It’s much healthier without constantly seeing some bad-faith, AI-crafted post that tries to get under your skin, prying open your values and baiting your outrage so you can think you’re actually achieving anything of value by biting the bait and trying to correct morons who aren’t even real humans.

I do not miss the site.

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I’m doing my part!

They never actually cared. They want a WWF villain to make a new big story they can all watch because they’re dumb and don’t understand politics and we gave them the country.

The only problem I’ve had with other dog owners in California or anywhere else, is owners who don’t pick up their dog’s shit. I see people bring dogs into stores all the time, they’re always fine, I never see problems with that.

Now when I step 6-inches off a popular trail to take a picture of a popular view and step in piles of dog feces that people don’t bother to clean because it’s technically not someone’s yard, that’s when I start to wonder if domestication was a good idea. (Of humans that is.)

I am sure you know what I’m saying here, but thank you for the required-by-law pedantry that occurs every time anyone says anything.

Ah ok, so you seem to have misconstrued what I’ve said here and have added in your own assumptions and straw men.

No I literally just asked you a question which direction you’re coming from, and the fact that you had to respond with this reactionary, defensive BS instead of using the opportunity to distance yourself from the kooks tells me you don’t have good-faith stake in this and my second option is probably true. No way I’m wasting my time reading further or engaging. Have a good one kook. Go ahead and say whatever you want, you’re blocked.

Reminder other readers: science is not dying, science is in a good shape other than US funding, we are making amazing discoveries every day around the world. The academic world isn’t perfect but it’s working. There is no coverup or conspiracy. Whatever sensational BS you guys read on the headlines, it’s not true, I promise, please talk to people who actually work in science and academia before trusting headlines.

I work in academia, and there is quite the abundance of closed mindedness and dogmatism

Are we talking about discrimination against young or foreign academics not getting grants and degrees because of bias about who should be the ones leading research and hesitancy to invest time, money and political capital into new tech, or are we talking about “They didn’t want to read my paper about how I think the sun pooped out the Earth and why this is evidence for God”?

Seriously, that’s a loaded claim, you need to provide some context and nuance there, I haven’t met many actual scientific-minded people who are dogmatic, that is usually the exact accusation thrown out by theists who are butthurt that evolution exists and can’t be disproven.

That’s right, the wealthiest nation on Earth.

My sad epiphany of late is that not only are my nation’s population largely unevolved troglodytes whom would barely survive if we weren’t the richest nation and able to provide them with bare-minimum comforts or at least utilities, but so is everyone, everywhere, since before recorded history. And if anything, we’re at a HIGH POINT in human intellect and knowledge. Don’t let the current trends and localized issues trick you, objectively we’re at the highest point in human history for literacy, knowledge of the world, peace, prosperity and communication.

But there have never been nations and leaders of nations who have done all they can to immortalize the times they accidentally sent state secrets to the public journalists. Nope, they etch in stone their accomplishments and genius victories.

This tells me that most of what we know about history and leaders across the world is in fact, utter bullshit, and always has been. The reality is everyone is fantastically dumb and it’s only our creative minds working as a group that let us get this far. People like Trump and his cabinet are an unavoidable side-effect of the fact that largely, our population is very easy to manipulate, and people generally care far less about what’s true or not than they do how comfortable they are.

What a bad dichotomy.

It’s not the same as “violating someone’s privacy” because that implies that these people shared something deliberately with someone they trusted, that wasn’t the case, this was stupid people posting shitty, hateful, vindictive or exploitative material in a semi-open space and not being careful about who they invite in. Fuck them, they deserve this lesson.

I had a teller LITERALLY try to steal money from me.

A number of years back I was depositing cash from doing some side-hustle party entertainment work, I counted the cash, handed the cash to the teller and he counted it off, and it was short $100.

The thing was, I was doing magic tricks at parties, I had taught myself a bunch of very basic card tricks and slight-of-hand, not amazing but well enough to impress grade-schoolers, so I caught when the teller did a thing with his hands as he counted, he seemed to palm a bill and I felt immediate unease and wasn’t sure what to do, so I called the manager over and my partner and got the attention of another teller, I figured if I got enough people around he couldn’t pull any further tricks. I said we were “missing” a 100-dollar bill, and the teller acted really confused, pretended to look everywhere, then suddenly the missing bill “appeared” in his drawer. I let it go because I just wanted to go home.

I can even forgive that, that’s one person, not an entire institution. I wouldn’t have a gripe with Wells Fargo if that was all that ever happened. But they did things later on in my life like when I rented a car, they sent me on an overdraft-fee spiral that made my account -$5000 by the time I called the bank. They undid the erroneous charges after lots of shouting.

Later on, I had no choice but to finance a vehicle through WF, I will save the whole, long, horrible story and the shouting matches, but to give an idea how bad-faith they are, they fucking REFUNDED ME THE ENTIRE CAR with a series of “apology checks” over a period of three years after they repossessed it wrongly.

The only reason I didn’t lose tens of thousands of dollars to Wells Fargo is because I learned to fight, fight and scream and yell when they tried to scam me. This shouldn’t be on the customer to be aggressive and angry just to guarantee normal business.

Our best bet right now is acceleration.

The administration is trying to boil the frogs slowly enough that people forget their discomfort and worry, so people get used to being without services like social security or medicare slowly enough that America just keeps running but with less benefits for the citizens and more prosperity for the wealthy.

If the administration moves too fast, people will connect the dots and associate their discomforts with the presidency, and there will be popular movements to oust leadership, peaceful or otherwise.

What you’re likely going to see happen soon is an “economic stimulus” check program with Trump and Musk’s names on checks sent to every American to try to get people to associate them with wealth again. Stick everyone with a 3k - 5k check, while stripping us of tens of thousands of dollars in benefits a year. And it will likely work amazingly well, because our population has memories of goldfish.

So we want them to make more stupid moves faster, we want more people to feel the pain of losing public sector jobs and services, we want chaos and recession and consequence, that is the only way American people will move.

I would really like them to try, they are toeing a line right now because Trump and his closest people aren’t there for ideological reasons, they’re just trying to make a recession happen so they can all gobble up devalued assets and blame biden or trans kids or something. The outliers are the Millers and Bannons who tried before and will try again to assert an ideological presence to bring about the Fourth Reich, but their hold isn’t as strong as the oligarchs who just want money and security for their business empires.

You don’t sustain a business empire when popular political figures are getting jailed, much less if they’re being executed. That would signal the beginning of the actual overthrow of Democracy and if they do it too fast, that would immediately trigger massive popular uprisings and they would lose a lot of control. As it is, the donor-class is looking at the administration right now with a LOT of apprehension about current market destabilization.

Capital doesn’t want instability, and would rather go back to a country of rules and regulations than see the entire market literally burn to the ground, so we would see a sudden and dramatic tone shift in politics broadly, we would see media channels turn on Trump’s administration instantly, we would see prominent republicans in house and senate suddenly start forming opposition groups, we would see impeachment.

Let us make no mistakes about what’s happening. There are people who do indeed want to turn America into a monarchy and they have longer-term plans to do so, and may succeed, but they want it WITH the wealth and prosperity that we have now, they don’t want a banana republic, they just want a really big class-divide so they can have while we have-not.