politics

I appreciate the gusto, but I find rally posts like this to be extremely irritating.

Do you really think the people who are saying he'll just get away with it all don't think all of these things? Do you think people dropped their morals on the issue and now think "this is fine" because it's the status quo?

Pray tell -- what can I do, today, as a drop in the fucking ocean, to ensure this specific white collar criminal gets summarily apprehended, convicted, and meaningfully punished for his crimes on a reasonable timescale? What reasonable, concrete action am I supposed to take that will do a damn thing about it that I'm not already doing by dutifully casting my ballots and boycotting support for people and causes I don't believe in at every opportunity?

I am convinced there is no such action. The dominos that matter in this specific case were already set long ago. All we can do at this point is make logical predictions about how they will fall. And from my point of view, "Donald Trump will not be meaningfully punished" is looking inevitable. I have no faith in the current stacking of the judicial system to declare an outcome I'd be content with. I and others like me are not happy about it. But we aren't deluding ourselves either. The train for proles like us doing anything about this now is long gone.

Now, I don't think it's hopeless on the grand scale. We can and should work to claw progress on the general form of this issue over time. There's lots we can still do about that. Activism, protesting, dragging people to polls, etc. But that will likely be a "plant a tree whose shade you will never sit in" kind of thing.

Regarding this specific man today, I think we are powerless to meaningfully affect the trajectories of these cases. Anything short of rioting in the streets, casting aside legal process, and marching on the courthouse demanding his head on a pike (in other words, stooping to the level of Jan 6th insurrectionists) is too slow and/or only theoretical. And I am very tired of cheerleaders trying to tell me otherwise when they offer no substantive plan of action.

The question is what people who conclude the truth will do next. I think we're stuck between a rock and the hard place that is human nature. I'm growing increasingly cynical about grassroots democracy having any hope of victory in the age of the algorithm controlled internet.

Sam Harris made a good point during the pandemic that is if everyone had just followed the lockdown instructions to perfection for three solid weeks, the virus really would have been eliminated in the US, and the world if we in the global community all followed suit. Millions of lives and trillions of dollars would have been saved. But we fucking suck at acting in our own best interests, and if Covid had been as deadly as we first feared, we'd already be fucked.

I think there's a reason fascist authoritarians are so seductive to so many, and it's because most of us are suckers for charismatic leaders telling us what to do. Enter stage right a left-wing populist, and the left will get just as horny for them as the right is for Trump.

This happened in NZ (where I live) over Jacinda Ardern. Turned out she was just in it for her career and the rest of her party was just downright incompetent. Ironically, they did well early pandemic which won them and the left an overwhelming majority in 2020. They honestly just got lucky. Not only did they screw up royally late-pandemic, but in the aftermath, they totally fucking failed to do anything worthwhile with the power they had to move the progressive agenda forward in any enduring way. They just lost the 2023 election in a complete landslide. The only silver lining is the new right-wing three-way coalition is very likely to be even more incompetent, so maybe the left will get another chance in three years.

Point is, populists always win elections because most people don't vote for policy, or if they do, vote single issue, and rarely strategically. Then, anything that would improve the situation at the grass roots in the short term (e.g. integrating civics and critical thinking into school curriculums) would lead to accusations of progressive bias since science and progressivism are natural allies. Even so, change of this kind might still be possibly perhaps if it didn't threaten capitalism as a whole which thrives on the left/right oscillations of so-called "representative" democracy.

I think we're fucked in the near term unless one of the following two miracles occurs:

1. A charismatic left-wing politician more popular than Trump emerges in the US for the 2028 election who is scientifically literate, a competent leader, an excellent sales and business person, and genuinely interested in advancing the UNs "Global Goals" agenda in the most effective ways already known to world leaders in their respective academic and technical fields.

2. Benevolent aliens announce themselves with a power comparable to God of Abrahamic and they strong arm us into adopting a Solar Punk society.

I put (2) as being as likely as God actually existing, which is, basically nil. So... Taylor Swift 2028?