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.

  • Azzu@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    The end game is a cyberpunk-esque corporate controlled future. No government, only companies/the owning class deciding what’s happening. Yes, slavery essentially, because people have to work for them to survive, but that’s already done. No “less work” savings because of rising productivity, only more and more money/power centralized in them.

    • Korhaka@sopuli.xyz
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      1 month ago

      The government is the only one stopping me from buying a small patch of woodland and building a cabin there to live in. Get rid of that and suddenly I no longer have a reason to work more than a handful of hours a month.

        • Korhaka@sopuli.xyz
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          1 month ago

          It is illegal to do so. You cannot live on your own land for more than 28 days of the year unless they give you permission to live on it. Which of course a house comes with that permission, a patch of woodland does not.

  • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    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…

  • Devanismyname@lemmy.ca
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    1 month ago

    Look up curtis yarvin. That’s basically their ideology. So 100s or 1000s of city states scattered around north America. Mostly dominated by either the religious extreme or tech bros and ai.

  • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    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.

  • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    There is no endgame, it’s just "how much bribery and corruption can I do before I have to leave the legal immunity bubble that the Supreme Court created.

    They’re rich enough that they will be unaffected by the global consequences of their actions.

  • j4k3@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    WW3 is coming. It is the solution to climate change that does not alter the oligarchy; it is a population problem from their point of view. No need to fix pollution or the environment if there are less than 1 billion humans on Earth. That buys at least another century of business as usual. This is the obvious solution for anyone without ethics to arrive at. If you do not have hundreds of millions of dollars now, you will be eliminated one way or another in the coming conflict. Wars have always been the primary form of population control in feudal societies. Thus the emergence of neo feudalism. You must have no access, communication, ownership, or rights so that you can be forced into the death grinder.

    • BmeBenji@lemm.ee
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      1 month ago

      I don’t see how you can possibly be certain about this. The push to fight abortion rights and the constant bitching about how people aren’t having enough babies to maintain the workforce undermines this theory.

      Unless you’re completely convinced that this is the future and the reason for it, I’d strongly suggest against stating it so certainly on the internet. Asking a question about it or stating it as a possibility given certain factors makes sense, but the way you said this can’t be good for your mental health, or the mental health of the people who read it.

      • f4f4f4f4f4f4f4f4@sopuli.xyz
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        1 month ago

        “Abortion debate” and all other culture warfare is only to keep the masses busy fighting each other so they don’t engage the rich in class warfare.

        • cheers_queers@lemm.ee
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          1 month ago

          i would believe this if they hadn’t literally taken it away. it’s about oppression, simple as.

          • f4f4f4f4f4f4f4f4@sopuli.xyz
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            1 month ago

            Appease “the Base” and “own the libs”. Drive a deeper wedge and call it freedom and unity.

            This isn’t normal.

        • BmeBenji@lemm.ee
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          1 month ago

          So are you saying that having a large workforce isn’t key to keeping the rich rich? Because if you ask me losing 7 billion people would be a fairly large cutback in the workforce

      • j4k3@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        See my comment to over_clox below. I’m pretty sure on many levels of abstraction. It is unlikely to convince you. I’m cool with that. I don’t want it to happen. I’m simply noting the pieces aligning. I am broadly curious in many areas and subjects. I am also more broadly aware and generally skeptical than most people. None of that is a source of depression or in any way shape or form a justification for your accusatory statement implying the state of my mental health. I find that accusation tangential, offensive, and a personal attack in reply to a general statement where there was no individual in question. Turning a broad abstraction into a personal attack on an individual is reprehensible and rather pathetic behavior.

        • BmeBenji@lemm.ee
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          1 month ago

          I apologize because I did not mean to make any sort of personal attack. If it came across that way that is entirely my fault.

          If I can clarify in hopefully neutral terms, what I meant to say is that believing with certainty that 7 billion people are facing violent death within a generation or two cannot be good for anyone’s mental state and that sort of doom weighing on a mind will likely cause it many problems. It was not intended to be an attack on you, mainly an observation on the idea from my very limited point of view.

          • j4k3@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            I wrote some long explanation but accidentally clicked on a link and lost it. Oh well. You are still doing the thing. It might be beneficial for you to learn about the range and types of functional thought that exist in various personalities.

            Someone that is very abstracted in functional thought can be one of the outliers that is difficult for some to understand. I’m driven by curiosity, but comfortable relying on intuition heavily. I think in something like a statistical space without absolutes of right and wrong, just probabilities and contexts. I’m motivated by curiosity and exploration in many contexts. My emotions are disconnected from this space of curious exploration.

            When I put the pieces together to state WW3 is very likely, I’m in a mindset like watching Magnus Carlson play a game of chess and making educated predictions about how he will play the next 3 moves. I am not playing the game and I have no emotional investment like the opposing player. You could ask me how I feel, but that is not part of my default thought process.

  • FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website
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    1 month ago

    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.

  • kingthrillgore@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    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.

  • Jolly Platypus@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    The hour is later than we know regarding climate change. Authoritarianism is the only way for governments to maintain control for as long as possible, protecting the powerful.

    Collapse of civilization is right around the corner.

    • JillyB@beehaw.org
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      1 month ago

      Collapse of civilization is right around the corner.

      I wouldn’t be so sure. History is filled with examples of power grabs that endured for generations.

      • Jolly Platypus@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        The ability to grow, store, and distribute grains at scale is necessary for the continued existence of civilization. Climate change will destroy this in short order. Once that ability is gone, so will be civilization.

        There is no tomorrow.

        • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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          Countries like the PRC are making vast strides in the way of fighting climate change and emissions. We won’t be able to avoid all of the consequences of climate change, but we can minimize the damage and develop methods of environmental engineering.

    • LiamBox@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      4 channer said to not do that.

      Also mentioned most business are fake or provide fake materials, probably why buildings are made of tofu in china

  • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    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.

  • 10001110101@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    Oligarchs replace most government functions with private entities that they have equity in and funnel tax dollars into their own companies. It looks like they’re trying to cause a depression too, so they can buy everything up for cheap (farms, homes, etc). I think they’re stupid, but not stupid enough to not realize an economic depression coupled with gutting social safety nets will lead to massive crime waves and riots; so I’m guessing they’re planning on a police state and work camps for people they arrest (think that’s what they’re going to do with many of the immigrants too).

    I’ve heard it postulated they are realigning with Russia and other dictators because we’d lose our normal allies if we became such a society. And they probably have very lucrative deals with Russia as well.

    I sucks we don’t have a good, inspiring opposition party or something to lead or rally around. Without that, anger will just manifest as unorganized, unproductive riots and violence. “Conservatives” are still pretty brainwashed too; believing whatever they’re told by media. They will support the government gunning down and enslaving “criminals,” at this point in time. I’d hope that changes when things get hard, but media will work hard to redirect the blame.

  • TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    President Muskrate is an accelerationist; who believes that societal collapse should come sooner rather than later. Some speculate that his plan is to capitalise on burgeoning AI along with the billionaire class to control people once the dust settles.