Unless its asked for by a lobbyist

This is the key.

Political power in the US is openly bought and sold, and wealthy individuals and corporations generally control it simply because they outbid everyone else.

It really is just that simple.

Ah …

I’ve been wondering what Trump gave the Chinese in exchange for that cringeworthy credit as the supposed savior of TikTok.

There’s a world of difference between “a troll” and “just a troll.” I expect you know that.

And you’ve evaded my point, so I’ll repeat it, broken down into bite-sized pieces:

The sieg heil didn’t cause direct and measurable harm in and of itself.

Meanwhile, there are many things that this administration is actively doing right this moment that are causing and will cause direct and measurable harm.

Every single bit of energy and attention spent on the sieg heil is energy and attention NOT spent on them.

That’s not an accident.

Musk is a troll.

Don’t feed the troll.

Every bit of energy and attention expended on the sieg heil is a bit of energy and attention that’s NOT being expended on any of the actions being taken and policies being enacted by Trump and the oligarchs right this moment for the direct and explicit purpose of destroying liberty and democracy in the US.

The sieg heil is performative. It’s a symbol. In and of itself, it causes no direct harm.

However, a terrifying number of the actions that Trump is actually taking - directives he’s issuing and policies he’s implementing -are causing and will cause direct and measurable harm.

They need to be the focus, and the sieg heil is a distraction from them.

And that’s not an accident. Musk is a troll.

Except of course it is obvious, and the only delusion here is the farcical idea that there’s some legitimate explanation for the known facts unfolding the way they did.

1. Trump has a “very good” phone conversation with Xi in which they discuss, among other things, TikTok
2. Biden announces that his administration has no intention of enforcing the ban.
3. TikTok announces that they’re going to shut down US access themselves.
4. TikTok announces that they’re not going to shut down US access after all, and credits Trump for saving them from a ban that was never even implemented in the first place, and over which Trump had no authority anyway since he wasn’t even in office yet.

Since you’ve so definitely rejected my explanation for why and how these particular facts unfolded as they did, you certainly must have some alternative explanation.

So let’s see it.

So pretty obviously what happened here was that Trump and the Chinese authorities struck a deal by which Trump would be given credit for not enforcing the ban that both he and Biden had already said they had no intention of enforcing.

The interesting question is: what did Trump give China in exchange?

If only it was a cult.

It’s actually something far more dangerous, and very simple really - Trump 2.0 is pay-to-win.

Funny… this is actually a different account than I was originally posting from - I switched to it because the entire thread has vanished from fedia.io.

And pretty much the first thing I see here is this response, which I didn’t even know existed before.

Not a good look for fedia.io.

Anyway…

Do you believe ayn rand believed in rational self-interest?

I think she probably thought she did, but I also think she obviously didn’t even begin to understand it.

If so, why was she against all forms of welfare and socialism?

The glib answer would be because she didn’t even begin to understand rational self-interest.

The more likely answer, which somehow manages to be even more shallow, is because the USSR was nominally communist and she hated the USSR.

If not, isn’t she the inventor of the concept and thus the arbiter of what it should mean?

No.

Even if she was in fact the inventor of the concept, which she most assuredly is not, she still wouldn’t be the arbiter of its meaning.

Though she was such an egotistical authoritarian that if she were alive today, she’d undoubtedly be insisting that she was.

Doesn’t that mean you’re changing the definition to suit your needs?

Kind of.

While I really couldn’t care less what Rand envisioned, so certainly feel no desire to hew to her conception, I haven’t changed it to suit my “needs” per se. I’ve changed it as necessary so that it actually is, as far as I can see, what it appears to refer to - “rational” “self-interest.”

I think it’s a sound concept, and that Rand, blinded as she was by her emotions, her authoritarian habits and her gargantuan ego, didn’t grasp it.

Thanks for the response.

All I know is that Kagi triggered my scam alarms from the start, and moving into the browser market just made them ring even louder.

