It took Rome 1000 years to collapse.

I mean, if you want to get extra snarky, Rome’s still there. Still one of the wealthiest cities on earth, to this day. The infrastructure is what makes the city and that can be repaired or rebuilt, improved even, as generations come to their senses.

More people started living from the survival mindset and actually getting sick impacted their brain. Dictatorships help people feel safe.

I pin this far more on the toxic media atmosphere than COVID, although the pandemic definitely took its toll. That said, the current hysteria around migrants and Woke feels a lot more like the post-9/11 moment than COVID. Democrats rolling over sheepishly while a Republican wields unitary executive power to disappear dissidents and intimidate

What folks on here don’t want to accept is that this isn’t the first time we’ve had a President behave like this. Its not even the first time in our lifetimes (for the most part - sorry teenagers). This is more normal than not, in fact. Reagan’s War on Drugs, Nixon’s War on Crime, Eisenhower’s Red Scare, and FDR/Truman’s Japanese Internment echoed all the same fascist tendencies.

What’s really changed in 2025 is the abysmal long term economic outlook. Liberals in 1984 could duck their heads and glare at the rampant poverty around them and mutter “If those hippie slackers had earned an education rather than smoking dope and fucking around, they wouldn’t get picked on by the police”. But now… fucking kids at Columbia University are being targeted. Surgeons are getting targeted. Judges are getting targeted.

Literally the only thing you can do to avoid these purges is Be MAGA. And “Just be MAGA, you won’t get hurt” isn’t something liberals can quite bring themselves to do yet (although keep an eye on Gavin Newsom and Richie Torries and Andrew Cuomo, because its coming).

Dictatorship isn’t making people feel safe. It’s making them feel terrified and helpless.

It’s not an issue of believing/not-believing politicians nearly so much as it is a media environment that’s fully saturated with right-wing propaganda.

What do you tell a person who has been listening to AM Radio for 30 years? What do you tell a person that was taught Ayn-Rand-o-nomics in High School while the teacher clutched a copy of Atlas Shrugged alongside her Bible? What do you tell a person who has never actually been involved in the higher levels of business management, because our economic model is so subdivided and the commodities so fetishized?

You can’t get mad at the loyal acolyte of a cargo cult for praying to the cargo gods if that’s all they’ve ever known. Neither can you simply ignore the Cult Leader, who has been blaring the message from a megaphone into everyone’s ears, for their entire adult lives.

I have immense sympathy for people who are pre-programmed to get hoodwinked by this shit and I count my lucky stars every day that I only get hoodwinked some of the time and mostly on things that don’t obliterate my quality of life when they come due.

But more than them, I feel awful for the people who come after us, because we at least got to enjoy that World’s Greatest Middle Class Life while it was on offer. The next generation is going to be fed all the same propaganda, but they’re going to be doing it from in the pod while eating the bugs.

Parents aren’t all powerful.

From the perspective of a newborn, they might as well be. Everything you need to be happy, healthy, and comfortable is actively managed by the parent. You don’t understand anything about your condition or your history or your source of care. All you know is the id-based impulses to complain when you don’t feel good and the soothing release of your feeding, playing, and sleeping cycles.

So it could stop any war, any disease, any pain, … but does not.

What would that look like, from a practical perspective? Imagine trying to explain to a baby that you’re going to stick a needle into its skin in order to prevent it from suffering a disease, when it has no conception of disease. All you know is the pain of the needle. Must you conclude, from that pain, that your nurse is fundamentally evil for inflicting this upon you? And that, by extension, your parents are evil for bringing you to this nurse?

“If parents were truly worthy of my attention, they would have found a better method of vaccinating me than this needle!” is the sort of thing you get to say as a child, precisely because you do not understand the underlying nature of the world you live in. All you know is the scolding language of a parent cajoling you into this immediate superficial pain.

Should humankind be incapable of performing wars? What does that look like? Should humankind be incapable of contracting disease? What does that look like? Should humankind be incapable of experiencing pain, even? Is that what you really want? An eternal numbness of being? Is godly perfection just being a particularly resilient tree?

Either it’s not all powerful or not good.

One can be both exceptionally powerful and exceptionally good without needing to draw a distinction between the two. One can be beyond comprehension, as well. But the argument that a single person experiencing a single moment of discomfort disproves a benevolent deity seems to throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water.

Kinda like blaming a President at war for not saying “thank you” to its “benefactor”

What’s crazy about this line is how frequently Zelenskyy has done the “America A#1, you’re the best!” media tour in the run up to this meeting. How many clammy-handed, rictus grin photo-ops does this guy have to do for you people? How many trips does he need to make to DC to say “Hello from Ukraine, I love you!” to Congress? Dude’s entire career as President has just been going abroad and brown-nosing for NATO support.

This reminds me of the British journalists who will cut an Arab liberal off in the middle of an “I am here to condemn Hamas and ask for release on behalf of the Palestinian people” automated response to grill them on why they haven’t condemned Hamas. It’s all just bullying at an international scale. I’m amazed Trump didn’t drag Zelenskyy into the restroom and try to give the man a swirly.

I mean, setting aside the “We’re from the Government and We’re Here To Help” liberalism that American conservatives reflexively recoil at, I do find it disorienting to pretend a heavily rural American breadbasket would need agriculturally scarce Europe to send food aid.

