Despite challenges coming up, our world is broadly in the best state it’s ever been in. We are objectively at an all-time high in lifespans, quality of life and reduced war and violence.

You really, really need to turn off the news and social media (like this site) more and spend more time in your moments. I am speaking as one of your peers here. You are gonna regret spending too much time despairing over things you can’t change when you could find small joys in the miraculous world we have around us. You have likely been disheartened growing up in the same world I did thinking that we would have a future with food replicators and starships. That’s a hard one to let go of, I know, but there is still magic and wonder we can experience in our daily lives.

Yah you’re gonna die, we all will.

So make the most of your short time and go plant a garden, take a hike, raise a puppy, learn a new language, travel to places where people don’t actually dwell on the sorrows and learn from them.

No, I’m not giving you platitudes here, I am promising you, you will regret spending too much time in sorrow. The world will feel most wondrous and magical when you know your time is short, and you WILL wonder why you didn’t work harder to stretch that time out.

Made-made climate change is now beyond any threshold where we previously had reasonable expectations of being able to prevent it.

Something we could have led the world in averting like we did with ozone-depleting chemicals, if it wasn’t for all the christians who believed there is no such thing as a future, that everything is just some kind of prophecy unfolding and nothing is even “real” and just a big test of some kind of from God.

The Christian mandate for pillaging the earth of all its resources because Genesis can be translated that we have dominance over all other life as well as the death-cult attitudes of the modern followers have directly led to some of our worst outcomes and if anyone survives the next millennium, the religious people of today will be seen as the world’s most horrendous mass-murderers.

Why the heck did they compact their garbage if they just eject it into space anyway?

It’s proof how much of it is performative and attention-seeking, if they actually believed in anything they would be giving their belongings away, not selling the car they intended to sell anyway.

Fun Fact: they’re all the same thing.

Most right-wing sexual hangup and insecurity is just kink. There’s a reason why whatever the right is currently screaming against is also the top category of Pornhub at that time.

I have very little faith in our liberal late night hosts in shaking the boat very much.

I mean, he never even said anything actually controversial in the first place.

I hope I’m wrong, I hope the first thing he says is “Fuck Trump the Fascist! Retake the white house! End the genocide in Gaza!” and then gets turned off immediately, because he’s going to have a LOT of people watching him. He has an opportunity to say something shocking and lasting and he will still retire with wealth and respect.

But I am not holding my breath.

That’s my point in my original comment, that the rate of return for the effort is just enough to recruit an army of foreigners to influence our politics.

I don’t have negative feelings towards people in India trying to survive by using any means necessary, I certainly get it, these are humans with lives and families and the opportunity is just dangled in front of them.

But these are people who don’t have to live in the country they help tear down to ashes and rubble by supporting right-wing, fascist propaganda.

That’s a picture of knockoff-brand, “Charlie Kirkland”

It’s not going away just because you seem to want it to.

I thought you had a good counterpoint up until you tried to be smug edgy dude. Fuck off, understand what’s at stake and why people like myself are worried that the left is going to get stuck spinning it’s wheels in a procedural issue while we’re literally losing the constitution. You can care about Epstein and keep pushing on it, I don’t give a fuck, just stop calling everything else major that happens a “distraction” like it doesn’t matter.

The thing I hate most about Lemmy is what a fucking circlejerk it is.

I know people are gonna read this and make deeply frowny faces and try to poke me with their little arrows but we have to get better about identifying what a fucking bubble we all fall into.

These kinds of sites are the same as what the right uses, but the left gets far less out of them for affecting change and good outcomes. They’re feed-troughs to get people gathered together, getting their feelings out of their system, without actually going out and challenging power and facing the opposition. It’s like when you have a great idea for a novel and you tell your bored friends all about it and that gets the inspiration out of your system so you never pursue it.

Epstein files also seem to be the first thing that cracked his base of political support.

We all need to get a lot better about actually visiting and reading right-wing websites and groups. Even if they are painfully stupid and infuriating, we have to know the reality of what they think and feel.

This is because for every huge story that breaks, the media splits it into two angles. One set of headlines pandering to the right, and another pandering to the left.

Because of this, Epstein had a far smaller long-term impact on the right than we think. They have already moved on, every bit of “outrage” was performative and lip-service to the few right-wingers who want to feel intellectually honest. (Very few of them.)

They are celebrating in the streets right now, they feel they are winning and they don’t actually care about child sex trafficking, largely most of them attached to that cause because it feels objectively good and they all want to be the “good guys.” That storyline is over, they’ve moved on to new storylines.

No dingus, we just can’t DO anything with the Epstein case, the king owns the judicial branch and his kingdom doesn’t care about it. It’s a dead-end while we CAN in fact fight on the front of demanding the admin hold to the constitution for freedom of speech, because without that we won’t even SEE things like the Epstein scandal.

It’s not the same, you just have to soothe the butthurt that we can’t keep calling everything else bad that happens a “distraction” because the other things that are happening are real and bad and they will destroy us.

the naive belief that we have simply yet to find the perfect argument that, when shown to the frothing genocidal fascists, will somehow magically turn them 180 degrees and renounce american fascism.

This is also why the left infights so much, they are so desperate to have intellectual fights and showcase their logic and reason in a way that matters that all you can really do with that is just pick at other leftist’s takes and beliefs.

We probably could have made a lot better progress in effecting change in our country if we all digested the reality a lot sooner that we are NOT arguing our way to a better outcome, that all we could really hope to do is change narratives and change the way the right feels about topics.

Fuck webp and the horses it rode in on.

Or I should say, the several supported horses it rode in on, and the rest of the horses standing there looking confused like they have no idea what a webp is even though they can make a preview thumbnail of the webp image, but just can’t do anything else with it.

Repeat right-wing bullshit all day and push nazi takes on midwest white women until you get retweeted enough that you make a couple bucks. Helps if you actually farm like, 60 accounts on burner phones, each doing the exact same thing.

Helps more if like, a million of your friends do the same thing.

Reminder to everyone: you can monetize being a blue-check twitter user if you get enough followers and engagement.

It’s not much, but in places like India and other countries, it’s more than enough to live on, and as a result there are HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of shill accounts based in India and other countries, who just circulate each other, follow each other, retweet each other and recycle the same Grok talking points and hollow phrases all day, every day.

Our entire political landscape is being propped up on the backs of people who do not know or care about what happens in the USA and are just shaving off as much as they can by riding along like the remoras that follow sharks.

Disney is a massive machine always crunching numbers and making predictions, it doesn’t matter what short-term dips and peaks and whatever political points they score for either side, they have calculated their margins out to like, the year 2300.

Yeah! Because the current federal administration is already well in progress in sabotaging and gutting our entire education system, someone like Bannon is just trying to farm publicity and engagement for saying the outlandish things already happening.

Sure is wild how all of this got so many people talking about Disney+ and what shows they offer.

This is some kayfabe bullshit you suckers keep falling for over and over.

The illusion of conflict, the dog wagging the tail, manufactured outrage and consent.

Please people, we didn’t score any kind of victory here, this entire experiment was a success, it drove up media engagement, lit up the ratings, got people to start saying brand-names all day and got both political sides to feel smug and rewarded for that engagement. Disney calculates their projections in terms of decades, whatever short-term dips they get are more than made up for by the public engagement.

YOU ARE BEING MILKED AND NOT IN A FUN WAY