All other considerations aside “Thiel-backed” guarantees all by itself that it’s technofascist bullshit explicitly intended to benefit the oligarchs at the expense of everyone else.

Weird how so many techbro ideas boil down to registering your identification with the tech oligarchs…

If the US has free and fair and honest elections, the Republicans will lose their majorities, therefore Trump (with the brazenly dishonest support of the corrupt and compromised conservatives of the Supreme Court) will see to it that the US does not have free and fair and honest elections.

Nobody said he wasn’t.

I’m not even really talking about Trump per se - he’s just the inspiration. Reading the linked story, and with all of the past similarly insane things he’s said and done, it struck me that he almost doesn’t even exist as a person. Rather, he’s more like just a vehicle for his ego (and, now that you mention it, for his lusts and his delusions). As if, where other people have thoughts and ideas and beliefs, he just has the incessant yammering of his ego (etc.).

And then that in turn got me to wondering if that was part of the origin of myths of demonic possession - if people more or less like him in the past were seen by others the same basic way that I see him - as if whatever personality he should have had has been pushed aside by his overwhelming ego (etc.).

Or in their more primitive interpretation, by a demon.

So this makes me wonder about legends of demonic possession.

In a sense, it could be said that Donald Trump is not President of the United States, because Donald Trump in a sense doesn’t even exist as an individual. Instead, he’s essentially a vehicle for his gargantuan ego. He’s really just a sort of mindless zombie, lurching from one thing to another as his ego dictates.

Which makes me wonder if that was really the way he would’ve been seen in a more primitive past - as if the person who should be inside of him had somehow been pushed aside and he was possessed by a ravening demon. And if that’s the way that other delusional egomaniacs like him were seen in the past.

So at the very least, one would think there would be some sort of consequences for the plain fact that Trump’s thugs keep blatantly lying.

Furure sociologists are going to be spending entire careers trying to sort out how the US went so badly wrong.