I’m roundaboutly reminded of one of my favorite novels - Greener Than You Think, by Ward Moore.

It’s a science fiction story about the end of the world that was written in the late 40s. The proximate cause of the end is all of the landmasses of Earth being smothered by a gigantic and very aggressive strain of Bermuda grass, but the real cause is the utter and complete failure, due to ignorance, greed, selfishness, short-sightedness, incompetence, arrogance and so on, of every attempt to combat it.

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Even “the pot calling the kettle black” isn’t enough to sum this up.

It’s more like “the pot calling the salad bowl a pot.”

In a somewhat metaphorical but nonetheless very real sense - most politics is effectively snake oil.

There’s a set of people who exhibit a particular combination of mental illness and natural charisma, such that they feel an irrational urge to impose their wills on others, a lack of the necessary empathy to recognize the harm they do and the personal appeal necessary to convince others to let them do it.

There’s another set of people who feel an irrational sense of helplessness - who want to turn control of their lives and their decisions over to others, so they can just go along with a preordained set of values and beliefs and choices rather expending effort on, and taking the risk of, making their own.

And just as in any more standard “snake oil” dynamic, the first group, exclusively for its own benefit, preys upon the weakness and hope of the second. Just as in any other such dynamic, the people of the first group make promises they have no intention of keeping ultimately just so that they can benefit, and the people of the second group continue, irratiomally, to believe those promises, even as all of the available evidence demonstrates that the promises are empty.

Candidates for public office should be required to undergo a mental health assessment as part of the process of getting on the ballot, and those who score beyond (above or below, as may be relevant) particular thresholds are barred from seeking office.

I sincerely believe that there’s no single thing we could do that would provide more benefit to the world than to get sociopaths and narcissists and megalomaniacs out of positions of power. Each and every one of the most notable and contentious politicians in the world today is, if you just take a step back and look at them honestly, blatantly profoundly mentally ill. Enough is enough.

Well damn.

No - I very deliberately used round peg in the square hole, initially just to avoid the cliche, but the more I thought about it, the more I liked it.

Conservatives pound on round/natural/organic/smooth pegs to try to force them into square/artificial/contrived/rigid holes.

I liked it anyway…

In all seriousness, I sort of pity conservatives.

They’re sort of like the one kid in kindergarten who could never manage to figure out which plastic peg went in which hole and would just get frustrated and throw things. Except that they never grew out of it. Here they are, twenty or thirty or sixty years later, still unable to grasp the simple fact that the world just is what it is and the round peg isn’t going to go in the square hole no matter how much you pound on it, and still angry over it, as if it’s some sort of vast conspiracy rather than just the fact that they’re fucking morons.

That has to be an unpleasant way to live.

Of course, they’re such vile and loathsome and destructive assholes that my pity is short-lived, but still…

Just another step toward making used-to-be-Twitter a safe space for cowardly fascists.

Who said anything about the “owner class?”

The oppression I’m talking about is that which the “vanguard party” (the new owner class) will direct against those of the people who don’t submit to their claimed authority.

“People’s Army” = the violent thugs in the employ of the new state, to replace the violent thugs in the employ of the old one.

“Support of the Proletariat” = the alternating oppression and indoctrination of the people will continue, under new management.

And all in support of:

“Vanguard Party” = the new ruling class.

I think that for many of them, it’s actually sincere. It’s not a cynical strategy to continue failing to actually represent their constituency and get elected anyway - they actually believe that those on the left who oppose them should be ashamed of doing so.

As a general rule, people aren’t consciously evil and destructive. Some certainly are, but many (most?) live in a sort of fantasy world in which they’ve framed their evil such that it’s at least justified if not actually good. They rationalize and excuse all of the concessions they make and build up this whole framework in which what they’re doing is right.

And then when they look out at other people from within that (warped) framework, it really does appear to them that those who have not chosen to do as they do are wrong for having done so, and thus justifiably shamed.

And they never stop and pull back and try to analyze things from another perspective, since to do so would risk destroying this whole fantasy world they’ve built - all of their rationalizations and excuses and comforting misconceptions would come crashing down. And they can’t allow that. So they just cling to the fantasy, which means, among other things, charging ahead with the (mis)perception that their critics are shamefully wrong.

