Not one particular thing, but had a friend of a few years suddenly turn evangelical christian after being a pretty chill gamer dude and often hilarious troll online.

Just one day does an about face and now every single fucking conversation comes back to “The Lord” and his faith and Jesus and prayer and do I want to join his church and please let’s talk more about the Kingdom of Heaven and also Trump isn’t that bad, he means well, the people at church say so.

Just no, fuck off totally. I can’t deal with someone always trying to push some utterly delusional moral superiority on me, It’s literally like having someone you know die.

I also had a sibling go full Qanon, which seemed to pivot to just spiritual shit and talking to aliens as of late. No contact, so I don’t know the details or what happened to the shadowy cabal of pedophiles since they were actually found.

There’s a “yo momma” joke in here but I’m still too groggy to make it happen. I’m tagging someone else in.

Sure gave me a lot to think about there, very nuanced and thoughtful response.

I had to double check that they weren’t just recycling stories, but who would have thought that erosion and geology is still happening even as humans exist and oppose it!

An omen that we can’t fight water.

When water rises, we cannot fight it, there will be mass migrations as coastal cities become unlivable with constant storm surges and rising sea levels in the coming decades.

I mean, we’re all raging at this presidential administration for ending USAID which supplied food and medicine to developing nations and poverty-stricken regions without infrastructure, it will lead to the deaths of millions, for no other reason than they don’t have access and resources in many of the places the program served.

if populations collapse in too many industrialized nations too rapidly, many industries and shipping lanes and distribution channels will start to slow down and possibly even eventually close entirely, leading to much greater problems than even the absence of USAID or other programs. A lot of our modern infrastructure we depend on functions on a scale dependent on a certain level of production and labor.

A lowered population would absolutely help us with a lot of issues with scarcity and pollution, but we can’t get to those lowered population levels rapidly or that’s the same as any other apocalyptic event that will cause vast amounts of suffering.

Yep, basically anything that delivers new “things” to you that requires a level of updating and re-engagement over and over with a sense of looking for something that’s interesting to you, especially including anything that supplants socializing with comments on the internet by random strangers.

I feel like it was different in the days when we just read a morning newspaper, because it wasn’t all interesting or relevant to us, it was just informative and you got “today’s concerns” and then set it down and used it for kindling or bird cage lining later. There was no need to pick it up again and see if anything changed.

Here we train our brains to feel like they’re going to get “interesting stuff” on demand, and it creates an expectation for that dopamine reward over and over, so whatever you read that doesn’t give you that feeling becomes less interesting. This is why so many of us can’t finish a book or sit through a movie, it’s just conditioning.

The good news: You’re a childless adult who can do fun things and just let the rest of the population keep the numbers up so civilization doesn’t collapse from rapid population decline.

The bad news: Everyone else has this idea also.

edit: your downvotes without actual arguments make me think this is triggering some of you kids and I have no idea why. Learn to articulate and stand for your values you cowards. I’ll still probably block you because you’re likely just angry tankies and shit but at least stand for something.

If you’re going to adopt violence, you have to target the exact right people or you just plunge yourself into a long, dumb spiral of public outrage until whatever the organization originally meant to accomplish is lost in the news cycle of violence. People won’t remember what you represented, only what you did. And you can’t fix that with messaging, it’s just not how it works.

I can name a dozen different iconic seditious or rebellious groups in recent history and for every name read, you will see in your mind’s eye terrorism and bombings and violence, not what that group wanted to accomplish or what their goals were.

I get gnashing teeth reminding people of this fact, but Mussolini was not defeated by a plucky band of rebels who dragged him out of his bunker, he was arrested by his own king and government and handed over the opposition. We still need political action or we’re just embracing mindless chaos, we will need politics to both secure an actual victory and we will need politics to deal with the millions of people who didn’t vote for any of your actions but will still live next to us after.

You can just stop using content-aggregation websites like reddit, youtube or twitter.

Seriously, it’s hard at first because you have no idea how addicted your brain is for content and information about the world, but after a few weeks you will settle back into how you were in the before times, and may even have a desire to sit and watch a whole TV show or movie without scrolling, or you might even read a “book.”

(Books are these things that have “content” encoded in text on sheets of pressed wood cellulose, ask your grandparents about them. Side effects include enhanced imagination, retention of knowledge, images and ideas forming spontaneously in your mind, and simulated experiences that create actual emotional responses.)

