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Asklemmy @lemmy.ml
Onno (VK6FLAB) @lemmy.radio

What is the end game?

What kind of world are the Orange and his puppet master billionaires building?

Are we headed for slavery, extinction, the matrix or some other post apocalyptic future?

How do these despots think that food arrives?

At the moment it seems they're hell bent on global destruction.

80 comments

  • The most likely scenario is something similar to the post Soviet style collapse that followed USSR.

    Gorbachev Introduced glasnost and perestroika to reform the Soviet system that inadvertently eroded the ideological and institutional foundations of the USSR, accelerating its collapse. Today, Trump is pursuing a similar, if ideologically inverted, disruption of the US institutions. Attacking the deep state, undermining trust in media and elections, and prioritizing loyalty over expertise. He’s enacting a purge of the permanent bureaucracy under the guise of draining the swamp, feeding off polarization and institutional distrust. These policies are eroding the foundation of the system paving the way to its collapse.

    Soviet collapse followed as a result of a shock therapy with sudden price liberalization, fiscal austerity, and privatization that led to hyperinflation, economic instability, and the rise of an oligarchic class. Similarly, Trump is busy slashing regulations and cutting corporate taxes, fuelling short-term growth that deepens wealth inequality and corporate consolidation. Like Gorbachev, he’s ushering in a polarized economic landscape where faith in the system is rapidly dwindling among the public.

    The decline in living standards is amplifying nationalism, in form of MAGA, and deepening cultural and regional divides in the US. Trump's whole rhetoric is rooted in divisive politics. Just as Soviet republics turned inward post-glasnost, prioritizing local grievances over collective unity, so are states like Texas, Florida, and California are increasingly talking about breaking with the union. People like Musk are well positioned to target the remaining public services and industries for privatization.

    The USSR collapsed abruptly, while the US might face a slower erosion of its institutional norms. The big difference here is that the Soviet Union was structurally more resilient to societal collapse compared to the United States.

    USSR had a lot of redundancy in critical infrastructure such as public transit, people owned their homes, and food production was largely localized. This allowed communities to survive during systemic failures. Another big factor is that Soviet society emphasized collective welfare over individualism, fostering mutual aid networks and state-provided essentials like healthcare and education, which could buffer against collapse.

    The US relies on fragile, privatized systems with just-in-time supply chains, and largely deregulated utilities. We already saw how this system buckled under the stress of the pandemic, and routinely fails to deal with natural disasters like the LA fires. America's dependency on globalized trade coupled with hyper-individualism and lack of contingency planning, makes it prone to chaos in a collapse scenario. The profit efficiency driven model risks catastrophic failure under pressure.

  • The disappointing answer is that it's going to be very similar to how things are now, just with fewer rights and more repression around the edges. Almost all of Project 2025's policies are things that this nation has used in the past or is using today to a lesser degree - voter suppression, rollback of labor rights and civil liberties. The rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer, but that was happening long before Trump.

  • Simple. We are on the express to cyberpunk (the literary genre).

    Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian futuristic setting said to focus on a combination of "low-life and high tech". It features futuristic technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cyberware, juxtaposed with societal collapse, dystopia or decay.

    Cyberpunk plots often involve conflict between artificial intelligence, hackers, and megacorporations, and tend to be set in a near-future Earth...

  • What they think they're doing and what they're actually doing are two different questions. What they're aiming to do is keep things trucking along while making as much profit as possible, more or less the same as most politicians, but with a bit more of a realpolitic approach. There is no long term plan, and that goes for basically anyone remotely near to the levers of power. What we have is a system of competing groups all singularly focused on maximizing their profits for the next quarter, nobody's actually at the helm and it's an open question whether anyone could take the helm and alter the course from the natural progression determined by systemic forces.

    Where we are actually headed, regardless of who's in charge, is a matter of several inconvertible facts. First, the US is clearly in decline and will eventually lost its spot as global hegemon, at this point, there is a serious risk that it will start WWIII in response, as Americans are not ones to accept defeat gracefully. Second, climate change will render more and more areas in developing nations unstable or uninhabitable, causing a major refugee crisis which has already started and is going to get considerably worse. What measures will be taken to maintain the dividing lines that keep people from poor countries out of rich countries is another question, and it may well be answered with genocide.

