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  "publishedAt": "2026-04-20T20:33:46.000Z",
  "site": "https://tumblr.sztupy.hu",
  "tags": [
    "sisteraccurate",
    "mostlysignssomeportents",
    "https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/20/praxis/#acceleration",
    "https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/",
    "https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53616011737/in/photolist-2pFS5kt",
    "https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-two-countries",
    "https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/howard-dino/#the-scream",
    "Keep reading"
  ],
  "textContent": "sisteraccurate:\n\n> mostlysignssomeportents:\n>\n>> mostlysignssomeportents:\n>>\n>>> # Comrade Trump\n>>>\n>>> ALT\n>>>\n>>> **If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:**\n>>>\n>>> **https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/20/praxis/#acceleration**\n>>>\n>>> There aren’t a lot of things I agree with Mark Carney about, but there’s one area where he and I are in _total_ accord: the old, US-dominated, “rules-based international order” was total bullshit:\n>>>\n>>> https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/\n>>>\n>>> Unlike Carney, I never pretended to like that old order, and indeed, I spent my entire life fighting against it – literally, all the way back to childhood, organizing other children to march against Canada’s participation in America’s nuclear weapons programs:\n>>>\n>>> https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53616011737/in/photolist-2pFS5kt\n>>>\n>>> All of which means that my experience of the Trump years is decidedly _weird_. On the one hand, I exist in a near-perpetual state of anxious misery, as Trump and his chud army of Christian nationalists and degenerate gamblers pursue a program of gleeful genocide. But at the very same time, I’m living in a world in which Trump is (inadvertently) dismantling many of the worst aspects of the old order _in favor of something decidedly better_.\n>>>\n>>> Take Trump’s tariff policy. Back during Trump I, he decided that Americans couldn’t buy Chinese solar anymore, which had the double benefit of allowing him to pursue the twin goals of throwing red meat to Sinophobic Cold War 2.0 freaks _and_ delivering a giant gift to the planet-wrecking oil companies that had helped him buy his way into office.\n>>>\n>>> This was really bad for America, of course, but those solar panels had to go _somewhere_. Mostly, they ended up in Pakistan, dumped there at such a massive discount that the country solarized virtually overnight. Pakistani solar installers learned their trade from Tiktok videos set to Tamil film soundtracks, and unwired the country so thoroughly that today, the national power company is in danger of going bust because no one buys their electricity from the grid anymore. Pakistani bridal dowries now routinely include four panels, an inverter and a battery:\n>>>\n>>> https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-two-countries\n>>>\n>>> This is an inversion of the normal order of things, in which rich countries get all the good stuff first, and poor countries like Pakistan get scraps after we’ve gorged ourselves. Think of vaccine apartheid, in which monsters like Howard Dean insisted that we had to prevent countries in the global south from making their own covid vaccines, because poor brown people are too stupid and primitive to run a pharma manufacturing operation:\n>>>\n>>> https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/howard-dino/#the-scream\n>>>\n>>> But, thanks to Comrade Trump, Pakistan was _first_ in line to become the world’s solar capital. The country’s LNG terminal – built with Chinese Belt-and-Road money – is now a stranded asset, because no one there needs gas.\n>>>\n>>> Keep reading\n>>\n>> ALT\n>\n> I’ve been trying to parse this out morally. I remember reading from a person in China whose dad thought that Donald trump was sent by god… to destroy the great evil of the american empire from within. My own mother has wondered to me whether the administration was an unfortunate but nessesary part of escaping capitalism. But I can’t square that with the reality that tens of millions have died and hundreds of millions will die because of this administration. I cannot look at a regime that has a serious chance of killing everyone I love, that is currently killing childeren, and say “well at least he’s so incompetent that he’s also accidently fixing climate change”. I do not believe a loving god would ever use trump as an instrument of reform.\n>\n> I think i parse it like this. Trump was unnecessary. We could have pivoted to solar either as a massive publics works project under cities ruled by people who cared about the city continuing to exist in the future, or as a more broad and decentralized movement of the public buying cheap, easy to access solar panels payed for by governments and given to anyone who wants them. We could have had a free internet without Spyware and ads, products without planned obsolescence, medicine without bankrupting expenses. But at every possible opportunity, the people with money and power chose the most greedy, cowardly, short-sighted and stupid options they could. There were dozens of off-ramps where our society could have become better peacefully, but the people who would have chosen that did not get access to the levers of power. Power draws the greedy, cowardly, short-sighted and stupid. It is, in fact, entirely plausable to me that we avoided dozens of worse timeliness because someone or some group managed to choose the better option despite or against or before the people who are greedy, cowardly, short-sighted and stupid’s efforts. I am not a fatalist, the world could have been better.\n>\n> Donald trump was not nessisary, nor is he good. But he was the inevitable result of the powerful taking the worst choices possible. Any system that cannot go on forever ends. The first tyrant in a succession has to be competent enough to put themselves in power, but every time a tyrant takes power they make it easier for the next one, while punishing those competent enough to call out their misdeeds. Every cycle of tyranny, the tyrants get less competent and the competent assistents get fewer in number. Every greedy, cowardly, short-sighted and stupid action eats away at the infrastructure that lets them hold power to begin with. Every public misdeed breaks down their legitimacy.\n>\n> Donald trump is not a brutal but nessisary salve to the worlds evils, the accelerationists have it wrong. He is the catastrophic point of failure. The point where the tyrants believe their own hype too much, where the infrastructure of power is too worn away to continue, where people stop believing in those that crush them. Donald trump was promoted into power by greedy, cowardly people for short-sighted and stupid reasons. He has continued to make greedy, cowardly, short-sighted and stupid decisions. But the system he’s in can no longer absorb it, and so it is breaking down beneath him. He was one bad decision too far. We could have avoided him as a society. I’m not prone to blaming the masses for this, the fault lies at the hands of those who had the power to choose otherwise but in hubris chose consistently to prioritize wealth and power over people and the future. By the point that our options were Donald trump or notorious genocide and cop apologists Joe and kamala, we were probably doomed to a collapse of some kind. But there were points before we could have chosen better.\n>\n> When this regime falls, we will once again as a society be forced to make choices. Choices about how we proceed, how we rebuild, how we deal with those complicit in the worst crimes and how we make sure this can never happen again. In this, there will be opportunists, eager to make greedy, cowardly, short-sighted and stupid decisions for their own benefit. We need to filter them out of the decision making process, stop society from forming single points of failure where one rouge man can ruin the lifes of millions, and learn from this era to stop the next one from being just as bloody.\n\n> This was really bad for America, of course, but those solar panels had to go somewhere. Mostly, they ended up in Pakistan, dumped there at such a massive discount that the country solarized virtually overnight. Pakistani solar installers learned their trade from Tiktok videos set to Tamil film soundtracks, and unwired the country so thoroughly that today, the national power company is in danger of going bust because no one buys their electricity from the grid anymore. Pakistani bridal dowries now routinely include four panels, an inverter and a battery:",
  "title": "This was really bad for America, of course, but those solar panels had to go somewhere. Mostly, they…"
}