@RustyCrab @PurpCat I don't want to resort to underhanded tactics to beat them. I want it to be possible for normal people to influence national policy to make this kind of collusion illegal in the first place.

Right now, I have a tentative hope that the corrupt establishment has done such a bad job that Trump and the people he's got with him are gonna sweep in and start fixing shit. Let the former crimelords keep their ill-gotten gains to avoid a bloody civil war, but cut them off from ever getting that kind of power again. Turn them back into normal citizens whose fortunes will dwindle over a few generations, as they tend to do when you don't have the benefit of intergenerational political power to keep your social position forever. Spread the dynasties to the winds.

If society has even a tiny amount of trust or faith in itself at all, saner heads have a chance to prevail. At this moment, and this moment alone, a collation of exactly the type we see with the people Trump has gathered around him have a chance to break and change the order to something better. I hope it turns out they their rhetoric is something they believe in enough to actually do, rather than people who just happen to have never encountered a temptation alluring enough to give in. So I'm (very) cautiously optimistic for our current state. I will say a prayer that things work out well, that we can have cool shit like a peaceful world where humans can live. Because the alternative is... Well, kind of tiring to be honest. It gets tedious reading about how shit turns to shit in history.

And now we're finding evidence there's another civilization before ours that was much bigger and more capable than anyone thought before (gobleki teplei or something) and there's no historical record of them, nor previous evidence of them at all. They were great, now they're gone. It's all just so tiresome (lol that was unintentional).