Authoritarianism is spreading like wildfire

The entrenched neoliberal post-Cold War consensus is cracking up.

But anyone who told you that the Reagan Era global order wasn’t authoritarian sold you a box of rocks.

Upper middle class Americans are getting a taste of life outside the bubble. This is what “democracy” has felt like in The Philippines and Brazil and Ferguson, MO for some time.

They are using their essentially bottomless pit of money, influence, and resources to shape a world where they are permanently definitively on top.

When were they not? Do you think the folks fucking kids on Epstein’s Island twenty years ago weren’t doing the exact same thing?

When you snip away the social safety net, drop the illusions of “friendly neighborhood police officer”, and abandon any effort at mitigating the ecological consequences of capitalist expansion, this is what you get.

assigns them a score if a citizen walks on the sidewalk correctly

Funny story about Jaywalking

The automobile lobby in the US took up the cause of labeling and scorning jaywalkers in the 1910s and early 1920s. In 1912, for instance, Popular Mechanics magazine reported that the term was current in Kansas City: “The city pedestrian who cares not for traffic regulations at street corners, but strays all over the street, crossing in the middle of the block, or attempting to save time by choosing a diagonal route across a street intersection instead of adhering to the regular crossing, is designated as a ‘jay walker,’ in Kansas City.”

In 1915, when New York City’s police commissioner Arthur Woods sought to apply the word “jaywalker” to anyone who crossed the street at mid-block, the New York Times protested, calling it “highly opprobrious” and “a truly shocking name.”

Originally in the US, the legal rule was that “all persons have an equal right in the highway, and that in exercising the right each shall take due care not to injure other users of the way”. In time, however, streets became the province of vehicular traffic, both practically and legally.

Anyway, enjoy your hyper-criminalized car culture hellscape while making spooky fingers about Evil Foreign Country.

Gaza: What starts here, changes the world

Koryo Tours, based in Beijing, China, offers several marathon packages to foreigners, departing from Beijing, Shanghai and Shenyang.

Packages start from €2,190 ($2,529; £1,894) for 2.5 nights in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, including a marathon place and “highlights” of the capital and tickets were sold out this year, according to the agency’s website.

Is this just an ad for a tourist company that got smuggled into a BBC article?

Democrats haven’t given a shit about cost-of-living since… LBJ?

Like, Carter practically campaigned on not giving a shit in 1980 and that was a big part of what sank him. Clinton ran on immigrant bashing. Obama ran as an antiwar candidate who promised to give people coupons for private insurance. Biden was the closest president we’ve had who ran on populist cost-of-living pressure (cribbing generously from Bernie Sanders), then immediately shat the bed once in office.

When the economy is growing, you can get away with not caring. When you’re staring into the recessionary abyss, it’s not something you can talk your way past.

It’s talk until it isn’t.

they would do this is if they knew that there weren’t going to be anymore elections

Ballot box or bullet box.

You’d get street protests from sea to shining sea that would make BLM and Occupy look like the Macy’s Day Parade.

The US is enormous, authority is devolved, and a lot of what keeps the wheels moving is voluntary compliance. Elections help people to believe that government is popular and their own stupid opinions are just in the tiny minority.

When you try to force these systems of power through brute strength, you break them. It’s a recipe for balkinization and civil war. Same as what happened in the run up to the Civil War, when slavers and abolishionists came to a head.

You had low key insurrection all through the North long before Buchanan left office. Southern states effectively denying Lincoln a ballot line only fueled his popularity in response.

ICE repurposed to chase down draft dodgers and press gang anyone under 40 into the war effort

It’s just clown on clown violence. Different factions within TrumpWorld undermining one another.

If you think David Navarro and Scott Bessent aren’t getting their own licks in, you haven’t been paying attention.

Trump’s cabinet is Oops! All Scheming Vizers! Miller is just one of many and they generally all hate each other.

It’s honestly kinda gross to see people blink past the bombing of schools, hospitals, and water treatment plants - the outright massacre of thousands of people - as though it’s a distraction from your domestic pedo politics.

Americans can’t even prosecute Woody Allen for this shit. It’s an absolute joke to think “Release The Epstein Files” is going to come to anything. Much less that it would preclude anyone from talking about the carpet bombing of Tehran.

Deliberately formed a number of minority controlled governments, with a mandate to kill the majority ethnic group if they got out of line.

Israel was one of these, but hardly the only one.

The main players in the Middle East have been fighting for the last 3,000

That’s wildly ahistorical.

What you’re describing is the Ottoman Empire, a region that was largely stable and peaceful for centuries.

In and out. Twenty minute quagmire.

You can just withdraw if things go bad, because it’s not like Iran will continue to bombard US and Israeli bases if we just shout “Time Out” loudly enough.

Speed running the Tet Offensive in weeks rather than years

I dont think you can blame everything Orban does on Americans

Sure. He’s got a huge network of domestic supporters who are along for the ride.

Every fellow American I know hates and mistrusts their government? To be fair, all of the people I spend energy associating with are strongly progressive.

Will you distrust the government when it flips back to Dem control?

Obama currently has a 90% approval among liberals. It doesn’t seem like they’ve learned anything.

Orban is a fucking FSB puppet

He came up through US anti-communist front groups and has turned his country out to Silicon Valley goons and evangelical reactionaries.

So had Putin, at least during the War on Terror era.

They’ve been peas in a pod under every Republican administration since Bush 41. At best, you could describe them as Rogue Assets, assuming you ignored how often they work to benefit American industry.

Trump, Silicon Valley, and Europe’s Far-right

Heritage Foundation, a prime mover in American domestic politics: Why the U.S. Must Befriend Hungary’s Populist Leader

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban at a Joint Press Availability

We’ve seen the American hand behind Orban since his days in the Alliance of Young Democrats (ironically enough, founded by Orban’s favorite whipping boy George Soros).

He’s an American proxy and always had been. If he’s been a wedge into the EU for decades, that’s by design.

Orban is a fucking russian asset

He’s more bound up in American geopolitics. But then Americans keep smelling shit, then blaming foreigners for the load in their pants.

This seizure appears in response to a gas pipeline that Ukraine destroyed during the war.

The price shock from the Iran War is driving people to do desperate things in order to stay in power. You can get mad at Orban for being a POS. But he’s not the prime mover here. This is all downwind of Israel/US closing the Straight of Hormuz.

I give it another two weeks before CBS runs an hour long special explaining how the Iranians bombed their own girl’s school.