Apparition of Jack

Also, what about the fucking parents? A mum and dad can only organise so many socially-distanced play dates or try and teach their kids Grammar or whatever before they themselves have to get back to work, look after other family members, etc. I mean the literal reason we have schools is so that parents don’t have to look after and teach their kids 100% of the time. Schools is fucking ESSENTIAL to early childhood development; kids were denied this opportunity because of a DEADLY VIRUS ravaging the world.

Again, you’re putting the cart before the horse. Yes, families DID do this, but there’s only so many socially-distanced camping trips you can have before the dire need for in-person education (you’re not teaching Maths to your kids at Umina beach), socialising with other kids their age on a daily basis etc becomes pressing. Also, let’s not forget that many families can’t afford to do that shit all the time and rely on school to be the main source of education/trips/socialising for their kids. And again, ITS NOT ME JUST MAKING THIS UP. It’s observable fact. You have a problem with my argument, feel free to refute the evidence. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12574550/#:~:text=Impacts of COVID-19-Related,onset%3B Amplify%2C 2021).

Do you not understand that parents literally weren’t allowed to? Parents DID try. Parents DID organise those things. The problem is the seriousness of COVID was far too great and too widespread for a few online play dates to remedy. For fuck’s sake you might as well say kids dying during the London Blitz was parents not buying their kids hard hats to stop German bombs. The problem isn’t the parents, it’s the world they’re in.

Ok and? COVID just exacerbated those already-existing trends. Even your average game addict kid will occasionally go to a birthday party or something. With COVID no one could do that though. The whole point was that we were living through lockdowns and social distancing to stop the spread. Again, I’m not making this up. There are countless articles of the very real effects this has had. Again, just look them up. The evidence is obvious.

As a young kid? God all the time. I feel like pretty much every weekend I had some sort of park party, or swimming trip, or whatever else planned out for me. I mean isn’t that what most people urban people in the modern world do? When you have kids you take them out, go to lunch etc. That’s why parks, museums, libraries etc exist. People like to socialise and have activities, especially developing minds. Please tell me this isn’t an outlier, I feel like this was the norm for pretty much most modern people, right?

Yes because everyone - and especially young kids - are still traumatised by the impacts of the pandemic. Early childhood development is a delicate thing. If kids aren’t out there learning social skills, making mistakes, playing with other kids etc it stunts their development and makes engaging with the world harder. Just look it up, this is like well-documented human psychology (as well as just basic common sense.) Having kids miss out on these milestones creates psychological problems for these kids that, again, society has refused to address. The reason your average 8-16 year old these days is a shut-in phone addict is because for two years this was literally the only way they could survive. Plus considering how callous adults have been about COVID and recovery since the pandemic ended, it’s no wonder they’re not wanting to do anything other than play Minecraft all day.

I’m not going to get into the details about urban vs rural living, but even if you believe this, being able to go out to the park of the cinemas with your friends/family in a city is still much healthier for your average child than not being able to do that. I grew up in the city and I turned out fine, precisely because I was able to go to the zoo, the water park etc. If I had been a kid not being able to do that for years at a time it would’ve screwed with my mental development. I really feel for anyone under like 25 these days.

Yeah man toddlers being locked up in dense houses instead of being out at the park or on field trips certainly had no impact whatsoever right

Being free to run around the countryside in a pre-industrial society =/= being locked up in an urban appartment or home for 2+ years having digital screens as your only source of education/human interaction while a pandemic rages around you. This isn’t rocket science. fuck it I’ll make it painfully obvious for you. Did YOU go to school in some isolated rural hamlet?

What century are you talking about man? Are you from the 1800s? 💀 I literally just searched it up, here was the first article. It’s a real thing that happened. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/mar/18/how-covid-changed-children-britain edit: quote from the article: “Five years on the fallout continues. Uncertainty, increased inequality, accelerated screen use and crippling anxiety are just a few of the Covid legacies affecting children and young people. Covid babies are now five and struggling to meet basic developmental milestones; 1.6 million children in England are still persistently absent from school; and students whose university years were stolen by the pandemic are still struggling with low mental health“ WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT COVID.

It depends in which part of the world you are, but a lot of kids functionally spent 2+ years locked inside. Even if lockdowns only lasted like six months, most schools didnt really do full reopenings until like 2023. Not to mention even after schools reopened, a lot of kids / families simply checked out of school altogether cause of the psychological disruption and basically only showed up for lessons like one a month or something. I mean, I’m not making this up. Just search “kids education COVID disruption” or something on Google and you’ll find thousands of articles, all across the world. This is nothing to say of teenagers / young adults who missed a lot of traditional milestones (prom, graduation, moving out of home, getting a degree etc) because COVID fucked everything over.

See, this is more of what I’m talking about. Everyone had different experiences. Some people got through the pandemic rather easily; others got super frustrated and turned into like aggressive extroverts the day lockdowns ended. some people used it to grow skills, watch shows, etc, while others, idk, tried to beef with police who were telling them not to cough all over the restaurant they were at, lol. What about kids? Kids these days fucking suck at school, and that’s largely because they spend much of their most formative years learning through online zoom meets. We NEED to talk about it; it’s impacted everything but we remain silent.

