One rich asshole called Larry Ellison
That’s how his company ORACLE got its name.
Larry’s son is who owns the company that bought Paramount and shit canned Colbert.
This is awful. Larry Ellison is also a human piece of garbage only concerned with himself and making money.
Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think ‘oh, the lawnmower hates me’ – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle. — Brian Cantrill
US is truly turning into an oligarch run mafia state dominated by chauvinists, fake-christians, nihilists and criminals. There is a large amount of sane Americans too (I’ve lived in the US for many years and have travelled extensively), but they are too well off and risk averse to take any actions to protect their freedoms and American society.
I’ll just quote another post I made on this topic:
While I genuinely hope this will serve as a wake up call (not in the seemingly fake and preformative way done by the California governor) for the locals, from my time living there I have my doubts, it seems that Americans are a bit too well off and risk averse to take action.
Perhaps it may make sense to share a vignette from an Asian country I was travelling in.
We took the train from a regional capital to a smaller city. A week later, we were on our way back to the regional capital to catch a plane.
We go to the railway station and find out that Maoist rebels bombed the railway. So we we find a driver with an off-road vehicle to travel through the jungle road (it was in a terrible state, don’t think a regular car would have managed) to the regional capital.
On the way through the jungle we approach a group of burned out trucks with the military surrounding them. We ask them what happened. The military said the Maoist rebels stopped the trucks, let the drivers go (I believe they were actually treated well and the military said they were dropped off at the nearest village completely unharmed and with their belongings). The truck drivers were merely employees and get shit pay with significant dangers (trucks are often heavily overloaded, you constantly see them crash because of this).
So you might say, well what does this have to do with the US? While I don’t support Maoists (even though they likely had good reasons as that region was particularly corrupt and did not benefit from broader national economic growth), one has to admit that they definitely are not risk averse and are willing and able to go through.
To cite another (fictional) example, it’s like that scene in The Godfather 2 where Michael Corleone sees the commitment of the Cuban rebels and realizes that the Batista regime is not going to hold after he sees the Cuban rebel blow himself up to take out the goon leader, rather than face arrest (and likely torture and death).
America is not that kind of place (for better or worse).
EDIT: I will also add that I really hope that I am completely wrong. Without context the post is overly negative. There is a chance for things to change; none of us (including me) can predict whether it will happen or not. That being said, I think we can all agree that it’s not going to be easy and will require novel approaches outside of the standard processes that drive American political culture.
Funny thing is America had a sizable chunk ‘rebel’ people like this. There’s plenty of ‘I dont want to risk my job’, but plenty of the other too. It’s easy to dismiss folks as preppers or performative, but in my opinion, a lot would go Maoist if push comes to shove.
…But, as it turns out, guns cannot protect you from Fox News and Facebook.
I would disagree.
From my time living in the US, I got the impression American society is generally meek, conformist and often a bit shallow in their claimed political beliefs and attitudes (this is not true for everyone of course). See the postscriptum for some additional clarification
I thought the “rebel” attitude was primarily theatrical and aimed more at maintaining and conforming with the local cultural milieu. When everyone claims to be an “independent-minded free thinker”, then no one is really a rebel.
Take the tendency for localism, “rural posturing”, alleged libertarianism and faux-survivalism. The impression I got is that this is a sort of a “theme park” for adults movement. The localism is a bit superficial, it’s not like the rural areas have their own language or a truly distinct culture relative to the rest of the country.
In US rural areas everyone drives around in expensive off-road style vehicles (from both a cost and opex perspective). Infrastructure is well developed you can access all ecosystems for every manner of product and service with ease and relative cost efficiency by local standards (I will specifically note eCom delivery being universal ).
Compare that to the situation in that town when the Maoist bomb railways, most people cannot afford getting an off-road vehicle and would have to switch to busses which are heavily overloaded and prone to accidents and breakdowns. This is especially true during the monsoon season.
Or consider the gun culture in the US. My family are from very run-down towns in Asia and Europe, lots of poverty, challenges, no growth and so. One of my first experience of the US was Detroit, Gary (the where Michael Jackson is from) and Flint. Never could I imagine that the towns where my family is from could have a much higher standard of living than large areas of the US (at least you don’t risk getting shot or robbed if you are out at night).
US lacks any functional to limit the negative externalities of gun ownership and much of the gun culture is built around opposing all common sense measure to reduce externalities purely out of malice and conformist culture. There is an abstract beauty to this level of stupidity and backwardness.
“Gun ownership” is a massive cultural signifier. Thinking that having a gun makes you “independent-minded, powerful, free thinker” is the most stereotypical American cultural motif there is. It’s not very “rebel” to think that merely owning a gun makes you independent and free. The whole “gun ownership to help fight back against the risk of oppression” is Hollywood style fanfic. This might have been true 250+ years ago, a lot has changed this days. I live in Ukraine, gun ownership would do nothing to help fight back against the russians. You need APCs, tanks, ballistic missiles, anti-air, bunker infrastructure in cities, mine clearing ships.
Apologies for sounding like a broken record, but the very notion that “America has a lot of rebels” is a conformist attitude. It really does not. I’ve even had
P.S. This is not an anti-American rant. It’s a great place, lots to see, with friendly people, good food from all over the world even in smaller towns, it’s a good to place to earn money, many world class companies, very strong R&D and higher education culture (at least historically). I’ve travelled a lot and a good policy is to focus on the positive things in a country/region and be flexible and try to be understanding about the negatives. In this case though, we are discussing the negatives, these are actual things I encountered while living in the US (as someone who didn’t necessarily wanted to move there permanently, immigrants are often a bit biased in their evaluations).
One of my first experience of the US was Detroit, Gary (the where Michael Jackson is from) and Flint.
Out of all the possible places for a visitor from abroad to come to in America, you landed in Gary, Indiana?
That is fucking fascinating. Are you open to tell me a little more about your time in Gary?
This has definitely been true from the 80s on and DEFINITELY from the 2000s.
Most of this appears set in motion by Russia. Following an identical, expedited trajectory unfortunately.
