Has anyone been keeping track? I don’t remember what comes next in the desperate flailing rotation. I don’t think it’s quite back around to “destroy your entire civilization” yet. I’m pretty sure there’s a round of “make a ludicrous offer that Iran refuses out of hand then claim they’re on the verge of accepting it” first.
The president, I was told, “no longer trusts Israel. He now believes he was misled” by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
More evidence for a theory I have about Trump.
I think that at least some significant number of Trump’s lies aren’t technically “lies,” in that they’re not conscious attempts to knowingly substitute a falsehood for the truth.
Rather, I think that he’s so egotistical and so narcissistic and so sociopathic that he’s effectively delusional - that his primary measure for the truth or falsity of a statement is simply whether or not he believes it.
In his private universe of Trump, whatever he believes to be true is and can only be true, and whatever he believes to be false is and can only be false.
For example, that (combined with the fact that he has the emotional maturity of a toddler) is why he takes it so personally when someone influential and/or close to him takes a position contrary to his. In his private universe, the fact that it’s contrary to his position means that it’s false, which means that they’re lying, which means that they’ve betrayed him.
It’s also why he initially believed Netanyahu - a corrupt and self-serving piece of shit that anybody with a working brain would recognize as a liar in mere seconds.
Netanyahu certainly got through to Trump in the easiest way possible, and the way that’s available to anyone dealing with a delusional narcissist - he simply told him what he wanted to hear.
That’s about the weirdest part of this whole thing to me.
It really is just The Emperor’s New Clothes played out in real life, as a wide swath of people who certainly know better all studiously pretend that the President of the United States is not a petty, shallow, vindictive, willfully ignorant and delusional egomaniac with the emotional maturity of a toddler who’s slipping into dementia right before our eyes.
Trump doesn’t have policies. He has whims, urges, compulsions, reflexes and tantrums.
pushing Democrats to the center
Because that worked out so well for them in 2024…
Anybody who’s surprised by this is part of the problem.
If an organization possesses influence or power that can be abused, then it inevitably will be abused. It doesn’t matter how conscientious people are or how many safeguards are put in place - loathsome, power-hungry pieces of shit will angle for position in the organization, and sooner or later some will get through, and they’ll immediately start shifting the organization to accommodate them, which is to say, to accommodate loathsome, power-hungry pieces of shit. And it’s all downhill from there.
I’m not an anarchist by accident.
Gee whiz - who would’ve thought that when a toxic piece of shit bought Twitter it would turn into a home for toxic pieces of shit?
That’s part of why I’ve generally been putting quotation marks around the word “corporation.”
It’s not meaningless though, because the underlying structure will likely remain essentially the same as it was when it was merely a corporation. And the relationship between the “government” and its “citizens” will have evolved from a relationship between a business and its customers/clients, and will undoubtedly retain some aspects of that. Most notably, the whole concept of public servants will vanish. Instead, the “government” will offer some specific services to potential citizens-as-customers, who can take them or leave them. Or, additionally or possibly even alternatively, the “government” will demand specific things of citizens-as-employees who will have the “choice” of following their demands or seeking employment-as-citizenship elsewhere.
In either event (or any other - this can’t possibly be an exhaustive list), the basic dynamic between “government” and “citizen” will be notably different from any of the ones we’ve seen before (though likely broadly most similar to feudalism).
Maintaining a large private army would be expensive and time consuming.
So is maintaining a large workforce and infrastructure, but they do that as a matter of course. And already, there are corporations with operating budgets larger than some countries. That’s only going to become more the case with time.
What stops another corporation with a private army from coming in and robbing them of everything they have?
The same things that generally stop countries from doing it to each other - insufficient forces and/or unacceptable losses and/or a preference for stability and/or established alliances and/or any of countless other considerations.
This isn’t rocket science. Realpolitik is a fairly straightforward thing.
Where is the corporation getting their funding from?
From the sale of goods and/or services.
Duh.
