WatDabney

I'm assuming that the original plan was to excise all mentions of Trump (and possibly of his most loyal cronies), then at least threaten to release everything left (I'm not convinced that Trump really would release it, since it would be more in his nature to hold the threat of releasing it over people's heads in order to extort submission and/or cash out of them).

But then it fell through, most likely because among the data that Musk stole during his tenure was the originals of everything they intended to release, so his threat to expose Trump is credible enough that Trump decided the better course of action was to tell the faithful that none of it ever existed in the first place in order to head off Musk.

"Debate" in this case is actually just the blatant and obvious truth vs. evasions, excuses and lies.

Unfortunately, at this particular point in our history, the evasions, excuses and lies will probably prevail.

Sure - that'd be nice.

But there is no justice in the US, and no amount of wishing or complaining is going to change that. The system is owned by, and explicitly works for, the wealthy few.

And appropriately enough, that's who would suffer if the truth about Epstein was fully revealed - nowhere near as many of them as deserve to suffer, but possibly enough of them to put a bit of fear into the rest, and to give the common people some hope they haven't felt in at least 60 or so years now.

(And it's not necessary that Musk's reputation actually be redeemed - it'd be enough if he just thought it was going to be...)

Right. Epstein had no client list and Donald Trump definitely wasn't on it.

Here's Musk's opportunity to use his wealth for good. He should be able to buy access to the truth, and bring down a whole bunch of very deserving scumbags.

And imagine what that would do to redeem his reputation....

Appropriately enough, that bubble of aging people also holds an outsized proprtion of the political power.

So all they have to do, if they want to ensure that there's a constant supply of young people to do the work, is use their political power to make the country the kind of place into which people would want to bring children.

And I have to say, cruel though it might be, that if they can't even be arsed to do that, then it's their own problem and their own fault.

So?

The only downside to a declining population is that the moneyed class will have fewer people to exploit, and at this point, anything that harms the moneyed class is a good thing.

Oh, and:

Many researchers believe this accelerating global shift is being driven in large part by a positive reality.

And I believe they're wrong. I believe it's driven primarily by the negative reality that much of human civilization (and the planet itself) has been warped and corrupted for the benefit of a relative handful of greedy, power-hungry psychopaths, and more people all the time don't want to bring a child into such a shitty world.

Which also, ironically enough, pretty much dooms the US into being a bankrupt has-been in the future, desperatly clinging to outdated technology that nobody else wants any more, while China easily saunters into position as the new world leader.

Trump continuing his lifelong pattern of patting himself on the back even as he blunders into bankruptcy yet again, except this time he's dragging all of us along with him.

Ah well - it'll be really, really ugly for the US in the relatively short term, but it could be to our overall advantage in the longer term. All of the anbitious psychopaths will go somewhere else to make their fortunes, and the US could be left to just sort of toddle along, quietly decrepit and generally broke, which might actually give us a chance to do some good for ordinary people for once, instead of being warped to serve the greed of psychopaths.

Of course.

Readiness is just an excuse. The explicit goal is to undermine Ukraine for the benefit of Russia. It's not a coincidence that this came immediately on the heels of a one hour phone call between Trump and Putin.

Yes.

Corrupt as it was, it still maintained some degree of independence. It does no longer.

Think of it as something akin to the difference between the period when two separate corporations were part of a cartel in which the larger of the two was by far the dominant partner, and the situation after the larger one has bought out the smaller, fired the entire C-suite and most of the employees and sold off most of the company assets.

Oh absolutely. Minorities will disproportionately suffer and die, but nothing close to exclusively.

More broadly, disadvantaged people will suffer and die. Minorities are already overrepresented among the disadvantaged and under the overtly bigoted policies of the Trump regime, they will be even more overrepresented, but that's just something of a bonus to the would-br oligarchs. They're excited at the prospect of culling poor people, pretty much regardless of the details.

But not clearly defining DEI is key.

The actual goal is to effectively not only legalize but actively encourage discrimination, and that's done specifically by not clearly defining DEI so companies will tend to generally avoid hiring monorities at all, for fear that they'll be punished by the Trump regime.

Turns out that like so many other things, all of the noise about "replacement theory" was just conservative projection. They claimed that there was some sort of determined effort to eliminate whites because they were right in the middle of a determined effort to eliminate non-whites (and non-cis, non-het, non-christian, etc.) and as they do, they assumed/pretended that everyone else is as evil as they are.

This is the way it's going to work, by design:

1. Companies will not only avoid DEI hires, but will avoid hiring minorities broadly, for fear that they'll be accused of following DEI policies and punished by the Trump regime. So minorities are going to end up even more discriminated against.
2. Without sufficient Medicaid funding, employer health insurance will be the only way that most in the US will be able to get healthcare.
3. Denied employment and denied Medicaid, people - and disproportionately minorities - will die.

No wonder the Republicans are giddy.