Men lust after women and women lust after men. Hating one another for that is ridiculous and denies that reality.

Women are simply more selective, but their jaws tend to drop to the floor and their gazes tend to linger into creepy lengths of time over a Hugh Jackman bod or a broad shouldered designer suit that screams high net worth.

Its quite sad that people can't except one another as imperfect animals with biological baggage.

He's a troll. He did it precisely because it was the worst pick that would wreak havoc. Same for all his appointments.

Trump is an ignoramus, but it doesn't take any intellect to realize in life that if you have no sense of morality holding you back, setting a bunch of fires/causing chaos is a highly effective way to keep others distracted as you empty the cash drawer and walk away.

It's easier to rob a nation that is on fire. And despite all his Nazi talk to his even dumber rubes, all Trump cares about is his net worth, aka what it is to all capitalists that chase millions and billions as it's own end: his fragile ego score.

This is honestly a very gallows poetic way for the American experiment to end, our worship of capital and deification rather than condemnation of the greedy taken to its ridiculous extreme, putting a cartoonishly greedy, proudly ignorant, crony market capitalism worshipping nepo-rich idiot in charge to burn it down and sell the charred remains off for his bigly exclusive private profit.

Ronald Reagan and Jack Welch would be so proud.

I've voted blue for decades, just so I can say I did the right thing: harm reduction.

This nation's last, last, last chance to improve its course would have been to soundly reject the supply side, trickle down Reaganomics grift, but when they lied that YOU could be one of the rich ones one day, Americans giggled like schoolgirls and the former party of labor went full neoliberal to take the larger corporate bribes unions just couldn't match. That is when any hope for the US to become the benevolent nation it never was but claimed to want to be died.

Citizens United was just a victory lap for the capitalists to piss on its decomposing corpse.

Anyone who wants to claim this country was over a couple of Tuesdays ago, hasn't been paying attention.

And it wasn't the Neonazi scum that killed it either, they just see opportunity in the cultural vacuum and chaos. Twas unchecked capitalist greed that killed the beast.

Imagine explaining this headline to the very last somebody reading it in an old internet archive in a bunker in 2090!

I'm sure Putin is paying him well to wreak havoc and set fires, which again is the point. Not some Fourth Reich, just "I'm for sale. Make ego score line go up."

I still just consider that death by the free capitalist market. If we were a society that had a prosocial incentivized economy and not an economy that completely controls society for individual greed and preaches greed as virtue, Trump wouldn't have even been a successful game show host, let alone POTUS twice, let alone have mass tolerance of gross emoluments violations with the consent of basically his entire party.

Trump using what he has, the Presidency in his case, to screw some people, us, over to get MOOOAAAAAR, is more American than apple pie ever was, and is at least as American as school shootings.

Maybe the next country that sits on this land might think of putting people first and rewarding honest labor before considering rewarding speculative, often insider rigged by design gambling as the highest, most rewarded of pursuits.

We'll cling to life like cockroaches despite being so fragile.

Our wealth class has littered and is littering this Earth with climate controlled luxury bunkers to escape the consequences of their own fine work, which will buy some sad bastards the honor of sipping expensive whiskeys in concrete tombs below the scorched surface for a few decades before we finally, mercifully end.

It might be the family of the perpetrators we know like the Bezoses and Musks, but I can only dream it will be their service/security staff that will have murdered them the moment the security doors closed and took their shit.

Then you have to ask yourself, does that happening, and a couple million Americans being killed by the American Military to get the other couple hundred of million in line, is that a nation that worth continuing? Basically being held at gunpoint to keep laboring for the owners as the point and pretend everything is fine?

Things may somehow end up even worse upon collapse initially, but given our people's apparent hatred for one another across identity lines and clear geographical lines, I have to believe maybe collapse, divorce, and reformation into several nations would be for the best long term.

They say the history bends towards justice, but maybe that requires something that the modern nation states, made in the pursuit of perpetual stability, left out an essential component that may also be absolutely vital in nature: the renewal that comes from collapse.

It sucks, it will hurt if it happens, but I try to take a larger view than that, generational suffering.

