politics

What is the least amount of authority governments can have?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What is the least amount of authority governments can have in the market to allow functional free-market capitalism?”

Let’s begin answering this question by precisely identifying the role of government in market capitalism.

We, the people, through government, determine the rules by which the “game of capitalism is played.”

The government implements, administers, and referees those rules for “we, the people.”

The authority of government in this and all cases is determined precisely by the demands of “we, the people.”

Whatever authority a government has is authorized and endorsed by “we, the people.”

This is a basic explanation of how a democracy functions and from where its authority is derived.

There is no magic formula for determining how much or little authority a government has within any specific context, be it the marketplace or other social issues. Government authority is a dynamic thing which spans a spectrum of ideologies from right to left and top to bottom.

Generally speaking, “we, the people,” make demands of government, and the government responds to those demands.

Identifying who comprises “we, the people,” is where all our problems with government begin.

In the modern U.S.A., a society with arguably the most wealth and power on the planet has several stakeholders with varying degrees of power and influence on government operations — policies, procedures, laws, authority, and scope for implementing and enforcing their decisions.

This is no different than any other nation on the planet, except for how big the money and power pie is in the U.S.

The human condition is such that a contingent of us are so drawn to money and power that they deliberately influence government in ways that disempower and impoverish the many to secure money and power for themselves.

The largest pie attracts the largest contingent of the greediest among us. This is the cause of suffering for hundreds of millions of U.S. citizens today, which spills out onto the rest of the world because of its undue influence on global dynamics.

In many ways, the best thing for democracy worldwide is for the U.S. to lose most of its power and influence. If it becomes a sinking ship due to the recently elected corruption, the rats will abandon it for brighter prospects worldwide. Today, China is poised to become the greatest beneficiary of America’s power drain. It’s already benefiting from Russia’s hubris and overreach. China has been playing Putin in the same way that Putin has been playing Americans through Trump.

At any rate, to specifically answer this question, the least “amount of authority” the marketplace will have in its refereeing is already the “Lassez Faire” strategy the U.S. has been indulging in for decades. This is why the housing bubble and Great Recession occurred during the Bush Administration.

A complete lack of oversight means the predators in society have a heyday of mining suckers through fraudulent strategies to obtain their goodwill, support, and resources.

If you haven’t noticed yet, you might want to take a trip through Facebook and make note of all the advertisers.

There are at least ten scams for every legitimate advertisement because for a private, for-profit entity like Meta, generating revenue is a much higher priority than protecting their community. Ironically, they are serious about penalizing people for violating community standards.

Governments today have adopted a similar approach toward their administrative functions by outsourcing much of their responsibility to for-profit entities. The U.S. prison system is one such grotesque abomination of immorality practiced by the government through the authority it has been granted to administer national affairs under a for-profit mindset.

The fraudulent argument used to forward this human rights betrayal is an alleged saving to the people. The reality is that such a strategy represents a cost increase to the people with a dramatic reduction in the quality of service. This pattern of rapacious manipulation of government through propaganda fed to the people is most commonly associated with their (lack of) healthcare (health exploitation) system issues.

The goal, of course, in these cases is to appease the few with disproportionate power and influence in society to boost their annual incomes and quality of life at the expense of millions.

Their influence grants the government greater authority in areas that betray the people’s needs while strategically benefiting themselves.

In terms of authority in the marketplace, people are fed the lie that minimal authority is good for the market, while the reality is that it’s suitable only for the predators in the market.

To make matters worse, they succeed in their propaganda by delivering mindless solipsisms that dull critical thinking like a grifter convinces a desperate mark that they will receive a million dollars from a Nigerian prince by simply giving them a thousand dollars.

Like any sports event, a referee requires enough authority to enforce the game’s rules. If the field is big enough, additional referees are put on the field to ensure violations are spotted and dealt with effectively.

Without that oversight and the ability to respond to violations, the game is corrupted to such a degree that it’s no longer worth participating in any capacity.

Without the ability of the referee to exercise independent judgement, they end up favouring one team over all others to ensure they win every time.

In some ways, this is how the market has been corrupted by the notion that referees are unnecessary to ensure every player and every team has a fair shot of doing well in the game.

In some ways, the market has been rigged like a casino where the house always wins, and in this case, the house is the corporatocracy and the billionaires who own the house by proxy.

The less authority a government has independently from the stakeholders rigging the game in their favour, the less effective the market is for the economy. The restrictions on government oversight that are about to be stripped by the incompetence and malice characterizing the incoming administration will lead to widespread systemic collapse. This will be due to the predators among us experiencing a resurgence of freedom to victimize an entire population that will make the nation a new “Wild West of exploitation.”

By stripping consumer protections such as in food and environmental oversight systems, the outcomes are guaranteed to be fatal to an unpredictable number of mass casualties.

The next four years will be a supremely harsh lesson for those who buy into superficial soundbites because they are desperate to believe the Nigerian prince, who seems so concerned about their well-being, will sincerely deliver on their promise to drain the swamp rather than infest it with predators.

This bleeding heart bleeds for all the victims, be it left or right, liberal or conservative — but I will feel nothing but contempt for the self-serving MAGA addiction to hatred responsible for the ensuing chaos and destruction.

The people who fail to take heed of the nightmare ahead will be in for a lifetime of seriously bitter crows to chew on. I won’t be enjoying their humility, though, because I’ll be too busy grieving over the unnecessary casualties they will have imposed upon the nation.

Why is the label “socialism” often viewed negatively?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why is the label “socialism” often viewed negatively when discussing progressive policies? Is there a significant difference between socialism and liberalism?”

