WatDabney

The growth stage of a civilization is marked in large part by the fact that people pursue wealth and power by effectively creating it - by recognizing needs and the resources that can be tasked to serve them and arranging the systems by which the needs will be served.

The maturity of a civilization is marked in large part by the mere rearrangement and refinement of the sources of wealth and power that were established in the growth stage.

The decline of a civilization is marked in large part by the cannibalization of those established sources of wealth and power - by an increasingly desperate and ethically and intellectually bankrupt scramble by the most determined rats to steal as much as possible while they can.

The US is well along the way to that third stage, and pretty much the entire point of the Trump presidency and particularly of Project 2025 is to facilitate it.

It's not an accident that the US has militarized police granted essentially free reign, the largest prison system in the world and plans in the works for internment camps.

Human history broadly runs in cycles, yes.

But the history of a particular civilization is strictly linear, with a beginning, a middle and an end.

Humanity is at a crossroads.

Either we're going to solve the problem of psychopaths with power and wealth warping societies to accommodate their psychopathy, or, at the very least, modern civilization is going to collapse.

I see no third alternative. The Musks and Trumps and Putins and Netanyahus (and so on and on) of the world will, if allowed, destroy us all, because they're quite literally too mentally ill to restrain themselves.

Of course they did - the MSM is the public relations arm of the ruling class, and a significant part of their job is ensuring that the peasants don't revolt.

So... in response to Trump's plan to fuck over American consumers with artificially inflated prices so that rich fuckwads can keep paying themselves obecene salaries and dividends, China is threatening to go out of their way to keep prices as low as they can.

That's the most cynically amusing thing I've seen... well... today at least.

Remember - back when he was still the appointee, MTG threatened to release the dirty secrets of anyone who exposed him.

It's safe to assume that that threat still stands, and these are the Democrats who bowed to it.

It's really not.

It really is.

It's mostly nepotism and reproducing the an untouchable ruling class that creates an autocracy.

And all along the way, people protecting the budding autocracy from criticism by diverting attention to the faults of some other system in some other place and/or time.

Put simply; when one system goes too far into autocracy, you should entertain the values of another system.

Um... sure. But that's neither what you were doing nor what I was criticizing, so it's not relevant.

Condemning that is approving of the current autocrats.

So... condemning people trying to shift attention away from the current autocrats by bitching about some totally different aurocrats is protecting the current autocrats?

Are you even trying to make sense any more, or are you just desperately stringing together random claims?

But perhaps you're a particular fan of Trump/Musk.

Just desperately stringing together random claims. Got it.

The road to autocracy is paved with people who meet every criticism of the system with, "But look at how bad this other system is!"

Any system that gives a relative few authority over everyone else will sooner or later become autocratic, simply because that power inevitably comes to be held by those who desire it the most and are most willing to do whatever it takes to gain and hold it, and they tend to be greedy, power-hungry, dishonest, amoral assholes.

As far as that goes, the only real differences between systems are the specific hoops the assholes have to jump through.

Broadly, in a capitalist system, political power is awarded to the wealthy, while in a communist system, wealth is awarded to the politically powerful.

So the greedy, power-hungry, dishonest, amoral assholes follow different paths in different cases - accumulating wealth with which to buy access to political power in one or climbing the ranks of the ruling party in order to gain wealth in another - but the overall dynamic is always the same.

And that's a large part of the reason that I'm an anarchist.

If I had my way about it, I'd have a tree planted over me, but I don't expect to know the difference, so I don't really think about it much.

If the world actually made sense, the phrase "Elon Musk asks court to" would possess the exact same significance (or lack thereof) as the phrase "Joe from down the street asks court to."