Obama, Reagan, Bush and Clinton weren’t fascists.

Obama and Clinton were neoliberal to their bones, which meant lots of Realpolitik and backroom handshake deals with fascists in order to drive down the bargaining power of labor and transfer enormous volumes of wealth to business aristocrats. Whatever you might say of their methods, the consequences of their militarism abroad and their austerity economics at home was a steady rise in global fascist tendancy.

Meanwhile, if Reagan and Bush weren’t strictly qualified as fascists, they ran as close up to the line as they could get. Religious demagogues who leveraged a business media vomiting up disinformation and race panic to cultivate a white nationalist base of support and overthrow basic democratic institutions at home and abroad. The Brooks Brothers Riot was a coup in every way that mattered. Iran-Contra involved attempts at the illegal overthrow of multiple governments. Extremely fascist.

look, I know the Weimar Republic had its problems

The German state was doing a holocaust well before The Weimar Republic. They were just doing it to brown people in Africa, rather than white people in Eastern Europe.

Shark Island concentration camp

This is more than just “Pobody’s Nerfect”. It’s marginalized because it happened to people that modern western pop-historians don’t like to talk about on The History Channel or during NPR Story Hour. But it is absolutely fascism.

The invasion of Iraq was Fascism. The invasion of Grenada and the overthrow of governments in Chile and Honduras and Brazil and Argentina was Fascism. The constant feeding of racial resentment and inflaming of conspiracy theory among Florida Cuban ex-pats is fascism. The racial hysteria at the US/Mexico border is fascism.

Trump didn’t invent any of this.

Too much Ketamine

otoh, if DOGE really manages to mess up Social Security payments, there’s no way the GOP can recover.

Republicans straight up nuked the economy in 2008 and they were back in the Congressional Majority two years later. Same thing happened in 2020.

Gerrymandering makes many of these maps mathematically unwinnable for Democrats

Point to a second Republican that has actually been punished for their criminal misconduct.

Is Matt Gaetz in jail yet? Did Dick Cheney spend any time behind bars? What about Richard Nixon?

Adams has a small die-hard base of hustler-culture types and reactionaries who will keep voting for him. That’s where he’s getting his 8% approval from. But he’s dead weight against Cuomo, who wants a coronation based on name recognition, rather than a street fight with Zohran Mamdani.

So Adams is dropping out in order to clear the way for a Cuomo primary stomping. Meanwhile, he gets to salvage his pride by running as an independent against a guy whose own pile of dirty laundry will be all over the street by election day, which gives him a non-zero chance of keeping his job.

At the end of FFX,

not handing off the title of World Superpower to China

They put in the hours. Maybe they’ve fucking earned it. But if it makes you feel any better, most of the BRICS are rocketing upwards and positioned to match or eclipse the US by the end of the century. That’s just what happens when you implement modern industrial policies under a more egalitarian social system. Spreading the wealth engages more of the population in high value productive activities that benefit the national economy in the long run.

After you’ve built a broadly productive economic engine, the only thing holding you back is the size of your productive population. At that point, policies like universal health care and efficient mass transit really start paying dividends.

The basic graphing technology used by AI is the same pioneered by Alta Vista and optimized by Google years later. We’ve added a layer of abstraction through user I/O, such that you get a formalized text response encapsulating results rather than a series of links containing related search terms. But the methodology used to harvest, hash, and sort results is still all rooted in graph theory.

The difference between then and now is that back then you’d search “Horse” in Alta Vista and getting a dozen links ranging from ranches and vet clinics to anime and porn. Now, you get a text blob that tries to synthesize all the information in those sources down to a few paragraphs of relevant text.

what if they all come up with that because it has been publicised

Then I’d ask who published and where they got their analysis from. Very possible that we’ve got an AI that’s built up a backlog of Harvard Business Studies and CalTech economics models to reach the ideal hypothetical tariff regime. But it’s just as likely they’re ingesting 4chan reposts of Ron Paul Newsletters and Michael Savage radio transcripts to build up its economic background.

That’s sort of the problem with AI. There’s no specialist-driven guidance on what data is valuable and what data is crap. No litmus test to separate fact from fiction or serious discussion versus trolling. And these western developed models, in particular, are very bad about including the origins of their graphed logical output (because that would make the process of hashing and graphing more expensive, in a system that’s already inelegant and resource intensive).

I just glanced at it and wouldnt know how something like that is even supposed to be, so I dont really know how unhinged the tariff rate thing is.

The problem is less that we don’t know how bad the tariff rate is and more that the people designing the policies don’t know either. They’re fishing for answers in the answer pond, and they don’t even know if they’ve got a fish or a boot at the end of the line.

Go outside, there are no bugs.

My neighborhood is alive with cicadas every night and there’s no shortage of mosquitoes biting.

I’m inside the Houston loop, too. Not out in the boonies. Spiderwebs in my garage. Toads in my drainage ditch. I assume they’re eating something.

I drove from Victoria BC to Fairbanks AK three years ago without washing my windshield.

That’s pretty normal in the winter. Try it again after a big rainstorm.

decades ago, houses were affordable, college was cheap, Americans weren’t crushed under mountains of dischargeable student debt, wealth disparity and effective wages were far better, and we had a far more functional political system.

For Middle Income White People in Certain States

But we also had the hanging threat of nuclear war, leaded gasoline in the air and painted all over the walls, Satanic Panic, an AIDS epidemic killing millions of people, several large market crashes that deindustrializee the Midwest, and $7/gal, and a Global War on Terror.

None of this was indicative of better economics or a functional political system.

I can’t think of much that hasn’t gone downhill since 2016.

mRNA technology premiering on the eve of a killer pandemic leaps to mind.

Women don’t want to be approached in public.

I think the problem is that men don’t want to be approached in public. Or in private, for that matter. Half the joke of this is how antisocial, short-tempered, and easily discouraged men are.

I’m not interested in having kids because the world is ending

I’m hard pressed to point to any ten-year period in which some number of Doomers did not insist The World Is Ending.

Like, take your pick of any ten-year span during the Cold War. That butted right up against the OG World Wars, with a Great Depression breather. Before that you had plagues, famines, and economic crashes that shat all over '08 and COVID.

Westoids live in the wealthiest, easiest, most affluent era of human history. Then someone points out “hey, eating burger every day isn’t sustainable” and they conclude the world is over.

Specially, the suburb of Cleveland Rocks

It’s a big deal for Wisconsin but Elon just saw it as an excuse to flex on state election laws.

The real upshot of the vote was that, once again, wealthy people are allowed to commit crime with impunity. Now Elon’s goon squad goes back to the drawing board to find a better way to cheat.

How many people have suffered physical harm from ordering food adjacent to a service animal?

Bribes to local governments and police, mostly.

Accept this declaration of economic war on your closest ally.

Whoa whoa whoa! Who said anything about tariffs on Israel?

forcing a vote to nullify the emergency declaration that underpins the tariffs on Canada.

One wonders why any president should have had this power to begin with.

Unfortunately, the people pushing AI are the same ones selling recreational flamethrowers