WatDabney

Broadly, it’s because Musk and Trump are both psychopaths. That’s the real foundation for everything else - the simple fact that we’ve allowed ourselves to be ruled by people who are obviously profoundly mentally ill.

As a direct consequence of their profound mental illness, they have no honor, no integrity, no principles, no morals, no ethics and no comcern for anyone or anything other than themselves.

So the only thing that could possibly stop them is force, and the federal courts have no way of applying that force.

Inevitably, all hierarchical organizations end up on the wrong side of history.

In hierarchies, people compete for position.

People with principles, morals, integrity and/or empathy will have choices that they simply will not make.

People without those things are not constrained. They can and will make whatever choices might benefit them, with no regard for the consequences to others.

So all other things being more or less equal, psychopaths actually have a competitive advantage in hierarchies, and hierarchies end up effectively rewarding and thus selecting for psychopathy.

If he was going to, he’d do it, then brag about it.

The fact that he went out of his way to proactively say he would means that he most certainly will not.

They’re explicitly trying to get them killed.

And at some point they’re going to succeed.

They didn’t make that DEI accusation because they expected it to be true, so the fact that it’s so patemtly false doesn’t matter.

They made the accusation just because they’re hateful, bigoted pieces of shit trying to appeal to other hateful, bigoted pieces of shit.

Truth means nothing. Hate and greed are the only things that matter to them.

“Dark times” is putting it mildly.

I expect they’re going to be digging mass graves before this is all over, and Trump is going to be added to the list of worst mass murderers in history.

I wish I was kidding.

Very true.

I still think “class war” is the most accurate term for it though, and the fact that the working class isn’t (yet) fighting it is just the biggest reason that the moneyed class is winning (so far).

Those who could do something about it won’t.

Those who would do something about it can’t.

It’s class war. It’s been class war all along.

That’s why the courts and the legacy media and the bulk of the political establishment have been at the very least enabling him - because what he’s in fact doing, and has been doing since the beginning, is working for the explicit benefit of himself and his moneyed class cronies, to the detriment of everyone else.

Yes.

And some people recognize that it’s not a matter of if the world burns, but merely of when, and believe that sooner is less bad than later.

Sometimes accelerationism is the least bad option.

Most of those ‘sectarian’ spaces are the end result of anti-sectarian attempts

This is a vital observation, and not just in this narrower context but in the broader context of leftism subverted by authoritarianism.

The thing is that we actually can have instances free of sectarianism. All it requires is a population among whom enough people hold to the value of non-sectarianism to not only establish such spaces, but for them to continue to be non-sectarian solely because nobody succeeds in driving wedges (or better yet, nobody even tries). And again, this dynamic holds in the broader context and not just in this narrower one.

But of course the problem, at whatever scale and in whatever context, is that we don’t have such a population, and there’s no indication that such a population will come to be in our immediate future either.

And that’s the exact point at which it starts to go wrong.

Through some combination of indoctrination and irrationality-driven-by-impatience, some number of people, faced with that fact, decide that that means that what we have to do is force it into being, which is inevitably doomed to failure, since it essentially boils down to establishing a hierarchy by which some claim the authority to eliminate hierarchy and prohibit authority.

For the purposes of the autocrats though, a group that isn’t really a group is the best kind.

If nobody’s a certain member, everybody’s a possible member.

Accused of sexual assault

Isn’t that a prerequisite for a position in the Trump autocracy?

For the most notable examples of which I’m aware, go back to the period surrounding the subprime mortgage debacle (which he defended), the real estate market collapse (which he insisted wasn’t going to happen literally right up to the moment that it did) and the subsequent Wall Street bailouts (which he supported).

Krugman has been odd lately.

After spending decades slavishly carrying water for the moneyed class, he’s been on a notable anti-Trump lately.

Which implies two possibilities - either he’s finally developed some principles and integrity at this late date, which is unlikely, or the moneyed class support for Trump isn’t quite as universal as the broligarch stranglehold on social media has made it appear…

Future historians are going to have a field day with the fact that, by making pardoning the participants in his failed 2020 coup attempt one of his first official acts in 2025, Trump clearly signaled his intention of destroying American democracy and justice.

There’s a new game in town, and it’s called “don’t even pretend that ethics matter any more because they don’t.”

The only rule is that you have to let Trump and his cronies get away with anything.

The reward is that Trump’s criminal “justice” system will let you get away with anything too.

And most of Washington is already playing.

The masks are coming off.

I’m proud to say that I’ve never once bought anything from Amazon. Long before Bezos started to reveal the depths of his psychopathy, the company just grossed me out. There’s something about businesses that are that large and that dominant that just makes my flesh crawl (the same reason I never shop at Walmart or eat at McDonald’s or get coffee at Starbucks or…)

But at this point, it goes way beyond that - Bezos, alongside Musk and Zuckerberg and Ramaswamy and Thiel and so on - is a direct threat to humanity. He and the other would-be oligarchs, under the umbrella of Trump’s ego, are deliberately setting out to destroy the ideals of liberty, democracy and justice in order to build an autocracy in which they will be the masters they believe themselves rightfully to be, and the rest of us will be relegated to being serfs, slaves or corpses.

Wat Dabney is a minor character in Terry Gilliam’s first non-Python movie, Jabberwocky.

The protagonist, Dennis (Michael Palin) goes to the city to make his fortune as a cooper. One of the first people he meets there is a legendary cooper named Wat Dabney (“the inventor of the inverted firkin”) who’s been reduced to begging because he’s not a member of the guild that controls the trade.

I first adopted the name on IMDb, back in the late 90s, but retired it when IMDb shut down their general interest forums, and didn’t use it on Reddit. I revived it for Lemmy.