Someone’s got to be paying them.
Yes. Consumers of whatever goods and/or services they provide.
Duh.
So, they are using a sovereign currency created by a government using a central banking system chartered with the government.
Or more likely not.
Here’s just one quick idea - accept local currency with a handling fee sufficient to cover any potential losses on exchange (which are unlikely, since at that point their currency will likely be harder than about any government’s), and advertise a discount for the use of their private currency, accompanied by the offer of free and automatic currency exchange with an account at the corporate bank.
So you promote your currency, avoid the hassle of dealing with competing currencies and gain new bank accounts, all at the same time.
And that’s just one idea, off the top of my head.
I don’t blame them.
Neither the US or Israel can be trusted to negotiate in good faith, and in fact Israel can pretty much be counted on to violate any agreement almost immediately. And to assassinate the negotiators.
Whoever wants in on it really.
Primarily I presume it’d be the corporations themselves, but banking is certain to change to accommodate the growing independence of the “corporations,” and I expect that to some notable degree, the two will merge - that the largest “corporations” will have their own banking sibsidiaries and will handle most everything internally.
There’s a broad point underlying all of this - all that’s really necessary is that enough executives/owners at enough institutions have a desire to divest themselves of associations with governments and establish their own “states.” Once the will is there and they possess enough wealth and power to enforce their will, the rest is just details. They have entire staffs who are employed to figure out how to accomplish whatever it is they want to accomplish, and they will figure it out.
Of course. Gambling is a hallmark of civilizations in decline.
The Polymarket thing is a bit different though. It’s built on a foundation of saps hoping to strike it big, but it promarily benefits insiders, who are turning their knowledge into financial windfalls.
Just another of the privileges afforded the wealthy and empowered few.
So?
In the first place, a “corporation” could set up a legal system easily - draft some laws, build some facilities and appoint some officials, and done.
But they wouldn’t even need to do that. They likely would, because an impartial system wins voluntary compliance and thus promotes stability, but the only really necessary part of a legal system is sufficient power to enforce its dictates, and with enough armed professionals, that’s relatively easy, at least within secured borders.
Yes.
And specifically one of the things that impressed me about Snow Crash’s predictions was the idea that federal governments didn’t get overthrown or cease to exist - they were simply irrelevant. The “corporations” had amassed enough wealth and power that they could, and did, simply ignore the governments.
Sure.
They could even do it today simply by paying in Bitcoin.
I expect though that the future will see private currencies backed by the-entities-formerly-known-as-corporations.
Governments don’t monopolize currencies because nobody else wants to issue one, but because it’s in their interests to monopolize them, and they have sufficient power (for the time being) to enforce their monopolies.
No and yes…
A business entity that is proactively protected from liability could not exist without government charter.
However, a business entity could employ its own paramilitary and/or hire mercenaries and effectively make itself immune to liability, which works out to the same thing pretty much.
And I’m reasonably certain that that’s the future - that corporations will continue to acknowledge and submit to governments only as long as it’s to their advantage to do so, and that when the costs outstrip the benefits, they’ll simply stop, and instead manage their properties as essentially states unto themselves. And at that point, whether or not they have an official declaration of their corporate identity will be irrelevant.
Oh look - Newsom’s out there again advertising his right-wing credentials.
If the US has free and fair and honest elections, the Republicans will lose their majorities, therefore Trump (with the brazenly dishonest support of the corrupt and compromised conservatives of the Supreme Court) will see to it that the US does not have free and fair and honest elections.
Quid pro quo.
I’m fairly certain that their idea of meaningful review is making sure that clankers all say what a great guy and beautiful, perfect, beloved President Donald Trump is and how beautiful and perfect his ballroom is going to be and how mean and nasty Democrats are and especially that bastard Obama who thinks he’s so cool because he got a Nobel and Donald Trump is the most awesomest president ever in the history of ever and that’s why he deserves every Nobel and did I mention the ballroom?