Religion makes no sense when you think about it at all, so my imagery is more in line with our current “fairy tale” version of Christianity that most Americans have grown up with, without actually reading the book in any capacity. (Actually reading the book is what made me leave.)
Evil is rampaging across the country, the worst people in the world are being given positions of power, hate and racism are being made into policy and the people you hate most who scream about race are being given uniforms and guns and concentration camps, the Epstein-patrons are celebrating, there is a sweeping movement across evangelicals pushing back on empathy and Christian values broadly. Human rights are being taken away, as well as basic services like healthcare, food and housing for the poor and families are being torn apart without consequence.
I’m not religious but if I were and watching all of this, I would probably believe that a deal was really struck or that this was all some kind of Revelations prophecy.
Ah yes, the monthly “Trump is senile” post. Been going since 2016.
Should we meet back here in another ten years when he’s on his fourth term without consequence or care from anyone in power?
Democrats didn’t release the files for the same reason Trump didn’t. It doesn’t even have to be that prominent democrats were on that island (although it’s safe to say they were) it just takes a few CEO’s and other financiers of our current government to say “Nah, kill that” and it will NEVER see the light of day.
We are constantly losing sight of what all of this is really about and who’s really in power here. They want us screaming about Dems versus Republicans in this WWE theater spectacle so we don’t start a class-war. And it’s worked perfectly.
We all hem and haw endlessly about how bad the climate change problem is, but by not collectively DOING something about it, we’re leaving it up the countries that actually have the biggest populations and have the most at stake in taking drastic action.
In America or Europe we are talking about building sea-walls and flood control systems, spending billions or trillions on preparing for rising sea levels.
What about India? China? Southeast Asia? They have far more to lose from extreme weather and wet-bulb heat events and far more people with lives at risk and less resources to put into massive concrete walls around their coastal cities. How are we going to feel when they start seeing extreme, unilateral options as viable? If they decide to do drastic geoengineering projects like shading the earth with aerosols or orbital shields, we could all suffer if those projects have unintended consequences. (The climate is complicated, yo.)
These are the same people who complain endlessly about the sorry state the baby-boomers left America in.
When we stopped caring about our communities, we stopped caring about being a part of something bigger and capitalism has taught us all to just sit and stew in our own depression and our own emotions. Boomer generation 2.0.
I love every time a politician introduces another bill to “make crime illegal” when they can’t think of ANY other way to make the public think they have a real or valid job in the state.
I’m reminded of the recent Florida bill that “bans airplane contrails” to appeal to the absolutely smooth-brained conspiracists. (The bill imposes a fine of tens of thousands of dollars to any company found to be spraying mind-control chemicals to turn your children into trans frogs. Take THAT Illuminati!)
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.
So like America right now.