American dream

They’re called “teachers” and they work their asses off nearly every single day of the year.

I love that this insinuates teaching is some sort of manipulation. And that’s a completely fair argument!

Problem is people with good hearts aren’t very interested in manipulating people.

Also Americans aren't very interested in them either.
Speak for yourself.

Here's a version with a little less whitespace. 👌

Goddamn shrinkflation affecting memes too now?
- I rather feel like the blank space around these social media posts has gotten out of hand lately. Might just be me. 🤷‍♂️

I wish someone would give them enough critical thinking skills to be hard to manipulate, it's an ask, given the advancement of advertising / propaganda over the last century, but I wish.

I’ve coined the term “benevolent Machiavellianism” for schemed social manipulation of people into doing what is in all parties’ best interests

People call Lord Vetinari a Machiavellian figure, and indeed he is — but only for a given value of Machiavelli. A true student of The Prince would be a lot more brutal, and would firmly believe that it is better to be feared than loved. Vetinari firmly believes that it is better to be permanent than either.
- wasn't the prince satire though?

We've talked about engineering positive viruses. I wonder if we can engineer positive parasites?

Actually, create a political platform around a think tank + powerful AI system (and a network of fact-checkers / blue-teams) and then run it to create policy toward long term progress and elevating the bottom rungs of the population into the working class. Make the figurehead a movie star who is great at patriotic oration. This is quite doable.

The problem is, billionaires and oligarchs don't want to build a star spanning republic of which they're personally a small part. They want to rule a silly little banana republic. So autocratic fascists get huge infusions of cash from them to stop projects like the one described above.

Once we create a society that is a cultural panopolis, though, it's only a matter of time until the Zaphod Beeblebrox party, above, infiltrates all the dictatorships and causes political trouble, possibly challenging their rule to adopt the same set of principles. It may be this reason that aristocratic elites get very aggressive against anyone who tries to do a communism. (See the USSR who got shut out by Wilson early on, or the massacre of the Black Panthers by FBI.)

If we didn't have the climate crisis and the plastic crisis looming as unnavigated great filters we'd have a workable super-villain master plan that didn't actually involve killing millions of people.

excuse me zaphod isn't a dictator he's a distraction (and a target)
- As per the figurehead I was describing above. So... precisely!

Glass houses and all that...

That was Dick Cheney, problem was that good hearts 2 thru 7 weren't his...