This sounds like total bullshit. Money runs the world. There’s plenty of “they” with money.
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2026
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I'm sure he'd loathe the comparison but this reminded me of an Alan Moore quote
... and the billionaires keep kicking things and flipping random switches to try to wrench the world into their favored shape, and the rest of us are trapped on this ship with them.
The world isn’t rudderless, in fact its the opposite. There are so many rudder that they run into each other constantly and get in each other's way. Occasionally you can get a group of people to aim them in roughly the same direction for a little while, but they inevitably decide their direction is better than yours. If you're lucky they're on the outside edge of the group.
The other possibility is that plenty of analysts, historians, cultural advisors, etc know exactly how things work and what's going on but he doesn't listen to them because they're 'little people'.
Yep, they tend to not listen to them because they listen to their PR people, polls etc., more. It's sad, but after years of trying to see politics in its full complexity I'm coming back to "politicians are the problem". At least those that win elections. How can we turn that ship around?
Maybe we should have talent agents that campaign for candidates. Winning a campaign is a whole skillset that tells us very little how well a person can actually govern.
Most people give the government way too much credit when it comes to competency.
I would say that, paradoxically, the opposite is true as well.
You're not wrong, but I'm still amazed that the it's possible for me to mail a letter from Los Angeles and have it arrive in Berlin in less than a month.
That dead piece of shit was never invited to anything that ever functioned
rot in piss
I'd abstract it even further: There's no They - the system is self-sustaining. And it will run amok if it isn't regulated.
I mean it, in a well regulated (and preferably global) democracy people like Trump and Musk would just be unhappy psychopaths way too fixated on money, not the richest / most powerful people of a huge country.
I don't know this senator Graham but I suspect he's glossing over a lot of cronyism when he says "There's only we, and we ususally don't know what the fuck we're doing."
Oh how I dream we will have a self-regulating system one day.
The "self" in "self-regulating" for a functioning democracy is the citizens within it.
I've been reading about "systems thinking" recently, and it's fascinating stuff.
Resilient systems are self-organizing
Nice.
It almost - almost - makes religion make sense, at least as a concept. Something to help grasp the felt complexity of our planet, the universe.