed Harris wasn’t good enough on the issue is absurd.
"Five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four."
Educated people are now, and always have been, the biggest suckers. The easiest marks.
Trump isn’t a cause. He is a symptom. Getting rid of him will only solve the problem of having to hear him all the time. It won’t fix any of the problems that brought him to the halls of power.
A really bad video of the eclipse
Hanlon's Razor must be observed
I'm not terribly religious, but the 6th chapter of Matthew is an all-time banger.
we are back online
I'm supposed to believe some comedian reading American news articles is the authority on things? Is this peak idiocracy?
Best analysis of Aleksandr Dugin's vision I've found yet. If you have any memory at all then you might have some reaction
Ephemeral databases are ideal for pages like this.