Anything Musk touches is immediately tainted by association. Any AI product he has a say in should immediately be considered a potential danger to humanity as a whole.

He probably started to become active in politics so he can create the UXA at some point.

They’re going to outsource that to AI-robots soon. And then I hope they malfunction.

Because they read the books, but were fans of Sauron.

Yep, his battery factory in Germany got into lots of PR trouble for poisoning ground water and having a three times higher rate of work related accidents then is normal.

Except he hasn’t electrocuted a live elephant to make a point. Yet.

In the context of Germany, “liberal” means being for capitalism unbridled by the state but still generally progressive policies culturally, with more rights for minorities and such. The corresponding party is FDP. So in some ways it’s the exact opposite of the US idea of “liberal”.

Someone considered “left” would be for more social policies and government control of capitalism (traditionally SPD), extreme left would be following tenants of communism, opposed to the US and friendly with Russia (The party The Left and the new Sarah Wagenknecht party)

Someone considered conservative or “right” would be against social policies and try to reduce control of capitalism (CDU) extreme right would be plain fascists (AfD), ironically also aligned with Russia now.

The Greens are a special case, since they were originally a single issue party concerned with environmentalism, but since the SPD has largely vacated their social policies since Schröder was chancellor, they have become more and more the new “social” party.

There are also a huge number of smaller parties that are unable to reach more than five percent, which is necessary to be included in the govenmental body of the Bundestag. Most of those are single issue parties (there is even a beer party). The FDP has become so unpopular that it might also share that fate soon.

To come back to your original point, there were no “liberals” when Hitler was elected. There were conservatives, socialists and communists. The conservatives aligned themselves with the fascists and the socialists and communists were outlawed and thrown into jail/executed.

The word “liberals” means something else in Germany than in the US. The closes analogy would be Democrats=SPD and Republicans=CDU, which are the two biggest parties. When Hitler took over, the CDU fell in line while the SPD resisted. The SPD then was also a lot more leftist than it is now. It’s pretty much centrist now and only slightly more to the left than the conservative CDU.

Oh yeah, that’s way worse! But it doesn’t make me very optimistic about Germany’s future either, even without the Trump tragedy.

Our current government literally just collapsed today so… yeah.

Also social media sequestering people in cozy filter bubbles that distort reality.

Social media, or more precisely, algorithms designed to create ever growing engagement by feeding into confirmation bias and only showing you stuff you like, have destroyed the ability of critical thinking in a majority of people.

This doesn’t only apply to the right spectrum either, as evidenced by all the “hopium” articles here and on r/politics that were trying to construct a blue win or even a blue wave when all polls pointed to a Trump advantage. I had fallen into that trap myself. And everybody was also smugly making fun of the articles in r/conservative predicting the same thing for Trump. Well, turns out they were right.

I agree that he probably won’t last the four years but even if he does he is already too senile to set any policy. He was also already more than happy for others to do the actual work of creating policy because he’s incredibly lazy last time.

So I think Vance (and Musk) will be the real rulers behind King Trump. I don’t think either is really that much interested in religion and racism but both are incredibly sexist and/or transphobic. So sadly a lot of horror and pain will be delivered to women and transgender people. (Which doesn’t mean immigrants are safe.)

Musk will also push for deregulation/privatization of technology so that he can become even richer. This will lead to more monopolization/enshittification and stifle innovation for years, maybe decades. Vance will go along with it due to the Thiel-connection.

Additionally, Putin has made sure that Musk will also champion his interests even if Trump is unable to due to senility. The US will become a de facto ally of Russia and a geopolitical enemy of Europe in a similar vein as China (meaning not openly).

The military-industrial complex will quickly warm to the new reality of an autocracy and the US will start a new war somewhere. Probably in the Middle East. Maybe not within the first four years though. It will be used to distract from a crashing economy and the very real climate catastrophe (mirroring Ruzzia).

I wish all of this were ideas for an alt-history book and not a possible scenario for our future.

As a German aware of my country’s history I can only shake my head in sad recognition and try not to feel utterly hopeless not only about the future of a once-great country but the entire world.

We’re in the endgame now.

Doom in the comics is more like movie Thanos than comic Thanos. Comic Thanos is legitimately mad and killed half the universe just to impress Mistress Death (she was not impressed).

He’s basically Stark, Strange and Black Panther rolled into one, with the arrogance of Strange and Stark dialed to eleven.

He’s completely capable of doing very evil shit to reach his goals but also has moral principles. He has tried to kill the Fantastic Four countless times and is still the godfather of the daughter of Reed and Sue. Her first word was “Doom”.

Well, he never says he’s evil but is certainly seen as a villian: Dr. Victor van Doom. He’s actually glimpsed all possible timelines of humanity and only the one where he reigns is not ending in destruction. https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-4d9668819558c73a8fda43cd4bc0ef0a-lq He is also loved by the people of the country he does rule. And when he had indeed managed to rule the world, it was a time of peace. I mean, mind control peace (he amplified the power of Kilgrave the Purple Man) but still.

If you’re asking yourself why Kilgrave didn’t simply control him, Doom is one of the few people with so much natural willpower that Kilgrave’s powers don’t work on him: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d5/e8/c8/d5e8c8ee71120993b8616128b08a6a22.jpg

They always over did it with the aging make-up in those days. Picard at the end of The Inner Light looks straight up horrifying.

Which tend to be conservative socially.

Would that be… a spot check?

CITIZEN! DO NOT BE ALARMED! YOU WILL FEEL A SMALL TICKLING SENSATION AND THEN DEATH!

Pet theory: The Good/Bad Place entities are actually Q judging humanity by using cultural idioms they understand.

Also, he blatantly corrupt. If you pay him enough money, you can be sure that he will rubberstamp anything you want. He’s probably even relatively cheap if you stroke his ego enough.