AutistoMephisto

As Mark Twain once remarked, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it."

And is also a sociopath, incapable of feeling or giving love.

True, but they had been riding a wave of Pan-Germanism prior to the Nazis. Germany had many diverse regions that didn't see each other as equals prior to the Weimar Republic.

grant all 50 states independence, and let the states come back together into whatever new nation or collection of nations they wish to form.

Kind of reminds me of this map from the Unofficial Fallout TTRPG:

Here the 48 contiguous States are divvied up between 13 Commonwealths with Alaska being part of the Northwest and Hawaii being in the Southwest.

But could Germany have ever turned back from fascism on its own, without any help whatsoever? Let's say the entire continent just let the Nazis have their way and let Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss play out their experimental new form of government out to its horrible logical conclusion. Could Germany ever come back from that? Could the world?

Is that what we said to you when it happened to you?

No, we're about as far from OK as a country can get. The world needs to unite against us and muster the largest liberation force ever seen. And I mean the entire world literally every nation that can send warriors, send them. Germans, you have been where we are. You know, all too well, where this road leads. You could not turn yourselves back from it, and so you needed the help of 4 allied world powers. Now, one of those world powers is trudging down that same road you walked almost a century ago. And, I don't think we will be able to turn ourselves back, just as you could not.

One of the things I wish we'd stop doing is treating these guys as if they are rational, coherent political actors. They are not. They are unbelievable weirdos. And not the good kind, either. They're more like the kind of weirdos that I would not be surprised if came out later that they had a collection of human thumbs in a jar in their basement.

They are not defending conservatism and tradition. They are hard selling accelerationism and the complete breakdown of our world because they've convinced themselves that in 5 or 10 or 20 years they will have an AI that can do literally anything, from telling them how to rewire their bodies to survive on Mars to teaching them how to upload their consciousnesses to the Internet and live forever as digital gods, ruling the galaxy.

And I know that sounds like comical hyperbole, but that's what they very seriously and very literally believe according to Greg Fish, a compsci grad student and popular tech blogger, who, over a decade ago, was invited to be an advisor at the Lifeboat Foundation, one of the many think tanks they set up to convince themselves that this was all possible. He gave them a hard no, and wrote some articles skeptical of them on True Slant, which is now owned by Forbes. Immediately he got calls from the Director of the Singularity Institute challenging him to a public debate. This was all over a decade ago. And since then, because of the hyperventilating discourse around AI and ChatGPT, it's only gotten much, much worse.

So, yeah, if they seem really weird and like they've been marinating in some kind of "WH40K-esque" tech religion, it's because they are, and they have.

You know, you do raise a valid point, here. Note-taking has become something of a lost art/skill in the smartphone age. Not many people write shit down in notebooks and journals outside of what they are required to do in school, college, university in the US, anyway. I'm personally working on getting my groove back when it comes to taking notes on things, because as much as I love to create content I find it hard not to go into a rambling diatribe without notes. Honestly the dumbing down of America has led to a lot of people not writing shit down and that's going to be a huge problem down the line.

This. We have a culture that doesn't allow for much in the way of personal time.

They did. They also basically came in around the early 90's in San Francisco and all the tech hippies were like, "Yeah, we're gonna give people all these wonderful tools to create new realities and it's gonna be like a Star Trek utopia!" Then the VC investors and money men showed up and said "No, we're gonna use these tools on people to make them more predictable." So now instead of giving people tools, tech uses tools on people.

Nuclear fusion has made great strides. There currently an experimental Tokamak in China that set a new record for sustained fusion in 2023, then earlier this year broke that record again.