I just hope that maybe with the death of the Boomers and Trump turning the RNC into a circus that is very much a minority with younger people that the republican party as we know it is not long for this world. Maybe the current democrats move into that spot, and someone a little further left will emerge.

If ours was a reasonably healthy system, I think that’s exactly what would happen. And it wouldn’t be the first time something like that has happened.

The problem though is that the Republicans - or more precisely their think tank advisers - recognize that that’s the way things are headed, and the party is determined to stop it by any means possible, which basically boils down to undermining education and access to information to keep as much of the public as ignorant and misinformed as possible, and to destroy democratic institutions, discourage voting, gerrymander and expand the police state in order to counter those who will stubbornly end up opposing them anyway.

Broadly, there are three possible paths a party that’s gotten to the point that it no longer represents the will of enough people to be a contender can follow. It can reform itself, it can allow itself to be eliminated and replaced, or it can arrange things so that people are conned or forced into supporting it anyway, in spite of the fact that it’s really in almost nobody’s interests to do that. And the Republicans have very obviously chosen the third path.

And our system is so broken that they might just succeed.

Pretty much, yeah.

The Republicans are able to overtly promise to do things the corporate jackals want, and just spin it a bit so the voters will think it’s for them. They can promise to cut taxes (and not mention that that’s just taxes for the rich) or promise to downsize government (and not mention that they’re just going to eliminate regulations to which corporations and rich people don’t want to be subject), and so on.

The Democrats are in a much trickier position, since there’s no way to spin their intention of working for the benefit of the corporate jackals as representing the will of their supporters, and they can’t sincerely promise to do the things their supporters expect without alienating the jackals and cutting into the flow of that sweet, sweet soft money. So they’re stuck either making vague, wishy-washy promises that they then don’t keep, or just being overtly moderate-at-best and trying to shame leftists into supporting them anyway.

Cynically I presume that the Dems keep trying to court moderate Republicans because if they can get enough support from them, they can justify sticking with a moderate platform that allows the DNC to continue collecting enormous piles of soft money from corporations.

In order to appeal to the more progressive younger voters (and make no mistake about it - appealing to them would GUARANTEE victory), they would have to adopt a platform that would cut into thise enormous piles of soft money.

And they’re just not willing to do that. The simple fact of the matter is that the DNC values the money more than it values actually winning the election. If guaranteeing the ininterrupted flow of soft money requires tactics that mean the Democrat loses, then that, to them, is just the way it goes.

And after the fact, they’ll just blame someone else - almost certainly the progressives.

This is what an utter lack of integrity, ethics, scruples and reason looks like.

That’s so perfectly Turkeyish.

It’s a funny place - so obviously a result of its geographical location. It had its era of power-struggling against other Mediterranean civilizations, but as soon as the known world expanded out to include Asia, Turkey, stuck literally at the crossroads between the two, started playing both sides against the middle. And that’s what it’s done ever since.

Churches getting in on the “privatization” racket and Republicans getting another source for kickbacks.

It’s a win/win for… well… nobody actually, other than the churches and the politicians.

Imagine how much better the world would be if there was just a simple process of psychological screening for would-be politicians, and psychopaths were barred from holding office.

I would presume it’s not paid yet (though the CEO certainly is). That phase of the operation comes later.

For the moment, they’re working to solidify as much control as possible of as much of the fediverse as possible, which control will allow them to gatekeep it, monetize it, extract rent from it and inevitably enshittify it. That, so it’s hoped, will be the phase during which their investment now will pay off.

So… by my count, the board of directors actually outnumber the employees.

At a “non-profit” (until that was revoked) company that gets most of its funding through Patreon.

Years from now (and at this rate, not very many of them), when people wonder how it was that such a promising venture that championed decentralization turned into just another enshittified megacorporation squatting over a piece of internet real estate and extracting rent to pay obscene salaries to a handful of executives - this is how. We’re watching as the foundation is being laid, right now.