WatDabney @ WatDabney @fedia.io

Posts

0

Comments

161

Joined

1 yr. ago

Gotta love the brazen irony of eliminating fact checkers in order to encourage political content in the wake of Trump's election.

All the billionaires are lining up to swear their fealty and get a slice of the oligarch pie.

He's cosplaying a father.

That was the plan all along.

All of the Christian Nationalist jazz was just a cover for the dual purpose of winning the support of the religious right and distracting from their real goal, which, from the start, has been to fully institutionalize a government that serves the interests of the wealthiest few at the expense of everyone else.

Yes - to some notable degree, that's the system we already have, but with some important distinctions. Under the current system, there are still policies and agencies and programs to nominally limit the abuses of the wealthy and/or protect the interests of the common people. The wealthy can generally manage to get around them, but that requires exploiting loopholes and jumping through complex legal hoops and greasing palms and, if all else fails, paying fines.

The goal is to eliminate all of that so that the wealthy few are entirely unconstrained - so that they won't even have to pretend to do anything other than expand and protect their own privilege, and there will be no legal recourse at all for all of the people they will exploit along the way.

astroturfed

Ah, the irony...

I think we can take it as a general pribciple that anyone who considers themselves part of a "virtuous elite" and nominally fit to "provide order and structure to public life in order to ensure the flourishing of the ordinary citizens who cannot provide it for themselves" thereby proves that they are in fact neither of those things.

Wait, what?

They actually have the gall to say they stood behind Obama?

Obama's presidency was the exact point at which toxicity and hate became the overt centerpieces of Republican identity - when they stopped even pretending to be motivated by "fiscal conservatism" and instead gave themselves up entirely to just sowing division and spewing hatred.

Hell - virtually the first thing they did was co-opt the formerly libertarian Tea Party movement, which started out, under Bush, as a series of protests against the Wall Street bailouts - and converted it into a traveling right- wing carnival of hate. That became the entire point of it - after the Republicans took it over, the bailouts were never even mentioned again - all it was was an opportunity for right-wingers to congratulate themselves on how much they hated the left, and especially how much they hated Obama.

It's not too much of a stretch to say that everything MAGA has become - all of the division and all of the hatred and all of the lies - traces back specifically to how the hateful bigots among the Republicans reacted to Obama's presidency and the influence they came to hold over the rest of the party.

It's been too long since I read it to clearly remember the details, but yeah - I thought it was awful.

I most remember being disappointed that it deliberately and inexplicably sidelined Flynne, since her character was easily one of the best parts of The Peripheral. I have no idea what the point of that was - it seemed just as if Gibson somehow resented the fact that she was a memorable character and didn't want her to take over the story. Verity, by contrast, was a very weak character, and I remember thinking that it was ironic that she seemed to have no real agency of her own, and instead was just pulled along by the plot.

I can't really pinpoint anything beyond that though - as I say, I don't really remember the details - just my reaction.

Spook Country, to me, was just drab. It was like Gibson laid out the basic plot, which was pretty much just a standard political thriller, then filled in the blanks with whatever bits of technology and pop culture had his attention at the moment. It worked fine as a novel, but had nothing new to say really.

That entire trilogy was pretty poor IMO, and was a large part of the reason that I was so impressed by The Peripheral.

And thinking about it in that light, it's possible that my negative reaction to Agency was driven at least in part by the contrast to The Peripheral - that Spook Country (and more likely Pattern Recognition) were at least as bad, but at the time I read them, my expectations for Gibson were so low that they didn't have the same impact.

Mmm...

I thought that The Peripheral was the best book Gibson's written since at least Idoru, and I was very impressed and pleased.

But I think that Agency is quite possibly the worst book he's ever written.

Probably the one that grabbed me the most was Made Things by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I read Children of Time years ago, but bounced off of Children of Ruin and hadn't read anything else by him. But reading Made Things on a whim this past year set me off on a Tchaikovsky binge that took up much of the rest of the year. I especially liked The Final Architecture books.

The book that I enjoyed the most just in and of itself though was probably Early Riser by Jasper Fforde. It's a fascinating concept, and more straightforwardly written than most of Fforde's books (I like his writing, but he has a regrettable tendency toward style over substance that was refreshingly absent from this one).

How is anyone caught off guard by this?

The Republican strategy for at least the 50 or so years that I've been aware enough to pay attention has exactly and explicitly been to get the base all riled up with brazenly racist anti-immigrant rhetoric, make lots noise and spends lots of money intercepting/deporting some number of people, but ensure that enough still get/stay in, and are desperate enough, to meet the business demand for cheap and exploitable labor.

Trump and his cultists have been extra hateful and extra loud, but aside from that, this is all just business as usual.

It's like they have an asshole purity test, and Musk is too much of an opportunistic asshole and not enough of a racist asshole to meet their standards.

Are there actually people who didn't already know rhat Trump doesn't pay bills?

Yeeeeaah... but see, your analogy not coincidentally fails, since the kitten is just ignorant.

It would be more accurate if the kitten ran into the burning house because some fat, smelly old tom told it that if it did, the tom and his buddies would destroy the lives of everyone the kitten hates.

So yeah - there's a lot of ignorance there, but the foundation that makes that ignorance relevant and effective is bigotry and hatred and an utter and complete lack of empathy or integrity. If the kitten wasn't so blinded by its hatred and cruelty, "run into this burning house to destroy someone else's life" wouldn't have been an effective appeal.

I've been looking forward to this actually.

As far as I'm concerned, automatically avoiding Reddit just by avoiding Google (which I already do) is a welcome bonus.

Imagine how ethically and intellectually bankrupt you have to be to note that publicizing something you do undermines public trust in your office, then conclude not that you're wrong to do it, but that other people are wrong to publicize it.

Government of the working class by the ruling class for the ruling class.

At this point, the most determined and successful opponent of progressivism in the US is the Democrat party.

He doesn't actually want them gone. He wants them oppressed and desperate.

That's actually been the standard Republican strategy for as long as I can remember, because they're trying to serve two purposes at the same time. On the one hand they want to appeal to the racists in their party, but on the other hand, they want to ensure that American businesses enjoy uninterrupted access to cheap and desperate labor. And the two actually complement each other pretty well. They can and do foment hatred and promise mass deportations and all of that to appeal to the racists, but never quite manage to actually solve the supposed problem, or even really make any headway on it, which means that businesses can stil take advantage of cheap and desperate labor and there are still "illegals" for the racists to rail against.

That pretty much goes without saying.

"Privatization" the way the Republicans do it might as well have been tailor-made to appeal to Trump.

Imagine the sales pitch:

"Okay now Mr. President, see this program over here that's carried out by government employees? Just imagine that instead of having government employees do it, we contract with some private company to do it. The government would still be paying for it, but instead of all of that money going to a government agency, it goes to some private company that'd damned well better show their gratitude if they expect to keep that contract."

I can just see him, like Scrooge McDuck, with a dippy smile on his face and dollar signs in his eyes.