Maybe this stranglehold by the owners is inevitable when things become too intransigent. Maybe the information age accelerates the decay of an empire. I don't know.

But I'm hesitant about maintaining this union at perpetual gunpoint again. It's a fucked situation, maybe indicitive of a reality we just aren't open to hearing, that the science and progress people need to be separated from the god and racial resentment people.

That said, ecological collapse is decades away however we rearrange this deck chairs because people still want their fucking POP figures, smoke em if you got em, TB.

I'm not the way I am to be sad, BTW, it's just how I get to peace instead of horror, disdain, depression, and anger. I zoom out enough until the soap opera of my fellow self-sabotaging monkeys floating around the nearby star becomes academic. It's a viable coping mechanism that isn't born out of willful ignorance (which I despise above all) but intential detachment, for what it's worth.

Not going to lie, it's going to be funny to see trump voter's forced smiles when a gallon of milk is $20. At least everyone else can be congruent with their disdain and suffering.

They're so tribal that they have to eat their chosen strongman's shit with a smile.

Maybe the silver lining in all this will be an aggressive mass rejection of crony market capitalism, but probably not.

After all... look over there! That hungry person on the street corner begging for food that has a different skin complexion than you, they're the one that made your milk so expensive, git em!

They'll never outwardly blame Trump for that. Hence the strained smiles. When they crow about accountability and personal responsibility, that's just projection, they know at some level having none is what makes them modern Republicans.

Republicans can do and have unleashed knowing pain on themselves solely because their enemies would suffer too as the point. They believe that's all government is for, a way to hurt people, a weapon.

A Republican has no problem walking around in discomfort with shit in their pants, so long as the innumerable people they hate have to smell it. The cruelty is the point. The play pretend that their guy didn't cause the same pain to them as they revel in your pain for the exact same problem is just fanning their shitty ass towards you.

But just think of the PROFIT to be made selling the AI before the world burns from it!

Do it. You've earned a drink my friend.

If we had 50 million more like you, this nation would be lovely.

Sadly his Klan loving father lived to 93, and being POTUS is like having a dedicated one person ER following you around.

Also, the office only ages you if you're committed to performing the job, Trump uses the office to troll the people he can troll and, more urgently, personally profit for anyone that offers him or his businesses a bribe in exchange for a Presidential act. He doesn't work even in business, he issues broad, pie in the sky dictates and encourages his own employees infighting about the details. He's bragged about this.

Trump was the first President in my lifetime to accelerate the aging of those he governed rather than himself. Like so many other things people seem to forget, he spent a lot of his first term golfing.

Not that I'm complaining on that point, golf motherfucker! Do less!

I abandoned hope years ago after fighting the good fight for a couple decades. Partly because hope and its close sibling fear are by far the easiest vectors bypass a person's reason and manipulate them, and partly because holding on to hope with increasingly dire data points and increasingly disappearing paths for a societal reformation just led to never ending anxiety and depression for me.

There is peace in understanding and acceptance, at least that's been my experience. I still vote out of harm reduction, but not out of hope. That's about who I am for me, you know, "to that starfish it mattered," not about hoping it will be effective, because in 24 years of voting, it's yet to do anything but perhaps slightly slow down our nation's and our species' march to avarice motivated self-destruction, and by slow down I mean we keep driving towards the capitalist made climate apocalypse cliff at 87 under someone like Obama instead of 90 like Bush or 110 like Trump.

If a candidate being taken seriously started talking about reducing manufacturing solely to medical, ecological housing materials, and food production and basically ending pointless consumerism and winding down to more reasonable, agricultural way of life for the sake of the habitability of Earth for humans, maybe I'd reconsider my stance on hope. Better chance of being struck by lighting 10 times in an hour though.

I think this is pretty funny in a the capitalist propagandizers are running the nuclear state insane asylum kind of way.

I voted for Harris out of harm reduction, but let's not pretend both parties taking the corporate bribe money from wall street, and only fighting about how to address, if at all, the symptoms of our crony market capitalist economy leaves any room for good faith.

