Brother you have problems. I hope you find the help you need.

I'm sure it can be made worse with AI.

That's one way to put it, if quite the understatement.

Those who exported the US manufacturing base got insanely rich off of it, unfathomably rich. In doing this they were supported by bipartisan policy, and the government ran the PR campaign for them.

To add to what was already for all practical purposes selling the country for scrap, China was also smart enough to demand technology transfer as part of the deal. So not only were they handed the factories, the exporters taught them everything they knew about technology and manufacturing.

I cannot think of a single example in the whole written history that can hold a candle to the level of stupid this was. The US handed it's leadership role in the world to China on a silver platter, and all of DC and Wall Street cheered on on it, just so that a handful of rich assholes could become even more rich.

I cannot think of a single example in the whole written history that can hold a candle to the level of smart this was. Not in a thousand years does an opportunity like this present itself to anyone, and China recognized it and took it, and understood the level of greed and stupid in the US leadership, and bought the whole country for lunch money, kitchen sink included.

No. For everyone who can put two and two together it has always been obvious that:

1) Everything a country needs to function at war time is of strategic importance, and needs to be protected, defended, duplicated, and easily repaired, and

2) Everything a country needs to function at war time is going to be attacked. You can cry "civilian infrastructure" as much as you want, but the civilian economy supports, and is therefore largely indistinguishable from, the war economy. Damaging one means damaging another, means better chances of winning.

It was only corporations and politicians that wagered they can kick the can down the road, and not have to be the ones that will foot the bill. And they have indeed won that bet for decades, and now we have to face the fact that we have half a century of work to catch up with.

Or maybe, which is more likely, we will do our best to forget the problem, and carry on based on vibes as usual.

You might be on to something here. With the level of carefulness our elected officials are displaying in their use of AI, I'm sure we will be able to jailbreak the Epstein files out of some service sooner or later.

Isn't it just mighty convenient that our press and leaders are working hard to keep the evidence from being released. I wonder why that is.

But you can google pretty much any name, and there's an Epstein connection, if not good ol' island visits. And you can google pretty much any name, and find them not pushing for the release of the files, if not outright working to shut down the conversation.

In this kind of a situation, I consider everyone not actively pushing for the release guilty until proven otherwise. Guilty if not of outright rape and cannibalism, then enablement, obstruction of justice, and criminal negligence. The whole lot needs to be locked up forever, and our halls of power cleansed of the slime with industrial grade disinfectant.

But he did deal with people like you, hence his essay.

No, you aren't. A centrist is someone located between Social-Democracy, meaning what's done in most of Europe, and Social-Liberalism, "worst known" to Americans as "Liberalism". AmiMojo positions are centrist. Yours, from the little I've seen, are quite explicitly right-wing.

You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.

For the record, I'm neither American nor British, so I'm talking badly about a foreign country. Is that allowed? But I can talk badly about my own country, which is currently run by the left (as in, actual left, not what Americans think that word means), and full of corruption. Can I criticize that, or should I praise them because it's my country and thus that'd count as "truth"?

Depends on what you consider "block". For practical purposes, this is a done deal for quite some years now. For the amount of stink it created, look e.g. into how The Guardian was made to destroy their hard drives that had the Snowden files on them. No real stink came of it, but The Guardian was broken, and never stood up for principles again. In a similar vein during the last dozen years or so all of the mainstream media has been reworked, and now only parrots govt line without question.

These days you can have either have major news, or real news. Major news fall in line with govt, because otherwise they meet the soft power of losing first hand access to govt news, and the hard power of the weight of the state apparatus. And that is before you get into the problematic of media moguls like Murdoch maintaining their business empires, which depend heavily on good relations with the govt. The same has happened with new media like Goole, Facebook and so on, everyone's in bed with the govt now.

For a measure of how our media is functioning, check out the reporting, or lack thereof, on Gaza, and Epstein. That basically all of the Western governments are supplying the weapons for a genocide, and covering for it in the public... That basically all of the people in the Western governments turned out to be raping minors and eating children... These things are not only objectively horrible, and pretty much the worst things human beings can do. They also make a mockery of all of the "Western values" that we have been endlessly lectured on by our governments. This is a complete collapse of any moral authority we might have had, of any pretense of us being the good guys, and the destruction of the cornerstones of the postwar Western world we built. UK is now jailing people off the streets for protesting against the genocide now, and they're not alone. We are debanking independent journalists, ICC judges, and their families now, turning them into nonpersons... Where is the major real news here? They're cheering on.

AmiMojo: Defends one the hugest pro-free-market aliance of Capitalist countries in History.

Anonymous Coward: calls that Capitalist free-market alliance "far left".

AmiMojo: practices what G. K. Chesterton, one of the most well-regarded Conservative intellectuals of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, defended in his famous 1901 essay A Defence of Patriotism.

Anonymous Coward: likely believes Chesterton to be a Communist or whatever.

20 years, zero learning. Sad, so sad.

A major reason for that is the fact mainstream media is entirely owned by a tiny number of billionaires who actively use it to advance whatever narrative suits each one, to the point journalists wanting to keep their integrity must leave.

And a major way this might be solved would be by breaking these personal fiefdoms, forcing mainstream media to break into competing operations, as used to be the case before deregulation made consolidation possible, and then a certainty.

That's the thing though. The biggest source of misinformation in ol' Blighty is Nr.10. Whether it's Blair, May, Johnson, Starmer, whoever. The face doesn't matter. The bullshit remains the same. It wasn't Russian disinformation that made Brexit happen, it was Britains own Farage. And now Great Britain is on track to be the first un-developed country in the West.

And this is where the West is at by now. The powers that be are at odds with truth, with their lies, incompetence, and corruption, so they redefine truth to mean whatever is convenient. 1984 was a field manual for them.

You can bet your ass that to be trusted, a news source has to keep quiet about inconvenient topics such as Gaza, Epstein, and government corruption. And so it is trusted then means that the government can trust the media to not rock the boat.

The purpose of a system is what it does. The US has about 4% of the world population, and about 20% of the world prison population. The last country to have that statistic was Soviet Union.

I find that an artifact of a gay party is a great embodiment of equality, liberation, and pursuit of happiness. And also, of material success for that matter, being able to afford a party is not something one should take for granted. So we have the very core ideas of the Dream represented here.

And the unicorn as described is a great embodiment of the growing disconnect between the promises and the reality of the American life.

Your post is a demnostration of that disconnect. If you think enjoying a gay party makes someone closeted, well there's still a way to go on the road of liberation, because you appear to be a bigot. And I can imagine a scenario where cleaning up beach trash would be stealing, but I don't think the US is quite that dystopian yet. But if you think that Buc-ees, that is, the fact you can find a clean toilet here and there is the final form of the American Dream, maybe you have some reckoning to do.

I had a friend work in the US for a few years. Marine biologist, Miami iirc.

At some point in time he went for a road trip to search for the American Dream. Drove all across the US, from the east to the west, from the north to the south. Didn't find it, though. When he had almost made it back home, he stumbled upon a gay beach party in Florida. Had a blast. When he awoke on the deserted beach next morning, there he found a giant inflatable rainbow colored unicorn, and he recognized it for what it was. Took it home, put it in the pool between the mid-rises.

And when people asked about it, he'd happily tell them of the story of his search, and of the American Dream as it was found to be - an imaginary creature, full of air, construced of cheap plastic, made in China. Never made anyone laugh, never made anyone cry, but did make everyone quiet for a while.

Quite the opposite. He hates Anthropic and keeps trying to find a way, any way, to damage them. Those attempts keep backfiring, though. It's the internal image of his international misadventures.