I have the social skills of a cholla cactus and so when someone says ѻɼﻭคกٱչﻉ ץѻપɼ กﻉٱﻭɦ๒ѻɼɦѻѻɗ กﻉՇฝѻɼᛕ I find it only confusing and unintelligible. I did consider making cookies for my neighbors with a notice saying I don’t know how to ዐዪኗልክጎጊቿ ል ክቿጎኗዘጌዐዪዘዐዐዕ ክቿፕሠዐዪጕ but maybe someone else does…here’s some cookies? Mind you, my neighborhood is a tad lower class and has an air of desperation so they may not trust my cookies.

It’s a thought. My kitchen appliances are lent out right now, and I don’t actually know how to bake.

But I seem to understand enough leftist theory to bridge those who, like me, have been brainwashed to see communism and socialism as derisives and terms of contempt.

I’m also going through a psychotic break because a lot of stressors piled up at the same time seventy-seven million voters decided to give the Genie’s lamp to Jaffar.

No, I’m saying the species as a whole is failing because 77 million people could be simultaneously fooled into voting against their own better interests. It shows that democracy can always be subverted. People, brilliant rocket scientists, in the case of my own father, can be tricked by demagogy into backing malicious despots and kleptocrats, and the plutocrats and oligarchs can afford to find and hire them.

Careening towards more than one imminent great filter, it’s going to take some miracles of innovation to successfully navigate them, and more divine providence in sociopolitical theory to reorganize people into some sort of community-focused government system that resists subversion by those who seek power. So while we’re not completely fucked, we’re absolutely playing long odds.

Granted, not all is completely lost. Homo Erectus went through phases where their species was reduced to less than ten thousand, and they had to suffer through a harsh epoch of millennia before recovering and populating the world until they were weeded out by competing cousin species. We may still survive in small, meager tribes, but all this culture is going to be lost, ground into the geological record.

We may get lucky, but that is not to say we can evade catastrophe at this time (not without extra-terrestrial intervention or other deus-ex-machina techological development that its inventor doesn’t try to restrict and license), but a tenth of our population might survive, and every day we do nothing, or stay subjugated to far-right efforts to cling to power, is a day that more of us are doomed to perish, or rather fewer that our world will be able to sustain, while we figure out how to migrate offworld.

77 million people voting for an autocrat is a symptom of a greater problem, one that has plenty of other symptoms, and has shown us we are just not foresighted enough to act early; we can only be rational with effort, and are otherwise prone to emotion and fixed action patterns. It’s easier to blame the weirdos and marginalized in a society, than to recognize class conflicts, or acknowledge the wealthy fuck the rest of us over to retain their wealth and power.

Feel free to provide evidence that I’m wrong. I often present harsh reality as I understand it with hopes that someone knows a development I don’t. And sometimes that even works! But for now, we have to face the dildo of consequences unlubed.

You think political illiteracy is an epidemic only of white European descendants?

When 77 million people do the thing, you can’t really blame it on character. At that point it’s a failure of the species. Don’t worry, we won’t be plaguing the world for too much longer.

Agreed, to the bottom-rung investigators (which includes all the non-agent, non-administrative specialists who, I believe, outnumber the special agents) they’re there to investigate.

And according to Glenn Kirchner, the political leaning is a big regret and big resentment of the investigative staff. And yet, it’s shadow looms over them, as they pressured on issues like going dark seeking less information security and more surveillance powers, that allow for the authoritarian monolith we face today.

If they focused a bit more on seeing justice done and finding the truth through forensic science rather than getting the bad guy by any means including mass surveillance (and neutering fourth-amendment protections of civilians) then we’d be better protected from the autocratic coup / kleptocracy that has a stranglehold on the federal government.

We all sink with Titanic now.

The core values of FBI were lost in the J. Edgar Hoover years when its mission was set aside to attack the enemies of the current administration, Democrat or Republican, Liberal or Conservatove.

Since then, its been a secret police to the bitter end.

Those core values were always about as important as Jesus’ Beatitudes are today, which is to say, propaganda for the idealist novice.

It still smells of automotive exhaust. So they might have idea after all.

That’s because you’re thinking in short term. Hitler and his principals imagined German nobility (such as Göring) inheriting the throne. Hitler didn’t want a legacy of descendants. He wanted to replace Christmas with Hitler Day, and have the society sing Hitler songs and have Hitler bronze statues in every state park.

These processes of transition take a long time. The French revolution had to go through several stages (the Robespierre’s Reign of Terror being only the first one before it established a republic and almost a century before freedom of religion was finally ratified.

The point of right wing politics is to consolidate political power into a single nexus. Typically each despot appoints the next, and sooner or later, it’s going to be blood heirs. Trump probably can’t see ahead enough to recognize his own death, and his handlers could decide he suffers from diminished capacity as soon as it is convenient to do so. Vance is Theil’s stooge, and will be disposed of as soon as he crosses his oligarch masters. They would be next in line.

