Deeply unserious managers of empire continue to self-cannibalize their own productivity in an effort to go even more all-in on financial capital, all while the global south is doing its best to pivot towards more favorable relations with countries like China. When the US Empire runs out of countries to exploit, and financial capital ceases to be profitable, it will have no developed industrial base nor a strong scientifically trained worker base to pull itself back up. The US is cooked, this is just speedrunning the demise of the empire in a faster and harder fashion.
The good news is that the worse this gets, the more favorable the conditions for organizing become, and the more vulnerable to revolution the state becomes. We can legitimately take advantage of this, and gain mastery over capital, rather than the inverse. We can re-industrialize, become socialist, and begin the long and difficult but necessary path towards legitimate progress. It won’t be easy, but it will be doable.
“All you need is Jesus” -MAGAcucks
Wait, the bottom ones are PreK-12 students.
How are they planning to reduce the number of children?
Is this why they hired RFK?
Nah see we gonna use AI to train the kids instead of teachers. Also gotta make sure the AI uses the correct training data, like how the world is 6000 years old and the gays are a sin.
Number of children, being educated. Surely we could do that.
Surely this would help with the decaying birthrates.
Huge news for the WW3 odds. ✍️
That’s only the half of it. Look at the rest of the policies, look how they want to cut Medicare and food stamps and other safety net programs.
Make no mistake, this administration wants to see people die.
This is the end game the technocrats have been working towards, this is how they’re enacting their eugenics. They want poor people, disabled people, disadvantaged people, to die. They believe they are culling the weak members of the herd for the sake of the betterment of “their” kind (rich, white, “healthy”, etc).
These policies aren’t stupid or ineffective, they are cruel and insidious by design
Make no mistake, this administration wants to see people die.
They want to see people suffer before they die.
I still don’t understand their end goal. If everyone exept for them is poor and dying who are they going to sell their stuff to? What will they exploit the people for if they can sell nothing because only they can afford it? Are they banking on becomming the new china and sell everything to the rest of the world? Wouldn’t killing half of your population bite that plan in the ass as a fuck ton of manpower is gone? And if they want to use machines as a replacement wouldn’t removing all the smart people be extremely unhelpful?
It is not hard to understand if you think that money is just a number, practically is just used to obtain power and influence, and they’re using it for that. Once everyone is a slave, what do you need to sell
I think the ultra rich are preparing for the collapse of global civilization in our lifetimes. And they’re preparing by extorting as much wealth from the people as possible, now, to build redoubts to retreat to, and hire private armies to defend themselves, to bunker down until the wars are over.
Their long-term priority is not the financial health of their companies or their countries. Their long-term priority is surviving World War III and global mass starvation on an unimaginable scale.
Look. Climate change is really fucking bad. However bad you think it is, it’s worse. And the global economy is really fucking fragile.
Think about what happens when China or India get hit with a major drought and hundreds of millions face death by famine. Or when the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets go and a billion people in coastal cities are flooded out. Economic disruptions, supply chain breakdowns, a refugee crisis beyond anything the world’s ever seen. And as nations get more and more desperate to feed their own people, as the world produces less and less food and less and less clean water, war becomes inevitable.
And war will break supply chains even more. People who aren’t locally self-sufficient in food and water won’t be able to get food and water from outside their area. Even people who are self-sufficient will become less so as climate change fucks with agriculture. Result? Billions dead of starvation.
(In this interpretation, Trump’s obsession with Canada and Greenland makes a lot more sense. When the ice caps melt, that’ll be some of the most valuable real estate on the planet.)
Who will they sell to? Nobody. The ultra rich are planning for a future where global population is under a billion and most survivors have been knocked back to subsistence farming. They’re setting themselves up to be the techno-feudalist lords of a post-capitalist, post-democracy society.
Deleting science education just helps keep the peasants quiet, so they don’t realize what’s happening until it’s too late.
(Okay, alternate explanation: the people in charge are old men who want to make as much money as possible before they die and don’t care about the long-term future at all. That’s a much more banal explanation, but more likely to be true - after all, the environment is collapsing now because oil executives in the '60s and '70s looked at the very accurate predictions of climate change their scientists gave them and thought “who cares, I’ll be dead by then”. But Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, the other young-ish technocrats? I think they know collapse is coming and are using it as an opportunity to build a new post collapse world in their image.)
