Right-wing scams are a lot like right-wing trolls in that while those responsible consider themselves especially clever and superior to those they've fooled, mostly they're just dependent on insisting the social contract just doesn't - and shouldn't - exist.

There's a certain level of trust and good faith that's necessary for basically ANYTHING to work, and the right operates as if the smartest, most clever thing in the world is to demonstrate how easily this is manipulated, as if they're the first to figure this out.

When it's not that all of the rest of us don't understand that you can promise one thing and do another, it's that a lot of us actually consider the costs and benefits associated and generally grasp that operating with integrity is reliably better for everyone.

I tweeted about pranks a while back, along the same lines.

Most mean-spirited pranks are simply "you trusted me and I betrayed that trust".

Which isn't proving anything about intelligence or cleverness, but about the assumptions of both pranker and prankee.

To have someone extend faith or trust in you and to go against that might get you temporary benefit, and if you can do it long enough or to enough people you might even get all the way to becoming the most incompetent POTUS in US history.

But for society in general to continue to function, there has to be an understanding that everything we do, every human interaction, requires a certain level of acting in good faith, with integrity.

You simply cannot sustain everyone only looking out for their own self.

The GOP has rather perfectly illuminated why I came to the conclusion that what we call conservatism and legitimize as an ideology is a set of beliefs and ideals that is incompatible with civilization and human advancement.

They have institutionalized all the worst impulses of human behavior and elevated those whose primary motivation is self-interest, and when they believed they had secured power permanently began acting as if they could never be held accountable for this.

I increasingly do not see it as exaggeration to say that the GOP and what they stand for are to an ever greater extent incompatible with the continuation of human existence.

We face catastrophe, they self-deal. We face pandemic, they self-deal.

Even if we were not looking at them having actively embraced nazis, qanons, and other fascists, they would still be the party that has responded to every potential or actual catastrophe with an insistence that we not interfere with their ability to financially gain from it.

This thing with Parler should be understood as yet another demonstration that right-wing ideology is so utterly toxic and destructive that should they be rid of who they currently treat as enemies, they will only turn inward, ever self-destructive.

Should the genocidal types among them ever actually achieve the racial "purity" they crave, they'd simply find another classification by which to declare some inferior.

This isn't even a prediction, they literally already engage in infighting based on what counts as "white".

Those who are willing to accept the Andy Ngos of the world are already looked down on by those who see anything but Euro heritage as inherently inferior, and those who accept a wide definition of Euro are already looked down on by those who insist only A-S heritage counts.

And it should never be forgotten that even those on the right who don't openly share those beliefs regarding racial purity have demonstrated a fair bit of comfort in sharing common cause with those who do.

As if upon achieving their own goals their allies won't go after them.

What the right sees as the way the world is, and what they see as the way the world should be, even when couched in terms of patriotism and personal responsibility, is a world that simply can't be sustained.

You cannot have billions of people acting only for themselves.

Even if you were to ignore the actively genocidal bent the global right invariably, inevitably adopts, what they are demanding at the very least is that we pretend that selfishness is good and ignore the role that altruism and cooperation play in making civilization POSSIBLE.