I hope I don’t come across as defending Kaptain Ketamine here, because I’m not. I’m explaining a phenomenon while neither justifying it nor agreeing with it.

People here¹ still don’t hate Kaptain Ketamine. A lot of people still think of him as that slightly nerdy, goofy tech guy he used to portray himself as. In tech companies, you’ll see motivational posters with some slogan or other underneath his face. This is because, get this, they don’t follow American politics.

It’s very easy to think the politics you’re steeped in, the culture you’re inundated with, is the default that “everybody should know.” But it isn’t. People here (in broader East Asia) know about as much about American politics as Americans know about the nutcake war. It is very likely that Ikumi Nakamura, a Japanese game developer focused on making, you know, cool games, is not tracking every piece (or even any piece) of American culture wars. (She also probably has no idea what the nutcake war is.)

I’m not saying you shouldn’t feel disappointed. I’m not saying you should support her studio or this Kemuri game if this news breaks your heart or enrages you. I’m just saying you might want to withhold judgment on her as a person just a bit. After all, she is just as ignorant of your daily outrage cycle as you are (and she probably is) of the nutcake war. (Do you actually know what the nutcake war is, or what impact it had on Chinese social dynamics?)

¹ I’m in China, but I routinely travel to other destinations ranging from Cambodia to Korea.

Maybe you could mix this in somehow?

We just have to make our elected officials fear us more than they fear doing nothing. […] That’s starting to happen.

No it isn’t. You’re still making the mistake of assuming your elections matter when the damage has been done long before you went to the ballot box.

Wake me up with the USA’s populace wakes up again and actually overthrows its blatant, obvious tyranny like it did 250 years ago. I mean you can go through the Declaration of Independence line by line right now and see each entry reflected in the world around you; 250 years ago this was cause for revolution.

But unfortunately revolution interferes with getting the latest gadget, watching the antics of dumbasses on reality TV or whatever the Hell else is going on that’s making all y’all miss the enormous problems that are growing ceaselessly in your nation.

I’d like you to think for just a few minutes. See if you can’t come up with some kind of government spending that should be kept secret. Take your time and really think.

Indeed.

… and to shut down the very government departments that were in a position to regulate his companies.

The goal was to remove rules and regulations that would limit the power of companies …

Is there an echo in here?

That would be the American general public. Some countries remember the bad actions of leaders for hundreds or thousands of years.

Others have covered the most obvious flaw: it was 100% ineffective, causing chaos in government without any meaningful spending decrease.

But here’s the real reason, and it comes together with the other real reason: DOGE was never intended to be about “government efficiency”. It was intended to give Elon Musk access to all the information he could get his grubby little hands on for private enrichment and to shut down the very government departments that were in a position to regulate his companies.

Spotted the Redcap.

Anybody who was shocked by the AfD win in the east has not been paying attention to the east of Germany since 1989.

A quick glance at the voting statistics says otherwise.

Roughly a third of eligible voters voted Trump. They’re obviously fine with the attacks on everybody and their dog around the world, including Canada.

Roughly a third voted Harris. They’re the good people, right, who’ll undo all the damage? Weird that. When the Great Democrat Hope, Gavin Newsom, was directly questioned about that, he equivocated on whether he’d undo the attacks on Canada. Maybe there’s a significant fraction of that third that doesn’t give a shit about their northern neighbours either.

And the final rough third. They didn’t give a shit enough about anything to even bother voting. I’ll guess that a huge fraction of them don’t give a shit about Canada either.

From watching reactions both in the news and in public spaces like YouTube or Lemmy or such, it seems to me like the only people who care about the attacks on Canada are people directly impacted by the boycott.

I know, right? The same people who flatly said that enforcing copyright would “destroy [their] business model” (yes, they were that brazen!) are now whining that someone is doing to them what they literally did to all of humanity.

It will be interesting to watch this one get squelched.

Americans in general are as guilty as Donald. Some by commission. Some by omission. All guilty.

Or maybe the fact there never was an actual trade deficit? That the “trade deficit” is a mathematical byproduct of things like the US Dollar being the world’s reserve currency? Something that the USA wants, but as a byproduct makes American goods more expensive abroad, hence fewer people buying (slipshod) American products?

I guess we’ll see as the USA reaches the point where people stop using US dollars as a basis currency how quickly that trade deficit vanishes when the US dollar plunges into a hole.

I don’t.

In the last election, Trump won by a hair. Also in the last election, almost a third of the voting populace decided to sit that one out.

In effect two thirds of the American electorate was fine with Trump as president. One third directly voted for him, one third just said “meh, both sides” and went about their day.

The world’s oldest toddler plays in his pram again.