It’s much healthier without constantly seeing some bad-faith, AI-crafted post that tries to get under your skin, prying open your values and baiting your outrage so you can think you’re actually achieving anything of value by biting the bait and trying to correct morons who aren’t even real humans.
I do not miss the site.
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I’m doing my part!
That’s right, the wealthiest nation on Earth.
What a bad dichotomy.
It’s not the same as “violating someone’s privacy” because that implies that these people shared something deliberately with someone they trusted, that wasn’t the case, this was stupid people posting shitty, hateful, vindictive or exploitative material in a semi-open space and not being careful about who they invite in. Fuck them, they deserve this lesson.
I had a teller LITERALLY try to steal money from me.
A number of years back I was depositing cash from doing some side-hustle party entertainment work, I counted the cash, handed the cash to the teller and he counted it off, and it was short $100.
The thing was, I was doing magic tricks at parties, I had taught myself a bunch of very basic card tricks and slight-of-hand, not amazing but well enough to impress grade-schoolers, so I caught when the teller did a thing with his hands as he counted, he seemed to palm a bill and I felt immediate unease and wasn’t sure what to do, so I called the manager over and my partner and got the attention of another teller, I figured if I got enough people around he couldn’t pull any further tricks. I said we were “missing” a 100-dollar bill, and the teller acted really confused, pretended to look everywhere, then suddenly the missing bill “appeared” in his drawer. I let it go because I just wanted to go home.
I can even forgive that, that’s one person, not an entire institution. I wouldn’t have a gripe with Wells Fargo if that was all that ever happened. But they did things later on in my life like when I rented a car, they sent me on an overdraft-fee spiral that made my account -$5000 by the time I called the bank. They undid the erroneous charges after lots of shouting.
Later on, I had no choice but to finance a vehicle through WF, I will save the whole, long, horrible story and the shouting matches, but to give an idea how bad-faith they are, they fucking REFUNDED ME THE ENTIRE CAR with a series of “apology checks” over a period of three years after they repossessed it wrongly.
The only reason I didn’t lose tens of thousands of dollars to Wells Fargo is because I learned to fight, fight and scream and yell when they tried to scam me. This shouldn’t be on the customer to be aggressive and angry just to guarantee normal business.
Our best bet right now is acceleration.
The administration is trying to boil the frogs slowly enough that people forget their discomfort and worry, so people get used to being without services like social security or medicare slowly enough that America just keeps running but with less benefits for the citizens and more prosperity for the wealthy.
If the administration moves too fast, people will connect the dots and associate their discomforts with the presidency, and there will be popular movements to oust leadership, peaceful or otherwise.
What you’re likely going to see happen soon is an “economic stimulus” check program with Trump and Musk’s names on checks sent to every American to try to get people to associate them with wealth again. Stick everyone with a 3k - 5k check, while stripping us of tens of thousands of dollars in benefits a year. And it will likely work amazingly well, because our population has memories of goldfish.
So we want them to make more stupid moves faster, we want more people to feel the pain of losing public sector jobs and services, we want chaos and recession and consequence, that is the only way American people will move.
I would really like them to try, they are toeing a line right now because Trump and his closest people aren’t there for ideological reasons, they’re just trying to make a recession happen so they can all gobble up devalued assets and blame biden or trans kids or something. The outliers are the Millers and Bannons who tried before and will try again to assert an ideological presence to bring about the Fourth Reich, but their hold isn’t as strong as the oligarchs who just want money and security for their business empires.
You don’t sustain a business empire when popular political figures are getting jailed, much less if they’re being executed. That would signal the beginning of the actual overthrow of Democracy and if they do it too fast, that would immediately trigger massive popular uprisings and they would lose a lot of control. As it is, the donor-class is looking at the administration right now with a LOT of apprehension about current market destabilization.
Capital doesn’t want instability, and would rather go back to a country of rules and regulations than see the entire market literally burn to the ground, so we would see a sudden and dramatic tone shift in politics broadly, we would see media channels turn on Trump’s administration instantly, we would see prominent republicans in house and senate suddenly start forming opposition groups, we would see impeachment.
Let us make no mistakes about what’s happening. There are people who do indeed want to turn America into a monarchy and they have longer-term plans to do so, and may succeed, but they want it WITH the wealth and prosperity that we have now, they don’t want a banana republic, they just want a really big class-divide so they can have while we have-not.
A few years ago I was stealing water from a construction site so my partner and I could flush the toilet. Parked in a development lot in the middle of the night, watching for security guards while I filled a bunch of plastic organizer bins in the back of a van.
