Apparition of Jack

95% of our time goes to meeting our survival needs. We work to earn money to buy food and pay rent, but work is so stressful we spend whatever little money have left on distractions and coping mechanisms. Even if you live in a good country and/or are financially secure yourself, at most you could probably be some kind of leader in your industry or an academic, still distracting yourself all the while due to living in a decaying world. We are all so removed from nature that something that’s literally been free for all of human history - the natural world - is now incredibly expensive to access as you have to find enough time and money to draw yourself away from the cities to access it. No one seems genuinely happy. Some turn to religion to find meaning, but modern religion feels mostly about condemning fringe groups than actually connecting to God. Some turn to progressivism and hedonism, but that leaves one’s limited social and psychological impulses as the only fulfilment in life. There’s nothing wrong with being gay for instance, but if your own purpose in life is to be vaguely nice to everyone without truly accessing something deeper, it ends up feeling shallow and inconsequential. Politics offers no answers. Pop culture offers no answers. Religion offers no answers. Everything feels so pathetic and meaningless. There’s got to be more than this, right?

Republicans have also hamstrung every Democratic effort to pass meaningful immigration reform, most recently being in 2024 for the express purpose of making life worse enough for everybody that they’ll vote Dems out (really, look it up.) At this point I genuinely wonder if this isn’t some weird psychological impulse in Republicans to deliberately make society as chaotic as possible. They will not support aid in other countries to prevent people from migrating in the first place. They will not invest in communities in America to make the shock of immigration more manageable. They will not find border enforcement until it’s 10 years too late. It’s hard not think that these people LIKE having a bunch of “others” in their country that they can blame all their problems for whilst oligarchs loot their country, lmao.

Apparently elections don’t matter because you can just lead a riot and kill a bunch of people and still get elected President.

Politically speaking, Russia is a shithole, sorry man. For you to make great changes in Russia you’d have to be prepared to deal with a lot of threats, intimidation, violence and even death. I don’t know your situation, but I’m assuming you’re young and still planning your future. I’d say don’t jump into national politics just yet, instead focus on study, keeping yourself away from the low-conscious corruption within your country, finding likeminded friends and maybe quietly supporting politics on the side. Learn to play the social game and tell people your ideas without coming off as some radical Western degenerate. Establish yourself so you’re more free to pursue your own ideas without outside pressure. Learn to find optimism in dark situations and also practice kindness and compassion, without becoming a doormat either. These are just my ideas, in the end it’s up to you. Good luck.

This isn’t some radical leftist conspiracy either. You can be a dyed-in-the-wool conservative and admit this. He led a deadly insurrection against the US government that got five people killed after he lost the 2020 election. The man is a tyrant. He needs to go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capitol_attack

“No Kings Forever” doesn’t just mean Trump. It means that the foundational principles of America are build on people power and democracy, and any would-be tyrant (whether that’s Trump or whatever other asshat after him who tries the same thing) will never succeed in taking over the country. Democracy is America’s lifeblood. It’s not just a shallow political idea about voting but the very essence of the American character. If America ever had a king, or dictator, or whatever else, it would no longer be America. It’s us, the regular people, who get to say how the country is run.

Because Trump posts shit like this and expects no pushback 👇 He doesn’t get it. No one man can be king, president, dictator or whatever else for life in America. It belongs to the People, as laid out in the Constitution. He tried to undo the People’s will in 2020 (leading to several deaths, I might add.) He’ll try to break the Constitution in 2028 by running for a third term. We aren’t going to let him.

Let’s not forget Trump led a deadly insurrection attempt against the US government after losing an election. He already hates democracy. Let’s not mix our apples and oranges here.

“No Kings Day” should become a national holiday the day Trump is behind bars for good No Kings in America! From Now until Forever! 🇺🇸 🥳 🗽 🎆

The Dems under Obama were always going to have an uphill battle because having a black man for president broke too many people’s brains who then became utterly committed to having something like that never happen again, decency be damned. I honestly believe what we’re witnessing is the slow, chaotic, pathetic death of white supremacy in America, and that all the absolute insanity from people on the right is coming from their psychological inability to accept that white =/= superior anymore. The more people get put off by the obvious sadism and corruption of this administration and the more people realise having black (and brown, and Asian, etc) people run the country won’t lead to literal armageddon (as what every idiot conservative in 2008 was predicting), the more sanity will be restored and the more the world will be able to build an actual decent society, only this time all races will be included.

Can you tell me which thread?

Tomayto-tomahto 🍅

Any genuine attempt to understand the world’s problems inevitably lead to a progressive outlook. Capitalism as it stands has turned into a nightmarish leviathan that exists to suck the life out of modern society. Being a moderate means to live under the delusion that somehow this leviathan can be tolerated or reasoned with. It can’t. That’s why we got Trump.

Israelis will never give up the land because the Holocaust broke their brains and convinced them only violently holding onto a small slice of territory in the Middle East is the only way they’ll be safe from industrial genocide again. Palestinians will never give up the land because it was their homeland for over a thousand years and the way they were beaten, evicted and killed by the Israelis so their land could be stolen from them by a people they had nothing to do with will never be forgiven. What do we honestly do?

