Asklemmy

Total Control. That's really what it's all about. They want to control the narrative, they want to control the markets, they want to control every little bit that there is left that hasn't been touched. What they want is a dystopia and they're gearing moreso into realizing that dystopia than they ever been.

Ever heard of Shadowrun? The TTRPG? That's what things are gearing towards, just take away the interesting and cool aspects from Shadowrun and you basically have reality right now as we know it.

Oligarchs replace most government functions with private entities that they have equity in and funnel tax dollars into their own companies. It looks like they're trying to cause a depression too, so they can buy everything up for cheap (farms, homes, etc). I think they're stupid, but not stupid enough to not realize an economic depression coupled with gutting social safety nets will lead to massive crime waves and riots; so I'm guessing they're planning on a police state and work camps for people they arrest (think that's what they're going to do with many of the immigrants too).

I've heard it postulated they are realigning with Russia and other dictators because we'd lose our normal allies if we became such a society. And they probably have very lucrative deals with Russia as well.

I sucks we don't have a good, inspiring opposition party or something to lead or rally around. Without that, anger will just manifest as unorganized, unproductive riots and violence. "Conservatives" are still pretty brainwashed too; believing whatever they're told by media. They will support the government gunning down and enslaving "criminals," at this point in time. I'd hope that changes when things get hard, but media will work hard to redirect the blame.

President Muskrate is an accelerationist; who believes that societal collapse should come sooner rather than later. Some speculate that his plan is to capitalise on burgeoning AI along with the billionaire class to control people once the dust settles.

It's a coalition of crazy. It isn't entirely clear who is going to be in control of what or for how long. It could get very messy.

Paranoia can tell you anything you don't control is a threat - whether it's another country, a race, a personality type, lack of web privacy, whatever. The MAGA leaders are so drenched in that paranoia, there's really no limit to what they might do to squash anyone and anything they see as a possible threat to them.

When an empire can't expand, by means of territory, knowledge, or other means; it turns inwards on its own people and territories in a last ditch effort to survive, as it lunges towards its inevitable collapse.

There is no endgame, it's just "how much bribery and corruption can I do before I have to leave the legal immunity bubble that the Supreme Court created.

They're rich enough that they will be unaffected by the global consequences of their actions.

The rate of profit continues to decline because of overcapitalization. Factions are aligning to decapitalize rivals in order to increase their own rate of profit.

Also, they're all manic and dissasociated.

All these US-centric answers. Learn Mandarin. The world will continue on after the US empire ends.

What they think they're doing and what they're actually doing are two different questions. What they're aiming to do is keep things trucking along while making as much profit as possible, more or less the same as most politicians, but with a bit more of a realpolitic approach. There is no long term plan, and that goes for basically anyone remotely near to the levers of power. What we have is a system of competing groups all singularly focused on maximizing their profits for the next quarter, nobody's actually at the helm and it's an open question whether anyone could take the helm and alter the course from the natural progression determined by systemic forces.

Where we are actually headed, regardless of who's in charge, is a matter of several inconvertible facts. First, the US is clearly in decline and will eventually lost its spot as global hegemon, at this point, there is a serious risk that it will start WWIII in response, as Americans are not ones to accept defeat gracefully. Second, climate change will render more and more areas in developing nations unstable or uninhabitable, causing a major refugee crisis which has already started and is going to get considerably worse. What measures will be taken to maintain the dividing lines that keep people from poor countries out of rich countries is another question, and it may well be answered with genocide.

If, by some miracle, cooler heads prevail and we don't start WWIII, and you're lucky enough to have been born in a rich country, then we will likely just see things get gradually and progressively worse. But it will be the kind of apocalypse where you still have to go to work. Day to day life will carry on, just with more uncomfortable things you have to push out of mind, more frequent shootings, the reemergence of all kinds diseases and more pandemics that you'll be expected to work through. There isn't going to be a tipping point that causes a revolution, nor are the elites going to unveil a secret plot to make everyone eat bugs or whatever. You're just going to be working longer hours, affording less, retiring later (if at all), and probably having to navigate and even more bullshit process for applying for jobs. Going further into this sort of "boring dystopia" is almost certainly where we're headed.

The two most important political priorities, arguably the only two priorities that really matter, are demilitarization andopposing war with China, and opposing genocide of foreigners/refugees/immigrants. These are the things we will be facing, perhaps within the next 10 years (but if not then certainly later), and if we aren't able to organize resistance along those lines, things are going to get very ugly. Actually stopping the decline is very unrealistic/implausible and has been for some time.

