Voroxpete

They have simply have no way to wrap their heads around the idea of doing anything about it. The CIA was created as a weapon for the government to point at their enemies. They don't know how to respond when that government is the enemy.

Take a good hard look at how rapidly Trump and his team are expanding the powers of the president. Those constitutional limits are close to breaking point already.

Trust me, I really, really hope you're right. But please understand that these new fascists have spent a lot of time thinking about these problems and how they're going to solve them.

Anyone believing there will be any more free and fair elections in the US isn't paying attention.

It took less than 100 days for Hitler to consolidate power, and Trump is following the exact same playbook.

You can hold leaders to account, and you should - there's plenty to hold them to account for - but that still doesn't answer the question of what is to be done in this present moment right now.

You want a general strike, but you have no idea who is going to organize one, or how they're going to do it, because you'd rather feel justified in your outrage over grudges of the past than actually see anything useful done.

You're more interested in feeling righteous than you are in succeeding, and that's going to get you exactly nowhere.

This is part of the equation that they've proven themselves consistently awful at assessing properly.

There was this guy who did a bunch of interviews with super wealthy people about their apocalypse shelter plans, and he was like "What stops all the poors from killing you and taking your stuff?"

And they're like "Oh, we have ex-Navy SEAL private security details, we're good."

So the guy asks them "What stops the SEALs from killing you and taking your stuff?"

They were stumped. Not a one of them had a good answer. Like, one guy floated having the only password to the vault where all the supplies are kept, as if Navy SEALs don't know how to torture information out of someone. Waterboarding was that guy's best case outcome.

They really, really don't understand that they need us, but we don't need them. And the only thing keeping them alive is that we haven't really figured that out yet either.

The right wing assholes whining about free speech don't actually want free speech. You can see that in the campaigns to remove books from school libraries all across the country. All across the world the right are demonstrating time and again how little they actually support free speech.

What they want is the freedom to spew hate speech, which is the only kind of speech that a tolerant and free society should not tolerate. All other forms of speech they will gladly and eagerly suppress unless it agrees with them.

At some point it probably becomes more valuable to offer jobs that barely keep people alive than it does to deal with the sheer number of unemployed people who are now ready to burn everything down.

Then again, capitalism has never been good at externalities.

As someone doing the hiring, referral hires fucking suck. I want the best candidate, not the most connected candidate, and I don't want to have to deal with the bullshit company politics when the referral hire doesn't work out.

Again, where are your alternatives? If these leaders suck as badly as you say they do, then who should people be looking to instead?

No idea why you deleted that comment. You're right.

The bank bailouts in 2008 didn't cause the tiniest bit of inflation. Again, Mark Blyth calls this out specifically in his book and many of his lectures. The predominant question plaguing economists in the 2010s was "Where the fuck is the inflation?"

Japan has an incredibly high debt to GDP ratio, and their main economic constraint right now is too little inflation.

Once you start looking for the examples they're there. This whole idea that government spending = inflation is a total myth.

You have the power to build up leaders rather than tearing them down.

And if nothing else, you have the power to say nothing. If you're not going to offer better alternatives, at least make the positive choice not to attack the people taking action.

And, just to be absolutely clear, if you carefully read back through everything I've said here, you'll see that I never said "don't criticize." Criticism can still build up, can still inspire others to join a common cause. But you're not doing that. You're just cutting down what's there and planting nothing in its place.