Even the most “shocked” right-wing pundits who were screaming “COVER UP!” during the first few hours have now pivoted to “If there are secrets in there that could destroy corporations, we HAVE to trust daddy and protect the identities of the child rapists. We may not like it but preserving economic stability is more important than the lives of children.”

Not even kidding on this one.

It’s already over, the dust just hasn’t fully settled as a large segment of the population is now being told all the moral outrage over “pedophilia” was just for when other people do it. If you’re a big businessman or political leader, well that’s just the cost of preserving the system that treats us all so well.

The party of morals, christianity, small government and individual rights everyone.

Funny, but no.

We are trapped in our own cultivated echo-chambers. You are a victim of the same cognitive control mechanisms as the right if you think there is at all a large enough wave of regret and “realization” going through the general conservative or even median voting population to effectively produce change.

This is still not enough. If you want to understand why, spend a day watching FOX or even CNN or MSNBC. Right-wing news is already moving onto other bullshit topics like trade and trans athletes and immigration successes. The other networks are using this latest drama to squeeze the last traces of pus from the emotional pimple from a population that wants to read a feel-good, satisfying “We got 'em!” story so they can get back to their comfortable lives.

The only way this will turn into anything with actual political action is if enough people actively serving in politics right now organize and use this to affect actual political decisions. Investigations, evidence, articles and coalitions. We were led to believe that the Democratic establishment was supposed to be doing this, as there really isn’t any other sizeable organization working in politics who can, but the sad truth is that most dems are just working as cover for the fact that the entire establishment, republican and democrat, has been bought or is actively being attacked and dragged out of the picture for not being bought. (See: Mamdani)

You want this to mean something? Go get involved in your local political groups and work on getting rid of the foundation of this pyramid of slime that supports our congress and senate.

Our dumb, violent, primate species fucking deserves the apocalypse we’re crafting in laboratories as we speak.

I would be nice if people broadly opposed bombing ANYONE but even here, a site that appeals largely to self-proclaimed leftists and progressives like this is just oozing with as much bloodlust as you would see from the worst people we condemn.

This bloodlust for the deaths of others is why we have a genocide raging to begin with. Why can’t we all be better and be consistent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea_crisis

The Houthis say that any Israel-linked ship is a target,[90][87][88] including US and UK warships, but they have also attacked the ships of many nations with no connection to Israel.[91][92] From October 2023 to March 2024, the Houthis attacked more than 60 vessels in the Red Sea.

edit: the fact that people are snarling at actual, neutral reporting of factual events should be the clue-in that you’re all literally doing the exact same thing we despise from the right, letting feelings cloud our judgement about who our real allies are or are not. Use your fucking heads you hysterical children.

I am fully convinced that most of you are reflexively reacting because your favorite political streamer said something good about Houthis at some point and you’re not even sure why or what the nuance is.

The part where this goes off the rails in the public discourse is that people are broadly absolutely fucking STUCK in linear, binary thinking, I can list a thousand examples of this in every-day-life and it’s a weakness that governments exploit daily. For some reason our species can live comfortably in the cognitive dissonance about things like faith and reason existing alongside each other, but cannot fathom the idea that bad people can fight other bad people and they’re both bad. Or that people lie in ways that appeal to your own feelings to try to get public sympathy behind their own agenda.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea_crisis

The Houthis say that any Israel-linked ship is a target,[90][87][88] including US and UK warships, but they have also attacked the ships of many nations with no connection to Israel.[91][92] From October 2023 to March 2024, the Houthis attacked more than 60 vessels in the Red Sea.

They’re pirates. If the genocide stopped tomorrow, they would still be fighting for their own political agendas and of course the wealth onboard these giant ships full of goods, including food, aid and other vital supplies destined for countries unrelated to Israel, Yemen or Palestine.

I guess because I’ve witnessed authoritarian takeovers of other countries this detail didn’t even phase me, we should have expected it. There are a large number of places in the world where you will get turned away or worse for your beliefs if you’re outspoken. Americans’ deluded belief broadly that we had “free speech” was always a crutch people would use to justify their hate but was rarely used for actual social change.

The next layer of destruction of our species’ potential was when we monetized attention spans.

One of my more depressing moments in dealing with the human race was when people were boycotting Blizzard a few years ago for… well, everything. But the sexual harassment and discrimination scandal was the final straw for a lot of people.

I talked about it with my gaming friends on discord at the time, everyone agreed that what the company was doing was terrible, but the more we talked about it, the more they delved into nostalgia and thought about how much fun they had playing WoW when they were younger.

The next day I jump in discord and all five of them had reactivated their subscriptions and were having the time of their life running around WoW without a care in the world. I wanted to throw up.

Our species is fundamentally stuck in a state of cognitive dissonance. We will never have good things.

The reality is this:

They are accosting and hassling/turning away people who aren’t white. And I see pushback on this in the weirdest forms, people saying how most immigration officers are hispanic or black also, etc. That does not matter. This is entirely superficial and ordered by higher-ups and designed to drive up hate and racial tension so we don’t unify. If you’re not white, you face significant chances of being hassled at immigration but there are still thousands and thousands of people passing in and out of the country daily, so it’s not THAT high of a chance.