There are some interesting directions this can take. Borrowing a page from DPRK, they might pretend Trump is still alive and use AI to extrapolate all his public appearances, much the way that Kim Il Sung still rules North Korea from beyond the grave (without the help of AI appearances and speeches)

And the tech oligarchs have a strong interest in anti-aging, so we might see the first computer-simulated billionaire or advancements in keeping billionaires alive for a whole lot longer. Again, though as with Trump, Reagan and Wilson, it becomes the impetus of a leader’s kitchen cabinet to handle a disabled ruler, whether he’s mad, demented or too incapacitated to communicate, hence how we have geriatric elected officials who really can’t make decisions, so their staff decides for them.

In that case, it would be what Jamie Raskin calls neo-monarchy in which successors are still appointed by the current ruler, but also accounts for ideological appointees or kings that don’t expect ever to die and be succeeded. Even then, civil wars will occur between those who believe they’re on the short list, and industrialists willing to sponsor them.

(Extrapolating to the other side of the graph, far left society would distribute power as much as possible. Marx’s ideal was to make everyone politically equal, but we haven’t worked out a perfect means to run such a society without corruption rapidly infecting the process. This is why ideology is not something to be loyal to, but a basic model one develops and improves until it can serve as the rules for a functional system of goverenment.)

I’m a bit of a nerd, but I think it’s super classy to get all your jots and tiddles in order. Tildes and diereses give an air of authority.

But none of this is on brand with Hell’s Angels. We’d have to make our own mötorcycle touring club. (Metal umlaut.)

Nazis are monarchists. Granted, for starters they’ll settle for oligarchy or dictatorship but the end result is getting back to classic feudalism.

That was Hitler’s fantasy at least, to have his principals become his upper nobility and the SS become their landed knights. He was attracted not only to the wotanic gods, but in fact the Wagnerian interpretation of them. It would be as if MAGAs believed not only in Thor, but the MCU version.

In the case of the new Trump administration, Musk is not the only one who wants to control political power, but the tech bros do as well. Vance is Peter Theil’s toady and is Theil’s vector to get his voice heard. They want to be kings, and ultimately kings over each other. It may even result in a violent contest. (Not a gladitorial one between them, themselves, but whatever armies and assassins they can raise.)

The horizon point of the far right is the consolidation of all power to one point, and given they are really into passing that power to their next of kin (or trying to live forever, so far failing) it’s monarchy.

According to Karl Marx in Das Kapital, this is always the bitter end of capitalism, and so, given an unlimited amount of time, eventually we give up on systems that focus power, or have stratified wealth, for something else that works. Communism, anarchism or something we haven’t fully fleshed out yet.

Trump made it super clear what he intended to do, which was entirely in line with neutering the election system and installing a one-party autocracy. Fascism is merely a tool that prolongs peace before discontentment and public unrest. War follows.

The only reason for someone had to vote for Trump was because they wanted a one-party autocracy, maybe because they agreed with the white Christian nationalist movement and its mission.

Maybe they voted for Trump out of ignorance. I’m sure some of the 77 million who vote for him fall into this category. It doesn’t matter. They voted for one-party autocracy.

Maybe they voted out of criticism of the Democratic party. Maybe they were tired of neoliberalism (I sure am!) but what they voted for was one-party autocracy. Again, I suspect no small percentage of that 77 million were motivated this way. It’s happening throughout Europe. But it means they get to duck and cover while King Heron chooses what frogs get eaten.

Maybe they voted for Trump because Harris was not white enough or male enough. Those people, again, voted for the one-party autocracy guy. I can’t tell how many of the 77 million that voted for Trump did this, but the votes that pushed Harris out of the battleground states were single-tick voters (they voted only for Trump, leaving the rest of the ballot blank. It’s a common behavior in US elections.) Guess what they voted for? (Hint, it wasn’t the continuity of democracy in the US.)

And yes, a small percentage (probably millions, still) voted against Harris on a specific issue. She was a hard line corporate neoliberal probably going to do what Obama and Biden did, too little too late. Maybe they’re angry because we’re letting Israel massacre the whole of Palestine. I get that. But what they voted for was: You guessed it, one-party autocracy.

Trump’s entire campaign was about what he’d do as dictator. Project 2025 and Agenda 47 both featured largely the objective of seizing power, consolidating it to the executive, neutering the election system and installing a one party autocracy. Trump may even be looking to being the monarch, and passing the presidency to Don Jr.

So even if Trump voters were shocked and dismayed by Musk’s salute, there was an orgy of evidence and indicators that fascism, dictatorship and a fuck-the-public-twice agenda were on the table if they voted for Trump. It was a Faustian deal from the get-go and they signed on the dotted line in blood.