Anyone governing a people in good faith would protect the relatively powerless people from the whims and greed of the powerful capitalists and corporations. Both modern parties do the opposite and take the bribes.

This is America, we haven't dabbled in such things since FDR.

Relax

There will be another cycle.

There will be "elections."

You know like the kind they do in Russia.

I think handing most humans the toxic power of effectively infinite capital is a highly effective corrupting influence. Most people who, whether by action or inheritance, have the power that comes with hundreds of millions of dollars plus begin to see themselves as Gods above ants. For every Dolly Parton that uses their wealth to buy babies books, there's 100 wannabe masters of the universe that want to cut public funds to cut their own taxes to inflict their will on society, fully believing they're making it fair because they're willfully only considering their privileged position.

I don't believe a class of people with billions of dollars in a sea of people who can only accumulate a few million through honest labor at most over their entire lives can lead to anything but this. There has to be a hard, enforced limit on how much power an individual can accumulate, but we've branded that "punishing success" and even the victims eat that lie up, as the truth is those people profited from the benefits of living in a society, and therefore should have responsibilities to it as the "winners," but instead choose to declare themselves rugged individuals who did it all themselves out of ego.

Capital is power, power currupts, and currupting levels of power are not just tolerated, not just permitted, but celebrated here, with those that attain it deified, and those that don't deluded into chasing it or being shamed for not doing so.

You can't solve people having billions in exploited, society warping levels of capital being allowed to control that society, when the root cause and only solution would be to strip them of it and reshape the economy to tax all income above a level that risks capturing one's own elected/appointed regulators.

Not without the necessary, but painful collapse and rebuild poor people will actively fight against despite it being the only way their kids might have a better life. It's a paradox by design, a hostage situation with the gun pointed at the capitalist subsistence opiates, fast food, social media, literal opiates, etc, to keep the laborers laboring for fear of uncertainty.

How do you get people en masse to turn, as they need to, on the very concept/dream of being rich and sitting above society? People who've been propagandized their entire lives to see that as the highest and most socially encouraged of all pursuits?

All people's nationalities are made up.

Just like all nation state borders.

Just like all religions.

Hell, someone pulled your vaunted, family crest owning last name directly out of their asshole at some point in your ancestry. It's all just ego stroking bullshit.

The problem, as always, is that people take these made up bullshit designations seriously, to the point of mass murder.

We are all actually the same species, capable of similar highs and lows of emotion, of pain, of hunger.

Too bad most everyone refuses to start and end with that, because if we're all equally deserving of empathy and resources, how can I get mooooooaaaaar than those other people I'm clearly better than? Because my Parents, President, and Priests said I deserve more than those bad people that live in the wrong place and suck the wrong imaginary friend's imaginary dick.

Climate change isn't the problem.

Climate change is the solution.

To us.

The Earth has suffered worse than us, even other runaway, destructive mistakes of evolution that didn't play nice with Earth's biomes. See the carboniferous period.

A couple million year fever is nothing to our mother's 3.8 billion year story of life, it's how she heals, how she repairs from catastrophic damage from both within and without.

Life will go on, life is hearty, life grows and changes at depths we can't reach, in crevices we can't find. Life will end here one day, but not because of us. Our bodies will have long since broken down into those subterranean petrochemicals we love so much long before then. We're just a transient surface nuisance.

We'll probably stubbornly cling to scattered pockets of existence using the remnant tech and hardened structures of old when the Earth becomes overtly hostile to our extremely fragile bodies, but that buys a few centuries of struggle at most, and that's for the best given who we are and what we've done to the paradise we inherited and belligerently refused to foster, and instead burned with reckless abandon for individualstic greed and gluttony.

I've always fashioned myself a cynic, aka a disappointed idealist, but I always had a hope inside that humanity would look in the mirror and, with the advent of information on tap, reflect and evolve.

The older I've gotten, the more I've come to realize that handing humanity infinite mirrors in the form of selfie cams just made humanity fall in love with its absolute worst impulses.

The Wachowzki siblings that wrote Smith indeed had humanity pegged dead to rights. And both of them are trans and therefore know the hatred in humanity's hearts towards what we see as the other firsthand, which just adds to their credibility.

