“The US attempt to create a postsoviet style right wing oligarchic system collapsed because Americans are addicted to scams and turned the U.S. economy into a bubble for chatbots” is too neat a narrative arc though so in reality whatever comes out of this collapsing is going to be 500,000,000x worse

Genuinely it rocks that a bunch of dudes whose sole media diet is action thrillers and who have never read an academic nonfiction book have convinced the investor class to bet the entire U.S. economy on a gamble that relies on an untested technology raising productivity more than electricity did

Genuinely this is the end result of Iraq War trutherism — we lied to ourselves about the motives behind it so hard that we started to believe it was a sane motivation to begin with

The alternative to an Iraq-style occupation is not “we bomb maduro and go home,” it’s “we create a brutal civil war in Venezuela that will result down the road in something far worse crawling out of the rubble”