There’s a pretty radical idea going on in wiccan circles right now that believes the “Jesus” these Christian Nationalists are worshipping is actually something called an egregore. Now, an egregore is a non-physical entity or “thought form”, created by the shared beliefs, emotions, and intentions of a group. What’s more, I’ve met people who claim to have interacted with this being.They claim that it truly believes it is Christ and wants you to believe it, too. It desperately wants into Heaven, and it is vain, and narcissistic, and ugly. It butters you up with false flattery, empty promises and lies, and, if the true spirit of Christ is with you, it calls that spirit Satan. If you recognize it for what it is, instantly like a toxic person it flips to anger and threats to scare you into getting it to believe.

I was about to say I was grateful that human infection by screwworms is low, but then I realized that it will be worse if we lose tons of livestock to them.

Public healthcare also removes one of the few leashes they have on workers to keep them in line. My Father in law used to work at a local retail chain in my area, and the pay was straight dogshit, but the health insurance was phenomenal. It kept many workers from leaving for better paying jobs.

A free market is one that is free of corruption and unfair business practices. Which cannot exist without regulations and the enforcement of those regulations.

And the truth is that the oligarchs, the established players in the game of capitalism, do not want a free market. They want a market with the illusion of freedom. A free market like the one you describe is, in fact, a true free market. Because then they have to actually compete with new players. Players who don’t come from the same backgrounds as the established players. Who may have different beliefs, who might not have the same skin color. Who may have a superior product or service to one or more of the established players. Who are free to sit at the same tables as oligarchs and take up space because their government gives them the power to do so. De regulation gives the illusion of a market being free, by making it so that if you want to be a new player in the game, you can, but unless you pay obeisance to the top players, you’re not getting very far. Plus the top players will buy you out, which is essentially them bribing you to walk away from the table.

While they are still trying to slink away from responsibility, at first glance that’s not how it looks. To me, this is yet another example we should be following. Trump and his cronies have jelly where their spines should be. If people with spines show theirs, they cower and reverse course.

If you didn’t scream “WITNESS ME!” before death, was it actually loud?

So they might keep some of the impoverished around to make sure that they can keep the genetic pool diverse.

And as a source of replacement organs, tissues, and fluids when they reach advanced age. After all, they’re stripping everything else for parts, who to say they’ll stop just before putting poors under the knife to strip us for parts?

Danes are the sons and daughters of the greatest monster slayer to ever have maybe actually been real, Beowulf. Perhaps they shall come to slay our “Grendel”, as their forefather did for King Hrothgar, so long ago.

This. Build an army, 10 million strong! Waves upon waves! Let them try to contend with that!

https://www.hungarianconservative.com/articles/current/fourth-geopolitical-summit-democracy-2024-whose-democracy-what-rules-david-frost-danube-institute/

And, really, it’s just Ayn Randian Objectivism, mixed with Christian Dominionism, mixed with neofuedalism, dreamed up by a dude who spent years after the Dotcom Bubble popped, doing nothing but staying in his apartment after accepting a buyout of several hundred dollars reading the works of long dead white people.

This. Every trick Orbán used is straight from Putin. After he fully seized power in Russia, authoritarians the world over flocked to Moscow to learn directly from the master. Then they went home and got to work. The Danube Institute, the Hungarian equivalent of the Heritage Foundation, hosted a large neoreactionary conference where they laid out the case that democracy doesn’t work. That democracy is a well-meaning but fundamentally flawed system of government. The reason they think it’s flawed? Because it requires giving all people equality under the law. Women equal to men, gay equal to straight, non-Christian equal to Christian, Non-white equal to White, and this is really the only one that matters, poor equal to wealthy. The obscenely wealthy cannot comprehend a world in which the voice of those with less wealth is equal to their voice. By virtue of their enormous fortunes, taken through exploitation and inherited from their ancestors, they feel that they and they alone should have the right to govern. That they are inherently superior because they were fortunate enough to be born into lives of wealth, connection, and privilege.

Exactly. You can’t gaslight away a rumbling belly.

He can’t recreate them out of whole cloth, you’re right. But he’s got friends who could. They have the capital, they have the manpower, they have the brainpower, and could easily leverage all of that to creating privately owned alternatives, paving the way for Curtis Yarvin’s world to exist. America as we know it would be dead and replaced with hundreds, if not thousands, of small city-states owned and controlled by corporations, whose executive boards would have absolute free reign to control. If you’ve ever played BioShock, it would be akin to a bunch of Raptures, but on dry land.

Yarvin posits it as a collection of corporate city-states that would compete for citizens like corporations compete for customers. If you don’t like the oppression going on in your current city-state, you can simply move to another one and join it.(Nevermind that the corporate oligarch running your current city-state could write policy forbidding you to leave, or placing conditions on your emigration, such as taking all your money.) There’s also some crypto nonsense about how borders wouldn’t exist because you can be a citizen of one of those “network states” without ever having visited simply by logging in and signing up like you could for a social network. (Nevermind that the corporate oligarch running your current city-state might have beef with the oligarch of the state you wish to join and could restrict access to their network.)

See, the thing is, those tools of empire were government-funded. Congress allocated money and resources to those tools for them to do their jobs. The intent is to eventually replace those with privately owned, profit-motivated alternatives. Why do you think they cut NOAA and NWS funding and fired all their probies? So that private companies can fill the void. Then if you want life-saving weather information in the event of a tornado or hurricane, pay a monthly subscription fee to some billionaire’s weather/disaster alert service.

CA better get their hands on some ICBMs. Keep one pointed at DC, and another pointed at Mar-a-Lago. It’s pretty much the only way a state can keep its sovereignty.

Thank you, Based Mod. Not every day, we see one.

You forgot his third one, he supports stem cell research, which is odd given that his new buddies don’t approve of creating new sources of stem cells (aborted fetal tissue).

The only reason the Tea Party was successful in taking over the Republican party was that there was a huge amount of funding behind them.

That would be the Koch Brothers. Sadly there isn’t a left-wing version of them, and it feels as if the system is set up in such a way that there couldn’t be a left-wing version.

That’s interesting and terrifying all at once. If the Indian government is successful, it will basically set the precedent for other powerful entities such as autocrats, oligarchs, and corporations to also force Wikipedia to edit their content to suit their desires. I donate frequently and will keep making sure they can win.

Me and my friends walk into Musk’s office

Mr. Musk, in the name of the Senate of the American Republic, you are under arrest.

Musk: Are you threatening me, Master Jedi?

Me: The Senate will decide your date.

Musk: I AM THE SENATE.

Me: Not. Yet.

Musk: It’s treason, then.