Let's All Do Something Nice For Donald Trump

[Blankspace]

Mary Trump asserts that Donald Trump will "try to take the rest of us down with him" during this transition period:

https://youtu.be/_98infWoIT0

She also offers some interesting insights into Trump's lifelong psychosis. Mary Trump is not only Trump's niece, but she's also a clinical psychologist and her insights into Trump's character have been pretty much spot-on.

I think Biden needs to enter office under the assumption that absolutely everything is either broken or missing, and just do a complete, clean sweep of the whole place. Just flush it all down the toilet and start over again from scratch. It's a given that Trump will not willingly participate in any sort of transfer of power traditions and in fact, Trump will probably try to actively sabotage Biden on his way out.

To me, Trump is just like a neurotic little boy who, when you tell him he can't play with his toys anymore, will smash them all up, just to make sure no one else can play with those toys, either.

That won't end well.

[Tessera]

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the ex-President of the United States...




I'm willing to bet that similar words have been shouted at least once during Trump's cabinet meetings.

[Will Never]

Jared Kushner is one of the fucking weirdest and most depraved people the White House staff has ever known. 

[StarWrecker]

I'm recalling an interview with a white supremacist who said that Trump wasn't racist enough for them, since he "gave his daughter to a Jew".

I do wonder though. He's made a few anti-Semitic slips in the past...

[Tessera]

Meanwhile... back at the White House...

[StarWrecker]

I think Trump might want to leave a little "present" in the Presidential bed, if you know what I mean.

I'd have all the furniture burned and all the fittings autoclaved myself.

[Tessera]

This just in from QAnon:

Space aliens forced Eleanor Roosevelt to mate with Bigfoot... and Joe Biden is their love child.   

This shocking secret was revealed to them by Elvis, who as we all know is not dead.

The Illuminati may also be involved.

[Cylnar]

And all Democrats, liberals and progressives are cannibalistic pedophiles who worship Satan.

Hillary Clinton is the high priestess of the cult.

And she runs the whole thing out of a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C.

And millions of people ACTUALLY believe this.

Sometimes I wonder if QAnon may be more dangerous than Trump himself...

[Tessera]

Notice that the conspiracy they DO believe is actually more freaky than the gag I posted.

Cannibalistic pedophile pizza. Righty-o.

[Will Never]

Qanon is one of the most embarrassing things to ever happen in the United States of America.

[StarWrecker]

I mean Qanon is stupid, but you have to remember how many "secret communists" they were able to dig up during the Red Scare. This sort of conspiratorial nutjobbery is not without precedent in the USA.

[Tessera]

This sort of conspiratorial nutjobbery is not without precedent in the USA.

Not without precedent in Germany, either.   

[StarWrecker]

Oh, definitely. The human propensity for conspiratorial thinking is a real problem no matter where you are.

[Tessera]

Oh, definitely. The human propensity for conspiratorial thinking is a real problem no matter where you are.

Hate and fear + "group think" = the Nazi party, the KKK, QAnon, etc.

[StarWrecker]

This is why I'm genuinely worried for society. This past decade has been bad, and a lot of it has stemmed from society having not figured out what to do about social media.

It's given people who normally wear a tinfoil hat and rant on AM radio access to a megaphone that can reach billions of people.

Normally, it takes someone with the charisma and will of Hitler or Mussolini to whip up this crap into a truly dangerous storm, but now any jack-off with a Twitter account has a shot at it.

[Tessera]

I'll tell you what I think, Star...

I think Humanity is going through a tense transition period right now. I also think this transition period will continue until the end of this century.

What we're currently dealing with is a disparity, between the advancement of our technology and the advancement of our society. Our technology is rapidly overtaking our collective level of maturity. Soon, we'll be creating antimatter and mining the asteroid belt... but meanwhile, most of the people in the world still believe in magic (which is, after all, what religion is really all about).

Carl Sagan predicted everything that we're currently experiencing. Read his novel entitled "The Demon Haunted World." Read it from cover-to-cover. In that book, Sagan talks about the dangers that could arise, when our technological development outpaces our moral and philosophical development. I believe we are living in those times right now. People are surrounded by new technology that most of them don't really understand... and they feel uncomfortable. Small. Lost. Unimportant. Threatened.

It's sort of like going back in time 400,000 years, giving a Neanderthal a loaded AK-47 automatic assault rifle, and then expecting that nothing bad will happen.

At the other end of this transitional period, we have two major possible outcomes: the entire species has a grand epiphany and finally leaves childish things behind... or... we go extinct. I give it a 50-50 chance either way.

If you've ever wondered why we don't get visited by a different technological civilization every second Tuesday, then this may be why: most civilizations reach this time of crisis and then, they tragically make the ultimate mistake. They annihilate themselves... either violently, or else by pumping so much toxic garbage into their own planet that it eventually becomes uninhabitable. Maybe that's why we aren't finding any signs of them being out there in the galaxy: most of them are dead.

[Blankspace]

If you've ever wondered why we don't get visited by a different technological civilization every second Tuesday, then this may be why: most civilizations reach this time of crisis and then, they tragically make the ultimate mistake. They annihilate themselves... either violently, or else by pumping so much toxic garbage into their own planet that it eventually becomes uninhabitable. Maybe that's why we aren't finding any signs of them being out there in the galaxy: most of them are dead.

I agree with that theory and I don't think it's the first time I have heard of it.

[Tessera]

I agree with that theory and I don't think it's the first time I have heard of it.

I'm sure lots of learned folks have had the same notions. In fact, it's also a subset ("L") of the famous Drake Equation: the percentage of technological civilizations that don't destroy themselves.