Socialism and liberalism are distinct ideologies with no practical connection between them.

Liberalism is built on three fundamental societal values: Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality. These values inspire and guide liberal minds in supporting greater degrees of social justice in a broadly unjust world.

Socialism is the public ownership of the means of production. Socialism essentially strips plutocrats of their wealth and forces an entitled class of people to live alongside as equals to the people they prefer to benefit from their exploitation.

These two disparate concepts are often conflated as part of a centuries-long class war waged by society’s plutocrats against the proletariat (the working class) while employing the bourgeoisie (capitalists) as their armies of oppression.

Every movement toward social justice is met by resistance to the entitled classes in society who possess the leverage of despair against the working class to enrich themselves while impoverishing the weakest among us.

Every movement toward social justice is a strip of power taken from the entitled classes to enable the weakest among us to survive and prosper without suffering a dehumanizing indignity imposed upon them by the wealthy classes.

For the working class to fight for and win weekends off from labour is a cost to the wealthy class that they deeply resent and respond to with strategies to strip further dignities from the working class.

Their deep resentment toward increasing social justice and decreasing power over the working class has been deeply embedded into their psyches due to historical events like the Russian Revolution of 1917. A monarchy was violently abolished through two successive revolutions and a civil war, which spread a sentiment of hatred for the ruling class in society across the globe to inspire a similar German Revolution of 1918.

Russian Revolution — Wikipedia

The nightmare of breadlines persists to this day and has been used as a weapon of ideas against another uprising by the working class.

The plutocrats of today have learned to do whatever they can to insulate themselves from another violent uprising that would result in them losing their wealth and power to angry mobs of desperate working-class citizens.

They have invested billions over the decades to have people automatically associate socialism and communism with extreme poverty and extreme oppression. Their efforts have been supremely successful to the degree that the poorest in society today will fight to protect plutocrat wealth at the expense of their well-being.

Here’s an example of a random right-wing website, their fearmongering messaging and how successful the plutocrats have been in conditioning the working class to defend what they view as the saviours of humanity they refer to as “job creators.”

(Please do take a moment to “bask” in the sheer hatred they have cultivated within their loyal lemmings toward any form of social justice for society. These are the slugs in society who beg for a salt bath… and are deeply committed to taking all the rest of us with them on a trip to human oblivion.)

We can see the cancerous attitude as a caricature of humanity within the American political system as a corrupt plutocrat who has become a convicted felon can still campaign for president. In contrast, every other convicted felon is stripped of their right to vote while they rot in prison.

The plutocrats in society have been quietly waging their class warfare for centuries; before, they were plutocrats and considered a monarchy that assumed power over the little people through physical warfare.

They have persisted for over 100 years in a steady and patient strategy of protecting their wealth and power through every influential channel they can.

Look through this resource to see how the plutocrat class influences legislation creation through a group called the “American Legislative Exchange Council” (ALEC). This association has been responsible for literally writing the laws that are implemented verbatim to benefit themselves at the expense of the public good… and this is only the tip of the iceberg for their machinations:

ALEC Exposed

“Right to Work” laws enacted to strip workers of their rights while reducing “Right to Work” states have become the most impoverished in the nation.

Corrupt plutocrats like the Koch Brothers (Koch family — Wikipedia), the Walton Family (Walton family — Wikipedia), Elon Musk (Elon Musk — Wikipedia), Bill Ackman (Bill Ackman — Wikipedia), Steve Schwarzman and his Blackstone Group (Home — Blackstone), and etcetera.

Why Plutocrats Are Rallying to Trump

Click to access Hacker_Pierson_APSA_2019.pdf

Most hide their money behind organizations like Blackstone Inc., which bills itself as an “alternative investment management firm” and dumps millions into SuperPAC to fund the campaigns of politicians who will support their wealth acquisition strategies at the expense of the working class and the constituents who vote for them.

These are highly paid grifters whose job is to scam hundreds of millions of people out of the value of their labours, and they have succeeded to the tune of over $50 trillion from the middle class in the last few decades alone.

They have successfully converted a system of empowering the most vulnerable among us into a system of oppressing the most vulnerable among us.

They have invested billions in their war while reducing the costs of waging it to a small tax.

Their coup de grâce has been the outright purchase of the highest court in the land, seeking to convert the world into a facsimile of a medieval state with a two-class system of rulers and serfs.

Impact of the Heritage Foundation on Supreme Court nominations

Ironically, they have succeeded so well in entrenching their power to repeat the historic levels of income inequality threatening global stability one hundred years ago that we are on the verge of repeating the same tragedies.

It’s been easy to blame the motivations for all their socially destructive activities on simple greed, but the sheer irrationality of their behaviours transcends greed. It is a self-destructive behaviour that has abandoned rationality.

All of which is intended to prohibit these kinds of social justice goals for the working class:

The minimal costs of a social safety net don’t justify the extremes of greed they’ve been displaying. The only explanation for their extreme behaviour, which resembles the trajectory of an addict, is that they have been deeply scarred by history.

The revolutions of the little people throughout history have scarred them deeply, and that explains why they have invested so much into the optics of language to cause the public to viscerally reject a concept like socialism without bothering to consider aspects of the concept that can and are beneficial to society.

No one blinks about socialism when it involves public money spent on the military because security is more important to many, particularly among those who loudly and repeatedly profess their love of freedom the most.

The most frustrating aspect of all of this is that, as captains of industry and leaders in society, one would hope they would be astute enough to avoid making manifest that which they fear so much… yet, this is the state of affairs today:

Pushing people to extremes of desperation makes it seem like they’re begging for the pikes and guillotines to come out and repeat history.

