Trump: “Waaah! Waaaah! The Democrats are doing lawfare just because I incited an insurrection, hoarded top secret documents and refused steadfastly to return them, paid off a pornstar to hush up my affair and committed countless instances of fraud!”

“You’re the president now.”

Trump: “To the lawfare-mobile!”

What nightmare scenario is that? Someone inciting an insurrection to steal an election? An insurrectionist just getting shrugged at with a “boys will be boys”? The Supreme Court waving through an insurrectionist and declaring him not only eligible but also above the law? The Supreme Court turning out to be bought wholesale? A criminal getting elected as president? The president illegally gutting all infrastructure designed to provide checks and balances to his power and installing toadies in all positions of power? The president committing war crime after war crime, bombing countries at a whim, kidnapping other countries’ leaders, taking bribes and sending his personal paramilitary army of masked thugs to terrorise random brown people, disappearing them into concentration camps and depriving them of their most basic rights?

Which potential future nightmare scenario is no longer unthinkable here?

Well, after the rebrand, LMFAO had a few banger hits. I couldn’t remember a single good song that ROFL brought out though.

If I may introduce: your newest nightmare en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_diving_beetle

I keep saying that humanity’s toys do evolve spectacularly while humans are still working on the same basic impulses they’ve been dealing with for millennia.

Trump is a petty conman who does everything in his power to consolidate as much power in himself as he possibly can so that he can funnel as much money to himself and his gang as he can. That’s not new. The environment he’s doing in may be more complex, or differently set up than in previous iterations, but the core is depressingly mundane.

Gaza is just people hating people and other people supporting different sides while all sides give each other more reasons to hate each other perpetually, some more war-crimey, some less so. Tragic, quagmired to hell and back, but not groundbreaking in and of itself.

As for AI, the framework is the usual capitalists trying to convince everybody that their new best revolutionary thing is a word sorting machine that can sort very, very many words now very fast. Trying to cash in on the hype is the eternal constant, the occasion this time is a very sophisticated chatbot/image generator based on all the materials the inventors could get away with stealing.

And climate stuff is just this generation of capitalists stripping the planet for parts while they can get away with it. The scale is bigger, but vulture capitalism is also not even remotely new.

Just like the principle of singular attributability of data via the blockchain is a fancy way of assigning stuff to one recipient. We’ve had approaches to this before. This time the blockchain’s ledger system is the big new anchor for the human element, which will invariably at first be either grifters or people who wanna bash in other people’s heads with it.

How… how do they know what the frog doesn’t taste like?

To be fair, us elders had grifts and money laundering too, so crypto is nothing functionally new.

“I am close to tears. That is a human reaction, right?”