We’re moving towards an economy of low volume luxury good vs mass produced goods for the average person. Basically the floor will just keep rising until less and less people can afford things. The people who still can afford things will be getting nicer and more expensive stuff as time goes on.
It’s probable that they’re betting on technological innovation to bring about a post-scarcity economy where profit and capital are irrelevant. And relatively speaking, that could a good thing.
The issue is instead of taking a reasonable utilitarian approach, these people would rather lean on things like:
unmitigated greed
racism
a romanticization of historical imperialism
the social construct within the Western capitalist mindset to incessantly seek new frontiers of exploitation
and the insidious belief that other people don’t deserve to participate in such a society; either because of their beliefs or because of immutable characteristics that deem them unworthy or otherwise burdensome to the system.
IMO, the tragedy is that while the rich want to bet on consolidating enough capital to shoot themselves out into space, the statistical likelihood that they will find anything within reach that even remotely resembles the beauty and habitability of our planet is very low. Too bad they will kill all of us first before realizing that.
Something something, when we cut down the last tree and poison the last river…
I still don’t understand their end goal. If everyone exept for them is poor and dying who are they going to sell their stuff to?
I’m increasingly believing that they don’t actually care about anyone other then themselves.
Their only goals are self-serving greed.
And the methods they intend to use to serve that narrow goal are extremely short sighted and lacking any peripheral vision.
The whole conspiracy theory of the new world order feels more real every year. Make everyone suffer so they have no choice but to submit to the oligarchs.
People are already having trouble finding jobs. Cutting food stamps and Medicaid feels like pieces of making people suffer in a bigger plan.
The suffering is just a side effect. Massive death is the goal, they just don’t want to have to get their hands dirty.
I’ve figured this out. If MAGA gets rid of all the smart people, they won’t seem as dumb anymore!
This reminds me of a particularly hilarious scene from The Death of Stalin where they have all the country’s best doctors lined up to save Stalin after his heart attack, but they are all bumbling idiots and Stalins men get angry about how incompetent they are until someone reminds them that Stalin literally killed all the best and most capable doctors in the soviet union out of paranoia.
And so, Stalin dies.
Here’s to hoping for a similar result.
A country for REAL (white Christian male) Americans.
When are you people going to get the message. It was never a country that was about equality. It was about enrichment for a select group of people. When their privilege was threatened, the veil came off.
None of this changes until the rest of America decides enough is enough. That might never happen. If it does, it won’t be for years or decades.
The US died on Jan 20th, 2025.
I’d argue Citizens United was the death blow.
I’d argue Nixon started it.
I’d argue Johnson sealed our fate when he rolled over for Confederates after the war.
But really the argument could bemade that the moment European explorers realized they could just kill people and take their homes away and nobody would stop them, they decided to make it a core part of their identity by rationalizing everything they can, and dismissing whatever they can’t.
The devil works hard, but colonizers work harder.
Every good authoritorian dictatorsihp first goes for the educated people cause smart people know this shit is fucked… hitler, mao, polpot, stalin, lenin never failed to do this.
That’s how the 3. Reich started.
A healthy, broadly educated population, which feels safe and secure, are incompatible with, and toxic to, conservative and authoritarian ideologies.
They need you to be sick, stupid, and scared.
Turning the US into Russia 2.0
As an outsider, I honestly and sincerely invite anyone to explain how any of what’s going on in the US today isn’t as American as apple pie and school shootings?
America is still slightly ahead of Russia there, due to the legacy of the USSR. Not that Russia’s billionaires aren’t doing their best to privatize education and keep it out of reach of the peasantry since the fall of communism.
the oligarchs of russia sends thier children to elite or standard western colleges, russian is a shithole even for them for education.
Yeah, and a lot of the 56% college grad rate is boomers who were educated before the fall and are now dying off. We will see it drop precipitously in the next 20 years or so, and the quality of the education of the newly graduated decline.
Russia is actually significantly better to live in than America, and it is a total shithole.
