Trump has a lot that seems might be wrong with him, but schizophrenia never really seemed to be on the list. Narcissism, dementia, psycho-/socio-pathy, compulsive lying, and possibly more, but I’ve never gotten the feeling he displayed the hyperpatternicity I associate with schizophrenia.

The thing about compelling lies is not that they are new, just that they are easier to expand. The most common effect of compelling lies is their ability to get well-intentioned people to support malign causes and give their money to fraudsters. So, expect that to expand, kind of like it already has been.

The big question for me is what the response will be. Will we make lying illegal? Will we become a world of ever more paranoid isolationists, returning to clans, families, households, as the largest social group you can trust? Will most people even have the intelligence to see what is happenning and respond? Or will most people be turned into info-puppets, controlled into behaviours by manipulation of their information diet to an unprecedented degree? I don’t know.

The trick is, snake oil salesmen exist because there are customers. You might be smart enough to spot them coming, but many, many, many people are not. Being dismissive of scamming as an issue because you can spot them is like being dismissive of drownings because you know how to swim. It ignores the harm to your world done by having others around you destroyed, sometimes because they are cocky and hubristic, sometimes just because they were caught in a weak moment, just a bit too tired to notice the difference between rn and m in an email address.

Great, just in time for the number of shipments of imports needing to be distributed across the US to plummet…

A ways back, I saw an article about how the French were rioting because their retirement age was being increased from 62 to 64. I remarked that it was interesting to see the French rioting against a change that wouldn’t even quite bring them to parity with the US but Americans can’t be bothered to riot for almost anything. A Frenchman said they didn’t want to even be more like the US in any way.

This law is absolutely the now-classic American attitude that kids can watch violent movies all day, but if they’rEXC exposed to one female nipple, you gotta shut it all down. Is France turning into America now, following Britain down the red, white, and blue path?

This is absolutely the answer. If it isn’t funneling money away from actual value creation and into their pockets, it’s evil in the mind of the investors.