Donald Trump

[Renton 23258]

17 minutes ago, Gemmill said:

 

Blah blah, I'm naive, you're amazed how blind I am etc etc. The usual lecture whenever anyone says anything other than "it's the end of the world as we know it". 

 

Funny like cos you agreed that it was impossible to tell people that they were better off than they were when it was the Tories. They demonised "others" as well but it becomes irrelevant when your life is demonstrably getting worse and the government is failing on the basics. But I'm supposed to believe that Trump is somehow different because he has more mechanisms to tell them. Don't agree. 

 

We'll see though. 

 

This wasn't some great victory for democracy here though, the distribution of votes is scary and it might not take much to flip it. I mean obviously I hope you're right. I'm not trying to doom monger, I'm just reading the signs as I see them. The World has changed by an unbelievable degree since Bowie died, Trump is literally destroying the post WW2 order in front of our eyes. It's not normal, and I personally am increasingly finding it hard to see the off ramp. Us getting poorer isn't solving anything unfortunately, it just makes the extremes more extreme. 

[Gemmill 48923]

It was the worst electoral result in the Tory party's history. 

[spongebob toonpants 4259]

32 minutes ago, Gemmill said:

It was the worst electoral result in the Tory party's history. 

Mainly because loads of their voters were voting for somebody worse. Don't have that option in the US

 

[Renton 23258]

What Spongey says. Funny thing is I live in a bubble, everyone I know is a lefty wokelist. Yet you Gems, you have the evidence of this madness in your Mam and somehow ignore it. I can't explain people's stupidity but that doesn't stop me seeing it in action or where we are heading. Where the US go, we usually follow. 

[Rayvin 5798]

So Trump is purging the civil service, replacing generals with his own guys, and acting increasingly belligerently on the world stage. I mean that's literally what Putin did. So the US becomes a new Russia. 

 

Where exactly are the democrats in all this btw? I mean it does look like a coup - I agree with the received wisdom on that. I'm just struggling with where the organised opposition to it is. So where are they? It's like the democrats have completely collapsed under this, the fucking worthless, useless, arrogant fucks. All those dynasty families that were supposedly on "our side" probably figure that it's not going to get that bad for them at least.

 

Somehow it almost feels like Trump getting that relatively benign first time sucked the fight out of the American people, and now they're stood there handwringing while he attempts to turn their country into the very thing it was created to oppose.

[Gemmill 48923]

15 minutes ago, spongebob toonpants said:

Mainly because loads of their voters were voting for somebody worse. Don't have that option in the US

 

 

8 minutes ago, Renton said:

What Spongey says. Funny thing is I live in a bubble, everyone I know is a lefty wokelist. Yet you Gems, you have the evidence of this madness in your Mam and somehow ignore it. I can't explain people's stupidity but that doesn't stop me seeing it in action or where we are heading. Where the US go, we usually follow. 

 

Lads, they turned away from the Tories when the Tories turned their lives to shit. Because you can't tell people theyve got money in their pocket when they haven't. 

 

That rule still applies to Trump. Whether there are free and fair elections by 2028, who knows. 

[Rayvin 5798]

6 minutes ago, Renton said:

What Spongey says. Funny thing is I live in a bubble, everyone I know is a lefty wokelist. Yet you Gems, you have the evidence of this madness in your Mam and somehow ignore it. I can't explain people's stupidity but that doesn't stop me seeing it in action or where we are heading. Where the US go, we usually follow. 

 

I argued the same thing as Gemmill last time Trump was in power - letting an incompetent imbecile run the country, giving the far right their crack at power, might be what is needed for the illusion to be exposed. But yet here we are, 4 years on, back with the same guy but this time worse. The only thing that could have stopped this is actual change - the only thing we can unify people around is attacking the rich. The right to far right support that notion too, it's the last game in town.

 

I personally view this as a total defeat of Centrism, almost the world over. The status quo is now too shit to maintain, it needs radical overhaul. Wealth needs to be redistributed, society needs to be scaled back from excess. Nothing else is going to cut it now. Trump by the way I think does understand this, but he's identified a separate way to go rather than redistributing wealth - he's going to steal the wealth of other nations and run off the back of that.

[Renton 23258]

1 minute ago, Gemmill said:

 

 

Lads, they turned away from the Tories when the Tories turned their lives to shit. Because you can't tell people theyve got money in their pocket when they haven't. 

 

That rule still applies to Trump. Whether there are free and fair elections by 2028, who knows. 