We were several years into a total financial crashout from a combination of major health problems, deaths in the family, and a floundering job market. Things are better now, but I can say at least that I know now what it feels like to lose everything and claw your way back out of the hole. I don’t recommend it, it sucks.
Our nation doesn’t want you to succeed. Remember that. In order for the wealthy to stay wealthy, there has to be a class of people who have less or nothing so that money retains value. We’re the richest fucking nation that’s ever existed, many times over, so if we really wanted we could end poverty, we could end hunger and disease and make a glorious world where everyone is comfortable and able to aim for their own dreams without risk of losing everything and having to steal water to flush the fucking the toilet.
We’re not in that world for the simple reason that a tiny fraction of people want to have things and they want other people to envy them.
Privatising literally everything has been their end-goal with ALL of this the entire time. They plaster it with conservative talking points but this entire administration is an effort by corporate forces to dismantle public services, rights and benefits, so that if you so much want to drive to the store you will have to pay a subscription to use the privately maintained roads, so you have a credit-card reader by your faucet and toilet, so that they can tax you on rainwater you’re required to have to collect rain from your gutters. (This is real in other countries.)
The efforts towards killing public services goes way, way back and if you look at every conservative/republican legislation, it all hinges around how “bad” public services are. Public schools teaching evolution, public television for simply existing, and they’ve been massively successful and killing the regulations and oversight on things like media fairness, public health proposals, safety nets and social services, and yes they really, really want to kill our medicare and medicaid, so they can replace them with more bullshit commercial services. They won’t be happy until we stop getting paychecks we can choose how to use and we all just hand our pay right over to a number of subscription services for things they can take away if you miss a payment.
They want us poor, they want us stupid, they want an army of slaves and if they can’t get it via racism and dehumanizing some identifiable group or population, they will just settle for full on serfdom and monarchy. Now get out there and work your lord’s fields!
When I was a manager at a tech company this pattern female white woman was about 50% of our entry-level team. Every single day was a new journey into essential oils, herbalife, astrological signs and dreamcatchers. Their racism is there, it is subtle, but it’s also entirely a product of trying to appease the angry people in their lives.
These women are dim enough to be led to ANY way of thought. And I say this with kindness, they are often good parents and have sympathetic lives and want simple things. But holy shit their families and husbands and partners are literally demons in human flesh influencing them to the worst ways of thinking and feeling, I’ve gotten to witness them in the background on zoom being violent pigs and screaming at their infant children loud enough to pick up on the mic through a closed door.
The one thing that you don’t see that is shockingly common though is the physical abuse. As funny as this cartoon is, it doesn’t show the finger-shaped bruises up and down the woman’s arms.
I have a note scrawled on a torn piece of notepad paper, stained now, wrinkled from being folded and unfolded, kept and tucked away, found, thrown away, dug back out of the trash and kept again.
I wrote it in the depths of despair, one night after self-medicating with everything I could find and nothing worked, after trying to sleep and sleep not coming, after walking in circles around the block, after creating a new manifesto for my future and then throwing it away because it was hopeless. Then I had a brief glimmer of positivity, a small glint of appreciation for just sitting there breathing, because I know the alternative, because I have seen too much death.
Note just says “It doesn’t matter what you do with it, just being alive is enough.”
It’s impossible to “waste” your life, it’s impossible to “waste” time. Even if that time is spent miserable, struggling, or in absolute sedentary escape from reality. You are alive, you are breathing, you are experiencing things. That’s all the universe wants from you, is for you to experience it in some capacity. It’s the only reason you’re here. You need the universe, the universe needs you, they don’t exist without each other and even if you’re just mindlessly scrolling the internet from under the covers of the bed you haven’t left in three days, you are alive, you are experiencing the full force of human “aliveness” even if you’re sad, scared, uncertain or in pain. You’re here to experience it because at some point, it will all be about to end, and nothing you did will be any more or less relevant to your present moment. You will only want your present moment to continue, you will want that more than anything imaginable, you will long for your depression, your blankets, your dirty jacket and your phone. Just one more minute, just one more chance to see something or feel something.
You get to experience all of that right now, you can stretch it out, you can appreciate the small, stupid things in your life right now. It doesn’t matter if your life doesn’t look like someone else’s, what matters is you’re living it.
The less succinct version is that she was considered one of the OG progressive youtubers who gained a huge following and as a result has garnered a LOT of harassment over the years she was running. (Keep in mind she was at peak of her youtube career around the time of “Gamergate”) When she directed mild criticism towards the Disney movie “Raya and the Last Dragon” and how it was derivative of Avatar, I can’t remember the details but something about the way she made the comparison set her up to be attacked by online chuds pretending to be concerned progressives attacking her for being “anti-asian.”
