LOL yeah - a pyhrric victory at best.

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. — FDR, as Adolf Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany, 1933

:fire: :death:

So the teenage girl-screwing creep is out of the mix — oh, what high standards the GOP has!

So the teenage girl-screwing creep is out of the mix — oh, what high standards the GOP has! — Mikie

It's very telling of the entire republican party being so ignorant and bad at speaking out against these creeps and behaviors of Trump and his closest circle of people that the entire party is immoral.

How much proof is needed?

If you are a republican, are you supporting this or not? If not, then speak up, if so, then you're just as immoral as them. And if you're against it, but fear them, then bite the damn bullet and organize together into a new party. Take the loss if that leads to a loss in the next election through diluting the voters between the two factions. Eventually your moral faction of the republican party will gain in popularity and snuff out the immoral trash of the other. The Lincoln Project already tries this, support them, gain their strength instead.

Republicans turning a blind eye towards the immorality makes them complicit in the immorality. Either take a stand against it or embrace it, either way, the current state of republicans is that of immoral bad people. Doesn't matter where you stand politically, that conclusion is solid.

Trump transition teams turns to Project 2025 to fill positions with Trump supporters

It's very telling of the entire republican party being so ignorant and bad at speaking out against these creeps — Christoffer

Yeah, there’s really no parity. Both parties are bought by corporations and are comprised of wealthy people educated at Ivy Leagues, generally — but anyone not locked in the “go team” red/blue tribalism can still see the differences. These nominees are beyond satire.

It’s just that people have stopped caring. They don’t trust anything, they don’t know anything, and they’ve now been influenced by something even worse than “mainstream media” — social media “influencers” and memes. :vomit:

They’re isolated on their information islands, transported there by big tech algorithms, addicted to their phones — all for profit. Not a great situation. You see it in polls where it’s asked if the stock market is doing well and Republicans say it’s awful, when it’s at record highs. I assume the same can be done with Democrats.

We’re no longer in the neoliberal era, it’s claimed. We’ll see. Biden was neoliberalism lite, Trump is just an idiot — so anything is possible. But what eventually emerges will be interesting to see. And how it disseminates to the masses via this strange media landscape.

I agree with everything there. Trump and everything we see is the symptom of the modern condition.

We’re no longer in the neoliberal era, it’s claimed. We’ll see. Biden was neoliberalism lite, Trump is just an idiot — so anything is possible. But what eventually emerges will be interesting to see. And how it disseminates to the masses via this strange media landscape. — Mikie

I think post-truth-ideals have taken over from neoliberalism. It's not a value system, but a sign of neoliberalism breaking down. The values of neoliberalism have programmed everyone to only be looking out for themselves; both as a sense of having a strong identity standing against the world, as well as stopping to care for anything. Everyone is in a bubble thinking they can exist without having to interact with anyone else but who they choose to. That they're not affected by climate change, economics, war and so on.

Communism was something that previously stood as a counter-weight to the neoliberal change. But since the fall of the Soviet union and placing communism's tyranny on full display as a failed system, it's more or less died out and neoliberalism could rage freely. We have the playbook for communism, we know how it played out, but we haven't truly for neoliberalism until now. We're starting to see the terrors of what it really did to our culture. And in the hindsight of the future I believe we will look back at the peak of neoliberalism just as we look back at the peak of failed communist empires obscuring the tyranny and terrors at its core. We will have an historical context showing identity enforcement and the tyranny of isolation that failed to organize people into movements for the betterment of humanity. Failing to organize the world into dealing with something like the climate change for instance.

Trump's authoritarianism is a clear sign that neoliberalism is ending. I'm only hoping it inspires a new world order to form around less authoritarian views as people get fed up with that form of fallout from the ending neoliberalism. And that the world finds a better equilibrium between the liberal values of freedom and the necessity of collaborative collective projects and systems that help people and improves life for all.

I don't think that's really a dream scenario, because I'm seeing how fed up people are with how things have been run over the past 50 years. No one wants a communist state, people don't want authoritarian leaders, they don't want a state boot, but they also don't want the soulless capitalist neoliberal machine just grinding them into mindless dust in which the existential dread of being reach a climax of absolute meaninglessness. People crave for a system that actually works, something well-planned and intelligent.

It might not look like it with all the trash and unintelligent brain rot that's going around, but you can see it in people's eyes... they're tired. They want meaning. Some go back to religion, only to find themselves in the same mess of incoherent ideas that it had. But some look for more collective coherence, something that connects people beyond the superficial realm of online trash that is algorithmically controlled social media.

People need big projects, big movements, stuff that connects and builds towards something profound or that gives a sense of it.

One example of how neoliberalism has reached its end and is about to fall is young people's interest in only short form TikTok-style media. The entertainment industry became democratized with the rise of YouTube and short form media to the point that it took the formula of commercials as the main media format. TikTok and Instagram reels functions like commercials, one after another of short form content. It flipped the idea of watching a show with commercial breaks into the commercial format being the main form of entertainment. But there's very little substance in this format, not because it's uncreative, but that it doesn't have the time to form deeper meaning. It's like looking for answers to existential questions in the commercial breaks on TV.

But young people have started to behave lost, finding themselves dissolution and without a sense of actual meaning. We're seeing a peak of this soulless consumption of the neoliberal market and that soullessness is beginning to become clear to everyone. There's a reason why we see trends like the vinyl records making a comeback. It's not because of some hipster-nostalgia, but for the purpose of slowing down and be more personal with things like listening to music. People are leaving social media or don't care for it as much anymore; they're mostly using it as a main form of communication with friends and family, but not as an identity sign post.

This form of anti-behavior against the plastic shallow nature of neoliberalism will build something new, it's a movement that is yet to have a specific form and core idea, it's a reaction that I think is the seed for what's to come after neoliberalism as a system of values truly crash down.

One of the better takes I’ve read:

https://apple.news/AEToGjqpLR4aQxsRScVmgVA

Absolutely true. But…there’s still a majority in this country that isn’t into Trump. They didn’t turn out for Harris like they did for Biden, and there’s good reasons for that too. That’s the other side of the coin.

One of the better takes I’ve read:

https://apple.news/AEToGjqpLR4aQxsRScVmgVA — Mikie

:up:

Also, Fox and friends are entertaining, like The Jerry Springer Show. Has been referred to as entertainment, for that matter.^{(thedispatch, logicallyfacts)} Compare to more sober, boring, ordinary news channels.

The source-memes and whatever it all is (plus the amount of that stuff around), begs the question of where they came from and who wrote them. Determining (and perhaps poking at) their murky origins might be worthwhile.

The implosion continues.

Compare to more sober, boring, ordinary news channels. — jorndoe

Tik Tok and all the rest — something like 50% of users aged 18-29 use it to catch up on politics — are much flashier than Frontline or 60 Minutes, let alone reading a paper. That’s just the way it is right now. It’ll change, but whether for better or worse I have no idea.

So, Biden pardons Hunter. Me, I think it was perfectly justifiable, but what's the bet that within a New York minute, you know who will be citing it in support of pardons for January 6th felons.