Always were
Why the shock? It’s gone down this way every single time throughout history. Surround yourself with yes men and you lose your perception of reality shockingly quickly. People that challenge you from a place of truth and compassion are more valuable than gold.
You mean the ones who were dumb enough to be the figureheads. The smart ones are the ones you don’t hear about in the news, but spend their money to put forward the dummy who perpetuates the systems that made them wealthy.
Three assumptions:
- the owning (or “billionaire”) class is the ruling class
- over the years, more and more capital has been siphoned to the owning class (the rich get richer)
- this siphoning is a result of the way the ruling class has designed their laws
Combining all of this, the ruling class has ensured the ruling class got a lot richer. Doesn’t sound moronic to me. What’s moronic is falling for the “oh I’m just a dopey guy, I’m one of you, herpyderp” schtick they put on to court rural voters.
I remember listening to Rush Limbaugh in the late 80s, when he first came on. He had a great tonality for radio, and was facile, and could drone on for hours, in a uniquely entertaining way. He set the standard for the legion of wannabe conservative talkers that followed. That smooth talking, speculative, non-stop patter is all Limbaugh. He’s the guy that did it best, and the one they all copy.
I had good Critical Thinking Skills, so he didn’t draw me in, and I was able to watch from the sidelines as he spun his propaganda. But others weren’t as able to resist him, and I listened as they called his show, and praised him for showing them the way, through conservatism. As his popularity grew across the country, and he quickly became the main tentpole for the Conservative Propaganda Machine, literally the recruitment and indoctrination arm, I wondered where the Republican Party, and America would be in 20, 30, 40 years time.
I figured we’d get a hold of it somewhere along the line, but I also thought about how bad things could get if they got everything on their Wish List, and that Worst Cast Scenario is exactly what has happened. The Dems let us down badly, as I also predicted was possible, even probable.
There are paths out of this, that puts America on a proper path for the rest of this century. America can be a place where people are helped to rise and improve themselves, their families, and their community, like China has done, or it can be a place where people are enslaved to profit.
The only problem is that is going to take strong Democratic and Citizen resolve, and it’s going to get pretty ugly, and very possibly violent, to purge MAGA from our government and society, and the current Democrat Party doesn’t have what it takes. Let’s hope that changes in 2026 and 2028, and we get enough courageous people in office who will exercise that level of resolve.
He’s one person that should have never been platformed I blame him for the rise of shitty sorry excuses of men that are now full on maga.
Oh, yeah, the damage he caused is incalculable.
The thing is, you don’t have to be smart to become a part of the ruling class. You just have to be somewhere in the triangle of smart, lucky, and immoral. To be a billionaire, you just have to be lucky and immoral.
I feel that it’s easier to show one’s whole ass with the invention of the internet than when it had to travel via newspaper.
? They always were. Just less dumb morons.
That’s what you get when you start picking politics by number of likes.
Incest is a hell of a drug
The Hapsburgs have entered the chat
Um, do we have to go back and list idiotic leaders from the past fifth or a hundred years? We can do that easily enough… Takes time but isn’t hard.
I’ll believe that they’re stupid instead of just malicious when they actually start to lose their wealth and power. Until such a time, any dumb statements or actions can’t compare to the overall long term success of their campaign to horde more wealth and power.
The problem is that all the previous generations are the ones who came up with the unique schemes to start stealing back all the wealth. The current group just shouts “look over there!” Or “no I can steal 1 billion 776 million from you because its a patriotic number”
They are also to stupid to realize that losing some wealth would be the better choice than letting the world burn because some other guy sold them a shed with an underground bunker full of guns they will be shot with the moment they try to tell their security team they are the god emperor of the ashes.
Was there a time when they weren’t?
Based on everything I learned about history from watching Blackadder, probably not.
You know, genuinely…American education tends to go “Then there was World War One and we tried to stay out of it because it was Europe’s problem but we had to go win it anyway then there was the roaring 20s and the great depression 30’s and then MOTHAFUCKIN WORLD WAR TWO, the four years that makes up two thirds or our nation’s 250 year history.” So the scene where Blackadder sits George and Baldrick down and describes the alliances and how “there was only one problem. It was bollocks.” Is genuinely my understanding of WWI. That and rotary piston engines. I know what a blip switch is.
