sp3tr4l

I appreciate your optimism, but my realism says no, no we probably won't.

We've got a maximum of 20 years, probably closer to 10, before millions, and then tens and then hundreds of millions of people around the world will be starving to death and attempting to mass migrate due to climate change, which we will not stop or mitigate.

Governments around the world will continue becoming more authoritarian.

Maybe we can make small, individual differences in our personal lives, but no, barring a worldwide overthrow of capitalism in some way that also does not result in a collapse of mass agriculture...

No, we are looking at famine, destruction and chaos, and decent, critical thought oriented education will be an even more minor funding priority for all but the ruling class and their neo-nobility children.

54% of American adults have the reading comprehnsion skills of a 5th grader, or worse.

How?

Republicans have spent many decades defunding public education, with no effective pushback.

If you cut off the last two or three lines, you can see this as a screenplay for an extremely gruff, overworked guy who is intentionally dismissive.

If you cast the guy as more attractive than the girl, then the rest of the scene plays out with anon as a chad who just does not care.

If he maybe cares, he can further 'chad' by looking at his watch, saying "Well, if you need help looking for em, I'll be here tomorrow" and then him leaving.

There are still quite a lot of places in the US where either by State law, or the terms of your apartment rental contract, you can be punished for toking up in your own place.

They are considering charging people with treason though, and this is the group of people that keeps screaming about how people convicted of treason should be executed.

... And Trump and his ilk keep saying they want to deport at least a million people a year, which is logistically impossible without directing segments of the military to do it.

... And he keeps saying he wants to use the military to crack down on 'the enemy within', including military tribunals for basically any prominent politician or journalist he's offended by, as well military deployment to put down any riot or protest involving anyone to his left.

... And then there's Stephen Miller's Plan.

Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, has publicly declared that they would pursue such an enormous effort partly by creating a private red-state army under the president’s command. Miller says a reelected Trump intends to requisition National Guard troops from sympathetic Republican-controlled states and then deploy them into Democratic-run states whose governors refuse to cooperate with their deportation drive.

Such deployment of red-state forces into blue states, over the objections of their mayors and governors, would likely spark intense public protest and possibly even conflict with law-enforcement agencies under local control. And that conflict itself could become the justification for further insertion of federal forces into blue jurisdictions...

That would be a ... pretty... totally, complete and overt transformation of the military into an overtly partisan force, you know, potentially setting up different State's National Guards into direct conflict with other State's Nat. Guards and local authorities.

Yuck yuck, Private Red State Army, yuck yuck, Red Army, yuck yuck yuck.

... Oh and of course Trump just keeps yammering on about overtly politicizing courts, the FBI, you know, just everything.

Vivek has said, stone cold, either being an utterly incompetent idiot, or a decent liar, that his plan for downsizing the civil servant workforce would be to just take every gov employee, if their SSN starts with an even number, fire them, then of the remainder, every SSN that ends with an odd number, fire them.

75% reduction in overhead, and, I again stress that Vivek delivered this all completely seriously... He said this would have absolutely no negative effect on the ability of these agencies to perform their duties.

... And then you backfill that with totally unqualified people who just basically check off enough MAGA loyalty points, akin to how Christian scholars and scientists at fundamentalist think tanks have to sign a faith affadavit.

...

I guess maybe ... 'baby's first Stalin-esque purge' would have better captured that this would likely (hopefully?) be more inept (initially, at least) at direct mass murder and imprisonment than the NKVD's terror under basically the direct command of Stalin and Beria.

... Or, maybe Trump will actually go completely nuts, you know, fully commit to the bit.

It's kinda the whole problem with an absurdly singly powerful person backed by a like minded, well positioned bunch of amoral cultish bureacrats, in a government system that offers fewer and fewer effective barriers to the enacting of whatever they decree:

You can basically only count on them being either incompetent or not sufficiently pissed off, or distracted by some other random bugaboo issue.

Update: Apparently, RFK wants to send... ? Create a voluntary program ... ? ...

... where everyone who is currently on any prescription drug for any mental disorder, as well as hardcore drug addicts...

... to farms. Where they would have no phones, no TV, no contact with the outside world.

And this is being pitched as a detox program.

So yeah, got a Ritalin prescription? Wellbutrin? Lexapro? Zoloft? Adderall?

Off to the farms. Just work in the fields through your massive and abrupt withdrawals.

Alongside fentanyl addicts, who are of course notoriously well mannered during their withdrawals.

https://futurism.com/neoscope/rfk-jr-adderall-labor-camps

To me, this is the genius of Ikea instructions.

No words. None.

Just numbers.

Legos for adults.

If you cannot figure out how to assemble Ikea furniture, you're too stupid to be trusted... basically at all, with any responsibility for anything, imo.

Unintentional maximal wrongness unlocked!

=P

I guess one 'benefit' of living in clown world is that a whole, whooole lot of ludicrous nonsense scenarios that would normally be relegated to something like a joke HOI4 mod are now plausible enough that you can't say 'well that would never happen'.