As for transit across the states? Outside of some real backwater sundown towns in the deep south, there is a massive cognitive bias at work in the USA that works in two directions.

I can promise you that you can be brown, asian, hispanic, purple with polka-dots and could most likely bicycle across the entire country and you will be treated with kindness and respect and people will offer to take you into their homes across the country.

The weird disconnect that people are having a hard time digesting is that some of these same people will go online and scream about how immigrants are ruining our country and that we need to start a race war.

We don’t live in a coherent reality in the USA anymore. The media world, including the internet and places like reddit and lemmy and facebook and twitter reflect a weird “mirror universe” where people are following an entirely different set of feelings.

We are in a new world of cognitive dissonance and I fully understand how off-putting that is and I recommend not visiting the country for that reason alone. Don’t give this country tourism money as long as this administration remains in control.

* coughskincolorcough *

I want to go back about 20 years and find every idealist moron online who tried to debate with me that we can’t keep calling people racist and that oppression is a deeper issue than superficial appearances and I want to smack them clean into 2025 so they can see what they permitted.

Nobody cares about objective reality anymore. Once we started letting people live in their own worlds of “feel facts” without consequence, lest someone throw stones at our own escapism cognitive biases, we ceded control of the world to the loudest and most hateful people.

There is no convincing people of anything anymore because they can just close their ears and go somewhere more comfortable. If they face no repercussions and can not only get praise for being hateful but even raise money and become celebrities, what do we really think is going to result from explaining things anymore?

This is such a bigger problem than America. Our “leadership” is threatening the entire world’s health and safety. I am literally begging other countries to take this seriously, this is a spreading problem (and I don’t just mean the avian flu) this algorithmic destabilization of intellectual democracy is powered by international funding and if it doesn’t kill you directly, it will indirectly as something like the bird flu mutates and makes Covid look like the sniffles.

Fight America, but also fight for your own sovereignty and get money out of politics and make your leadership understand it’s a matter of life and death.

When the corporations start dividing your population and guaranteeing their own interests over democracy, look at what happened to us and learn from it. It doesn’t stop here.

You’re right, and what you need to understand is that the reason half of our idiots voted for an idiot is because we allowed corporations to atomize society so people didn’t mix anymore, we don’t have shared perspectives of the world anymore, everyone gets their information about literally everything algorithmically. This atomization of society is what took down the USA and it’s coming for you next if it’s not already happening wherever you are.

Almost every American just wants to stay home and play video games, we didn’t want any of this. We wanted healthcare.

Our population voted someone into the highest office riding on the promise of drilling for more oil and increasing factory farming. We have atomized our culture so much that corporate forces have stripped people of their empathy and care and passion like an overripe banana and we don’t mix perspectives anymore so that we can pull people back.

There’s no hope of ending this misery until those of us who remain thinking with our minds get off the computer and start socializing, organizing, challenging people and pulling people into our idea of a better tomorrow. Most people don’t even know where to find other people to talk to and debate with and this is by design. That’s the trap we’re in we need to break free of, and then maybe if we can get to that point we can start making cultured meats and alternative proteins a thing.

Otherwise, we’re going to fish the oceans until they’re dry and we will create hellish suffering for every life form involved until there’s nothing left to feel pain.

When we started letting tech-bros on social media hype up AI like it would be the savior for all humanity and in just a few short years we’ll all be sailing on our AI-powered yachts with AI-powered martinis and sacks of AI-powered cash from our AI-powered stock trades.

Then when they started getting snippy and biting back and saying how it “democratizes art” and it lets us spend more time working so the AI can do our art and writing, we didn’t laugh and then drive them into the FUCKING SEA, instead we all politely respected their opinions and now we have at least a decade of useless, incremental “advances” to products we don’t want.

You can love AI all you want, but the moment you go to bat for the corporate slop being pushed on us, you’re one of them.

They don’t have consistent values at all. We keep interacting with them in terms of pointing out their hypocrisy or inconsistent messages, but they literally do not care about what they said yesterday. They are simple, linear minds who only work in terms of what they’re feeling right now and I think if we did better to treat them that way and remember we’re not winning intellectual arguments with them, we would make actual progress in changing them.

They scream about “free speech” when they feel their words are unpopular and being booed. They care about life and abortions when it’s not their daughter. They cheer on cops who shoot innocent black kids, but would go firebomb the local station if a cop came into their house and shot their dog.

We seriously, absolutely HAVE to digest this so we can collectively start forming new tactics to manipulate them into making better outcomes for all of us.

Because whatever else happens, even if we win back everything tomorrow, we will continue to share a world with them as our neighbors and the people who… who… okay I guess contractors and plumbers? Probably a few truck mechanics too, but point remains, they exist all around us, and if we’re really going to be better than them, we have to be like parents who subtle change the way a toddler feels without yelling at them and making them feel mad or put out.

Our country is riddled with ancient old sacks of shit who serve as sheriffs until they die. It’s a whole thing. Among our many, many problems with police in America.