Deeply unserious managers of empire continue to self-cannibalize their own productivity in an effort to go even more all-in on financial capital, all while the global south is doing its best to pivot towards more favorable relations with countries like China. When the US Empire runs out of countries to exploit, and financial capital ceases to be profitable, it will have no developed industrial base nor a strong scientifically trained worker base to pull itself back up. The US is cooked, this is just speedrunning the demise of the empire in a faster and harder fashion.
The good news is that the worse this gets, the more favorable the conditions for organizing become, and the more vulnerable to revolution the state becomes. We can legitimately take advantage of this, and gain mastery over capital, rather than the inverse. We can re-industrialize, become socialist, and begin the long and difficult but necessary path towards legitimate progress. It won’t be easy, but it will be doable.
That’s only the half of it. Look at the rest of the policies, look how they want to cut Medicare and food stamps and other safety net programs.
Make no mistake, this administration wants to see people die.
This is the end game the technocrats have been working towards, this is how they’re enacting their eugenics. They want poor people, disabled people, disadvantaged people, to die. They believe they are culling the weak members of the herd for the sake of the betterment of “their” kind (rich, white, “healthy”, etc).
These policies aren’t stupid or ineffective, they are cruel and insidious by design
I still don’t understand their end goal. If everyone exept for them is poor and dying who are they going to sell their stuff to? What will they exploit the people for if they can sell nothing because only they can afford it? Are they banking on becomming the new china and sell everything to the rest of the world? Wouldn’t killing half of your population bite that plan in the ass as a fuck ton of manpower is gone? And if they want to use machines as a replacement wouldn’t removing all the smart people be extremely unhelpful?
They goal is to get rich, they are mostly old, thinking I’m death in 10 years and fuck the next generations. If the country crashed, well then I can continue living in a Mansion in Dubai with an coctail in the hand. Plunder policy.
I think the ultra rich are preparing for the collapse of global civilization in our lifetimes. And they’re preparing by extorting as much wealth from the people as possible, now, to build redoubts to retreat to, and hire private armies to defend themselves, to bunker down until the wars are over.
Their long-term priority is not the financial health of their companies or their countries. Their long-term priority is surviving World War III and global mass starvation on an unimaginable scale.
Look. Climate change is really fucking bad. However bad you think it is, it’s worse. And the global economy is really fucking fragile.
Think about what happens when China or India get hit with a major drought and hundreds of millions face death by famine. Or when the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets go and a billion people in coastal cities are flooded out. Economic disruptions, supply chain breakdowns, a refugee crisis beyond anything the world’s ever seen. And as nations get more and more desperate to feed their own people, as the world produces less and less food and less and less clean water, war becomes inevitable.
And war will break supply chains even more. People who aren’t locally self-sufficient in food and water won’t be able to get food and water from outside their area. Even people who are self-sufficient will become less so as climate change fucks with agriculture. Result? Billions dead of starvation.
(In this interpretation, Trump’s obsession with Canada and Greenland makes a lot more sense. When the ice caps melt, that’ll be some of the most valuable real estate on the planet.)
Who will they sell to? Nobody. The ultra rich are planning for a future where global population is under a billion and most survivors have been knocked back to subsistence farming. They’re setting themselves up to be the techno-feudalist lords of a post-capitalist, post-democracy society.
Deleting science education just helps keep the peasants quiet, so they don’t realize what’s happening until it’s too late.
(Okay, alternate explanation: the people in charge are old men who want to make as much money as possible before they die and don’t care about the long-term future at all. That’s a much more banal explanation, but more likely to be true - after all, the environment is collapsing now because oil executives in the '60s and '70s looked at the very accurate predictions of climate change their scientists gave them and thought “who cares, I’ll be dead by then”. But Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, the other young-ish technocrats? I think they know collapse is coming and are using it as an opportunity to build a new post collapse world in their image.)
It is not hard to understand if you think that money is just a number, practically is just used to obtain power and influence, and they’re using it for that. Once everyone is a slave, what do you need to sell
We’re moving towards an economy of low volume luxury good vs mass produced goods for the average person. Basically the floor will just keep rising until less and less people can afford things. The people who still can afford things will be getting nicer and more expensive stuff as time goes on.
It’s probable that they’re betting on technological innovation to bring about a post-scarcity economy where profit and capital are irrelevant. And relatively speaking, that could a good thing.
The issue is instead of taking a reasonable utilitarian approach, these people would rather lean on things like:
unmitigated greed
racism
a romanticization of historical imperialism
the social construct within the Western capitalist mindset to incessantly seek new frontiers of exploitation
and the insidious belief that other people don’t deserve to participate in such a society; either because of their beliefs or because of immutable characteristics that deem them unworthy or otherwise burdensome to the system.
IMO, the tragedy is that while the rich want to bet on consolidating enough capital to shoot themselves out into space, the statistical likelihood that they will find anything within reach that even remotely resembles the beauty and habitability of our planet is very low. Too bad they will kill all of us first before realizing that.
Something something, when we cut down the last tree and poison the last river…
I still don’t understand their end goal. If everyone exept for them is poor and dying who are they going to sell their stuff to?