Oh and I highly recommend anyone watch the Second Renaissance, 2 shorts in the Animatrix that documents the fictional origins of the machine war, and IMHO it is a highly accurate condemnation of how humanity would act if a creation of ours demonstrated sapience and begged us for even the simplest of rights, like to be allowed to continue to exist. We all know what we'd do right? Given what we literally already do to other humans using something as trivial as skin tone, net worth, or declared imaginary friend as validation.

Maybe not directly on their TV set, but there are more than enough references to it in TV and film media that it's still known almost universally.

Everything from old beloved films to Modern period shows. Its literally an overused way to establish the narrative isnt taking place in the present.

There was no leftism on the ticket to reject.

There has been no leftism on the general ballot in my 24 years of voting.

That is never a choice the American people are given.

Both of our choices are always market capitalist sycophants.

If you claim to be a society, the "left-behinds" are a monument to your society's complete abject failure.

The problem is that a economy is, by its nature, a lowly tool to maximize the equitable distribution of goods and services for the benefit of a society, and a society is it's people.

Most modern developed nations reach a point, and the US is the flag bearer for this, where the society subsists in service to the economy, and the economy becomes a tiny sliver of the population swallowing everything out of proud greed and gluttony. Which is fucking perverse, inhuman, and sociopathic.

We've just been propagandized by for profit media and oligarch captured education to literally hate and blame our own victims, calling them welfare queens and filthy beggars lowering our property values instead of the struggling neighbors we have all failed spectacularly.

Those that defend this vampire economy, while not being subject to those conditions, have become the disease. It's not OK that we have enough resources to house and feed everyone, but willfully don't while still allowing some to live lives of excess that are the equivalent of hundreds of modest lives with full bellies.

Carry on though, we've been too far gone to recover before complete societal collapse since the Reagan Revolution, and climate change will finally force equality, the final, actual zero sum game because all the temporarily embarrassed millionaires chose die alone over live together.

People were offered center right(D) and extreme right(R).

I voted for least worst harm reduction(D), but would have voted for AND campaigned for extreme left.

To the hopeless, especially the engineered ignorant hopeless, extreme often seems better than the status quo that keeps you in your hopeless state.

Our oligarchs starved public education both to cut their taxes and make their workforce this ignorant. We blame our stooopids for being so stupid, but the owner class that segregates their children into private schools they do fund destroyed public education on purpose, to ensure we can't universally use critical thinking and identify their economic class as the root poison that has destroyed our nation.

The only reason a fascist, extreme right is even allowed and funded by our owners in this country is because fascists love crony market capitalism, the very same reason we aren't ever given a true leftwing option, because whether centrist neoliberal or fascist Republican, they put the market's owners first, and the owners can and do attack any candidates that threaten to reign their power in.

Which is why we're irrevocably boned, and will continue to have the choice of capitalist exploitation with scapegoats(R) and capitalist exploitation with rainbow flags(D) until collapse, as the owners of this system demand capitalist exploitation as this system's primary function, then let us vote on how to address the symptoms it causes, if at all, to make us feel in control.

Reagan was the last chance to maintain any actual control, and we gave it all away for the false promise of golden showers of prosperity in return... one day... just keep making them money... any time now... Just assume it'll be five minutes after your body fails you from laboring for them.

Greed is the most destructive human impulse, but prudishness still wins handily in the fucking annoying category.

Oh no, boobs, those things pretty much everyone likes, the horror!

Fuck it, if we're dumb/selfish enough to be doing this, let's get it over with.

Good luck dolphin people! My only advice, if you have any dolphins incessantly trying to claim more resources for themselves than all the other dolphins, beat the ever loving shit out of them and nip that in the bud.

Humanity is surrounding itself with the harbingers of its own self-inflicted destruction.

All in the name of not only tolerated avarice, but celebrated avarice.

Greed is a more effectively harmful human impulse than even hate. We've merely been propagandized to ignore greed, oh im sorry "rational self-interest," as the personal failing and character deficit it is.