Lindsay Ellis was a champion of equality and diversity and the details were infuriatingly minor and stupid (which is why I can’t even remember it) but it was just the final straw and her mental health couldn’t handle any more threats, attacks and condemnations and she left Youtube other than doing some guest bits with other old-time Breadtubers and she still does work on Nebula.
I fully get how even if you make a widely praised and well-received work, you will tend to fixate on the negative reviews the most, but this was the end of a long-term campaign to bully her off the internet and we can’t expect every content creator to have inhuman thick skin. That said, I wish she would have just got off Twitter and kept making content, we could use her more than ever.
Lindsay Ellise, before the internet’s most worthless people drove her off youtube, made a very good video talking about the trope of women and their monster partners in media.
Lindsay Ellise did an entire video about girls and monsters. Worth watching.
For the most part it’s not getting the kind of attention you might expect, they are seeing this as all “part of the plan” and celebrating their great trade-warrior leader punishing the “bad guys” and the white house has deliberately withheld a LOT of the information about what’s going on. Most of the breaking stories we’ve gotten have been from foreign press. We didn’t even hear the tariff schedule until fucking France media issued stories.
There is not going to be the satisfaction we all hope for, not until there’s literally a new dust-bowl as we get ravaged by a new great depression, which as bad as it could be, might be our only hope for a more balanced political system going forward. I hate that these clowns have made me into an accelerationist but here are.
The part that crashed me into a very deep period of depression (probably the high fever from Covid didn’t help) was realizing that this is as good as it gets.
All of our current issues are the same issues we’ve been struggling with as a species for the last several thousand years, and likely a lot longer before record-keeping was a thing. As much as we can bend the forces of nature and manipulate the material world around us with flashy machines and complex systems, we’re still irrevocably and immutably just primate animals adapted to an ice-age world of predators, and even if we had the perfect social systems with limitless resources, we would find ways to break everything because we’re just not capable of more. We are animals who stole fire from the Gods but we do not have the minds of Gods, we have selfish, malicious, fearful and anxious animal brains that make us ignore facts and logic and reason and respond only to our reactions.
It won’t be us venturing into the universe. If we ever get off this speck of dust drifting around a sunbeam, it won’t be us, it will be some descendant made of silicon and logic-gates emulating our species at some level but synthetic and who knows if it will even be aware like us… who knows if we’re even aware. We are so good at tricking ourselves we actually believe we have choice and freedom and awareness of the world around us.
Try to find the place in which your thoughts originate and you will find a chaotic realm where your brain has already made all its choices and it just wants you to feel satisfied with the explanation you think you came up with. It’s deeply distressing. Don’t actually try it.
Our people are horrible, vindictive morons.
And I don’t mean that from a place of emotional response to bad things, I am saying all of this dispassionately and analytically. The country has a large population of people who are objectively horrible, and vindication has become our primary focus for political action, and this is all because they’re generally morons.
I can’t even really exaggerate or overplay this. The average American’s intelligence is worse than abysmal. I used to lead a team of data-workers at a large company, we had nice, casual morning meetings and talked about the latest events for about a half hour before work. I ended up in the position of people bringing me news stories and headlines to “translate” for them. I had to explain what planets are, I had to explain how gravity works, I had to explain how democracy works, I had to explain history and math and facts and ratios and words like “industrious” or “ambivalent” every day, over and over. AND I’M NOT A SMART PERSON. I have always prided myself on being informed, but at some point I became the one-eyed king in the land of the blind and I hate it.
Everything here is going to get so, so much worse because I know how far down the barrel goes, and we haven’t even touched the bottom yet.
People who are obsessed with some physical quality about themselves always make whatever the issue is, like 1000% worse than if they just left it alone and lived normally.
We cannot undo it, at this point it’s too set-in, it’s like an oily turd that’s now seeped into the woodgrain of our society. The only way forward is to accelerate it until it ignites. We have to push on it.
We have to tell everyone that we would NEVER risk touching another person NOR ourselves, if we wish to remain proud, strong, heterosexual, masculine. Even wearing clothes, the fabric may have been handled by female factory workers, we must encourage real men to never wear clothes. Real men would never enter a home either, feeeemales may have been in almost every home ever made, so they must also be avoided lest fem-particles invade your body.
The only way to truly be a Real Man™ is to live naked in the woods, isolated, unwashed, eating bugs (genderless, asexual ones like stick insects only) and never letting your hands touch your body.