You, populous mob of fickle appetites know not yourself or those you find as your enemies.
You are flat landers in a game of so many dimensions and sides, those you are familiar with are those least likely to be “real”, or the complete explanation by meaningful measure.
Trump is a masterful opportunist, and a man practiced in brinkmanship.
Listen to your own words. You are a scuttlebutt scavenger. Popularity is a curse, the world wants to eat and shit everything and everyone for their compulsive desires.
Let us look in terms of those determined to take upon themselves the terrible burden and those letting it cascade to the chorus of malcontents.
Veering offtopic a bit... Google lost its (search) way years ago. See the "The Man who Killed Google Search" [1], and the room they left for alternatives like DuckDuckGo.
At work, we have full access to Claude, and I find that I now use that instead of doing a search. Sure it's not 100% reliable, but neither is search anyhow, and at least I save time from sifting through a dozen crappy content farms.
The same, I suppose, as using Wikipedia to get an overview of a topic, a surface understanding, before following the citations to dig deeper and fully validate the summary.
I installed Mint on my Alienware and uninstalled Steam on the Windows partition. My tolerance for this BS is pretty high (and I just don't want to spend time on this), but it broke even my patience.
I’d like to use that extra processing and efficiency to get longer battery life when the phone isn’t doing anything special, and to have better performing apps.
> No one has the power to save America from itself.
Wrong!! Please don’t say that! We all have power inside the US. Congress had the opportunity in 2021 to correct the wrong, but Republicans kowtowed and they are still doing so. That was the easy way. Now for the hard way, American people will have to do something about it.
The current situation is bad, but this is just doomerism.
The current administration will end. Trump can't live forever. His approval rating is already low and falling.
We're in for a bumpy ride, but then it's going to start reverting toward the mean. Not necessarily back to the way things were, but periods of extreme like this are followed by a reversion to the mean more often than not.
They way the current administration act, I start to think that their plan A is to stay for a long long time. There is so much open corruption that half of them would land in prison really quickly and they don't seem particularly bothered by that fact.
You're thinking about it with the wrong basis. They will not land in prison because they broke enough enforcement mechanisms to escape punishment. The administration will end, but the regime will not. Even if Trump died tomorrow, enough people have followed him through the holes he created that things will continue. You will of course have factions form and have those factions fight amongst eachother as they head off in their own directions, but the factions will exist in the first place. There is no way to stop them from forming and pursuing their goals without building new enforcement mechanisms, which they will obviously and vehemently impede the construction of. These people will likely die of age before they spend even a second getting a burning hot de-lousing shower and an orange one piece. This has happened every two decades in the U.S. since Reconstruction was sabotaged and prematurely ended.
Always amusing. So sure. I like to imagine the conversations at the begining of the late bronze age collapse, or perhaps aristocrats of the western roman empire living in Gaul.
"To say anything that challenges the current trajectory is doomerism. We're in for a bumpy ride for sure, but this will all correct itself. _it has to_."
Five people are voting on what to have for dinner. Three people vote for pizza. Two people vote for "You three." Pizza has won, but there is still a massive problem in that room.
Gonna have to force-feed them enough pizza, maybe tricking them that it's causing the other three great pains to give it to them. Fortunately, it's been shown that these people are very easily tricked.
I don't think you can really state that right now as certainty, it's becoming part of the illusion of continuity, this administration has shown how fragile the institutions holding American democracy together are.
The Pandora's box has been opened, it's not doomerism to see how unprecedented actions have been taken by this administration and not be sure of what's come next, you've never lived through something like that.
I had much more trust in your institutions a year ago, after 2025 I really do not believe the USA will be able to revert toward the mean anytime soon. The ultimate test for it will be the midterms, if the election this year goes well without a hiccup it might signal there is some institutional power still left in American democracy; on the other hand if there are hiccups, meddling by the federal government, and its allies (including the rich elite behind a lot of these people), it will just cement my opinion that the USA's democracy is in a death spiral.
But don't be so trusting, the cracks are obviously showing and are being exploited, just wishful thinking won't help at all your society at this moment, it's better to be a bit more doomerist and act against these actions rather than just "trusting the process" because if you end up losing the process the bottom will fall out.
I hope the OC said that in good faith, but I have my doubts. I think it's just a gentle way to accuse people like you and I of having Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Trump is not the problem, he’s a symptom. The problem is the roughly one third of Americans who think he’s great, and to a lesser extent the roughly one third who don’t care.
After all that’s happened, his approval rating is still above 40%. Those people aren’t going away or changing their minds any time soon.
'Oh gramps, for once, stop talking about the war'.
People really don't want to hear those stories because it makes them uncomfortable. I'm in an absolute minority in that I wanted to hear the stories even if they made me uncomfortable. But the vast majority of the people would love to get through life without learning history's lessons and as a result are much more likely to repeat them.
reply