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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Still scary with how far/close it got.

    I’m still not clear what would have happened if rioters had actually beaten Congressional Reps to the door.

    Let’s say Mike Pence really did get lynched. And Nancy Pelosi had to watch her desk get crapped on. And then the capital building is surrounded by the DC police. And there’s a high profile hostage crisis, while whomever did get out reconvenes to decide what to do next.

    Does anyone believe Joe Biden doesn’t still get sworn in?

    This is the Presidency not a game of tag. Who is still going to take orders from a Trump admin on these terms? Everyone - Republicans included - wanted that asshole gone by the end of 2024.


  • Trump has practically giftwrapped oppo ads

    When you’ve gerrymandered all the districts and you’re threatening to federalize state elections? When Silicon Valley owns all the venues those oppo ads would run? When your response to every defeat is to deny it is happening and double down on the military?

    I just don’t think Scary Voice Ads during the Late Show With Not Steven Colbert Cause He’s Fired are going to make a huge difference.

    Like, I’m not a doomer. I don’t think “Democracy is Over!” Because, if Trump had the means to make Democracy Go Away, he’d have done it during the 2025 gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia. But it’s crazy to think Ad Buys are going to be what decide the next election cycle.


  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoFemcel Memes@lemmy.blahaj.zonevibe
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    9 hours ago

    Most of us will probably not live to see the end.

    There is no “end” to live to see.

    things are about to get a whole hell of a lot worse

    I get this line every fucking day on here. It really seems to deny the reality of the post-industrial era. One of shrinking poverty, enormous surpluses, and a backbone of infrastructure that benefits the entire planet.

    Like Kromptkin recognized over a century ago, we have already won as a society and a species. We just need to recognize it and dole out the winnings equitably. What Westerners see as a terrifying decline arrives just as much of the Eastern Bloc and the Global South are finally cashing in. And much of what Westerners dread is this equanimity - this international muscle enjoyed by nations not in the privileged Early Adopter group taking a slice of the pie they thought was always going to be theirs.

    And even then it isn’t really bad news for Westerners in the aggregate, because so much of that pie was going to an elite plutocracy in their own backyards.

    What people in the US and the UK and Germany and Japan are coming to terms with is the dead-weight loss of their own monarchies. Whether they choose to carry this baggage into the 22nd century will determine how they end up living. But the days of colonial extraction are closing. The Free Lunches paid for with the surplus labor of East Asia and West Africa are coming to an end.


  • The fascists at least admit there are problems

    When they’re out of power. Then they get into power and they sound just like the fucking neoliberals, plus or minus some white nationalist spin.

    And the neoliberals are happy to admit problems exist, but only so long as we concede the solution to the problem is more neoliberal Technocrats in charge. And if you don’t agree, then you’re a fascist, too!

    Take a look at the Starmer government in the UK right now, and what we’re witnessing is Trumpian fascism and British neoliberalism jerking one another off.

    Capitalism is in crisis

    It is the crisis. So much of our modern nightmarish policies are third and forth order consequences of the Profit Motive. Everything from our ecological decimation to our brutalization of migrant workers to our paranoid surveillance state traces its roots back to the need to extract an ever growing investment return from assets with diminishing yield.




  • climate change and pollution are legitimately unfixable problems in my opinion

    The Late Devonian mass extinction was likely caused by the evolution of oxygen producing plants. This fundamentally altered the chemistry of the atmosphere and kicked off the Hangenberg event which is estimated to have killed half of all life in the world’s oceans and around a quarter of all life on dry land.

    Incidentally, the sudden and massive spread of plant-life during this period is responsible for the rapid accrual of fossilized carbon that has become the fuel we’re currently killing one another to secure.

    Everything else could hypothetically be fixed

    We can’t ever really go back. We can update our social responses to climate-wide events. But industrialization isn’t just going to stop happening even if we check our fossil fuel consumption habit. Humanity’s propensity for engineering our surroundings to meet our comfort needs is an unstoppable evolutionary tendency. That’s not something we can ever “fix”. Pandora’s Box was opened millions of years ago. We’re going to have to play this hand out until we hit another ecological balancing point.