A nation can enrich it’s elites in the short term at the expense of its people, or it can invest in its people (education, commons, etc) at the expense of its elites.

The west, and especially my cesspool the US has made its choice.

China has been heavily building up its commons and infrastructure in the same 40 year span the US has let its commons and education fall into utter ruin in order to sell economically segregated education and gated communities for private profit.

The US is culturally indoctrinated to be hostile towards the very concept of society. Imagine resenting paying into universal healthcare because you don’t want to accidentally pay for your countrymen’s “bad decisions” like… Eating food.

I go on Rednote quite a bit. The US attitude towards China, just like non pure crony capitalism is “they are evil and from hell” for being a society. Their people, not their politicians, their people, are sweet, intelligent, and mostly treat Americans with an “are you guys OK? We’ve heard (true) horror stories.”

Thats humanity. Why would I want my schaudenfreude and greed ruled cesspool to “win?” It’s not about winning, it’s about the wellbeing of ALL your people. If the US dominates the world culturally, all that would mean is that humanity stands for “fuck you I got mine” at which point I have no comradery with my species whatsoever.

Actual human worth/value is measured in empathy for one another, which makes the US destitude in what matters.

Welcome to the party, pals!

Why would non Israeli Jews have to denounce the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians?

The conductor was Israeli.

Oh I think the capitalist “grown ups” as you say only concerned with quarterly GDP and their own individual hoards in charge are doing fine on their own. Don’t you?

They don’t need some idiot commie child as you say like me getting in the way of this great society’s trajectory. This bull is loose!

I lost, we leftists lost, and since the capitalists are destroying the very COMMUNal climate we rely on from one breath to the next, it’s too late for us to ever turn it around, as civilization hangs by a thread on the easy baby “just don’t shit where you sleep” climate mode we enjoyed and are eviscerating as we speak in the name of year over year metastasis.

What does winning feel like? Is it awesome? Do you feel victorious in your capitalist society?

(for me the main one are the tankie scum devs)

This right here is the crux of the problem and why the problem goes back so much further than the design and algorithms of platforms. We teach kids to focus on individual achievement, to celebrate the self, and we don’t teach empathy, something that needs to be taught young and can easily be taught but the west increasingly considers weakness and a dirty word.

When we fail to teach citizens of a society collectivism, because being a member of a society means you are part of a collective whether you decide to be a good collective that functions or one that operates against itself (herp derp competition!) that does not, you get communication between members like this.

“I hate these people fuck them they should me more like MEEEE” “their opinions suck because they aren’t more like MIIIINE” and we act as a bunch of petulant infants that resent each other’s very existence in OUR world.

If we were taught that it is our responsibility to lift one another up, if we rewarded people in society on the basis of who and how many others they’ve helped and not how much they hoarded for THEMSELVES, this wouldnt be as much of a problem. We could, now that we don’t have to survive in nature, orient our mindsets to the positive, which would have to be encouraged young. Instead we’re made to be like… This. A useful state for killing a rival in YOUR hunting area when there’s only enough game in the region for one tribe to survive the winter, not so much when trying to build a civilization up. And don’t get me started on the counterproductive mindfuck that is nation states and super serious imaginary lines between them, meant to protect hoards of INDIVIDUAL wealth of respective elites.

The problem is, how do you start such a virtuous cycle when everyone from the owners down are only concerned with “ME ME ME MINE MINE MINE?”

Then again you hate tankies, so go ahead and cuss me out for calling out the reality that capitalism, especially when it has effectively conquered the culture, turns people into selfish little gremlins more likely to shoot a stranger than help them.

The first wave was right. (equal legal rights)

The second wave had a good point. (reproductive rights and workplace discrimination)

The rest were just further attempted power grabs that don’t even make the people they claim to represent happy. They tried to do what well meaning but ultimately misguided anti racism waves did by claiming gender shouldn’t even be acknowledged aka “I don’t even see the color.” Which is it’s own kind of bigotry.

