… the ‘yo quiero taco bellllll’ commercials?

=P

Trump is the vector, not the disease itself.

The disease is the curdling rage of the (mostly) working class that’s massively failed to achieve the American Dream™ that was promised to them, which has been perfectly heightened misdirected and cultivated by decades of right wing radio talk show hosts, psuedo ‘philosophers’, outright racist and religious extremists, conservative ‘think tanks’ lending credibility to failed economic doctrines, 30+ years of conservative influence on our public education systems essentially ruining it to the point that now only around 10% of Americans are capable of comparing and contrasting news coverage critically… etc etc.

Trump was just the first presidential candidate to completely drop the pretense and show the country that its fine to go totally mask off with your inane bullshit falsehoods, that there is no real need for anything other than appeal via signifiers and cliches and dogwhistle.

Actual policy means nothing, only spin.

Actual hypocrisy means nothing, just sling more baseless shit at others.

Reality means nothing, everyone else is wrong, you know in your heart what I am telling you, no matter how contradictory or incomprehensible it is, is true…

… because it allows you to feel rightfully indignant.

This has always been the strong undercurrent amongst conservatives.

Trump was just the vector that metastisized it into basically mass psychosis.

This really is the idea bouncing through many tech companies heads right now.

Take yourself, give the app enough of you for an AI version of you to be trained on, then have that AI interact with other people’s AIs to… save everyone time.

Zoom is currently trying to make this work for meetings. Meetings suck, right? So here, lets turn everyone into AI facsimiles and have those things ‘meet’ and then just email everyone the resulting transcript.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/3/24168733/zoom-ceo-ai-clones-digital-twins-videoconferencing-decoder-interview

So basically now everyone will just get transcripts of AIs hallucinating at each other instead of actually being present in meetings which probably could have just been an email anyway.

(Zoom is also promoting this ‘new vision’ at the same time they’re demanding their own employees stop working remotely).

The tech bros run everything now and they’ve completely lost their minds.

Hah, well thanks for the idea endorsement, I guess!

Turns out Antarctica actually has some very interesting geography if you take the ice away.

That and the winter being totally devoid of daylight, the summer being totally devoid of night… the aurora australis being visible basically all the night time…

Sets up an interesting world, if you crank the temperature up enough.

Obligatory reminder that Cheney literally does not have a heart, nor a pulse.

His heart was replaced by a continuous flow pump after something like 4 heart operations/transplants/surgeries.

It isn’t at all, but apparently any form of price/cost distribution is indistinguishable from any democratically ‘owned’/managed/controlled productive enterprise.

Using this logic, a giant conglomocorp that uses 10% of the profits from one line of business to internally subsidize an expanding line of business hoping to gain a monopoly there, is socialist.

Just throw on a subscription model where some users barely use the service and others use it maximally, if you need the analogy to be more accurate.

What would actually make an insurance company socialist is if it were a worker owned co-op, where all workers voted on large company policy changes, hell maybe even include the policy holders in those votes too!.. or if the entire thing were a government agency in a faaaar more direct, transparent and accountable democracy than what exists in the US currently.

Well, this is good news in the sense that I am hoping to one day make a video game set in a not too distant future set on a mostly green Antarctica, you know dystopian corporate but also post apocalypse future type thing.

Good news for my estimated timelines being able to shift closer to present, less worldbuilding time gap.

Yep… all good news. No bad news whatsoever.

It is also being actively promoted as a ‘Bastion’ toward conservatives and racists, the way New Hampshire… was… kind of still is? similarly seen by Libertarians.

Oh, and Idaho is attempting to become Greater Idaho, with many of the red, sparsely populated counties of Oregon passing referendums to leave Oregon and join Idaho, with Eastern Washington as the next phase of that plan.

Oh and also also, a huge amount of the 90s militia movement was concentrated in Idaho and around events that sparked there.

The Ruby Ridge standoff happened there in 92.

The Oklahoma City Bombings were done partly to avenge what happened in Ruby Ridge.

In 2020 the so called ‘Bundy Ranch Sniper’, leader of a 3%er ‘militia’ ran for Senate in Idaho.

etc, etc, basically, the Idaho militia movement never died, it just went underground and then came out very openly thanks to Trump.

Racism, religious extremism, gun rights fanaticism … that’s pretty much everywhere in Idaho.

They’re not going to be ‘doing better’ any time soon.

Fortunately I do not currently reside in Texas, I could use some marinara tho

Well I’m still alive, not really better though.

Assaulted and held hostage for a week in my own apartment, causing me serious injuries and eventual homelessness.

Your analogy is confused good sir/madam, obviously patriotic American conservatives would never support an authoritarian culture of mass surveillance perpetuated by the state, they believe in laissez faire, minimal government!

… Its’s Big Whale Day!

Amazing.

Are you proposing the existence of monopolarbears?

Most of the Gen A and younger Gen Z I’ve randomly struck up conversations with in the last year or so have had their brains thoroughly rotted by TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, Rumble, etc.

Avril Lavigne is actually a clone, or Biden is, or Kanye is,

Astrology is completely real and my magic crystals will heal your chakras,

Atlantis was totally real and actually we are all partially descended from different alien species and that’s what ethnicity and race actually are,

‘Insert movie here’ was basically actually real and making it into a movie is the way the powers that be laugh at us,

Shadow Work isn’t just a very loose and differently defined psychological practice of attempting to understand yourself better and come to grips with trauma and negative urges its left you with, its actually that you literally have a shadow demon/spirit possessing you, and if you don’t exorcise it ‘properly’, it will magically spread to other people.

… and I can tell this because I am a naturally born empath who is 100% accurate at determining what other people are thinking and feeling even if they directly tell me otherwise, which actually means that they are narcissists…

and so on and so on.

Of course this is my anecdotal experience, but this is what is normal for me to encounter… as I and the people around me are quite poor.

This image implies they could also be mutually attracted to rub their butts together.

I have literally met high schoolers who sincerely believed the Marvel movies were based on real life events, until I explained to them that no, they’re based on comic books, they are entirely fictional stories.

We already live in the dumbest possible timeline.

Remember how when Idiocracy came out, the general reception was ‘wow this is over the top, dude-bro moron version of the future, not worth serious discussion’, … and now a good chunk of people are looking back at it as ‘well actually, a lot of this seems scarily reasonable?’

The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization.

The human being created civilization not because of a willingness but because of a need to be assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning.

The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms.

The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment.

God was a dream of good government.

You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands.

… prophetic words, one might say.

Anyway… in the sense you are speaking of, the only way to totally kill God would be the erasure of massive amounts of human history, combined with either killing or ‘reducating’ billions of people, and then the institution of some kind of Orwellian totalitarianism, which must basically persist in perpetuity.

Other than something like that… its not possible to totally exorcize the idea of God or Gods from humans… we are pattern seekers, we love simple explanations, and we love stories, narratives.

‘Under’ would have worked and been shorter.

Nothing to throw a hissssssssy fit over =P