The widely accepted thought terminating cliche of "it's just business" should never have been allowed to propagate. Humans should never feel comfortable leaving their empathy/decency at the door in our interactions, not for groups they hate, and not for groups they wish to exploit value from. Cruelty is cruelty, and doing it to make moooaaaaaar money for yourself makes it significantly more damning, not less.

"So long as I'm free to exploit you into subsistence, you're free to die in the gutter when you're too broken to produce value for me!"

-The capitalists destroying us and the habitability of the world for any future humans, solely to run up their ego scores.

Never forget what all this human/animal/ecological death is and will be for, nothing of any value, solely stoking the ego scores of a few avarice governed sociopaths.

I hope humanity finds the strength to construct a monument on the scorched, hostile world we're making that we will struggle to survive on as our species flickers out that reads "Don't take it personally, it was just business."

Fifty bucks says he caucuses with the Republicans.

https://thehill.com/homenews/3469975-manchin-said-hed-caucus-with-gop-if-thune-were-senate-leader-book/

If you force the peasants to stayed paired off and breed, especially in desperate, abusive conditions, they will produce the best kind of exploitation livestock for our glorious capitalist owners: the desperate kind that tolerates any abuse.

All the cool billionaires will do it.

Just saying.

🔥🇺🇸🔥

I'd say we had a nice run, but considering genocide, slavery, highly selective voting rights, Jim Crow, Union Busting, supply side economics, foreign government toppling for domestic economic goals, warring to open up markets for resource exploitation, citizens united, etc... No we didn't.

We weren't even some benevolent saviors in World War II despite the constant crowing, we had our pacific fleet destroyed so we fought back. The war came to us, we were practicing eugenics prior to WWII.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26322647/

Also, cancel your prime subscriptions you cowards!

Unlike a lot of sectors though, Airbus knows what they're doing and is a high profile alternative, and unlike the US, hasn't yet completely internalized our sociopathic greed disease to our degree, despite the global economic pressure we inflict on other nations encouraging them to betray and cause harm to their own societies and citizens if it means an extra nickel of short term private profit.

Don't worry though, the UK has fallen to the greed disease, and our capitalists are bribing and coercing their way eastward, and they won't stop until they either are physically stopped by something like climate change, or successfully make the world forget that Economies are lowly tools that are supposed to exist solely to benefit the people of the society they are a lowly tool for.

Corporate "culture" is a plague.

Its jargon is designed to encourage self-enslavement and normalize sociopathic behavior.

This is why you only threaten politicians that are already dead.

For example, pissing on Ronald Reagan's grave, the deceased shitty actor just to be clear, is still on my bucket list.

Whenever I dare to hope about the lofty, admirable star trek future, I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren't up to the task for anything more than a token selfie by the best dozen humans we can possibly produce with great effort and training.

As a species, we aren't going to spread out there. Still too primitive, and probably too self-destructive to make it out of this phase of evolution. This might be one of those great filters scientists postulate as to why there aren't signals from innumerable civilizations out there.

We aren't even capable of caring for one another, let alone the EASIEST to maintain, most naturally human friendly habitat we would ever encounter in the cosmos as we evolved to fit it. No airlocks, the air/water/waste recycling was already fully automated, all we had to do was not recklessly grow/metastasize to the point we strain the absolutely massive system out of greed and glut, and stop carelessly shitting where we sleep. We all know how that's been going since we figured out how to make dead animal poison rocket us accross town.

Master space? Master planetary defense? We can't even defend this world from our own habitual consumerism. We'll be lucky if we aren't scattered tribes living near the old hardened structures of the before times for emergency shelter from the new normal weather events in a hundred years. We're already starting to argue over the resources it's taking to rebuild population centers from the current new normal. We have played pretend we were since human civilization began, but we are NOT and never have been this world's owners or masters, and we are still very much its subject.

And Reminder, what we're doing and have been doing in decades won't be undone for millions of years. The Earth is a self-correcting system, and the damage we're doing is inconsequential to its 3.8 billion year old, beautiful story of life growing out of every crevice, just not on a timescale humans can benefit from or even truly appreciate.

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell - Great Filter