They can see the escalations occurring throughout the globe. Instead of taking action to avert catastrophe, they invest in secure bunkers to save their asses from the conflagration while hoping their billions will be worth something when the entire world’s economy collapses.

For a group of people who are generally viewed as more intelligent than the masses, they seem to wallow in more profound stupidity than the under-educated people they love to manipulate while convincing themselves of their superiority.

The environmental nightmare they are inviting into our world is rapidly approaching a tipping point in which there will be no return to stability without a dramatic shifting of power throughout the globe. Yet, no inkling of this impending catastrophe seems to grace their awareness. It’s as if they’re watching a massive iceberg drifting toward them, and they’re more fascinated by its structure than what it will do when it strikes.

Can a religion be political?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Can a religion be political? If so, which religions are left-wing and which are right-wing?”

People are political — from the self-management perspective by establishing community systems and laws to live by.

Religions are intended to guide people to live with the support they need to find happiness within themselves and through their relationships with others.

Religious zealots and leaders, however, seek to leverage community support to achieve political power. Wings are either moot within the context of religion, or they are leveraged to create further divisions between people while furthering the aims of the corrupt in their quests for power.

The consequences of seeking power ultimately corrupt a community’s politics to destroy community cohesion and create an oppressive environment where neither politics, community development, nor spiritual development are best served.

Religion was the first form of government. The consequences were the Dark Ages, in which humanity lived in a dark state of repression where no progress was made for society for hundreds of years. The world was ruled by the complete corruption of the human spirit made manifest by unrestrained power that we have always struggled with as a species.

We have yet to learn our lessons about restraining power enough to apply them to the mess we’re creating now through capitalism.

It’s become so overwhelmingly attractive a source of power acquisition that it has enticed corruption within religion to grow into a capitalist horror of its own.

The Vatican is among the wealthiest institutions on the planet, and it’s supposed to represent a religious commitment to ending poverty.

Some of the wealthiest people on the planet have grown their seed of corruption by betraying religious principles and leveraging hope against those in despair.

One of the most corrupt of political monsters today pretends at religion to leverage the naive trust of people who have become resentful of a political system that has betrayed them for decades.

Every day on Facebook, I see advertising for “lawyers” who claim they can help people recover the money they lost by trusting a scammer who swindled them.

There is no possible way to recover one’s money from a scammer, especially when their true identity remains a mystery.

The lawyer claiming to be able to help is just another scammer preying on people who were already scammed once and are desperate to trust someone who will help them.

These are among the worst of predatory parasites because they are preying on people who have already lost much.

Meanwhile, Facebook does nothing to protect its “community” because it benefits from the advertising dollars it collects.

What we end up with is an informal cadre of predatory parasites preying on victims on multiple levels throughout society, and to such a degree that it becomes impossible to trust anyone.

Everywhere one looks, every system one turns to hides another predator ready to invite one into their web to drain them dry.

That’s what the whole of society reminds me of today. I’m sure I am not the only one who sees how impossible the situation is that we have allowed ourselves to live within.

I don’t think we can hold out much longer before it all collapses like a house of cards. The problem with that is the most vulnerable among us who have suffered the most will also become the most significant casualties of the ensuing chaos.

People who genuinely wish to hang onto their sanity and maintain something of a resemblance of hope must do what they can to build walls between domains to prevent the corruption of power from perpetually overwhelming our systems and threaten our stability as peaceful and progressive societies.

Religion is not supposed to be political in the sense of a social management system.

Religion is supposed to be about personal growth.

“Render unto Caesar” was a prescient command for its time because the threat it addresses is always beyond evident to those who do not fall under the spell of attraction to power over others.

Some of us are lucky enough to learn that our power over ourselves is the only power that matters.

That is the most fundamental lesson all religions hint at and the only lesson of value they have for humanity, but they’ve lost touch with that.

Ironically, the best teachers of this principle today are characters from fiction.

How soon will Article 25 be invoked to remove Trump?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How soon do you think that the masterminds behind Project 2025 will invoke Article 25 to remove Trump? By now there must be many of the less insane MAGAs who see that his actions are irrational before even taking office.”

How soon do you think that the masterminds behind Project 2025 will invoke Article 25 to remove Trump? By now there must be many of the less insane MAGAs who see that his actions are irrational before even taking office.

I recently thought Trump was going to experience an epiphany where he realizes he’s being treated like the drunk uncle at the family barbeque. He may already be thinking about challenges to his power with Musk in the picture, as Elon has been hogging the limelight that belongs to him.

He needed Musk’s endorsements and money while he was campaigning. Now, he’s only tolerating him while getting some laughs at Musk’s expense to keep him in line.

Since Musk is arguably as much of a narcissist as Trump, this is when he began plotting his revenge against Trump. Musk is also more intelligent than Trump, which means he’ll keep a low enough profile to minimize pissing off Trump until he can devastate him with one punch.

However, Trump can’t be underestimated because his paranoia runs deep from a lifetime more experience fighting dirty than Musk has amassed. He may very well already have plans to shut Musk up for good. It’s hard to tell right now, but their conflict will grow. That’s as inevitable as day following night.

There could very well be a moment of realization by Trump where he begins to see himself being manipulated by the people around him who need him as a populist figurehead for entertaining the sheep but are squeezing him out of the decision-making process.

He may not care much about many of the decisions being made in his sphere of influence. He could mindlessly endorse many because they appeal to his superficiality and deep biases, but he always keeps his finger on the pulse of public optics.