Ok. In brief: more than a century of tangled alliances and a dying empire has errybody lickin they chops over all this shiny land that was just… Right there. All you gotta do is take it. You got Russia ruled by one of the most profound idiots to ever rule a country, Germany ruled by one of the other most profound idiots ever to rule a country, and Austria-Hungary ruled by the last gasps of the Hapsburgs.
Anyway some thugs did a Cohen Brother’s movie about Franz Ferdinand, the younger brother of the emperor. As it happens he kind of thought the people were important and wanted to do right by them, and also his dad hated him for not marrying his cousin. Anyway he dies.
The next 30ish days are another Cohen Brother’s movie. I’ll try to summarize. Kaiser Wilhelm gives Austria a blank check to start a fight, then goes on vacation. Austria sends a list of demands to Serbia, who delays until they can get some back up from Russia, and ultimately capitulates on all but one demand. A bunch of shit happens over the course of 3 weeks, when the Kaiser gets back he’s like “the fuck, I said go to war mother fucker.” At some point this could have been averted with a phone call but as it happens, a phone line did not exist between the two cities in question yet. Anyway, Russia starts “mobilizing” and then everybody loses their damn minds and actually mobilizes. To which, Russia formally mobilizes.
Up to this point, war was a formal affair, where you could dig in, stand in a line, and shoot. However between the last major conflict and this one, two things happened.
Somebody discovered a way to make cannons out of steel, and then sold those much more powerful weapons to literally every country that would ultimately be involved in WW1. (Previously they’d been cast in bronze. Steel was too brittle. The story of the motherfucker responsible is quite interesting.)
and somebody else invented man portable weapons that fired continuously, and sold those weapons to every country involved.
So now when you get a bunch of guys in a line and have them shoot, instead of a handful of them dying and the rest running away, everybody dies.
In 18 months all of the armies in Europe were depleted, to the point where a cease fire was called so they could get more guys for the meat grinder.
Anyway, a stalemate eventually emerged. Germany was doing ok, but it was clear that this was going to go on for a WHILE. The US decided she wanted to participate in the military industrial complex that the cannon guy from before invented, and started selling weapons and ammunition to the British. But like, under the table. And also like, not very quietly.
So the Germans started targeting American ships they thought were carrying weapons. One of those ships happened to be a passenger vessel that was absolutely carrying ammunition. But, sinking it turned public sentiment against Germany, (this was a major contributing factor in prohibition becoming law) and the US entered the war. By virtue of having more dudes on their side, and not through any particular action or technology brought by the US, this turns the tide of the war.
Wilson, the US president, had this whole plan for a post war clean up that might have worked. But he had a stroke, and his wife kind of ended up running the country for a few years. (This would lead to women’s suffrage.) So the league of nations and the 14 point plan kind of went out the window, Germany got stuck with the bill for the war that Austria started with Russia (who backed out after murdering the Tsar and his entire family in a fuckin’ basement).
The engineered post war collapse of the German economy would go on to have no consequences whatsoever.
Also this entire experience would lead to the Lord of the Rings. A book about children walking in to a hellish landscape for reasons they do not fully understand but generally agree is necessary.
it’s a function of the brain to decay into over-optimised depravity when its no longer functioning the normal environment in which it evolved
kinda like generative AI it starts creating a twisted reality that broken and dysfunctional
It’s like my mawmaw always said “shit gets real fucky when you stay inside.”
I mean…
You know…
Like for a bit…
They were NEVER smarter. At most at one time they had more leisure time and access to books and tutors when reading and books were rare. That made them more educated, and they want to go back to that desperately.
I dont think much of our ruling class wants to go back to reading, looking at the way they… are.
they don’t want to be more educated than they already are, they want to be more educated than us. they’re doing it by destroying the public school system, keeping tertiary education prohibitively expensive, eroding trust in experts through anti-intellectualism, and promoting the spread of misinformation
Exactly. They want to be perceived as smarter (basically look down on the unwashed masses.) They don’t want to do the work to be more educated. Hence the hurdles they can put in front of the poors while they get to pay for fastpass to skip the line directly into the ivy leagues.