And if the world were a just place instead of a twisted shithole designed to maximize the privilege of a relative few wealthy and empowered parasites, you could work fewer hours, make the same or even more money and afford a house.

But instead the system has been warped so that you have to work long hours for insufficient pay and still can’t afford a decent life, and all so that a relative few executives, board nembers, bankers, investors and politicians can siphon off the bulk of the wealth you generate so that they can buy more houses and bigger yachts.

No - actually I was talking worldwide. Russia’s just a notable example.

And I would say that all of the things you listed are, directly or indirectly, consequences of the fact that wealthy authoritarian parasites have warped societies to their benefit regardless of the harm done to others, so are actually examples of exactly what I’m talking about.

News flash for wealthy authoritarian parasites around the world, because you all seem ignorant of this fact:

Declining birthrates are a direct result of the simple fact that more people all the time decide that they have no desire to bring children into this world, and that in turn is a direct result of the fact that you’ve turned this world into a warped, corrupt, toxic, authoritarian shithole.

You have no one to blame but yourselves.

And I guarantee that billionaire Larry Ellison blithely believes that he’ll be exempt - that all of this surveillance will just be used against the little people. And he’s almost certainly right.

Almost immediately after Vance got the nod, I hit on a description for the way he appeared to me. At the time, it was necessarily based on very little info, so mostly I posted it because I liked the imagery - I admittedly wasn’t sure how accurate it really was.

Imagine that life is a roleplaying game, and in every interaction, one chooses from a set of possible responses.

And imagine that each response is labeled, so there’s the kind response or the neutral response or the angry response or whatever.

It’s as if, in every situation, J.D. Vance chooses the asshole response.

It’s actually sort of surprising to me how accurate that has proven to be. .

Write enormous screeds about how literally insane it is that the world is being actively destroyed at the behest of and for the benefit of a wealthy, powerful and profoundly mentally ill few.

Play video games and work in the garden.

The first likely accomplishes nothing of any note - even if other people recognize it, part of the insanity is that the psychopaths in power have arranged things so that nobody can stop them.

The second doesn’t accomplish much of anything either, but they’re at least situations in which my efforts aren’t systematically undermined and exploited for the benefit of psychopaths. Instead of being rigged so that whatever I do benefits the ruling class, they’re situations in which I can actually make choices solely based on what I think will work best in a given situation and reap the rewards if I choose correctly.

No surprise there.

After Knesset members actually got up and angrily defended the supposed right to rape Palestinians and the finance minister lamented the fact that the rest of the world would condemn arranging for the death by starvation of 2 million Palestinians, there’s pretty much no low left that’s too low for the Israeli government.

This is just the latest in a long string. Spez has demonstrated repeatedly throughout the years that he’s an entitled cretin - equal parts smug and ignorant.

My personal favorite was when he snidely commented on Reddit’s unprofitability in his AMA after the API debacle, making it sound as if it was somehow our fault, only to then not only have it made common knowledge that the official app was useless garbage and had been for years, but that the entirety of Reddit’s loss for the year was just about exactly equal to his salary alone.

I wonder how the plutocrats and the christofascists will try to carry out their plan of destroying US democracy and imposing autocracy after the stinky old weirdo they’ve pinned all their hopes on has a screeching public meltdown.

An oldie but a goodie.

…it’s not like hezbollahs militants have decent trigger discipline

Except that they do, demonstrably and consistently.

Israel isn’t going to let an opportunity to try to gain international sympathy go unremarked, yet in spite of the fact that Hezbollah has launched thousands of attacks on Israeli targets at the border in recent months, even resulting in 33 recorded civilian casualties, this is the first one that Israel has been able to at all successfully milk for sympathy. That indicates significant discipline and restraint - to not only confine themselves to military targets, but to do so so consistently that the Israeli propaganda machine hasn’t even been able to successfully pretend otherwise, until now.