And in blood they will pay. We’re not even at the find out phase. This is still the prologue.

But yes, absolutely, every one of the 77 million Trump-voters are responsible, not for Musk’s salute, offensive or no, but that we’re staring down the barrel of what it represents.

PS: I have secret hopes that there are a lot of Edmund Pevensies out there, who get they fucked up and want to make right and put heart and soul into the resistance.

Especially because I’d rather this end in overthrow and reform (the Magna Carta ending) as opposed to the China bombing Washington (the Allies storm the US ending) or the nuclear holocaust (the Dr. Strangelove ending)… but all this is speculation.

(Yes, there is the possibility that civil rights lawyers and Democratic lawyers hold off Trump’s agenda and a Democrat gets voted in a mandate like Obama did in 2008, but that will only lead to four-to-eight more years of neoliberalism, after which we’ll get a new autocratic usurper, and we get to play the game yet again.)

PSS: Note this moment, and the flying sabot that is DeepSeek (and make sure you know what it is) because it’s about to disrupt the economic power that the tech-bros were depending on to install their camarilla around Trump. The game of thrones is about to get crazy.

But that argument is utter tosh. Anyone sprouting it is a Nazi collaborator.

So you’re dismissing the (granted, slight) majority of voters in the United States? Or the wave of elections choosing far-right-wing parties over more of King Log’s neoliberalism across Europe?

I mean you can do that. They often seem inaccessible to me. Certainly, my stanch-MAGA father is. But then the next step is for Trump’s weaponized law-enforcement machine to come collect you for the detention centers.

To borrow a quote from Aliens (1986), Maybe you aren’t up on current events, but we just got our asses kicked, pal!

I would have called him a fascist and a monarchist (interested in being king, himself) but memes seem to work better using simple street language unless explaining the language itself.

e.g. The scary part is not the fascism, but the one-party autocracy, which can marry / fuck /kill the public without its consent. The fascism just slows dissent and unrest.

Before his direct involvement, he was more like the BMW and Porsche moguls who financed NSDAP to put down the communists. Though now, yeah, he’s trying to play as a principle official.

It’s a consistent critique. I was trying to play on the current argument that his salute was ambiguous, since so many of Musk’s behaviors before that moment indicated his Naziness, his monarchism and fascism and unending lust for power.

But then I suck at memes, even with practice.

I was trying to play on the current that’s a Roman salute. That doesn’t make him a Nazi with the point that the salute was only his most recent Nazi-indicating behavior, the most egregious of which was buying and ruining a $40 billion social media platform so he could push his monarchist agenda. (With himself being the final monarch. It’s always that way.)

I’m ready to call the United States North Mexico or the Unincorporated British Colony of the Indies

Azathoth just happens to be really useful to make idealism and the simulation hypothesis plausible. Either way, the mechanics that govern the universe are profoundly consistent and are not as fragile as our own dreams / our own simple, buggy simulations. So yeah.

Aargh! Okay, I’m going to fix this and the fine tuned universe argument all at once.

Nature does not care about your silly numbers and hypotheses. All of our scientific mechanics are models of the observed universe. The ones we call theories are just models good enough to be usefully predictive as to forecast outcomes, allowing us to safely land airplanes, build bridges, make safe pharmaceuticals (or super addictive ones, if we want), split atoms safely to produce power (or unsafely to level cities) and so on.

We care about the math and the numbers because they give us results that are consistent with nature. But nature is doing what it’s doing because it’s behaving as a giant causal engine (ever-smaller forces that drive observable phenomena, at least until we get to Planck scale). So when it comes to the fine tuned hypothesis, to quote a Texas physicist whose name I can’t remember These numbers ain’t for fiddlin’

If there are any storm gods at all, anywhere in the world, to the last, they are content to allow lightning to behave strictly according to static-electricity electrodynamics. And ball lightning happens whether or not we have a model that explains it. (Presently, we don’t.)

If one or more of the many-worlds hypotheses are true, no given universe cares what its science-savvy inhabitants have determined and whether their mathematical models allow for models that are factual. Facts don’t care about your feelings. Facts don’t care about your science either. It’s more that the science does is best to describe what’s going on in the facts.

Irreducible complexity is solved.

PS: This also stabilizes the cosmic horror scenario of Azathoth’s dream, that Azathoth gibbers in the center of the universe dreaming its whole, and each and every one of us is a mere figment, who will vanish to oblivion when eventually he awakes: From what we can observe Azathoth has been dreaming consistently for thirteen billion years, and doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to wake up, and his dream is profoundly consistent so that the mathematics we use to send probes from planet to planet, eventually into the outer solar system always works. Azathoth has our back!

No I meant dull, or drab. Fixed.