He quickly distanced himself from Project 2025 before momentum against it and his campaign, by extension, could grow. He promptly removed his version of it from his website and his platform and denied knowledge of the endeavour while selecting a key figure from it as his running mate.

He may endorse all or most of it, but he won’t endorse the public backlash, and that’s going to create anxiety for him to crank up his natural paranoia and push his limits. I expect to see more fracturing within his inner circle as he realizes those around him are playing him a fool. He can tolerate that from Putin because he has no choice, but that only means his tolerance for dissent within his ranks diminishes.

He has a lot of clout they would fear because he would not hesitate to throw them under the bus to save his skin.

If he were to view Musk and Vance developing ties, for example, that would be enough for him to show signs of cracking and his paranoia would leak through his polished veneer of dismissive disinterest in things he should be concerned about.

For example, whenever he is asked to walk back comments he’s made that were proven demonstrably false, he doesn’t admit error. He displays disinterest, and he deflects responsibility away from himself.

In a case where Musk is being viewed as collaborating more closely with Vance than he wants, he’ll start driving wedges between them. His nature cannot permit open collusion against him without him taking action against it.

Trump will also find himself increasingly isolated from his staff, partly because he’s pissed them off enough to want to avoid his company altogether but also partly because they will have made enough progress on their agenda to be more comfortable in marginalizing him. It will be a delicate balance for his associates to keep him focused on the attention he craves while keeping him away from the decisions they make to forward the Project 2025 agenda. Much of their success or failure is contingent upon Trump’s ability to maintain optics over what will appear like his decisions.

They will also have to work fast to cement some of their early objectives to secure long-term goals. Trump will likely fail to maintain the integrity of the illusion he needs to satisfy his MAGAt base with his performance. His tariff strategy, for example, will hit them hard in their pocketbooks. The job market will tank, and the economy will shrink while Musk will become the scapegoat for MAGAt dissatisfaction if he receives an official appointment and makes the cuts he indicates he wants to make.

It may be for this reason that Trump tolerates Musk’s attention-whoring antics within his crowd. He will likely rely on favours from Putin to help keep Musk reigned in and set up to take the public anger hit. When the feces begin flying, Trump will do what he has excelled at doing: dodge accountability and redirect it elsewhere. This strategy could work with Musk or backfire if Musk is astute enough to anticipate the inevitable betrayal.

In any case, Musk is setting himself up to be the next Mike Pence in Trump’s administration… and I doubt Vance could be happier about that.

Musk is new and ostentatious money, while the Heritage Foundation is supported by old money. They would not be entirely happy with Musk’s overt, reckless flaunting of his wealth. It’s in bad taste and reflects poorly on all of them.

Musk has been teaching the world to hate wealth through his public antics, which poses a risk to them because they prefer to achieve their agendas through subversive actions, not overt displays of disdain toward the little people. Leona Helmsley is an excellent cautionary tale from recent history that shows how the little people can quickly rally against that kind of condescending disdain from the wealthy.

Trump, by contrast, may indulge in grotesque displays of performative wealth to keep up his appearance of wealth. He at least knows when to keep his mouth shut or where the line is drawn between igniting passions among his base and against those he’s desperate to be perceived as an insider with.

Trump’s view of his tribe was cultivated from a young age by being exposed to old-world wealth that essentially keeps itself out of the public eye, while Musk is a new breed of instant wealth bolstered by his birth lottery. He was born on third base and has behaved like he got a home run. Old wealth has lived on home base for generations, and they know how to stay there and how much more critical being incognito is to gaining widespread public attention. Trump, in this regard, is their sacrificial lamb.

In contrast, Bezos — also new wealth — is much more astute about the importance of reserved public optics than Musk.

If the nation collapses and if chaos arises, Trump will take all the blame. Those funding the Heritage Foundation will slink back into the shadows to begin working on the next phase of class warfare they’ve been waging since the dawn of the industrial age.

I don’t think the Heritage Foundation will move to eliminate Trump until they’ve secured the next election cycle because of his value to them as a pawn. Much of their success with Trump will depend on how well he plays along with them. Meanwhile, Musk, who is viewed as a more chaotic and potentially destructive element in their plans, will be the focus on who needs to be eliminated in the short term.

The MAGAts, for now, are entirely oblivious to the implications of Trump’s cabinet appointments, and many even endorse them. The anti-vaxxers among them, for example, are pleased with RFK’s positions on vaccines and agree with his superficial assessments of food quality. They won’t even blame him after going through a few rounds of food-related fatalities due to his policies.

Another reason why they won’t and can’t remove Trump in the short term is that there is no one else who can achieve a religious-like stature among the little people. My guess is that they would want Musk handled first. Then, once they’ve set up their succession process, they may try to secure their power by turning Trump into an actual martyr because they’ve already run the scenario through theatrics they’ve already tested.

Their succession process is also problematic because Vance is easily despised, even though his presentation is pretty slick. The public will reject him unless they’ve been coaxed to be more accepting of a couch fornicator… which, sadly, is entirely possible because it’s not as bad as being a pedophile.

If they move too soon with Vance, they’ll lose everything. Trump has four years to prove his value and make a graceful exit, which will depend entirely on how secure the transition to the next generation will be. If it appears shaky, his retirement will be made permanent to secure the Republican majority that Karl Rove championed over two decades ago.

All of this is, of course, wild speculation that no one should interpret as gospel.
Take my caveat as you will.

Why would it be possible to live without the government?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora and can also be accessed via “Why would it be possible for people to live without the government?”

It’s not.

Without government, we would barely survive while struggling with anarchy and doing our best to avoid the bullies among us who would have free reign to terrorize anyone they please.

