Not really. He just bought his way into all the positions of power he held. He didn’t create paypal, he didn’t create Tesla, he didn’t create the boring company, he didn’t create SpaceX, he didn’t create Twitter. The only marginally useful thing he did was throw money at things.

https://youtu.be/rcUedQ_0988?si=VFePPVsml-sa8weZ

Well… were not on the other side of this yet. Were still in the sort of early 1930s Germany era where the real problems people face haven’t gotten all that much better, and the fascists have made many decently successful smaller attempts at power but haven’t quite succeeded in that big push for power. like the stuff that is planned in project 2025.

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I don’t think fascism is capable of producing competent longterm leadership. Like the ideology preselects for loyalty above all, it’s rabidly anti-intellectual and scorns anyone perceived as being an intellectual elitist. It’s purely emotion driven and requires ever escalating emotional rhetoric to keep the based angry at external all-powerfully weak enemies (lazy mexicans stealing your jobs, sneaky jewish bankers crashed the entire economy, thuggish high school dropout gangbangers in the inner city are criminal masterminds responsible for all the drugs flowing through rural communities who would overrun everything if they were smart enough to unify, take your pick of contradictory scapegoat.)

That’s not to say incompetence means harmlessness, there’s a lot of blood that has been spilled throughout history due to incompetence.

Thanks! I still def recommend checking out the video. It’s a really fascinating topic.

Sort of, basically because mercury has the small orbit it spends the most time closer on average to any other planet. The CGP Grey video someone else posted is a really good explanation as to what’s going on.

Delaware checking I’m we basically had the TI 83 or TI-84

The entire paragraph is is about the Prequels, I said phantom menace was about 1980s decadence and the Prequels theme suddenly shifted to post 9/11 and the transition of republics to empires.

And honestly I think it’s part of why people leave Phantom Menace off of their watch lists because thematically it doesn’t really fit thematically with the other 2 prequel movies.

For as schlocky of an adventure the OT and Prequels were, they still drew on real world inspirations. The OT pulls inspiration from WW2 and the Vietnam War as the backdrop, a small rag Tage group of guerilla style freedom fighters fighting off the highly militarized empire with weapons that can destroy entire jungles I mean planets in its path.

The Prequels, for as bad as the dialoge was (because Lucas was surrounded by Yes Men instead of people who actually knew how to cover his weaknesses), was about the decadence of the 80s and the exploitation of the labor of 3rd world countries (see the disparity between Anakin being a slave on Tatooine and Padme being a queen of/senator for Naboo), in phandom menace, which quickly shifted focus to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and how republics, like the Roman Republic, and Weimar Republic became the Roman Empire and Nazi Germany, and how America was following the same path.

And this isn’t really some reading between the lines speculation, George Lucas has said that these real world conflicts served as inspiration for the movies. Could it be post hoc rationalization? Yeah it could be, but it’s kinda hard to make those justifications even years after the movies have been released.

The sequels just aren’t pulling from any relevant sources. It was all nostalgia bait without any substance the first order is literally just Hugo boss wearing good stepping nazis 2.0, aka The Empire Again, the New Republic narratively exists only to be blown up by The Empire 2.0, everything is “Look its just like the Original Trilogy!” and it all lacks a cohesive vision and an actual hero’s journey for someone to go through. Like everyone has great setups, a rogue stormtrooper, an ace pilot for the rebellion and a girl who survived childhood gathering scrap from dangerous derelict. And they just all get sidelined for all the nostalgia bait.

I’m not mad they used the cloning technology that has been established and even referred to the entire conflict that was literally named after the tech back in 1976 to bring back Palpatine, but that one line is just the encapsulation of “they need people to not have common information” whenever the plot needs it and try to make it a surprise.

I always figured it was because metal is harder than rock.

FOX: “Trek isn’t woke!”

Star Trek: laughs in Let That Be Their Last Battlefield in 1969

I’m not saying you’re wrong because yes those are real problems your discussing and absolutely worthy of discussion. Mishandling how AI fits into society is going to be a major problem, the pandemic was a huge disruption globally, and devices designed to extract as much dopamine as possible are definitely targeting kids. These are valid problems of our day.

But (I’m assuming you are a teen), many people have experienced similar pervading fears in the past, in my lifetime I’ve gone through multiple economic crises, watched planes crash into multiple buildings on live TV in 3rd grade and watched our country split itself apart politically in real time recall the Y2K bug hysteria, and yeah even flip phones in my time were decried as addictive.

My parents lived through the looming threat of global nuclear conflict and the fear that commies have already secretly invaded and body snatched your neighbors and that “thuggish drug dealers” are on every corner waiting to give you drugs and get you addicted while the real drug dealers (tobacco companies) testified in front of congress that they weren’t marketing to kids with their cool and edgy cartoon characters and that nicotine wasn’t addictive.

Adults might not seem phased because most of us have been through global scale crises before. For some, yeah that stoicism is just callousness of a lifetime of unnecessary crisis. For others, it’s a call to action to tackle a problem none of us can solve ourselves. Most parents, if they had the choice and power, wouldn’t want their children to go through this kind of stuff, but we aren’t the ones who hole the keys to power, that belongs to our “heavily sponsored” politicians. All we can do is just figure out the next few steps as they happen.

I’m not saying this to invalidate your fears, there is truth to them, but don’t give up because of that fear. Learn about what causes that fear, understand it, and then fight to make sure others don’t have to go through it. You’re young, you have a good starting baseline of understanding about the world, far more than I did when I was a teen, you have a lot of time to expand that understanding, keep learning, and fight the good fight.