First off, stop watching the news. It’s not good for you.
Let’s play a little thought experiment. Everything you described and that is happening in the world is not just the work of one or two men with large ambitions and small…🍆. It’s too complex with too many moving pieces to coordinate. So who stands to benefit the most from all these things happening? Who is Sheev Palpatine here? What is the ultimate end game, not just the dog-and-pony show to preoccupy your attention?
The "who is Palpatine" framing assumes there has to be one. But the scarier answer—and the one that fits the evidence—is that there isn't a mastermind. There's no grand coordination. It's just a collection of grifters, ideologues, and opportunists pulling in vaguely aligned directions, none of them thinking more than two moves ahead.
The incoherence isn't a distraction from the real plan. The incoherence is the plan. That's what makes it dangerous. A competent authoritarian you can predict. A malevolent toddler with nuclear codes, you can't.
As for "stop watching the news"—I get the impulse, and I agree that the doomscrolling-outrage cycle is poison. But there's a difference between protecting your mental health and civic abdication. "Put your head down and take care of your own" is a fine philosophy right up until the people who didn't put their heads down have finished reshaping the world you live in.
Look deeper. Think more long-term. How did Trump come to the power in the first place? Who stands to benefit from there being a toddler with nuke codes in the White House? From the chaos of unpredictability?
Sit with it a bit and then come back and tell me whether you think this is all just random happenstance with a particularly great sense of timing.
I'm a Pynchonian at heart. His books are covered in conspiracies—vast, sprawling, seemingly connected networks of power and control. But when you dig underneath, there's not a whole lot of there there. The paranoia is real. The architecture isn't. There are the elect and the preterite, sure, but nobody designed it that way. The sorting just happens. The boring truth is that complex systems produce emergent outcomes without coordination. Entropy is the only organizing principle.
That's closer to where I land. There are people who benefit from the chaos, and some of them are clever enough to exploit it. But the chaos came first. The opportunists are riding the wave, not generating it.
A Palpatine is comforting because a Palpatine can be defeated. Entropy can't. You just manage it or you don't.
First off, stop watching the news. It’s not good for you.
Let’s play a little thought experiment. Everything you described and that is happening in the world is not just the work of one or two men with large ambitions and small…🍆. It’s too complex with too many moving pieces to coordinate. So who stands to benefit the most from all these things happening? Who is Sheev Palpatine here? What is the ultimate end game, not just the dog-and-pony show to preoccupy your attention?
The "who is Palpatine" framing assumes there has to be one. But the scarier answer—and the one that fits the evidence—is that there isn't a mastermind. There's no grand coordination. It's just a collection of grifters, ideologues, and opportunists pulling in vaguely aligned directions, none of them thinking more than two moves ahead.
The incoherence isn't a distraction from the real plan. The incoherence is the plan. That's what makes it dangerous. A competent authoritarian you can predict. A malevolent toddler with nuclear codes, you can't.
As for "stop watching the news"—I get the impulse, and I agree that the doomscrolling-outrage cycle is poison. But there's a difference between protecting your mental health and civic abdication. "Put your head down and take care of your own" is a fine philosophy right up until the people who didn't put their heads down have finished reshaping the world you live in.
Look deeper. Think more long-term. How did Trump come to the power in the first place? Who stands to benefit from there being a toddler with nuke codes in the White House? From the chaos of unpredictability?
Sit with it a bit and then come back and tell me whether you think this is all just random happenstance with a particularly great sense of timing.
I'm a Pynchonian at heart. His books are covered in conspiracies—vast, sprawling, seemingly connected networks of power and control. But when you dig underneath, there's not a whole lot of there there. The paranoia is real. The architecture isn't. There are the elect and the preterite, sure, but nobody designed it that way. The sorting just happens. The boring truth is that complex systems produce emergent outcomes without coordination. Entropy is the only organizing principle.
That's closer to where I land. There are people who benefit from the chaos, and some of them are clever enough to exploit it. But the chaos came first. The opportunists are riding the wave, not generating it.
A Palpatine is comforting because a Palpatine can be defeated. Entropy can't. You just manage it or you don't.