I’ve been thinking about this a bit more, and this the conclusion I’ve come to: The Iraq War was bad because it implies that there are international rules, but the most powerful countries are above them. The Ukraine War is bad because it implies there are no international rules at all. Both are bad but for different reasons. But I suppose in some sense it’s still splitting hairs - I doubt your average Iraqi family affected by the US invasion slept more comfortably knowing that their country was “only” being invaded because the US was powerful enough to get away with it. However, this doesn’t make Putin’s invasion of Ukraine any less ridiculous. Like I said, other Western nations criticised the US for the Iraq War at the time (France famously refused to join in), whereas afaik none of Putin’s “allied” states (if he has any true allies at all) have condemned his invasion of Ukraine. At most China seems to have taken a neutral stance on the conflict, but that’s more out of selfish geopolitical interest rather than any true commitment to international law. Putin’s war is still incredibly dangerous too because it sets a precedent that if he wins, nations can now just invade other nations to settle disputes. If Putin wins, what’s stopping North Korea from invading South Korea to reunite the peninsula? Or Bolivia invading Chile to regain its Pacific coast? Or, hell, even Britain invading Ireland to put the Northern Ireland question to rest? International rules exist to prevent human bloodshed and to encourage diplomatic solutions to geopolitical grievances. If all nations could just declare war on any other for any reason, the world would become a much darker and more violent place in general.

https://apnews.com/article/nobel-peace-prize-oslo-41b6bff88e2d57af0917bcf778e132ad Interesting choice. Obviously Trump didn’t get it, but that was to be expected. I don’t know much about Maria Machado though. On one hand, sticking up for political rights against any autocratic government takes bravery. On the other hand, she’s a Trumpist and seems to be a simp for US hegemonic military power. Odd choice I guess. More on her here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/María_Corina_Machado

True, although just to be clear I still think Russia is more of a rogue actor than Western powers are on the world stage. UK and France have (mostly) followed the international rules, for instance. And America, despite its disastrous invasion of Iraq, is still technically a democracy (the largest anti-war protests in history occurred before the Iraq War, for instance, something that never could’ve happened in Russia) and the Democrats are generally more responsible and sensible when it comes to foreign policy than the Republicans (see: Obama pulling out of Iraq, 2015 Iran nuclear deal, etc.) But yes, ultimately there are no major countries free of hypocrisy, and we need to demand better of our leaders than to just wage war recklessly despite the consequences of those wars. The world isn’t our play thing to mess around with as we wish.

The crazy thing is, this is what empires and superpowers used to do to countries they conquered. Rome might’ve waged war on Gaul, but when the fighting was over they built roads, cities, aqueducts etc. Britain invaded India but they left behind railways, ports, bureaucracies, etc. These days we just send in a few thousand troops, carpet bomb the countryside, leave the nation in ruins, before fucking off back home and patting ourselves the back for on a job well done. And we wonder why no one trusts us anymore, lol

Yeah, agreed. I think the West - and especially America - have yet to fully atone for what they did to Iraq for basically no reason. It’s weird how it was one of the most destructive wars in modern history and yet we’ve barely talked about it since it ended barely over a decade ago. What’s done is done, but the West needs to take a good hard look at itself if it thinks it can just ruin other nations and pretend the destruction we’ caused never happened. We need to be WAY more careful with wielding the power we posses. EDIT: To add to this, look at how we treated the Afghans who helped us in our war over there as soon we turned tail and ran - people who put their homes, livelihoods and even lives at risk, only to literally be abandoned on the airport tarmac as the people who want them dead took over the country. The modern West (by which I mean mostly America) has basically zero concept of geopolitical responsibility.

Both the war in Iraq and Ukraine are massive geopolitical fuckups that have caused untold levels of unnecessary human misery and will continue to have negative repercussions for decades to come. Iraq was the most egregious example of a nation unable to keep its revenge-boner in its pants and unilaterally (and illegally) destroying another nation and hundreds of thousands of lives in modern history. Ukraine was the most egregious breach of national sovereignty, the rules-based world order and basic diplomatic decency since the Second World War, all on the whims of a deluded septuagenarian who will be either dead or deposed within a few years anyway. Both never should’ve happened. War is goddamn awful, especially for flimsy nationalist dick-waving reasons. We should just stop killing each other.

It’s so clear JP isn’t actually a believing Christian though. He’s more like some weird post-modern pseudo-Christian atheist. His video only Jubilee proves that. His daughter, I don’t know though. She’s probably sincere.

In many ways you’re probably living a more holistic life than high earners in the West, since you have an immediate connection to nature / growth / the cycles of life that people in big cities are alienated from. Not saying your life is perfect but at least on a physical / energetic level you’re probably better off than a lot of other people.

You have to also consider that there’s a lot of low consciousness people out there who gravitate towards these celebrities precisely because they let them indulge in these sick fantasies (vicariously or not.) It’s why I’ve always had a problem with weird celebrity obsession and putting obviously bad people on a pedestal. Think about how many people still defense Kanye despite being an unhinged Nazi. Or shit, think about how TRUMP was a successful reality TV star despite widely being known as a sex pest before then. There’s a lot of really dumb, impulsive and sick individuals out there. Humanity isn’t yet at a level of full maturity collectively imo.

I don’t know if this has been posted elsewhere but Trump’s “spiritual advisor” has just been imprisoned for sexually abusing a 12 year old girl. These people are sick.

- Factory farming - No public healthcare (in the US) - No internet integration with democracy / governing / policy making - Rampant greed and materialism Those are all I’ve got for now.