Which, if that worked, would be a spendy but powerful play for turning the US into a one party autocracy.
Benefits (for musk): He doesn't need to manipulate elections anymore
Hazards: He now needs to manipulate the new regime.
Also the one party autocracy is not popular and depends on fascist rhetoric, eventually a war to keep the social unrest manageable. That doesn't work long term, and Musk is a clear collaborator
We didn't have the term incel when I was a young adult, but at 25 I had an experience that allowed me to realize I wasn't too far off from my peers, and decided to brute force my way to learning to socialize. My therapist suggested hunting down the local recovery community (which meant going to AA groups even though I wasn't an alcoholic) which got me to CoDependents Anonymous.
As a note CoDA and SLAA (Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous) are full of people glad to fall off the wagon, which is a major plot point in Choke by Chuck Palahniuk. Before I got too involved, a very nice person yanked me from CoDA into the local kink community, who were the advanced class of consent, limits and boundaries training. This isn't to say they're perfect at it, but they get more into the nitty, especially those who engage in edge play. (Not to be confused with knife play, though there's some intersection.)
That said, I became sexually active at 26, which is pretty late in the game, but a far leap from world records. Sir Isaac Newton died sexless and was obnoxious and proud of the fact. Incels often have nothing on the mathematics sector.
< rant >
The current state of how we regard our teens remains an issue to me, and at one point while Microsoft was fantasizing on how to get Cortana to fend off unwanted advances (Google's LLM would just ignore them and turn a come-on into a web-search), I was thinking of how a simulated girlfriend might teach incels how to engage others without scaring them off through trial and error and sheer practice. But now we have scary data-stealing e-girlfriends that prey on the lonely.
Then with the rise of abstinence-only education, the alt-right and the eagerness of the Republican party to keep their War Boys ( witness me! ) as a voting bloc and recruitment pool for their militant wing, I realized US society doesn't have a strong interest in making things better for our newly-sex-starved teens since, as George Orwell observed, sexual frustration + three minutes of hate turns into a powerful tool for fascism-style civil wrangling, at least of the lumpinproletariat (the people who can't civics very well). Kids developing a healthy sexuality doesn't serve to turn the population into devout workers / soldiers glad to serve the ownership class.
It also may be that we just don't like our own teens, and want to evict them (which might be a hunter-gatherer means to stir the gene pool. Gorillas do a similar thing) and the thinking ape actually sucks a thinking past some of our presupposed values like dominance hierarchy. Hence we worship athletes and fear smart, less physical guys will turn into supervillains, and this informs our incapacity to do anything about schoolyard bullying, or workplace bullying, or gunboat diplomacy.
So, when it comes to my fellow incels, I'll borrow from Red Dragon (The Harris novel and two movies)
I couldn't help feeling sorry for him. He wasn't born a monster; he was made one through years of abuse.
< /rant >
Um, yes?
NGOs often face situations in which the people that need humanitarian aid cannot be reached because a belligerent interest intercepts all supply. This is how we ended up with ad-hoc military support vehicles (say a pickup with a machine-gun mount) being called a technical since it and its crew would be budgeted in as technical services since Red Cross can't exactly say they hired some goons to stand guard while they dispensed first aid services.
So when NGOs scout a new region to support and ask the local villages what they need, it's super common to hear well, our biggest problem is the warlord up-river who keeps sending guys with guns to take all our stuff. And since NATO isn't interested in sorting that out, it's up to our peace-corps crew to think about how to provide an ad-hoc balance of power.
The problem is with a village with nothing but pointed sticks, one or two guys with an AK-47 can throw the balance or power so far that the village is forced to capitulate to the warlord. And it's not that the NGOs are consulting with an arms dealer (which is how the warlord is getting his guns), so they're improvising, which sometimes means 3D printing gun parts and then smithing them locally.
As per most crisis hot spots in the world, few things are simple, and so yes, NGOs that are supposed to be non-violent (and even will present themselves as such to the international community) will resort to ad-hoc violence or violence-adjacient solutions. IRL is often messy.
It was published in 1968, and to give you an idea of how bad things were Michelle Remembers was published in 1980, was regarded as factual and featured Mary, Mother of Jesus coming to save Michelle from a Satanic ritual, and that wasn't enough of a hint to stop the book from being used as evidence in courts of law.
And yes, Bananadine was a hoax and Powell bought into it and he poo-pooed toad licking and it's real (look up Colorado River Toad. I explain it in another comment). So yes, Powell was convinced despite his best diligence. We should be grateful for the wisdom of the internet (warts, worts and all).
I could see how he might change his opinion, and later adopt a philosophy of nonviolence. But at this point there are some valid concerns regarding global catastrophic risks that we may not be able to confront without violent action. For a deeper dive on it, consider Sophie From Mars' video The World Is Not Ending ( on YouTube ) and How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire by Andreas Malm which confront that either we face that capitalism will kill us and collectively stop doing it, or we, as a species, perish. And the sooner we can make that change, the less stark our future will be.
And in that regard, Powell's practical instructions might still see some proper use.
Oh, lots of things. But for one thing, Powell wouldn't mock the Colorado River Toad the way he did in the first book (or commenting facetiously about his buddy who suggested smoking toad skins ) since it's an actual thing. Incilius alvarius' defensive poison has actual hallucinogenic and psychotropic properties.
The poison on the back of a typical toad can kill a dog, so be careful, or it will fuck you up. First nations folk would actually lick the toads and just suffer the bad trip until they got accustomed to the toxins. But that's a rough ride.
Since the late twentieth century cultivators would raise and milk toad venom and then distill the desired chemistries into a powder that can be ingested or smoked (much like cannibis, rolled into cigarettes, smoked from a pipe or mixed into edibles), hence yeah, when Powell heard about it, it registered as smoking toad skins though thankfully, the frogs survive the process.
Powell's 'tude about drugs was informed by the 60s mind-expansion movement to try different stuff and see what broadens your perspective. And so the 5-methoxy-dimethyltryptamine / bufotenin cocktail would actually fit right into his philosophy. If I remember right, he talked about trying peyote, which was a really bad trip for him.
All that said, there's self-awareness related stuff that I would want to throw in, since the western psychiatric model is not great for dealing with mental illness or for reconciling living in a toxic society. Drugs are commonly used to self medicate but even then can be so much more effective when we're aware that's what we're doing, and this is a point often missed in drug culture, in recovery culture and in the mental health sector all together.
The thing NGOs do in Africa is 3D print AK gun parts to be used to make molds to fill in where captured gun parts are lacking so that resistance groups against warlords can be better armed.
It's entirely about loyalty and institutionalized stratification. Laws are meant to constrain those outside the party, while those within the party are given a lot of latitude.
Thank you! I will pass it on.
One of my family has Alexa in her house, which advertises whenever they engage it. Whenever we go there, I have to resist the urge to pick a fight with Alexa regarding the improprieties of Amazon.
People big enough to have a staffed social media team will stilk have an Xitter account just because it is a viable vector to get news out. They may also have Truth Social account, just because it's there.
My first thought was giving mind-blowing orgasms and yeah, I'd be okay if my partner just believed that mind-blowing orgasms were just a natural occurrence.