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this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
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They would not keep doing it if it did not keep working.
There are a great many similarities to this and all of Trump's many & varied trials - when the rewards (of rape, bribery, extortion, blackmail, assassination, and so many other things) FAR outweigh the risks, it would be the height of stupidity to expect that nobody would ever even so much as dream of taking advantage.
And by stupidity, I suppose I mean Mitch McConnell, who more than any other singular individual that we can see decides e.g. which and whether judges can be appointed to their seats, and which and whether government programs may get funded - e.g. watchdog organizations that used to prosecute law-breaking behaviors, way back in ye olden times. (Mitch's partner in this is not worth mentioning bc that role is played by a rotating cast of characters - now it's Mike Johnson, before it was Kevin McCarthy, maybe next it will be Matt Gaetz, who da fuq knows.)
Every time we hear about another tech bro that gets a slap on the risk, while e.g. a black person gets shot just for walking/running/jogging/working/breathing/sleeping, we should remind ourselves: this is on purpose (or at least deemed "acceptable losses", "collateral damage"). Those laws were supposed to be ours (Of/For/By The People) to make as we wished, and were, before this country was taken over from the inside by a silent coup, more than a decade prior to January 6. Now, an increasingly smaller minority runs the entire nation - e.g. less than a handful ousted McCarthy - and we seem to have collectively decided that we will do nothing about it.
Even conservatives should be against this, bc getting your way is not the same thing as doing things properly, and maintaining a stable ~~democracy~~ system of governance (who am I kidding, we've been a plutocracy since basically the beginning) is something that is required for us all to continue to exist. Example scenario: I am a father and two of my teenage children are having a birthday celebration, with both of their hearts desires set on sushi, and my wife wanted Chinese food but is okay with sushi. However, I don't like sushi, hence we are all going for barbecue (despite one of the birthday teens being vegetarian except fish), and that's final - sound familiar? Winning an argument is not the same as "winning" at life.
TLDR: expect more of this kind of "tech bro" nonsense over time rather than less, bc we have more foundational issues that are leaking out to cause / allow them.
Sorry this is a lot of words - I think sometimes we oversimplify so wanted to keep all these details, this time.
They'll probably end up becoming the next big conservative party if the social conservative fascists are beaten.
In a very realistic sense that has happened already.
First, the actual smart ones (or those who listen to smart advisors, same difference) - I'm talking about the likes of Zuckerberg and Bezos - have adapted to get ahead no matter who wins the election. These will utilize whatever advantage their robot/lizard brains can concoct. We hear about these, but they have successfully managed to train society to not think about them all that much, especially in conjunction to words like "politics" or "inflation", despite being very much active in both. e.g., FaceBook ~~facilitated genocide~~ was bad - oh uh... well uh... haven't you heard, FaceBook is dead now, while we are "Meta", didn't you know!?
But both the Musk and the Donald have their own proprietary social media platforms - Xhitter and [Alternative]Truth Social, respectively - and they have already eaten out the heart of most of the former conservative party. i.e. before the Tea Party (e.g. Ted Cruz) could eat out the GOP from the inside out, the Donald overtook that process and was so "successful" at it that a lot of people - us and them even! - call it the "GQP" now. The Kings of Old, aka Moscow Mitch, now have to kiss the ring of the twice-impeached former reality TV personality, while ignoring the sounds & smells of shatting (it pains me to think that the latter part of that sentence I mean literally! and then arguably even worse figuratively, e.g. how Trump makes fun of their wives in public but they have to swallow their pride and praise him or else their own supporters will boot them out as fast as McCarthy was).
Anyway, Trump is not a "tech bro", but the likes of the Musk look up to him all the same, and also there's a fantastic argument that FaceBook helped elect Trump to be President in the first place, much as Twitter is trying to get him back in for a second term, so the tech bro culture is very much ingrained in the heart of the conservative party even now.