I’m going to start using the “single crab alone, clawing in a bucket” analogy to describe our current world.

I just can’t see it happening with the Internet.

This, even without the technological forces of capital swooping in to take advantage of every leveraged opportunity, even if people did rally together it would just turn into a political/performative circus and the entire thing will get lost and buried under some streamer drama that erupts from it.

I’ve been following space science for years, and I have traveled the world, there very much are “firewalls” of news and information we get between different countries. It’s not “conspiratorial” it’s just normal geopolitics. It would be a conspiracy if anyone was trying to hide the fact that they do this.

All that said, I see a LOT more news and information in mainstream media outlets about ESA than I do CNSA domestically. It’s not a conspiracy and not a coincidence that we get information about our political and economic rivals downplayed.

But at least China invests in its people.

They are investing in solar system exploration and space exploration in general too. We just rarely hear about how much progress they’ve made in the US because that stuff is pretty embarrassing for the US.

A multiplayer game that pits you against lousy AI bots with human looking names for your first "games’ so you feel like you know how to play and makes the game seem fair and fun.

Then after you’re comfortable, you get pitted against a lobby of 12-year-olds who haven’t seen daylight since birth who annihilate you and curse you out on coms.

This artist gives me emotional whiplash. I can never tell if it’s going to be something sublimely wholesome and introspective, or like… a dead dog hanging on a noose.

This has been both the left and right for decades.

Not a centrist, but we have to get better about understanding how manipulable we all are to social trends and pressures.

Honestly, I’d be fine with it, if it actually led to the part where the population is healthy enough to work and thrive if they so desired.

But that’s not what they’re saying. They’re saying they want to keep you alive long enough to keep working past your retirement age.

Quality of life never factors into financial projections, so their goal is give the bare minimum to the people who can pay for it. The part where he says “If you so desire” is so incredibly loaded I am surprised it didn’t make a loud crashing noise when he said it. Tell us what the alternative is Doc Oz. What’s the alternative??

This argument never made sense to me.

Don’t worry, it’s just because they’re not arguing from a place of good faith. They are often not even serious or thoughtful enough to even understand that they’re arguing in bad faith, it’s just they have strong feelings and not enough capability to form logical arguments in their heads to fight their own discomfort with foreigners or people of color or having to respect people’s gender identity. (It’s almost ALWAYS about race or sex.)

This is why centrism is dead. There is no “middle ground” between having paralyzing hangups and emotion-driven policies and not having these things. Either you get incredibly sweaty and ashamed watching interracial cuckolding porn or you’re chill and don’t care. There is very little overlap.

The big difference here is that the average liberal american thinks they’re on the side of the poor, they believe themselves to be good people who want to see good outcomes, but will be the first people to show up at their town hall to protest the new low-income housing or rehab center.

The large swath of America’s white middle class, which are mainly liberals definitionally, will scowl and feel awful about ICE deporting hard-working migrants on television, but then clutch their purses to their chests and hit their power-locks when they see someone with dark skin walking down their side of the sidewalk.

But our challenge, if we’re politically motivated to make change and create better outcomes, is to have the social acumen to know that if you point out this hypocrisy and inconsistency, you will actually push them further right. Our Overton Window is in a weird place right now, it’s not just all the way right, it’s broken into pieces. We have to understand that labels mean things to most people, and most people don’t understand that they aren’t being progressive because they have good intentions. And people generally put a lot more stock in their intentions than their actions.

This is the paradox and frustration about wanting a better world and better outcomes, which is the harder you try to correct behavior and habits, the more you’re seen as a bad guy trying to control others. But also, if you don’t and just let people be what they want, the right will also suck them further right.

Which is why real progressive activism requires a kind of parental strategy where what you know and what you tell people are different in tone and direction. You make people feel a certain way because you want them to do come to the right conclusion themselves, otherwise they will resist change.

Hakeem Jeffries making a snarky post and @'ing Donald Trump with a meme from 2015.

The way they’re being staged isn’t actually doing more than displaying solidarity, which isn’t bad, it’s a good thing.

But it’s not going to change anything without actual leadership in politics making changes due to POLITICAL PRESSURE. This should be the Democrat’s motherfucking JOB, to look at this momentum and use it to call out and depose ineffectual or bought-out congress and senate members, to strike down legislation, to block defunding institutions, or at the very fucking least, get some strong candidates up for the midterms instead of preserving this geriatric social club/American branch of the Israeli government.

We need to be ousting our Democratic leadership and forcing in new people who aren’t just playing roles and preserving status quo or all of these protests really will be for absolutely nothing.

I keep seeing people talking about how Mussolini was hanged by freedom fighters who marched in the streets. What people miss in that story is that Italy’s ruling government handed the fucker over and he was essentially arrested by the king himself. We don’t win with marches alone, it needs to lead to political action and so far I haven’t seen more than a handful of democrat politicians even reference these marches.

If anything at all comes from this, it will be how we can see clearly which ones are owned by the fascists and which ones actually represent the people.

Riding on the wave of this momentous mandate, we can expect our great democratic leader, Chuck Schumer to write a VERY stern letter to Trump.

Cory Booker might stand and talk for a long time too.

When I was very active there I would frequently “adopt” incels if I looked through their post history and saw something worth saving. I engaged with them in a non-judgemental way, listened to them whinge and rant about how awful the world was to them, then started asking them a lot of questions and started introducing new ideas and perspectives to them that way. I often had to be a bit of “chad asshole” to them at first to earn their respect.

I grew up around wolves and other wild animals, they really do respond similarly.

I had a pretty high success rate too, the ones that didn’t crash and burn tended to go on to just send me updates about their lives regularly until they suddenly found a new calling or got a girlfriend. At least one thanked me for “saving his life” which felt good to hear.

It’s tiring and exhausting and I can only imagine how hard that kind of project is for people who aren’t social or don’t have a lot of emotional intelligence, but I feel strongly if more people at least tried, it would make a dent in this atrocious problem we have with young men.

Oh, I can guarantee that there is no small share of young incellish guys who have their crippling insecurity triggered every time they see even loosely-drawn cartoon characters hooking up.

I know because I used to have to deal with those fucks while moderating that cursed place.

There is no way that scrawny, pale, slenderman-looking grey alien wannabe could handle that thing. It would break him in half.

The recoil from the glock-looking thing that is, the dildo would fall in and you would hear an echo eventually.

All the best people. Big, strong people, lube streaming down their faces.

Welcome to the second quarter of the millenium. The motto here is “You have no need to change as long as there’s a community who supports you.”

I mean, if Asmondgold can be one of the most popular people in the world, I am pretty sure there is no such thing as the word “indefensible” anymore.

If you want to give it a go, I’ll give you a rating compared to what I was used to seeing!

A lot of the young men who frequent larger sites like reddit feel very sensitive to what they perceive as criticism of men broadly, or have spent so much time reading man-o-sphere victimization porn that they see even mild jokes like this as misandry and hate and why women won’t touch their weewee and cook them tendies.

Source: used to mod a large gender-related subreddit, it’s even worse than you can imagine.