Possibly the least comforting fact in regards to the Oval Office being two sandwiches and a sledge hammer away from becoming the Presidential rage room, is that a wide disaffection and alienated sense of abandonment that has in some measure led to this catastrophic shit show, it’s not entirely wrong.
Ah, now there’s a problem: “all these rancid ferals with trumplatitudes™ and pitchforks are correct?” Well, yes, they are; in as much as their lived experience of disadvantage is tangible, concrete, persistent. Governments are, without any shadow of a doubt, completely absurd – read more, please, before popping an apoplexy on this point. Of course, Mad Max as an aspirational social aesthetic doesn’t really work that well, either. So, without extraterrestrial intervention, we are very likely stuck with government as a method of ensuring humanity does not “die on the vine” and <insert appropriatw Winston Churchill quote about DEMOCRACY here> a shitty system is still a functioning system – if you are clever enough to work out exactly why it sucks, you can improve it.
Probably worth remarking at this point that, while the United States currently has an inordinately vast embarassment to manage, I do not see or hear a single commentator discussing what caused this: everyone is amplifying precisely the wrong signal, just as is Trump’s team providing precisely the most incorrect, utterly simplistic and absurd solutions to what remain complex problems.
Perhaps also useful to remember is that, while “bad actors” undoubtedly operate in this space and shape – by technologically-mediated statistical entropy – perception and behaviour, there is absolutely no doubt that, for better and for worse, US citizens have had their fears weaponised against them, and commercially leveraged, by the innocuously self-directed information operation we all prefer to call mass “advertising”.
Your mileage may vary. I left my PhD study for complex reasons largely beyond my control but nominally because I could perceive the things that remain inarticulable and unintelligible to institutional systems. (All institutions are similarly broken but successful or interesting ones are each broken in their own way.)
Daedelus Kite 