Everyone should be allowed to fill the same role, but while a minority might be ecstatic in the corpo grinder, it made society worse for men and women more generally, and I don’t see many women who enjoy being forced into the hunter gatherer role by the capitalists and the convenient femininists whose message they coopted to boost productivity by mandating ALL the poors make widgets for them if they want to subsist.

It hasn’t been productive to raise women to believe it is essential that they defy gender norms as if it is their mission in life to do so. More than anyone else, modern feminists have culturally demeaned the role of being a wife and mother in society, which is ironic, since they seem dead set on making women fit the mold of the men they see as their oppressor.

Men and women are different, with different strengths and weaknesses and intrinsic desires. With overlap, there are things that make men happier and things that make women happier generally. We should have equality, but we’ve been trying to shoehorn both genders to be interchangable in any societal role en masse, and it’s taken a massive toll on men and women in different ways.

Edit: Nevermind, everything is awesome, we did it!

Nah.

We think we’re that powerful, but there’s an entire domain of creatures we can barely reach that utilize geothermal energy that will just keep plugging away out of our sphere of influence.

Surface and shallow water life is and will suffer greatly until we burn ourselves out and are no longer a threat on the scale we currently are, but humans are even egotistical in this topic. We couldn’t come close to sterilizing this world, even if it magically became as important to us as fucking one another over for paper simulacra of supposed value.

We are a nuisance, but we aren’t the first evolutionary nuisance the earth has dealt with. We have no mastery over this world as much as many like to believe so. A nuclear detonation possesses a tiny fraction of the power of a volcanic eruption.

If you want to believe me calling them the peak of capitalism by capitalism’s own inhuman metrics is a compliment, knock yourself out.

Are you kidding?

From the perspective of capitalists, Boeing is the fucking dream. They can innovate fuck not at all, they can bury inconvenient data AND the people who know it with impunity, and since they’re too big to fail in literally the cronyest capitalist industry on Earth, American War, the government not only won’t lift a finger, but will actively print money to give to them to let them keep doing all of the above in perpetuity.

Boeing is the capiteeliest of capitalist success stories. You didn’t think modern corporations actually believed their own propaganda about free markets deciding profit and success based on herp derp honest compertition? Thats just the bullshit they drive into kids minds when they can’t yet muster questions or concerns to ruin their lives and forge them into wage zombie husks. Capitalists want to win, preferably at the gunpoint of their captured governments, because actually prouducing products/services that people actually want is for suckers.

Policy wise, this has always been my hill to die on. Giving the homeless money directly is my exclusive form of charity. Because I don’t want some capitalist on some bragging rights philanthropy board getting part of my donation as part of their six figure board salary. They’ve done enough.

A large homeless population is a symbol of a failed society’s crimes against itself.

If a society doesn’t exist to take care of its people from the worst off upward at all times, it is without a benevolent point and it’s existence is without worth.

The homeless in the US are the US’s greatest domestic victims, left to die horribly of exposure and police capital defense force brutality for the crime of failing to become model exploitation vessels for our robber Barron’s insatiable greed disease.

Most of them should have conditionless basic housing, the worst off should be inpatient mental health wards of our society, as they are us whether we hate them or not. But we aren’t willing to pay for that. Even though mass homelessness is not inevitable with good policy and funding.

Worse still, many non wealthy Americans hate them for lowering their… 🤮… Property values. This all goes back go us being a society in name only. We’re more a bunch of exploited, deluded peasants at each other’s throats for robber Baron scraps as they use their media and their captured government for blaming their greatest victims, those people under your local freeways and tent cities, for their avarice fueled malice.

Communism may starve human nature, but capitalism indulges and gluts humanity’s worst, most vile impulses exclusively. It breeds sociopathy as a desirable choice.

And considering the depths our homeless have been brought to by the society that betrayed them, I genuinely do not care if they spend it on food or shelter or alcohol or drugs or whatever will give them even a moment of solace/escape/peace from what we have done to them.

