"I don't hate you because you're a POC, a woman, or queer. I hate you because you're poor."

I don't agree.

These fascists are all following the political ideology and strategies laid out by Curtis Yarvin under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. He's been in the orbit of people like Peter Thiel for 10+ years and has been very influential among the tech oligarch crowd.

His vision centers around creating a tech-oriented monarchy for America. At the top would be the president who would operate more like the Chairman of the Board in a corporate structure. Rather than governing on a day-to-day basis, this President/King would appoint a CEO to oversee the actual management of government. That's the role Musk has taken on.

Trump appoints Musk to do the actual running of the country to accomplish what Trump wants accomplished while letting Trump seem above the fray (at least that's the intention, Trump is too incompetent to actually stay above the fray). Musk isn't a red herring. He's not diverting from anything. He's just the guy doing the job so Trump can go golf all day.

Can we start using "Vichy" to describe any Democrats who collaborate with the fascists?

Jon Stewart slammed Vichy Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer...

Stewart argued Vichy Democrats avoid proposing real alternatives by pretending Republicans will compromise.

Wouldn't ever even come to that, at least not under the current Trump administration.

Yes, the US Marshall Service is technically the enforcement arm of the judiciary, but they're under the Department of Justice and answer directly to the US Attorney General. The DoJ is part of the Executive Branch and the AG is a member of the Cabinet appointed by the President. The current AG is Pam Bondi, who is a VERY close Trump ally who's been working for him in various ways as a lawyer since at least 2019.

The Supreme Court doesn't order the Marshall Service to do anything. They send a request to the AG, who then gives orders to the Marshall Service. Even under previous administrations it would have been incredibly difficult to imagine the circumstance where the AG would order the Marshalls to arrest a member of the Executive Branch, and it's just never going to happen under Trump.

Microsoft has the ability to do this if they really wanted to. It would completely destroy their business if they did, though, so they won't. I mean, who would keep using Microsoft products if the company was willing to just take it away from you at a moment's notice?

The US government cannot do it so easily. They'd have to order Microsoft to do so. Microsoft would resist and take it to court. The US Court system makes a LOT of really fucked up rulings, but the one thing they do reliably is side with big business. I'm inclined to think that in this hypothetical showdown, the courts would side with Microsoft.

I think there are actual elected Democrats who want to oppose the fascists. Look at Bernie, AOC, Crockett, even Pritzker and Walz. Hell, even Seth fucking Moulton and Nancy fucking Pelosi criticized Vichy Schumer over his collaboration and capitulation.

The problem is the Democrats, at the national level, are all led by the Vichy caucus of the party. Schumer, Jeffries, Newsom, etc who actually agree with the fascists on a number of issues.

We can't write off everyone elected with a (D) next to their name. History has shown us time and time again that the only thing that has ever defeated a powerful fascists movement is a popular front of leftists and liberals working together. We need to eliminate the Vichy wing of the Democratic Party. I'm not going to pretend like I know how to do that, but we're never going to defeat the fascists if we keep lumping everyone in with the collaborationists. That just fractures our side and strengthens theirs.

And electoral politics can't be the only thing we do. It's one tactic, but it's not the only or even most important one. Most importantly, we need to build connections and networks within our communities so that we can support each other against the fascists. We need to establish the relationships now so that when the fascists come for the marginalized in our community people (especially those less engaged with politics) are more willing to side with the victims of the fascists who they've come to know against the power structures.

It's not that complex or Machiavellian.

Look at what rich people have done after every recession of the past 40 years and how what's happened to their wealth after the recovery. The economy crashes forcing middle-class people to sell off what scant assets they own. Even people on the lower end of upper-class tend to sell off assets when the stock market crashes. Super rich people who have enough money to weather the economic downturn buy the dip, gobbling up all those assets people are selling. Then when the economy recovers the rich people make out like bandits (which they are).

That's all that's happening. He's tanking the economy so Musk and his other rich friends can buy the dip and increase their wealth even more when the economy improves.

I'm asking for a fictional novel I'm writing. I'd like to describe my character in detail rigging a Cybertruck to burn but making it look like it was a spontaneous battery fire. I intend my character to believably get away with this crime.

Can anyone help me with detailed steps how this fictional character would fictionally accomplish this feat. Fictionally, of course.

I agree with the overall point here, but starting it off with "Someone on TikTok said...." (or really, any variation of "Someone said....") just completely undermines your credibility. Just say "There are more kids with measles...."

Don't bother with the wishy-washy "someone said" nonsense. Confidently assert your point rather than attributing it to someone else. If you're unsure of the facts and don't want blowback for posting something inaccurate, either verify the facts yourself (it's not hard or time consuming) or just don't post it.