Life would be cheaper than it is now. Justice would be non-existent, and perversions of it would be meted out by force and without any form of protection for anyone without the power to dominate others.

Virtually all scientific and technological progress would halt. If government ceased to exist from this point forward, we would be facing a nuclear holocaust through much of the world as centuries-long enemies would no longer be restrained from indulging in their worst fear impulses. The mid-East would essentially be vaporized and rendered uninhabitable for the next century. India and Pakistan would decimate each other. Much of Eastern Europe would be bombed into rubble. China would decimate its neighbours and indulge in its most significant expansion across the globe… or it could fall apart into factions ruled by powerful interests within the nation whose infighting would also collapse the country and leave it vulnerable to external aggressors seeking revenge.

Whatever may exist of what you call home would have to be protected by traps and a twenty-four-hour armed security detail. You would sleep in shifts.

Your environment would be like living in a perpetual purge. That would likely last until we’ve culled most of our species and our numbers shrink from eight billion to a few hundred million within a few years at the outset.

Once we’ve burned ourselves out from a pent-up violence orgy, we’d start seeing primitive tribal infrastructures negotiating arrangements to secure our survival as a species. At the same time, we would find ourselves living in an entirely hostile world as we experience ecological collapse all around us from our careless mismanagement of the environment ramped up into overdrive from global conflicts.

We would make the world of the Mad Max mythos manifest and find ourselves severely humbled as a species.

As much as people may hate government and as much as many criticisms are justifiable, we need government for the simple reason that the one in five who currently manifest the mental health pandemic we’re living with is a perpetual threat to human existence.

Once we succeed at reaching a point of optimal mental health where we have overcome our psychoses, human society may evolve to a degree where government is as much an automated system as the rest of the industrialized world promises to be.

Until then, our best bet is to become more engaged in our self-governance as a collection of democratic societies — which, at this point, means “taking our government’s back” — out of the hands of the few with too much power and back into the hands of all of us.

Humanity’s worst threats have always been the few with too much power victimizing the many with too little power. This is why democracy was born and has dominated the landscape over the last century.

Sadly, those with too much power in today’s world hate it and are actively undermining it to send us all back to a medieval state of existence as a two-class society of rulers and serfs.

As much as many people may wish to mock democracy as a fundamentally flawed system while pointing out the advantages of an autocratic system, the reality is that we have never truly committed to making democracy work. If we had, we would do the necessary thing — equip everyone with the education, skills, and insights required to make proper decisions reflecting what’s best for all of us.

This last American election showed us that people are still trapped within the paradigm of what’s best for them personally in a zero-sum game that necessitates the existence of losers to support the winners.

The solution to our problems is not eradicating what we struggle with but fixing where we fail to make it work. That means improving our education systems by learning to value education on a level as if our lives depend upon it because they do.

Why is democracy considered an ideal form of government?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/Why-is-democracy-considered-an-ideal-form-of-government/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

There is no such thing as an “ideal form of government” because humans are from “ideal.”

What makes democracy a superior form of government to all others is self-determination.

What makes democracy a far more chaotic form of government than all others is self-determination.

No other form of governance is as capable as a democracy of facilitating the full achievement of human potential because no other form of governance empowers individuality.

No other form of governance is as prone to overt assaults against it, while no other form of governance can survive those assaults.

Human nature demands self-determination, while the assaults against democracy today are born of that demand for self-determination — albeit in horrifically corrupted and myopically self-serving terms.

Think about the perspectives of those displaying an aggrieved assault against democracy. They are commonly born from an autocratic mindset which expects the world to conform to their perspectives. They interpret the evolution of society as a rejection of their insular views and a violation of their rights to those views. It is Frankenstein’s monster of cancerous individuality disguising a toxic desire for sublimation to authoritarian rule by people who imagine freedom as their right to dictate the lives of others.

They are not entirely oblivious to the inherent hypocrisies they champion, or they would otherwise not conduct their protests while disguising their identities or hiding behind masks or fake profiles, managing multiple sock-puppet accounts on social media.

They are the disruptive elements in a democratic society screaming a need for a much more coherent strategy for social development. The challenge at hand, however, is not an authoritarian solution dictated to the masses, as history’s failures have made clear. Today’s dynamic in an information-rich society demands a supportive strategy of education and social welfare programs providing opportunities for healing and growth for a species emerging out of a dark and brutal history while still suffering the effects of generational PTSD.

For democracy to survive its current challenges and begin to approach whatever may be deemed as an “ideal form of governance,” our systems must evolve to prioritize the people over the plutocracy seeking to regress human civilization to a medieval state of rulers and serfs.

We will otherwise find ourselves repeating the bloody histories of our ancestors who sacrificed everything to win the freedoms far too many take for granted today.

In today’s world, the closest examples we have to an “ideal democracy” are embodied within the Nordic models of social democracy.

We would save countless lives if we could take stock of how fundamentally destructive the world’s current adoption of right-wing ideologies is for human society and global stability.

Is the defeat of the Democrats a spectacular failure of the left?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Is the defeat of the democrats an example of what Stephen Fry call the spectacular failure of the left?”

No. It’s a stark warning to the people of how utterly corrupt the corporatocracy is.

Fifty years ago, a menace like Trump would have been laughed off the stage long ago. He would not have made it past the primaries in his first election.

“Grab ’em by the pussy.” would have been the end of his political career precisely because the Fourth Estate took their responsibility to inform the people seriously enough to challenge him on his policies, his character, and his platform.

They gave him a pass on every ugly thing he said and did while demonstrating double standards applied to every candidate he ran against in all three elections he campaigned for.