Western psychology, and I say this as a former psychologist.

Like so much else, any potential at being a science was bastardized long ago in order to make it an industry focused on getting people productive again instead of focusing on their wellbeing which usually has an inverse relationship to getting them back to work in the short and medium term.

Meanwhile the small population of people that can afford actual psychoanalytic therapy that isn’t throwing pills at them and teaching them coping strategies within 3 covered sessions tend to be the reason so many others are miserable.

For the non-wealthy, mental healthcare in the US is a complete and utter scam that is geared to serve others at your expense and shoehorn you right back into the stressors that got you into therapy. If you need help, you’re out of luck.

I consider it insult to say I agree with either of our 2 parties on 50% of the issues. Almost all of both of their policy positions are derivations on “how will this metastasize the capital markets faster” and not “how will this improve the wellbeing of the citizens of society, preferably at the expense/taxation of the capital markets that we kindly permit to profit off of society at all so long as they don’t undermine said society to increase their profits”

Both parties would be lighting themselves on fire to prevent the latter. The tail has been wagging the dog for a long time, the fucking profoundly perverse servitude of a society to an economy. It obviously needs to be the other way around or… Well this.

I voted for Harris, and voted for Biden before that, and Clinton before that. With shame as I should. Harm reduction, methadone instead of heroin.

It’s nothing to brag about. You guys try to make them sound like a good choice, when neoliberals are for the same status quo, only minus the scapegoating. They’re just a lesser degree of bad. They’re for mass homelessness, they’re for entire murder for profit economic sectors including American “Healthcare,” they’re for ever worsening income inequity, because on economic policy (that informs and often dictates social Ills) they’re on the same take as Republicans. Just because they don’t cheer and pour the blood they’re drenched in over their heads in celebration like Gatorade, doesn’t mean their hands are any cleaner.

That scapegoating makes Republicans worth voting against, but you’re praising Jack the Ripper in the face of Adolf Hitler. No American should feel anything but shame about only having a extreme right wing party and a fascist party as our only two options. No one should have left an American polling place with a smile or pride for the last half century, it’s been a rocketship to avarice diseased oblivion, that Trumpism is just a newer symptom of, not the cause.

Reagan toppled this empire, it just takes an empire a while to hit the ground. We have arrived at a while. Trump is more of a vulture come to feast on the corpse.

The Trump base will blame Obama/Biden/Clinton, I guarantee it.

It must be so freeing to live a life more divorced from logic or reality than an indoor dog.

Maybe eliminating natural selection was a mistake.

deleted by creator

The one that started it all.

In 1999 Blockbuster video had a contest, giving away 1 full size episode 1 Yoda made by Industrial light and magic in every state. I didn’t know about the contest until the last day, put in my entry, and he’s been looking over my room, now office, ever since, keeping me contemplative ever since.

Either that or a trap used in Ghostbusters 2 that I had signed by Dan Aykroyd. But probably Yoda.

Yet another thing that is beyond our willfully ignorant American Republican’s comprehension.

Adults cooperate with others who are open to mutually beneficial cooperation. Babies (and largely seniors past 70 as we become very similar to our sunrise at the sunset of life) kick and scream demanding to get their way the way they want it.

I’m a 40 year old manchild who collects movie props and even I know that.

They were right to be talking down on us and we have been trash since at least Reagan though.

Most European nations are societies. We’re a bunch of deluded fools playing pretend we’re rugged individuals at each other’s throats for oligarch scraps.

We can’t even agree as a society to feed or invest in educating our kids. We let millions of our worst off neighbors die of exposure out of economic tribalist spite. We’re a loathsome country worthy of ridicule. Honestly if we weren’t so good at marketing, the art of bullshit, we could have saved a lot of potential immigrants time, shown them who we really are, and they never would have crossed a desert to come here. This is a cesspool.

Glad I went Emby.