Orange juice

The end game is a cyberpunk-esque corporate controlled future. No government, only companies/the owning class deciding what's happening. Yes, slavery essentially, because people have to work for them to survive, but that's already done. No "less work" savings because of rising productivity, only more and more money/power centralized in them.

Simple. We are on the express to cyberpunk (the literary genre).

Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian futuristic setting said to focus on a combination of "low-life and high tech". It features futuristic technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cyberware, juxtaposed with societal collapse, dystopia or decay.

Cyberpunk plots often involve conflict between artificial intelligence, hackers, and megacorporations, and tend to be set in a near-future Earth...

Look up curtis yarvin. That's basically their ideology. So 100s or 1000s of city states scattered around north America. Mostly dominated by either the religious extreme or tech bros and ai.

Endgame?

the two types of people in this world (if you're not a lib), literally the embodiment of the Mario says/Luigi says meme:

I don't think they know for sure where it will end up but no matter what it will be, it will be brilliant, it will be the greatest, and it will have been the plan all along.

Rich people like to keep their money. So the only objective right now is to dismantle the oversight within government. It's not government efficiency they're after but removal of impediments to big business interests. That's the Melon side of the plan. It's his ROI. It's also is MO. Tabula Rasa everything and then build anew. It didn't work for Twitter. I don't think it will work for a federal government. We've already seen lots of unintended side effects. Oops, we fired the guys who look after the nukes. Lives will be lost here and there but, cynically, not enough to mobilize the masses.

It is of course worrying that Trump said as much as wanting to enlarge the US again. I'm not sure yet if that's just a dead cat he's thrown on table to distract us from Melon or if that's really the plan. It worried the US NATO ally Denmark enough to massively increase their defense budget over Greenland. Trump likes to be contrarian. He feeds off the stir he causes. He never built the wall, Mexico never paid for it. But he reveled in the reactions. Greenland could be a similar thing but I'm not sure yet.

It's worrying me the amount of sh!t the lgbtq+ community is getting, especially the T. There is danger there. I don't think Trump cares an awful lot about this issue, he just likes it as a way to unite the sleepy, the anti-woke behind him. But there are people behind him and with power now that do care, that do want to please their leader. And that creates a maelstrom of zealous a-holes trying to one-up each other with cruelty to score browny points with the boss. When I think this through, I fear citizen liberty is most under threat here.

I don't believe a world war with nukes is what they're after. You cannot really prosper as a corporation if the planet is barely habitable due to the radiation and the nuclear winter. It would be bad for Wall Street. But they wouldn't mind a few conflicts comparable to Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine. While nukes have been threatened, they haven't been used. So it's a conventional war and that's good for arms manufacturers.

In simple terms, Trump's cozying up to Vlad actually decreases the threat of a world war III, at least in the short term. It reduces the number of trouble hotspots. There were big ones between the US and Russia (until January 25) and between the US and China. Trump parroting Kremlin talking points and showing the rest of NATO the middle finger reduces hotspots with Russia. Russia is on relatively friendly terms with China and could probably meditate issues between China and the US. At least in the short term, that's not a bad thing. But it isn't stable. It remains to be seen if Europe plus Canada plus X can fill the vacuum and that would reignite hotspots with Russia again.

I do agree that climate change poses a threat. I don't think the billionaires worry so much about it beyond buying New Zealand and blanketing it with villas with bunkers. But it is a threat to maintaining order when the people get hit with more severe tornados, droughts, etc. Best way to maintain order is an authoritarian government.

WW3 is coming. It is the solution to climate change that does not alter the oligarchy; it is a population problem from their point of view. No need to fix pollution or the environment if there are less than 1 billion humans on Earth. That buys at least another century of business as usual. This is the obvious solution for anyone without ethics to arrive at. If you do not have hundreds of millions of dollars now, you will be eliminated one way or another in the coming conflict. Wars have always been the primary form of population control in feudal societies. Thus the emergence of neo feudalism. You must have no access, communication, ownership, or rights so that you can be forced into the death grinder.

So far, seems to be a poor bid at reindustrializing, as the US is failing to keep up with China's growth and will see its global Hegemonic status falling. More than anything, it seems like the current admin are "true believers" of the lies the architects of Empire concocted to justify their tools, hence why the current admin is gutting USAID and other forms of soft power exertion.

The US can't re-industrialize without Socialism, so it will flounder until it collapses via revolution as it dies a slow death.

The hour is later than we know regarding climate change. Authoritarianism is the only way for governments to maintain control for as long as possible, protecting the powerful.

Collapse of civilization is right around the corner.