I’m increasingly believing that they don’t actually care about anyone other then themselves.
Their only goals are self-serving greed.
And the methods they intend to use to serve that narrow goal are extremely short sighted and lacking any peripheral vision.
The whole conspiracy theory of the new world order feels more real every year. Make everyone suffer so they have no choice but to submit to the oligarchs.
People are already having trouble finding jobs. Cutting food stamps and Medicaid feels like pieces of making people suffer in a bigger plan.
The suffering is just a side effect. Massive death is the goal, they just don’t want to have to get their hands dirty.
Make no mistake, this administration wants to see people die.
They want to see people suffer before they die.
Wait, the bottom ones are PreK-12 students.
How are they planning to reduce the number of children?
Is this why they hired RFK?
a dumb population is easier to control than an educated one. They don’t plan on reducing the number of children, no they need more to produce for the wealthy. What they need are dumb kids that will grow into dumb adults. uneducated adults are more likely to have A LOT of kids. So you strip education, you strip healthcare, you make abortions illegal across the board, thus you force the population to keep pumping out new workers. many will die, the strong idiots will survive.
They’re turning the country into cattle.
Nah see we gonna use AI to train the kids instead of teachers. Also gotta make sure the AI uses the correct training data, like how the world is 6000 years old and the gays are a sin.
Number of children, being educated. Surely we could do that.
Surely this would help with the decaying birthrates.
“All you need is Jesus” -MAGAcucks
A healthy, broadly educated population, which feels safe and secure, are incompatible with, and toxic to, conservative and authoritarian ideologies.
They need you to be sick, stupid, and scared.
Turning the US into Russia 2.0
As an outsider, I honestly and sincerely invite anyone to explain how any of what’s going on in the US today isn’t as American as apple pie and school shootings?
America is still slightly ahead of Russia there, due to the legacy of the USSR. Not that Russia’s billionaires aren’t doing their best to privatize education and keep it out of reach of the peasantry since the fall of communism.
the oligarchs of russia sends thier children to elite or standard western colleges, russian is a shithole even for them for education.
Yeah, and a lot of the 56% college grad rate is boomers who were educated before the fall and are now dying off. We will see it drop precipitously in the next 20 years or so, and the quality of the education of the newly graduated decline.
Russia is actually significantly better to live in than America, and it is a total shithole.
Every good authoritorian dictatorsihp first goes for the educated people cause smart people know this shit is fucked… hitler, mao, polpot, stalin, lenin never failed to do this.
A country for REAL (white Christian male) Americans.
When are you people going to get the message. It was never a country that was about equality. It was about enrichment for a select group of people. When their privilege was threatened, the veil came off.
None of this changes until the rest of America decides enough is enough. That might never happen. If it does, it won’t be for years or decades.
The US died on Jan 20th, 2025.
I’d argue Citizens United was the death blow.
I’d argue Nixon started it.
I’d argue Johnson sealed our fate when he rolled over for Confederates after the war.
But really the argument could bemade that the moment European explorers realized they could just kill people and take their homes away and nobody would stop them, they decided to make it a core part of their identity by rationalizing everything they can, and dismissing whatever they can’t.
The devil works hard, but colonizers work harder.
I’ve figured this out. If MAGA gets rid of all the smart people, they won’t seem as dumb anymore!
This reminds me of a particularly hilarious scene from The Death of Stalin where they have all the country’s best doctors lined up to save Stalin after his heart attack, but they are all bumbling idiots and Stalins men get angry about how incompetent they are until someone reminds them that Stalin literally killed all the best and most capable doctors in the soviet union out of paranoia.
And so, Stalin dies.
Here’s to hoping for a similar result.
Huge news for the WW3 odds. ✍️
As non-american I’m becoming increasingly convinced republicans are actually lead by traitors wanting to destroy the US.
I dont think that’s it.
It’s an overwhelming case of “got mine”.
Like sanders said, being a GOP member just means staying in line.
Since Trump is Putin’s puppet, that makes sense.
Yeah pretty much, Trump had ties to the Russian mob. Beyond that, they probably poured money into the MAGA movement for God knows how many senators. Putin won. Well played really.
putin have pouring into the gop for a long time, and almost all the right wing governments elsewhere, why do you think the sudden rise of right wing govt all at once, plus they also fund alt-right groups like racial supremcy groups. isreal is similar, just by the USA (which is the most right wing western country even before trump)
Russia is funding all the right wing politicans and groups but trump is definetly a russian agent without a doubt. you dont get permission to cross the iron curtain willy nilly.
Putin said he would have preferred biden in charge as he is “more predictable”.
Because former head of KGB would definitely never lie in public…
If you want to continue to lie to yourself, I won’t stop you.
Yet, he will lose to Ukraine.
The Handmaid’s Tale was a premptive documentary.
Wanting? No. But they see the impending collapse and rip the copper out of the walls.
Explain why you would intentionaly get rid of cost saving EV’s? Either they are a total cult, of actively trying to make America as miserable place to live as possible.
GOP’s decisions only make sense if they are in it for the sadistic thrill of torturing and killing millions.