They read, a lot more than you probably realize, and probably a lot more than the average person.
They also have access to teams of analysts.
Have you read the “analysis” on the 2024 election?
I think that “analyst” is just fancy talk for their relatives who dont have another job when its not an actual scientific field cause I have worked with real analysts.Sure they are more literate but also the way they balk at expanding their knowledge makes me think they aren’t reading much worth it.
They have access to money and trial and error with more room to make more errors than the average person.
Remember during the French Revolution where, when told that her people were starving because they didn’t have any bread, Marie Antoinette wondered why they don’t just eat cake? Rich people have always been idiots who believe they’re smart. They live simple lives due to the luxury they enjoy, and wonder why poor people without such luxuries think life is so complicated.
not to defend french royalty, but she didnt say that, im certain she wouldnt have thought it either.
to think the rich are unknowingly oppressing their people is a stupid idea, they know where their cake comes from, and they want it because you can’t have it.
to think the rich are unknowingly oppressing their people is a stupid idea, they know where their cake comes from, and they want it because you can’t have it.
I don’t think it’s that far fetched to think that some of the people back then, who were born into aristocracy and have been separated from regular folks their entire lives, might not know that.
On the one hand, I’m convinced Marie Antoinette didn’t say or think like that.
On the other hand, I think there’s a good case to make that if her brother had come to Versailles and explained to Louis XVI how to fuck his sister four or five years before he actually did, the French Revolution wouldn’t have happened.
The short version of this story as I, an American nearing the bottom of his third Mint Julep of the evening, understands it, is the French–of all people–came up with a king that didn’t know how to use his penis. Letters from nobles at the time explain how he would stick it in, soak without moving for two minutes or so, and then “bid goodnight.” I mean, to be fair, they were like 15 on their wedding day. So Marie Antoinette’s life consisted of hanging around Versailles, a palace designed specifically to be an expensive place to hang around. She basically partied the French economy empty, like any teenage girl in her shoes would have. Eventually her brother, Joseph II, visited Versailles and apparently had to awkwardly explain to the young king what orgasms are, and eight months later Marie was pregnant with her first child. She significantly toned down the lavish lifestyle by then, but not after spending the country into an actual crisis.
It is my understanding that, later in life, Marie would show some frugality, doing away with expensive gifts for her children during famines and such. This happened when she was an adult, I think I must point out. Again, I am an American and thus indoctrinated against the very idea of royalty, but a flaw in absolute monarchy is that absolute power over foreign and domestic policy may land in the hands of a teenager who can’t figure out his crotch by himself, and the only thing standing between the nation and an empty treasury is one very specific teen pregnancy.
This story should be in the first chapter of every sex ed book. Why is sex ed important? Lack of sex ed literally ended a thousand year monarchy.
They’ve always been morons about something. Just seems now that they are morons about damn near everything.
Yeah, at least like their grandparents had interesting and clever schemes about money that made you feel like they thought it through even if they were largely incapable of anything else.
Currently it feels difficult to assume they think about anything.
You’ve bought the image they’re selling. If you think they’re idiots, it just gives them another mechanism to manipulate you.
I’m no fan of Bush Jr, but go watch some of his speeches.
Sometimes he says “nuclear”, sometimes he says “nuke-u-lar”.
That’s someone putting on an act. No one says it both ways.
Go watch any politician’s speeches, look for the subtle variations in their behaviours.
They’re not morons, they’re Machiavellian. Appearing to be a moron is just another tool in the box.
(That said, some genuinely are morons, but I’m not dismissing any one of them so lightly - even morons can be Machiavellian).
And in the end, all politics is about manipulation (or said more positively, inducing groups of people toward a shared goal). And politics exists in every single group of humans, no matter how small.
We occasionally get lucid leadership. As a whole group though, our leadership class has always had some glaring idiocy going on.
The ruling class are the ones with insatiable ambition and no morals. Intelligence doesn’t matter as much as willingness to abuse others.
The willingness to abuse others is low intelligence
nah these have nothing to do with another. they’re orthogonal properties.
Depends on who you’re abusing / pissing-off. Can’t imagine it’s good for your health to have large numbers of people angry at you.
It’s almost like the state was built to protect capital or something…
Emotional vs intellectual