You won’t miss out on anything, I promise. Our species has existed for thousands of years without you knowing what’s going on, we will continue to exist for millennia without you knowing what’s going on, just read up on your local political candidates when election season rolls around and you’re golden.

If the universe is infinite in size, then statistically there are an infinite number of empires in far away galaxies. Not sure about the FTL drives though.

Honestly, the ridiculous prices of fast food has been the best thing for my health. I never ate it a lot, but I would sometimes grab something if I didn’t have time to cook or make something at home, now that’s totally off the table, if I wanted to spend $45 for burgers for two people I would take us to an actual local restaurant and get higher quality food that supports a local economy.

I haven’t touched fast-food since before covid.

I’ve been screaming it for years because I was raised in the back-country by apocalypse preppers surrounded by ruraloid hicks preparing for the great coming race war/battle with China and the homosexuals.

Somehow media has been right all along with its stereotypes and we broadly kind of ignored the warnings, I guess because the message that movies and shows aren’t real? Like a generation of parents telling kids whatever they see on TV or on the internet isn’t real and can’t harm us.

Well, it was all very real and it’s all harming us.

boondocking

I will never not read this as some kind of obscure, local nickname for something absurd and sexual/scatalogical. Like “Me and this chick did an Ohio Boondock in an Ace Hardware parking lot once, the manager called the cops so we had to get out of there, but man they must have been glad they rent carpet steamers, ah tell you what.”

I was floored when I saw what even the low-end pre-made travel-vans were going for. They’re really following the whole “Why sell a million cookies for a dollar each when you can sell one cookie for a million dollars” economic model with these things.

To think the trend probably really started because some folks decided to build like, plywood frames around their poop-bucket in back and documented it on social media with various photo filters to look romantic and free-spirited.

Bonfires on the beach at night, shirtless young dude with a guitar, maybe a dog, probably black lab or golden retriever, girls in bikinis and everyone is just perfect and happy… don’t you want to be happy like this too? Get your van with built-in poop bucket for only $90,000 now and start recapturing that escaped youth living off your parent’s dime and a trust fund!

That could have potentially been bred out for domesticated strains like we did with horses also, but we never even got to that point because horse hierarchy and zebra hierarchy are very different beasts, and you can’t really tame a zebra matriarch and have the rest of the herd fall into line, because zebras don’t have that kind of matriarchal social system. They are so mistrustful and hard to approach that we were never even able to get to square one.

Lets also not forget that since we’ve allowed capital to infiltrate the very foundations of intelligence and military, we now have several thousand competing companies and contractors each with their own agendas, their own secret testing programs, their own proprietary tech they won’t dare let other companies get wind of, and so on. The US’s relationship with secret tech didn’t start and end with Skunkworks, that’s just what got the most attention back in the day. So when the US government says “We saw a thing we can’t explain” and are 100% honest when they say it, that still doesn’t mean it’s not a US government product being tested, it’s just that they don’t know about it yet.

I also fully believe as our sensory extensions expand, as we send up more satellites, install more cameras all over the place, create more observation systems, we’re absolutely going to see more and more things we can’t explain, and likely will never be able to explain, because the universe is fucking crazy.

Our fixation that things we can’t explain must be ghosts or aliens from other planets says more about our limited capacities and biases than anything.

you’re really not paying attention to what’s actually going on.

Nice contention-bait opener, but I am one of the few people who have actually read exit polling. You’re not wrong on any of that, but the reality is definitely not plain and simple, there were more factors at work, but yeah the overall gist is people vote based on what they’re feeling at the moment.

The wild-card is how the populations feelings have been tampered with systemically by capital for decades.

And a vast number of the people who voted for Trump voted for Obama and are Bernie supporters, so if we’re trying to figure out some kind of through-line narrative that makes sense, we’re not going to find it.

He did a short video about sex and gender a few years ago, it was a tad performative but that’s how he does a lot of his work. Broadly though it made a LOT of people angry because even people who ostensibly pretend they’re progressive and care about science, freak the fuck out when thinking about genitals.

That’s basically the US in a nutshell.

“America. Freaking the everloving fuck out about other people’s genitalia for 249 years strong!”