They complained about Harris’ complete platform and well-thought-out policy initiatives as being too vague while Donald Trump talked about another man’s penis.

They overlooked Project 2025 and let Trump run roughshod over everyone and everything without so much as a peep. A few talking heads indulged in performative outrage at most, but all those people were marginal media entities. No one who was a significant personality challenged Trump’s horrendous behaviour in any substantive way.

This election and every election that Trump participated in is a scathing indictment of the corporate-owned media and a solid argument to break up the media monopoly that’s responsible for massaging the citizenry’s perceptions into a stupor that will set the world on fire.

He’s not fit to be president, but the people who refuse to see are incapable of exercising their judgment with any form of objective clarity because they’re all members of a cult that has been conditioned to perceive this atrocity as a win. They will need to experience the shocking effect of hitting rock bottom, like every addict, before they can awaken to the horror of their blind choices.

Every Republican woman who gets raped will learn to understand hatred on levels far beyond their current imagination.

Every Republican voter who finds themselves facing medical bankruptcy or the loss of a family member due to being denied healthcare will now have reason to regret their choice on a supremely visceral level.

Every single one of these people will become a ticking time bomb.

School shootings will continue and likely escalate.

Violence will escalate, and the media will benefit from it.

People will turn to the government for support, and they’ll find it’s been wholly repopulated with Trump sycophants, and they’ll get the bird they flipped against the “librulz” they’ve been taught to hate so much.

This era will become even more significant to American history than the McCarthy era in terms of a nationwide fervour that tears it apart.

… and the media will benefit from it.

What are the key reasons people voted for Trump in the 2024 election?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://donewiththebullshit.quora.com/What-are-the-key-reasons-people-voted-for-Trump-in-the-2024-election-2“

Unfocused rage is likely the most encompassing sound-bite answer to this question.

MAGAts hate struggling in their lives — like everyone does. These days, during our historic levels of income inequality and minimal tax burdens on the wealthy, as they plunder our world into extinction, everyone but the top is struggling.

MAGAts have had their emotions leveraged against them, though, by a steady diet of hatred toward anyone and everyone not responsible for their hardship.

They’ve been taught to hate liberals because the left is a threat to the oligarchs.

They’ve been taught to hate immigrants because they’re an easy target to blame for their misfortunes. It’s a form of manipulated displacement.

They’ve been taught to hate minorities because they have been conditioned to believe minorities, like trans people, are assaulting their way of life simply by existing.

They’ve been taught to hate women because women are easier to victimize when they can be called “baby killers.”

They’re afraid of how quickly the world is changing and feel left behind, and they hate that.

They’re afraid of being unable to keep up and are insecure about their future. Meanwhile, the groups they’ve been taught to hate appear to weather the storm better than they do, and they hate that, too.

They hate a status quo that seems deaf to their pleas, and Trump is a disruptive element in society that echoes their hate. His perceived political outsider status and natural personality of overt indulgence in hatred convince them that he represents their interests.

He validates their hate fantasies and permits them to indulge openly in their hatred while manifesting it in physical reality. They don’t realize how much other people struggle with similar emotions or that they acknowledge how a significant reason why fantasies should remain fantasies is not all fantasies should be acted out because they are too destructive to be made manifest. They are fantasies that should remain fantasies because they function as forms of therapy. Making them real necessitates entirely new levels of treatment.

MAGAts have lived a lie through their belief systems that blur the distinction between fantasy and reality, and that has convinced them to blur distinctions even more, to justify coping with all the pent-up hatred.

They can’t grasp long-term strategies or how distant a consequence can be from an action.

For example, a complaint they expressed was the cost of living, and because their narrow view of the highest authority in the land means that person dictates how everything works, it was easy for them to blame Biden. They didn’t learn to understand how the corporations that feed the media empires with profits would not risk losing those profits by demonizing the price-gouging corporations who butter their bread through advertising revenue.

The Republicans have been leveraging the naivety of their undereducated constituents for decades. States like Kentucky can sink into poverty while their leader overtly grows their wealth and blatantly betrays the entire nation, and they still can’t connect the dots.

All of this is a recipe for wallowing in the kind of hatred that can only escalate dramatically further as the fiscal incompetence of Republicans catches up to them. Their economic mismanagement has now run out of room to blame the Democrats. Trump’s strategy for tariffs and utilizing Elon Musk to be the voice of cutbacks in the trillions while gearing up to make the public accept enduring another round of austerity will begin to crack their support.

His appointments to senior administration roles are already horrifying as an overt pedophile has been appointed Attorney General, his Health and Human Services Secretary is an overt mental health case, and his Secretary of Defense is a television talking head. These three are already a toxic enough recipe for disaster, while the list of notables merely adds orders of magnitude to the levels of concern these already register.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/14/trump-cabinet-administration-maga-extremism

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/14/trump-cabinet-administration-maga-extremism

Anything innocuous and unpredictable can become the match that sets the entire edifice of plutocrat manipulation over the last half-century into flames. This administration seems poised to ignite public backlash as Trump pushes an economy-killing tariff agenda and insiders like Elon Musk warn of impending cuts at impossibly surreal levels and public adjusting to another round of austerity.

The MAGAt argument, on its surface level of concern for the cost of living, appears rational. However, its sincerity will be tested in ways that challenge national stability at previously unseen familial levels. The cracks in the social contract will dramatically grow at the level of fundamental building blocks for society. 

Once we’ve breached the final veneer of tolerance and the MAGAts realize they’ve been played for fools while hating the wrong people, they will harness all their unfocused rage into a tight focus to enact destruction on orders of magnitude well beyond what they have achieved thus far in society.