I mean, they aren’t particularly smart and will make huge blunders. But they’re still smarter than those neoliberals who try to keep the empire running like a cartoon character in midair
So is every racist government.
So do the Democrats…
I hope they fix their system, but I have no idea how they could.
They need more parties. The two party system is forever broken
First past the post is also forever broken as it inevitably leads to a two-party system.
Never played a conquest game where you stop researchers from giving your empire a tech advantage over others.
Narrator: It did not.
It’s a popular strategy for Fascists.
the Nazis and the OG Fascists did it, and so did the communist Chinese.
China currently churns out more college graduates than any other country, and the rate is increasing.
And they had a hell of a way to go given that it was less than 1% when they took over.
China currently is not communist either.
They stopped killing academics at around the same time they stopped being communist.
Incredible, more than 100% wrongness
What makes you think that? Nazi Germany was very interested in science and engineering, at least in the disciplines that develop weapons.
at least in the disciplines that develop weapons
So interested they declared quantum physics an anti-Arian idea that should be exterminated and forced almost everybody with any knowledge that could help in making a nuclear weapon out of the country…
They ousted all Jewish and all politically non-compliant scientists. They were interested in science, that’s true, and according to their world view, eliminating “inferior” scientist should have enhanced the quality of the science done by “superior pure blooded Aryan Übermenschen”.
While still being pro-science, they did cripple their scientific community on ideologic grounds. The communist regimes did the same.
MAGA being outright anti-science, the effect will be far more devastating.
And still some people think it will be fine in 3.5 years.
Oh my god it’s only been half a year D:
5 months, he was inaugurated January 20th
Fuuuuck this is depressing
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
It absolutely won’t be.
But it might be moving in the right direction.
Regardless, will take decades/generations to fully recover from this, if ever.
Especially given that even in the best case scenario the period of recovery will be 8 years maximum. No matter who will be the next president, the one after will be another angry conservative, and I don’t believe there will be a lot of progress after.
No, you’ll never recover. Your previous status was the result of a very specific set of historical circumstances (specifically the fact that you were the only major power left standing after World War 2) that aren’t going to repeat. If you fall, the best you can hope for in terms of recovery is to equal the other developed countries of the world. You’ll never exceed them again.
Which is fine. Really would love to not have a fall happen, but ultimately if the rest of the world can thrive and move forward even with our current idiocracy taking hold, I can live with that. All I hope for is that this will pass and we can rise up from it.
Unfortunately Americans cannot stand being told they don’t live in the greatest country on earth. It’s a wonder that fascism took this long to win in the US, because it’s fundamentally hyper-compatible with American Exceptionalism which every American besides a tiny fraction of far-leftists believe to be inherently and unshakably true.
Where do you go from there when most of your population wouldn’t accept a trade alliance that doesn’t massively favor the US? Because even if Trump is impeached tomorrow that’s what Fox News will be running all day every day to successfully torpedo anyone attempting to rebuild the country.
I believe the same. They will recover eventually, but they will never be a superpower again.
Or another way to look at it- cutting nearly 75% of scientists. Can’t have climate change if there’s no one working! Watch them find some money to give to ExxonMobile to ‘study’ the impacts of fossil fuels. Wonder what that report will say! /s
No need for the /s I fully expect that is what will happen. Also a great firewall, so yanks can’t access unapproved information from over seas
I used to wonder how did the Islamic Golden Age end, how did the Muslim World go from leader in science, technology and commerce to has-been. Now I see leaders in the West destroying in years what took centuries to build. Civilizations like living organisms go through cycles of birth, rise, peak, stagnation and decline, some make a comeback in a different form like Europe after the Renaissance and China after Communism, and some don’t. Good thing we have other nations picking up after the decline of Western Civilization.
The Islamic golden age ended because of centuries of European crusades followed by the mongol invasion. It had little to do with a lack of appreciation for science and scientists.
But there is only so much scholars can do, when under relentless attacks by barbarians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age
This period is traditionally understood to have begun during the reign of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (786 to 809) with the inauguration of the House of Wisdom, which saw scholars from all over the Muslim world flock to Baghdad, the world’s largest city at the time, to translate the known world’s classical knowledge into Arabic and Persian.[4] The period is traditionally said to have ended with the collapse of the Abbasid caliphate due to Mongol invasions and the Siege of Baghdad in 1258.
Probably more important is the next paragraph:
There are a few alternative timelines. Some scholars extend the end date of the golden age to around 1350, including the Timurid Renaissance within it,[6][7] while others place the end of the Islamic Golden Age as late as the end of 15th to 16th centuries, including the rise of the Islamic gunpowder empires.
The Ottomans managed to siege Vienna centuries after the end of the Golden Age. They were not that behind in technology. Really the big change happened with the industrial revolution, which the islamic world mostly failed to implement. However at least the Ottomans managed to do a good enough job, to stand the ground against the Brits. Of the none Western world only Japan and depending on how you look at it Russia was better at adopting Western science and technology.
Iran and Moghul India did much worse though.
Well, actually, the US intervened in the islamic world.
Their golden age was long gone.
They might have had another if the US hadn’t pushed them around.