This reminds me of the 90s US effort to do welfare politics in West Africa, by dumping millions of tons of excess agriculture into Trans-Atlantic wholesale markets. The flood of “free” food (with tons of political strings attached) shifted the balance of power to the African urban centers, as local agricultural markets collapsed and people flooded to the industrial centers to get food at below the domestic production cost. Political leadership capable of controlling the influx of foodstuffs rapidly consolidated power within major port cities. This gave rise to authoritarian governments, political purges, and ultimately two horrifying Congolese Wars (the second often referred to as The Great War of Africa).

Obviously, more complicated than this. Along with food “aid” we also delivered a surplus of “military aid” to our regional allies (a list that was constantly shifting between US and African administrations, particularly during the fallout of the failure of the Soviet Union). Then there were a host of local tribal conflicts and score-settling that got ramped up to eleven with the sudden glut of foreign wealth.

But maybe I’m drawing lines where none exist. Can you really imagine how the US economy might be upset by a sudden shift in who controls the supply of cheap imports? Can you imagine what our country would look like if it was flush with small arms or if we had a bunch of local land barons with short tempers and delusions of grandeur? Can you conceive of an America that had a bunch of poorly defined interior borders that suddenly become flashpoints of political tension?

I certainly can’t. Bring on the flood of EU eggs!

You could replace “God” with “Parents” to the same effect.

But arguing that a parent is evil because they see a child committing an error, know it is an error, and decline to intercede doesn’t rationally follow. If you helicopter over your kids and intercede every time they make mistakes, they never develop into independent and mature adults. You also induce a lot of anxiety, as you’re constantly interposing yourself between the child’s desires and actions without the ability to convey the wisdom of your decisions. So the kid sees you as the harmful force, rather than the thing you’re seeking to avert.

So what’s a Parent/God to do? Do you puppet your child, never letting them stray farther than the length of a string? Do you lock your child in a padded ceil and hand-feed them every day? Do you hardwire their programming, so they can’t deviate from your design, acting exclusively on a divine instinct?

Is that really what we consider “Goodness”?

There is also the Calculation Problem to consider. A God-like intelligence might be able to observe far more than a human without being perfectly omniscient. Similarly, they might be able to calculate probabilities more quickly and accurately without being perfectly prescient. If a Parent/God knows most of the things but is not omniscient, does that mean they are unworthy of your attention or the reception of wisdom? At the same time, is it the duty of a Parent/God to restrict the actions of the others in their domain to the things they can calculate in advance? This brings us back to the idea of the Child Prisoner or Brainwashed Child. You’re safe at the expense of any kind of growth or personal liberty. God treats you like a farmer treats a veal calf - perfectly unspoiled through inaction.

And finally, there is the problem of Entropy. A God who can foresee everything and recognizes that Evil is inevitable. Is such a God responsible for this Evil simply because it can perceive it? Is such a God responsible for this Evil simply because it cannot prevent it? Is this flaw in God’s power a reason to reject it as a source of virtue?

Consider Odin hanging from Yggdrasil, his eye plucked out in pursuit of a way to prevent Ragnorak. He is not all-powerful. He is not-all knowing. He is routinely makes mistakes and even acts out of anger, lust, or petty vengeance. He is fundamentally flawed as dieties come. And yet his primary goal and function - to prevent the end of the world - seems noble enough to justifiably cultivate a religious following.

Lost yearly Nitro

You cuck.

Death to America

What really got me was how quickly conservatives pivoted from “Russia is an enemy of all right thinking, red blooded Americans!” during Snowden/Wikileaks under Bush to “Vladimir Putin is the only man who truly cares about freedom and democracy!” under Obama.

Same with Hong Kong, which consistently enjoyed the highest praise in Paleocon/Libertarian circles… right up until the 2019 protests, when half the conservative movement realized this city was fully within the thrall of the Chinese Communist Party. I’ve seen Singapore bleeding support for similar reasons.

People being disappeared in the US isn’t a sudden turn of events. The BLM movement from 2014 revolved around chronic police abuses, including the kidnapping and murder of local residents by municipal police (Sandra Bland and Freddie Gray being two contemporary well-documented examples). Then we had the hundreds of residents tossed into Gitmo and other US blacksites, going back to the War on Terror. And the police terror campaigns during the Nixon-Reagan War on Crime/Drugs and the Eisenhower Red Scare. Hell, we’ve known about police-endorsed lynchings as an American tradition since Emmett Till, ffs.

But we have to pretend this is an Evil Foreigner Thing that we need a strong overseas military to prevent, rather than a sinister domestic agenda that Americans need to rebel against and overthrow. Otherwise, we might begin to see the Thin Blue Line as less of a protective barrier and more of a garrotte closing around our necks.

Its not just a matter of shipping. You need dealerships and licensing and the like. England is notorious for its long line of middlemen who make everything more expensive. So no surprise BYD can’t get a competitive vehicle into a state that hates foreign competition and loves rent-seeking at every turn.

Anarchists recognize class as a social construct rather than a biological imperative or a free market condition. As a result, they will often make a point of transgressing or undermining the pageantry that class-centric organizations cling to.

Its not that they think “no classes” will be a result so much as they think “explicitly defying class” is a political act.