Once they reach rock bottom and have their come to Jesus moment, the plutocrats responsible for dividing the people and ripping us all off will have hell to pay.

How did the US fall so far?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How did the US fall so far? This isn’t an Anti-Trump question. I really want to know how it became okay to hate someone or even attack them because of who they voted for. At what point did things go so wrong? See comments for further context.”

RE: “I sincerely want to know how it became okay to hate someone or even attack them because of who they voted for.”

If you sincerely want to know, you must go further than this recent election.

This didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen over just one election.

This is an entirely predictable outcome of over 50 years of demonization of the left by the right.

Things have been going wrong for a long time, and they went overboard when the right began treating their “honourable opposition” as enemy combatants.

The demonization has just been getting worse over time, and electing Trump was the final straw.

You must understand that the hatred isn’t about “who they voted for” as much as the values they voted for.

They voted for an evil monster — convicted of 34 felony counts, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American citizens, has caused the wanton destruction of countless lives throughout his entire life, and he gloats about doing that. He laughs at the people who worked for them and has refused to pay them for their work. He’s caused people to go bankrupt because of that, and he cares less about that than about the hamburger he ate last month. He’s an admitted sexual predator — he bragged about it, and he’s been accused of rape. He was a close friend of Jeffrey Epstein, who trafficked in underage sex slaves. He’s a pedophile who has openly lusted after his daughter.

He’s an overt racist who tried to have five innocent men killed to satisfy his murderous lust. The man is so much scum of the Earth that the entire state he called home and has done business in most of his life has run him out of it. He instigated a treasonous coup against the nation when he lost the last election.

People aren’t so much pissed at him but at the state of affairs where millions of people chose his brand of hatred to define the nation they love.

People are dying right now because of their hatred.

Children were hauled away from their families in cages and sold for a profit the last time he was president.

That’s what people hate.

More of that evil is returning, and millions don’t care.

That’s why families are being torn apart.

That’s why people are shutting the door on people who welcome that evil back into an acceptable standard of living for the nation.

School kids have been dying from unhinged freaks with guns on an almost daily basis throughout the nation, and instead of wanting to do something to save lives, those people voted for more of that.

That kind of evil cannot be tolerated without giving up something important about one’s integrity and self-respect.

The U.S. fell because it’s been falling at the behest of the misanthropic plutocrats who regard average citizens as disposable chattels.

The U.S. has been falling for decades, and it got worse, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s demonization of government, betrayal of unions, tossing out mental health patients onto the streets, massive upward wealth transfers to impoverish the working class and sowing distrust between citizens.

Eliminating the protections ensuring the citizens were informed correctly by the Fourth Estate opened the door for a corrupt monster like Rupert Murdoch to steadily drip hatred into uncritical minds who got ever more desperate with rising costs and vanishing incomes to arrive at a state of general insanity.

We are here today because of a visible mental health pandemic affecting one in five citizens.

We are here today, repeating history from 100 years ago to almost the day when the Nazis threatened global domination under their jackbooted heel.

They’re back again, which means everyone who supported a return to an evil regime dominating humanity is an enemy of decent society, whether they are blood relatives or not.

This is the beginning of the next major war the world is facing, and people need to wake TF up because it will only get uglier now and result in chaos until people realize we need each other to survive our challenges as a species.

That means all the people who want to demonize and hate those who are unlike them are enemies of humanity.

That’s why families are fracturing into warring pieces.

They chose hatred, and that just can’t be tolerated any longer because hatred is a fire that will consume everyone and everything we value.

Fifty years of this means they finally got what they wanted.

Should the rich not help the poor?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/Should-the-rich-not-help-the-poor/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

People who ask this question have entirely missed the point.

It’s like asking the con artist who stole all your money if he can lend you a few dollars to feed yourself on a promise that you’re going to pay him back.

The rich are both responsible for the poor and are not responsible for them.

How does this work?

Simple.

The rich do what they do best, and they make as much money as they can so they can become rich.

How do they do that?

They spend all their time and energy scheming ways to extract every penny of value out of every moment in their lives and through every micro-transaction they have that most people think of as just spending time with friends.

Since they have the resources to influence legislation in ways that enrich them, that’s what they do.

Most people would take advantage of any opportunity they can to enrich themselves. Most people don’t have the resources to do that. Most people also don’t obsess about every penny everything costs or how much they can make from any interaction.

Life is transactional for the wealthy, not interpersonal.

The only true friends that some of them have are those they cannot extract wealth from and that are not a threat to their financial well-being. That means most of their interpersonal relationships are shallow and transactional. They experience very little to no emotional vulnerability. That part of them has been shut down.

What that means is they cannot feel anything for the poor. They can’t empathize with poverty on any level. Poor people are an abstraction to them, as inevitable as night and day. They don’t see themselves as responsible for the poor, nor should they because they have their own lives to live, and poverty has existed since the dawn of human civilization.

They were not the first contributors to poverty. Even up until a few decades ago, their wealth-building activities helped people rise out of poverty, and that’s where their imaginations live today.

They cannot conceive of how their successes are now responsible for creating poverty because they view themselves as above reproach. How could they be so wrong if they’re so wealthy?

That’s why people like Elon Musk can become such an overt egotist. It doesn’t matter how utterly disgusting any of his words or actions are because he’s so wealthy; he cannot accept that anything he does is wrong.

The real problem here is that the wealthy are the victims of their success, and that success has manifested in a system that automatically feeds that wealth. Instead of a system which regulates wealth to ensure it is adequately distributed throughout society to continue raising people out of poverty, it’s now become a system of parasitically draining people to the edge of existence. People now cannot survive without additional measures to enable their survivability.