    If, by some miracle, cooler heads prevail and we don't start WWIII, and you're lucky enough to have been born in a rich country, then we will likely just see things get gradually and progressively worse. But it will be the kind of apocalypse where you still have to go to work. Day to day life will carry on, just with more uncomfortable things you have to push out of mind, more frequent shootings, the reemergence of all kinds diseases and more pandemics that you'll be expected to work through. There isn't going to be a tipping point that causes a revolution, nor are the elites going to unveil a secret plot to make everyone eat bugs or whatever. You're just going to be working longer hours, affording less, retiring later (if at all), and probably having to navigate and even more bullshit process for applying for jobs. Going further into this sort of "boring dystopia" is almost certainly where we're headed.

    The two most important political priorities, arguably the only two priorities that really matter, are demilitarization andopposing war with China, and opposing genocide of foreigners/refugees/immigrants. These are the things we will be facing, perhaps within the next 10 years (but if not then certainly later), and if we aren't able to organize resistance along those lines, things are going to get very ugly. Actually stopping the decline is very unrealistic/implausible and has been for some time.

  • I don't think they know for sure where it will end up but no matter what it will be, it will be brilliant, it will be the greatest, and it will have been the plan all along.

    Rich people like to keep their money. So the only objective right now is to dismantle the oversight within government. It's not government efficiency they're after but removal of impediments to big business interests. That's the Melon side of the plan. It's his ROI. It's also is MO. Tabula Rasa everything and then build anew. It didn't work for Twitter. I don't think it will work for a federal government. We've already seen lots of unintended side effects. Oops, we fired the guys who look after the nukes. Lives will be lost here and there but, cynically, not enough to mobilize the masses.

    It is of course worrying that Trump said as much as wanting to enlarge the US again. I'm not sure yet if that's just a dead cat he's thrown on table to distract us from Melon or if that's really the plan. It worried the US NATO ally Denmark enough to massively increase their defense budget over Greenland. Trump likes to be contrarian. He feeds off the stir he causes. He never built the wall, Mexico never paid for it. But he reveled in the reactions. Greenland could be a similar thing but I'm not sure yet.

    It's worrying me the amount of sh!t the lgbtq+ community is getting, especially the T. There is danger there. I don't think Trump cares an awful lot about this issue, he just likes it as a way to unite the sleepy, the anti-woke behind him. But there are people behind him and with power now that do care, that do want to please their leader. And that creates a maelstrom of zealous a-holes trying to one-up each other with cruelty to score browny points with the boss. When I think this through, I fear citizen liberty is most under threat here.

    I don't believe a world war with nukes is what they're after. You cannot really prosper as a corporation if the planet is barely habitable due to the radiation and the nuclear winter. It would be bad for Wall Street. But they wouldn't mind a few conflicts comparable to Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine. While nukes have been threatened, they haven't been used. So it's a conventional war and that's good for arms manufacturers.

    In simple terms, Trump's cozying up to Vlad actually decreases the threat of a world war III, at least in the short term. It reduces the number of trouble hotspots. There were big ones between the US and Russia (until January 25) and between the US and China. Trump parroting Kremlin talking points and showing the rest of NATO the middle finger reduces hotspots with Russia. Russia is on relatively friendly terms with China and could probably meditate issues between China and the US. At least in the short term, that's not a bad thing. But it isn't stable. It remains to be seen if Europe plus Canada plus X can fill the vacuum and that would reignite hotspots with Russia again.

    I do agree that climate change poses a threat. I don't think the billionaires worry so much about it beyond buying New Zealand and blanketing it with villas with bunkers. But it is a threat to maintaining order when the people get hit with more severe tornados, droughts, etc. Best way to maintain order is an authoritarian government.

  • When an empire can't expand, by means of territory, knowledge, or other means; it turns inwards on its own people and territories in a last ditch effort to survive, as it lunges towards its inevitable collapse.

  • So far, seems to be a poor bid at reindustrializing, as the US is failing to keep up with China's growth and will see its global Hegemonic status falling. More than anything, it seems like the current admin are "true believers" of the lies the architects of Empire concocted to justify their tools, hence why the current admin is gutting USAID and other forms of soft power exertion.

    The US can't re-industrialize without Socialism, so it will flounder until it collapses via revolution as it dies a slow death.

  • End game is to go on yet another settler genocidal war to appease the imperial core working class.

80 comments