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I can’t applaud this piece enough:
The trick here is simple and old. You starve the public systems until they’re so weak that anything looks like relief. Then you let a billionaire deliver a drop of water and call it a miracle. Americans have been trained to applaud the spectacle. They forget to ask why one of the richest men in the country gets to decide how twenty-five million children experience their first introduction to money. They forget to ask why the richest people get public praise for giving back pennies compared to what they extract. They forget to ask why children need investment accounts instead of stable housing, food, medical care, and schools that aren’t falling apart.
The applause is the point. When billionaires are cast as heroes, no one has to admit that the system has collapsed so thoroughly that private charity is now doing the work of the state. This is how the social contract dies without anyone calling it what it is. People look at the $250 and say at least it’s something. They say maybe it’ll grow. They say maybe it’ll help someday. They don’t say what’s obvious. They don’t say the quiet part. They don’t say that America now expects the financial markets to raise children because the country has decided it won’t.
The applause is the point. When billionaires are cast as heroes, no one has to admit that the system has collapsed so thoroughly that private charity is now doing the work of the state. This is how the social contract dies without anyone calling it what it is. People look at the $250 and say at least it’s something. They say maybe it’ll grow. They say maybe it’ll help someday. They don’t say what’s obvious. They don’t say the quiet part. They don’t say that America now expects the financial markets to raise children because the country has decided it won’t.
I am not in America so thankfully my parents at least have/had pensions and healthcare freeing me up to recover from a noxious brush with Silicon Valley.
And whatever Pronatalist anti-abortion but pro austerity wrt any actual support of kids who are born types like Vance and his inane limitless growth cabal (and those abundance types like Ezra Klein aren’t any better), it helped that I was a childfree only kid. And I am sick of handing my resources over to shitheads.
I returned to my home country after a hateful job/bullshit intervention (Reefer Madness huzzah
). I realize now that it was part of a coup against publicly funded science and healthcare by the surveillance state/capitalists. I am out of patience with spineless rot.
The most worthless parts of the national security state and cancer like defence contracting sans any regulation.
I am myself a military brat so the military doesn’t necessarily scare me. But someone like my dad, who wouldn’t know how to grift is nothing like the type of person who flocks to grift via defense contracting. Whether you like stuff like that or not, he is an honest patriot.
My dad would only be able to keep a secret for legitimate classified work not for sleazy grift. Anyway, he never had anything to do with military intelligence (except maneuvers tied to one war he was in long back).
Deception isn’t really a family trait. I would be able to keep a wildlife refuge secret so industrialists, influencers and other greedy creeps don’t flood it. I could hide info about people/women ICE, Musk etc would harass or dox.
But not hide creepy little things whose purpose is some sort of creepy little scam exploiting loopholes meant for legitimate stuff like bank security or something.
These days I look at any damn thing and go “How could the creeps exploit something no one thought to have a legal precedent around, since no one was expecting a heist on quite this scale.”
Creeps who take to scams like fish to water are not bright. They call people gullible or suckers if they weren’t expecting a scam. And once you wise up, you are paranoid and crazy.
It is so no decent publicly funded science remains, but more and more of whatever this type of creep represents takes over:
https://roadtoomega.wordpress.com/
That guy’s Substack is a work of trash. This creep is going to be the only type of “scientist” who remains funded in the US.
I wonder if all my former colleagues are fleeing to Europe. I hope not. They should stay and push back. And in some cases wake up at least now. I dislike that Cassandra shit (who thinks like that), but surely common sense should tell you why something that seems abundantly creepy and scammy (e.g.: anything Google etc do) probably is. I am afraid to find out these days.
It’s also so stupid and ott (that road to omega creep) that you can even pretend it’s satire or parody later* when it is just parasitic garbage. Esoteric Nazis come to mind..
.
*: there is no way these guys can prevail at this point. It is merely a question of how much collateral damage they try to inflict further (Life is simulation! No it really isn’t!) and I don’t know about anyone else, but I am not sucking up anymore damage and I am pushing back. We need more legal protections against these predatory things that are choking out all healthy stuff.
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