I used to wonder how did the Islamic Golden Age end, how did the Muslim World go from leader in science, technology and commerce to has-been. Now I see leaders in the West destroying in years what took centuries to build. Civilizations like living organisms go through cycles of birth, rise, peak, stagnation and decline, some make a comeback in a different form like Europe after the Renaissance and China after Communism, and some don’t. Good thing we have other nations picking up after the decline of Western Civilization.
The Islamic golden age ended because of centuries of European crusades followed by the mongol invasion. It had little to do with a lack of appreciation for science and scientists.
But there is only so much scholars can do, when under relentless attacks by barbarians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age
This period is traditionally understood to have begun during the reign of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (786 to 809) with the inauguration of the House of Wisdom, which saw scholars from all over the Muslim world flock to Baghdad, the world’s largest city at the time, to translate the known world’s classical knowledge into Arabic and Persian.[4] The period is traditionally said to have ended with the collapse of the Abbasid caliphate due to Mongol invasions and the Siege of Baghdad in 1258.
Probably more important is the next paragraph:
There are a few alternative timelines. Some scholars extend the end date of the golden age to around 1350, including the Timurid Renaissance within it,[6][7] while others place the end of the Islamic Golden Age as late as the end of 15th to 16th centuries, including the rise of the Islamic gunpowder empires.
The Ottomans managed to siege Vienna centuries after the end of the Golden Age. They were not that behind in technology. Really the big change happened with the industrial revolution, which the islamic world mostly failed to implement. However at least the Ottomans managed to do a good enough job, to stand the ground against the Brits. Of the none Western world only Japan and depending on how you look at it Russia was better at adopting Western science and technology.
Iran and Moghul India did much worse though.
Well, actually, the US intervened in the islamic world.
Their golden age was long gone.
They might have had another if the US hadn’t pushed them around.
Europe is infinitely welcoming of these people, they’ll always have a place here.
Canada has also been increasingly welcoming American expat academics and medical professionals.
We need to up our game on many many fronts. We need more investment and harder turn toward deomcratic socialism to fully reap what is being sown.
Europe will welcome them with open arms.
People starts to realize that having a higher wage in the US doesn’t translate into a better quality of life.
Quality has nothing to do with the money they gain, but whith what they can buy for it, apart of the quality of the public services. Higher wages in the US mean nothing, when even this isn’t enough for education and health, which in the EU isn’t a problem. There the people don’t lose their existence base because of hospital bills or to pay the studies of their children.
i dont believe anywhere is currently safe from fascism.
In the “first world” sphere that regularly ignores and denigrate any country that could be perceived as inferior even if it’s not necessarily, then yes, maybe. We’re doing great over here in some places that are often overlooked.
Unfortunately I think Trumpism is lowering the bar. Maybe right now it’s not fascism everywhere, but there’s no doubt that on a decades time the world will be more fascist than it would have been without Trump.
I have confidence in the one step backward, two steps forward doctrine. If our current government is any indication, we’re heading in the exact opposite direction of the fash trend for the foreseeable future. There’s hope. Please don’t lose yours!
Yeah.
I’m in Australia, I suspect you might be also, but for reference a few months ago our centre-left party ground our centre-right party into the dust in a landslide election victory.
I suppose I agree that its not all bad news.
However, I’m gravely concerned about the US trajectory and I’m certain it will have an impact here sooner or later.
Right now our PM is trying to negotiate the current tariffs. The US will want us to increase military spending, and reduce investment in science and research. We might resist, but it’s certainly pressure to move in the wrong direction.
no, but it safer than if a authoritarian is control, like trump, Russia, and china. until those other countries in europe starts attacking science(defunding, jailing them, or alternative “science”) its better than the US.
only the PI/PHDs, and postodcs, the ones that do “majority of the work” in a research lab, undergrads, and grads wont have the same opportunities in europe.
Europe will welcome them with open arms.
The next step in the authoritarian playbook will be to limit the movement of educated people. Soon enough, those people won’t be able to leave even if they wanted to.
Keep on winning, America!
The times, they are a’changing
Death to IMPERIALISM
Death to CAPITALISM
Death to FASCISM
Death to MAGA