The egg is the only possible correct answer to this.

Modern chickens didn't exist until something like 10,000 years ago. The egg was a key development in allowing animals to live on land, and first came about somewhere around 300 million years ago.

But if you want to narrow it down to just chicken eggs, then you have it right. The immediate predecessor to the first thing that can be called a 'chicken' laid a chicken egg from which hatched a chicken.

The egg absolutely came first.

Not while remaining faithful to their religion. A core tenant of all three faiths you named is that their God (which are all different interpretations of the same god) is the ONLY god and you cannot recognize any other god.

Of course, there have always been varying interpretations of each faith. Christianity, especially, has lent itself to syncretism quite well. There have been (and still are) many cultures where the people would identify themselves as Christian, but see no contradiction in also recognizing aspects of other faiths, including sometimes gods (although they might call them some other word).

If you're following any of the major, world-recognized denominations of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam (eg Catholicism, Protestantism, Sunni Islam, Orthodox Judaism, Shia Islam, etc) then, no, you cannot worship pagan gods. But there are smaller versions of each religion which do.

Honestly, I think the issue here is more your lack of education/awareness than anything else.

Like electing citizens to office at random

Ancient Athens had a system to do exactly this for a period of time.

Or even a pure democracy in a modern sense

Check out the Democratic Confederalist system currently in practice in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (commonly called Rojava). It's not strictly pure democracy, but that's a core principle, and it's MUCH more participatory than virtually any other governmental system on the planet.

The big issue here is that education is always political, even if you don't think it is. I'm guessing, based on your writing here, that you were educated in a western liberal democracy. The curriculum you were taught in school, especially with regards to governmental systems, civics, and history, is heavily influenced by the ideology of your country: liberal western representative democracy. I had the same education in school growing up. The curriculum is only interested in presenting alternative forms of government as a way to show how great the one you were living under is. "Monarchy was bad for these reasons, so we replaced it with liberal representative democracy." "Fascism is bad for these reasons (while ignoring all the ways it's very similar to our current system), so be happy you have a liberal democracy." "State communism was authoritarian and bad, so be happy you have what you do." Etc.

They never talk about the shortcomings of their own system, or the benefits of others, because they aren't trying to educate a bunch of radicals who might one day overthrow the system.

There are a lot of people thinking of alternative forms of government. For my own personal ideological biases, I'd recommend reading stuff by people like Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876), Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921), Murray Bookchin (1921-2006), David Graeber (1961-2020), or Abdullah Öcalan (1948-).

It says he worked an an intern and it was several years ago. I know the meme is fun, but I highly doubt that if he were not under arrest that he'd have been working on Civ 7 UI.

There were well over 1000 people at the protest I was at on Saturday...

Next Saturday (April 5) is supposed to be a huge day of protest across the country, notably with a very large demonstration planned for the National Mall in DC. I plan to be at that one.

Governments were formed and exist to protect property rights. As much as they can be said to have an underlying purpose, it's to protect property rights, and those who own more property will always have a greater level of protection.

The thing the liberal revolutions of the 19th century, socialist revolutions of the 20th century, and the development of social democracies in the 20th century taught governments is that there comes a point where wealth inequality gets so extreme that it threatens the stability of government, which poses the largest possible threat to property rights. Governments learned that they need to have some form of wealth redistribution in order to prevent a violent revolution. To the degree that governments do address wealth inequality, it's focused on doing it just enough to prevent the system from collapsing.

That's why there's really nobody focused on complete wealth equality. They don't want that. They want to maintain status quo property rights.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14458011/Luigi-Mangione-sex-tape-bombshell.html

There's the news article. The source is one of his friends who claimed to know about the videos. But the videos aren't public.

He also filmed hours of professional quality porn of himself (with partners).

He's just going to insert a cylinder into the fish. Note, the cylinder canNOT be cut. That's why he wants no teeth.

I think this is a factor of your media echo chamber. I've personally attended protests nearly every week since January. I'm going to one tomorrow. They are all over my news feeds.

Mostly because the only real exposure to electricity the people who came up with the "classical" elements had was lightning. I'm sure they experienced static electricity from time to time, but they probably didn't associate it with lightning.

From their perspective, lightning is a very brief moment of extreme light, then maybe a fire if they can actually see the impact site. So it seems a lot more closely related to fire than we would suppose.

maybe there is a scientific explanation of why it isn’t

Nothing about the "classical elements" is rooted in what we would understand as science today. It was just people making guesses about how the world around them worked without the rigor of the scientific process. It was little more than wild speculation.