During the heyday of middle-class growth, society spread money more equitably, and the economy grew at its most rapid rate ever. Few people want to believe this, but that was due to taxes.

High taxes on the wealthy were responsible for raising the most people out of poverty and contributed to the most growth of the economy.

Have a look at this tax chart:

Notice how the years circled by a red border comprise the highest level of taxes, the most aggressive economic growth, and the most expansive growth of the middle.

How does this work? It’s simple beyond belief.

High taxes on corporations, in particular, incentivize them to hire more people — voila, an instant job growth formula for the economy. Paying people more is much easier to bear when it means a tax deduction on the other end. High employment rates and fair compensation (also guaranteed by union negotiations) stimulate economic growth. Everyone benefits. People rise out of poverty. More people have more disposable income to buy the stuff that corporations make, which corporations benefit from.

High taxes on the wealthy contribute to fair wealth distribution throughout the system and allow prices to maintain some sanity so that the middle class isn’t deprived of their dream of home ownership.

Since the wealthy, through their corporations, need to keep investing their money to keep it growing, it means they begin encroaching in areas that would otherwise be accessible to the lower classes — and that mostly means real estate and real estate is a finite resource. Suddenly, most rental accommodation is no longer small mom-and-pop entrepreneur but a multi-trillion-dollar entity whose goal is to squeeze profit from every transaction. Living expenses skyrocket as a result.

What was once available for living accommodations on a standard metric of 30% of one’s income is now 70%-80% of people’s income — for just a roof over their heads.

Since real estate is a finite resource and the appetite for wealth acquisition is an immense monster feeding the people employed by this system, they’re constantly looking for new opportunities. In the real estate market, that’s now become mobile home lots and campgrounds.

One used to be able to rent a piece of land from a local owner and plant their mobile home on that lot and pay a small fee to maintain services. Since all the lots are now owned by corporate entities instead, fees have to increase every year at a minimum to keep up with inflation and a little extra profit built-in on top to make their budgets balance. It’s an automatic decision-making system where no one cares to pay attention to the few extra dollars being asked of people, nor do they care that every corporation is doing the same thing so that the few extra dollars asked of by each adds up to lots of extra dollars from consumers whose incomes have remained flat or shrunk throughout the decades.

Voila… an instant formula for making the poor ever more poor.

Now… have another look at that tax table and pay close attention to the tax rates outside the red lines — particularly before the red-lined years begin.

Notice how they coincide with major events like The Great Depression and World War 2.

Then, look closely at the tax rates after the red lines. Notice how we are repeating history.

That’s right. We are repeating history, and it shows in the tax rates.

What’s next is an economic collapse and worldwide conflict that may or may not escalate into an outright global war. We are at a point where global conflict is a certainty. As the American economy collapses due to the radical incompetence of a grifter whose primary motivation is self-aggrandizement, the rest of the world will be busy jockeying for position in an emerging new world order.

The wealthy are okay with this because they stand to benefit from it, just like they have with the boom and bust economies. It means excellent deals for themselves as they pick the bones of the casualties who won’t survive the meltdown. They are not loyal to any nation because the entire globe is their playground. Nationalism is for the sheep they manipulate to do their bidding.

How can Donald Trump truly believe his act of kissing the American flag when his bread is buttered from Russia? In this respect, he’s no different than most who place their loyalties in the hands of those who feed them.

The people he convinced to be loyal to him sincerely believe he will help them improve their lives. If the best they can expect is to destroy the lives of their enemies, at least they’re okay with that. As long as they can laugh at their fellow citizens, whom they’ve been taught to hate, they can accept impoverished conditions for themselves.

That’s when the mask will fall off, and they begin to realize that the impoverished conditions they live in that they’ve accepted also make them the most vulnerable to the destructive efforts of a corrupt leader whose sole purpose for leadership was personal benefit at the expense of a nation.

The real lesson here is that the only way out of poverty is to embrace the notion that we are all in this together.

United, we stand and divided, we fall.

A historic wedge has just been hammered into a cultural divide that’s been slowly growing over the decades as the wealthy have been pitting the little people against each other to distract us from their efforts at ripping us off to increase poverty levels.

Imagine, within a small group of friends, one with the highest income always manages to forget their wallet and sponges off their comrades when they go out to dinner together. Imagine how angry everyone gets, not by their sponging, but by their constant whining about how shitty the service is that they get and how expensive everything is.

Most won’t notice because they value loyalty to their friend and will displace their subjective resentment of their sponging and project it onto the wait staff and restaurant they dine at. Eventually, they get so pissed with the restaurant that they burn it down.

Meanwhile, none of them notice how they’re going to miss that restaurant, nor how they got pissed at it because one of their dining comrades needed a scapegoat to distract them from their sponging.

That’s where America is today.

Tomorrow, without the restaurant, everyone goes hungry while the one comrade who sponged off everyone gets to rely on their hoarded stash because they didn’t spend any of their own money on eating at the restaurant.

It’s not up to the individual rich people to help out individual poor people because that’s like pissing in an ocean. No single rich person can solve poverty. However, all of them working together to restore sanity to a broken system can function like creating a rule for the person who sponges off the rest that mandates they pay their fair share or be denied access to the restaurant.

Expecting a few altruistic wealthy people to make up for the greed of the rest is unfair to them.

Our system has been corrupted to punish those with good intent and reward those with evil intent.

That’s why we’re doomed to repeat history.

People watched Gordon Gecko’s claim, “Greed is Good!” and interpreted that as an inspiration instead of a warning.