Thoughts in these dumb times

1. Suck off Trump by writing articles. 2. Fail your way up to the top. 3. Be involved in a Nazi scandal. 4. Get promoted after the Nazi scandal. See Kyle Kulinski's piece on Secular Talk discussing a self-described Nazi who wields power in the Trump admin. See Lukium's article in American Manifesto on how to use the term "TEI".

 I stood on the precipice Overseeing that enormous expanse known as the "Epstein Files" And lo, there was not a Somali in sight. Amen.

The US economy, from the antebellum period to the present, has a long throughline of extractivism as its mode of operation, with a disruption during the post WWII era to the 1970s in which capitalism started to work (however imperfectly) for the majority of people. Extractivism is not capitalism. It's neo monarchy, corporatism and neo slavery, with the tools being different but the outcomes largely the same. The white working class has all too often been coopted to see itself as "above" black people, opting for a psychological wage of racial hierarchy instead of a real wage. It has partaken in its own exploitation so long as someone else was being treated even worse. Meanwhile, economic elites (slave owners, sharecrop plantation owners, titans of industry, and now the broligarch AI/tech moguls and neo Nazi/Red Pill charlatan billionaires and grifters) have reaped the benefits and kept everyone else distracted. What we need in this country is working and middle class solid...

More broadly, why are they okay with destroying "God's green Earth"? Dominionism over custodianship. Most evangelicals are entirely scientifically illiterate and are thereby susceptible to the propaganda of anti-science grifters, creationist preachers, corporate liars (PR departments), conspiracy theorists and "Christian" politicians, especially if the arguments of these people are couched in terms of fighting against some "evil," such as abortion, "wokeness" or secular authority. Earth systems science, which incorporates atmospherics and biogeochemical cycles, tacitly involves accepting an old Earth, and for many religious extremists, this is beyond the pale. If science is "wrong" about evolution, then it might also be wrong about the Earth's other natural processes, including climate change, and by extension anthropogenic climate change must likewise be a "sham". "God chose Trump," so if he says that climat...

Isn't it funny how the Trump administration is willing to endanger the lives of trans prisoners but is willing to step in to give a convicted child sex trafficker a transfer to a minimum-security prison?

MAGA is a cult of self-immolation. Grievance and outrage as gospel; revenge instead of reform; living in the ruins of oligarchic dystopia and begging the oligarchs to keep exploiting them. They don't want water to put out the fire, only more matches.

As LBJ said, if you convince the most mediocre white man that he's better than the best black man, he'll gladly empty his pockets for you. The racist Trump administration, which routinely traffics in all kinds of racist tropes as well as the Great Replacement Theory, and which has smeared an entire community of people in Minnesota as "trash", has taken LBJ's statement to its zenith by acting as a giant DEI scheme for stupid and incompetent white men. One such mug is Pete Hegseth, probably the most unqualified Secretary of Defense ever and who is a clown whose only talents are getting drunk, raping women and being a racist piece of shit who loves the Confederacy and deletes the history of the contributions of people of color in the US armed forces. He's also a Christian Nationalist nonce whose favorite pastor thinks women shouldn't be allowed to vote.