Bluesky

A system’s purpose is what it does

You may like this quip, and I'll admit I'm partial to it myself, but it's just a quip. A system can have other purported or actual purposes and then simply not be structured correctly to reach them. The quip is skeptical and cynical, but not everyone is a cynic, and not all non-cynical people are stupid.

Values like “Greed is Good”, “AIs are superior to humans”, and “Israelis are entitled to a militant ethno-nationalist enclave state”. They’re the ones currently running the country.

Great? The values espoused or imposed by the currently ruling regime aren't universally shared even in fully developed totalitarian states.

There are some very, very good poker players who cannot tell you the name of the state they took all your money in, because they could not be bothered to learn the name.

A better analogy is if there was a poker player that came into the game with more chips than any other player at the table, was allowed to continually and openly cheat and evade the established rules of the game, and was still crowned the winner. Is that player possibly stupid? Yes, it very easily could be the case that he is.

Trump's chief insight in his entire life is that the people who enforce the rules in this country are weak-willed and will fold under applied pressure. That's not exactly theory of relativity stuff, and many other people knew this just as well as Trump but were restrained by other things that don't apply to Trump from exploiting it.