 

Okay, so the hope is Labour will turn the economy round and people will feel better off then? But in a World where we are still suffering from Brexit, including increased immigration, and with the threat of a global trade war and fuck knows what the impact of AI will be in 4 years, are we going to feel better off? And if not, then what? 

[Gemmill 48923]

I'm not even making an argument for what happens to Labour. 

[Dazzler 11362]

7 hours ago, Kid Dynamite said:

I've read recent stories that Musk is readying a bid for OpenAI and Trump is considering creating a PIF to purchase TokTok. 
 

They also have Zuckerberg/Meta onside by the looks of it, which would leave the worlds biggest narcissist and sociopath influential over Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and X and the future of AI.

 

If it wasn't so terrifying it would be impressive. It's like all your favourite dystopian novels rolled into one.
 

 

The OpenAI CEO has publicly laughed in Musk's face about the offer. Musk called him a scammer - the brass neck cunt.

[Renton 23258]

9 minutes ago, Rayvin said:

 

I argued the same thing as Gemmill last time Trump was in power - letting an incompetent imbecile run the country, giving the far right their crack at power, might be what is needed for the illusion to be exposed. But yet here we are, 4 years on, back with the same guy but this time worse. The only thing that could have stopped this is actual change - the only thing we can unify people around is attacking the rich. The right to far right support that notion too, it's the last game in town.

 

I personally view this as a total defeat of Centrism, almost the world over. The status quo is now too shit to maintain, it needs radical overhaul. Wealth needs to be redistributed, society needs to be scaled back from excess. Nothing else is going to cut it now. Trump by the way I think does understand this, but he's identified a separate way to go rather than redistributing wealth - he's going to steal the wealth of other nations and run off the back of that.

 

Redistribution of wealth is the crux of the problem, I agree. How the fuck that is actioned is anyone's guess. What I would say, before dismissing centrism entirely, is it was centrism that gave people the longest run of increasing living standards and greatest wealth equity in the history of  human civilisation. I'm beginning to see with some hindsight in my case that perhaps the end of that era was the birth of the neocons in the US under Reagan and Thatcher here. We had some periods of respite, but maybe this has snowballed into something worse than I imagined. Oh well, I can't always be right.  

[Meenzer 16198]

21 minutes ago, Gemmill said:

Whether there are free and fair elections by 2028, who knows. 

 

A minor postscript that's actually the entire point.

[Kevin Carr's Gloves 4173]

2 hours ago, Renton said:

 

You're wrong about Trump. When you have total control of the media, you can use it to blame and demonise sections of the population. I think you're being quite naïve if you don't think the fascist playbook doesn't play especially well in the digital age. Your kids are hungry? It's their fault. Meanwhile you subvert all elements of the state including the military and judiciary, steal people's data etc. We are well on the way there. I am constantly amazed how people can't see what is happening in plain sight. 

I'd hope we have more protections in the UK. All depends on keeping Farage and his ilk out though. If they get in, its game over for us too. 

The fascist playbook can only work for so long until it eats itself with the failure it always leads to.

[Renton 23258]

2 minutes ago, Kevin Carr's Gloves said:

The fascist playbook can only work for so long until it eats itself with the failure it always leads to.

 

Yeah, but the last time it took it 70 million lives and that was before nuclear weapons. Germany 1930s was nowhere near the hegemonic power the US is today either. Uncharted times. 

[Rayvin 5798]

39 minutes ago, Renton said:

 

Redistribution of wealth is the crux of the problem, I agree. How the fuck that is actioned is anyone's guess. What I would say, before dismissing centrism entirely, is it was centrism that gave people the longest run of increasing living standards and greatest wealth equity in the history of  human civilisation. I'm beginning to see with some hindsight in my case that perhaps the end of that era was the birth of the neocons in the US under Reagan and Thatcher here. We had some periods of respite, but maybe this has snowballed into something worse than I imagined. Oh well, I can't always be right.  

 

I agree - and I want to say here that my opposition to centrism in recent years isn't a philosophical one. I'm not a communist. It's been entirely based around the fact that all it has been doing in my adult memory is slowing down the car crash at a time when we needed to divert course. We should, at the end of all this, actually get back to centrism for just the reason you state - long periods of uninterrupted peace and prosperity. Possibly with better safeguards next time though.

[spongebob toonpants 4259]

Trumps not even the main problem this time. Musk is going to be unstoppable if he isn't already 

 

https://bsky.app/profile/lewisgoodall.com/post/3lhvue2aqec2y