This is not going to be the all-politics zone going forward, but for now one more.
Because, frankly, I’m beginning to think my satirical future where the tech bros fuck off into space (or at least make the attempt) and leave the rest of us behind on a ravaged Earth to salvage what we can might have been eerily prescient, honestly.
Specifically, the TESCREAL accelerationist Libertarian assholes and kleptocrats have the wheel right now, and as I was just recommending on Bluesky, if you haven’t read A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling yet, now would be a great time to do it.
Here’s a quote from an interview Hongoltz-Hetling did with Vox in 2020:
And the thing about the TESCREAL accelerationist Libertarian assholes and kleptocrats is that they have no constituents and even if they did, they would have no loyalty to their constituents (Donald Trump sure doesn’t; loyalty only flows in one direction for him and it’s to aggrandize his ego). And they experience “move fast and break things” as a tenet of an apocalyptic religion.
When that kind of faith (and it is a kind of faith—tied in with ego and sense of their own selection as a kind of Elect) comes in conflict with reality, reality has to lose. The kleptotechnocrats are at the mercy of a sophipathology where they see the lives and wellbeing of other people as a necessary sacrifice to their own winning of some real-world game of Civilization in which they leave behind a poisoned and ruined Earth and blast off into space, and that is actually a win condition.
You don’t have to think any farther than that. Roll credits and play a jaunty little tune.
Except most of us do, not being insulated from the consequences by billions of dollars.
I don’t think it’s going to work out for them in the long run (Space is a much harder problem than we science fiction writers make it out to be), but that’s not going to stop a lot of people from suffering and dying along the way. And a lot of those people are going to be MAGA constituents, who are going to be among the people who experience the worst outcomes in America of the global climate crisis, and the gutting of FEMA.
I will not be surprised if Florida gets abandoned by the current Regime to sink beneath the waves. (All while the Ministry of Truth spews doublethink about how beautiful and perfect everything is.)
Major economic repercussions for this weekend’s fuckery are on the way, and this is not the last of the fuckery. Social safety nets and health care systems, which are already fraying, are going to be pressured beyond bearing. A lot of people are going to get hurt.
The vast carelessness has occurred and is occurring, and will continue well into the catastrophic consequences. And unfortunately for all of us, even those who didn’t FA get to ride the wave of FO.
It doesn’t matter what happens to the damned, after all. The Elect are going to Mars.
Or something.