Post-modernism laid the groundwork for an ‘I have my facts and you have yours’ culture. Or call it ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’. Community has been replaced by an atomised screen time facing our individual echo chambers. Decades of neoliberalism has impoverished swathes of the population, materially and intellectually. There are many chickens coming home to roost.

Not as long as they keep buying any dip. Which could continue for a long time.

‘They rigged the election then I won’ (or words very much to that effect.

Meaning they rigged the election in 2020, then I won (in 2024).

Certainly there were concerns regarding the security of voting machines. Eminent computer scientists wrote to Harris about it in around 2022. Then Trump made the comment about Musk knowing about voting machines. She had ample time to do something.

But nobody else (before you) has suggested the election was rigged.

Your only claim can be that because Trump made that comment regarding Elon knowing the voting machines, Americans didn’t vote for Trump. It is a silly claim.

Ok I see. I think I took your original message to suggest that the rest of the world needed to do something to stop it, whereas I guess you are saying the rest of the world needs to wake up and not expect the old America to be around.

I think the world is realising that. I am in the UK, as far as I am aware much of our intelligence and military capability is intertwined with the US. That isn’t changing over night. But I guess that some sort of security co-operation with the rest of Europe, provided they make right their appalling response towards the UK on our leaving the EU, might happen regarding our nuclear capability. Failure to do so opens the door to the pro Russian reform party, which suits no reasonable person, least of all the EU who presumably can act reasonably when suitably incentivised.

Still you might rejoin the British commonwealth according to Trump yesterday, and I think it might be offered to him formally so that might deepen ties between our two nations lol. Maybe we will give him a title or something.

Thanks for the reply but you didn’t really answer my question.

You say other countries should be moving a lot faster, as though it is our responsibility.

Americans voted for Trump. Twice. And Americans are going to be most harmed by him. It is on Americans, including those in the military who took an oath to defend the constitution, to do something about Trump if they don’t want to be harmed by him, nobody else.

What do you mean? How do you think other countries should be moving, in response to Trump? And why?

A capitol building, too, if I remember correctly.

This presidency is debasing every institution it touches. It is built on the corruption of the courts, or he wouldn’t be in power at all.

I have read capital volume one maybe two and a half times. I wonder how close to Pikkety’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century Marx might have written today. I haven’t read Capital in the Twenty-First Century but think it is worth the time and effort it would take to study. I will find the time at some point.

That isn’t strategy.

I am referring to the fact that Trump seems to want America to be a manufacturing base, but does he have a plan to achieve this, beyond creating developing world conditions in the USA? He might be able to create conditions within the US where labour and environmental costs are cheap enough to be competitive with India or China, but is that actually his aim?

If he wants the US to be a manufacturing base he/his administration would need a much weaker dollar, which would necessitate at least various countries selling their dollar reserves. Does he want people to buy bitcoins as a strategic reserve rather than, say, Yuan? Does he realise that encouraging countries to give up on the dollar as global reserve currency is forcing the US to pay its debts finally? Is really an admission of defeat for the US, and the end of the US empire?

The fascism/racism seems innate to his personality rather than anything strategic, but why look to destabilise Europe into it rearming itself away from US arms manufacturers? He can’t expect countries to view the USA as anything beyond a competitor to China or India after this, can he?

Is his interest in Canada and Greenland simply because he has been told that sea ice is collapsing and the Arctic is going to be of strategic importance going forward? Or is he looking to start some kind of hot world war in order to try and recreate the conditions post WW2, where I could easily see his idea of a ‘GREAT’ America might have come from?

His tactics are easily exploitable: see Russia. It is hard to figure out if his administration has any kind of strategy in terms of geopolitics or geoeconomics.

On the one hand you have to take Trump seriously because he is dangerous, on the other he definitely is an idiot.

It is easy to post a response containing no information whatsoever.

Fascism might not be the inevitable outcome of decades of ‘the west’s’ brand of neo-liberalism on top of the historical circumstances to which it was applied, but, all things considered, it is hard to imagine an alternative.