Also, it had direct impacts on events still happening today. Lybvov has pointed out that Putin only invaded Ukraine because she spent too much time on brainrot internet during lockdown and came to believe his own shit about Russian destiny. Hamas only committed October 7 because Gazans were feeling super frustrated because of Covid and wanted to take it out on the Israelis. How about all the anti-social behaviour we’ve been seeing? Jan 6th happened a year into the Pandemic. What about all the crime, speeding, greed that has occurred as a result of it? We all went super insane for like 2 years after COVID and we haven’t yet accepted that fact. im not alarmist when I say COVID had dramatic implications for the whole world that we haven’t even yet BEGUN to address. This is just like incredibly basic surface-level understanding of history and societies.

Was it really though? Lockdowns changed how we thought about working in office and how much we relied on social media. A lot of people are still struggling with strong symptom of it (literally Yimpa in this thread has long covid.) The fact that we haven’t poured millions of dollars into helping people deal with on-going symptoms is criminal in my opinion. What about the social aspect? Half of society proved themselves to be petutulant children who thought wearing a $5 mask to prevent people from literally dying made them fucking Soviet prisoners in a gulag. It’s absurd. What about supply chain issues and the economy? People blame Biden for inflation or whatever but when your entire society grinds to a halt, the economy is going to take a hit no matter what. What about collective health and responsibility? Millions of people died. Could that number have been lower if society was more prepared and culturally aware of disease mitigation? It’s not lost on me that America - the richest country in human history - was also the home to the most COVID deaths. Are we prepared for the next pandemic? How many more thousands of people will die again needlessly because people haven’t gotten the memo that masks = good? Can you imagine if no one discussed WW2 or the Holocaust after 1945? We’d be culturally adrift. I don’t think we’ve “discussed all there is to discuss about it”, I think we prefer to ignore the question because it reminds us of our own mortality and that hurts our fee-fees. EDIT: What about worker’s rights and nurses? It wasn’t billionaires who got us through the pandemic (they all fucked off the Hawaii), it was front-line store keepers, factory workers, garbage men, truck drivers, etc. Shouldn’t that account for something? And nurses and doctors obviously too. Thousands of nurses - again, people literally saving lives - had to give up their jobs after because the stress on the health system and the mass level of denial put them through traumatic shock. Hell there are literally thousands of nurses struggling with actual PTSD today. That’s not “a few years ago”, that’s TODAY. For fuck sake. Why do I even bother. Pearls before swine and all that.

Are you sure? I feel like I almost never see it come up on Twitter, youtube, everywhere basically. I don’t see people talking about how lockdowns affected them, the need for more research, etc. It’s almost always other issues (Trump, Russia, AI, whatever), which while obviously important, have all also been influenced by the pandemic we all went through.

Well, see, that’s what I’m talking about. Your symptoms are a very real thing that need to be socially addressed, lol. If most people just pretend it didnt happen, then too many other people with long COVID won’t be able to express themselves and get help if they seek it. I’m glad you’ve found some humour in it though, life can be rough but it’s always good to look for the silver linings 😂

I find the distinction between “capitalism” and “socialism” to be largely made up. Ideally, an economy should take elements from each of them in order to achieve its specific goals. Want to encourage economic growth and stimulate entrepreneurship? Cut taxes and regulations so people have an easier time starting a business. Want to ensure everyone has fair wages and safe working conditions? Implement labour laws and give employees a say in how businesses - especially large businesses - are run. I will say though, as it currently stands, I think the pendulum has swung a little too far in the direction of “Wild West capitalism.” The fact that healthcare is still a commodity or new housing complexes are bought up by rich investment firms seems ridiculous to me. But even then, something like cutting back red tape on approving new housing developments (so long as they’re not also immediately bought up by these firms) also seems to make sense. I think we should focus on heavily regulating major businesses (tech, finance, etc.) and ensuring a basic minimum of quality of life (so safe housing, decent wages, national healthcare etc) whilst also encouraging small and medium-sized businesses to stimulate economic activity. I call it Abundance Populism the best of both worlds.

Not exactly what you’re looking for, but here’s a video showing the countless times conservatives (including Trump) called for political violence. People forget what an abusive asshole he really is.

The internet feels like one giant process of shadow work for humanity to deal with all the hidden corruption and egotism we haven’t yet fully dealt with. It’s why it’s so hard to find truth here. There are billions of competing voices all trying to claim the mantle of reality, and whatever is genuinely true and authentic gets drowned out. Idk why this is happening but I can only hope it’s some sort of larger process to increase human consciousness and development in the long run. I just wish it didn’t feel so fucky in the meantime.

Yes, change is the operative word here. The idea of life being about getting a job -> earning lots of money -> buying nice cars -> retiring in the Bahamas will fade out, and be replaced more with participating in communal life and engaging with many of the new emerging technologies to innovate in health, science, literature, etc. ”Bosses” might not be as much of a thing as they once were. 4- or even 3-day work weeks will become the norm. Jobs will blend together as the internet allows people to hold multiple roles at once. For a lot of people this will feel uncomfortable at first (“why am I being invited to some gay community garden event?!”) but as the shock from COVID wears off and the depths of corporate corruption unveiled, people will begin to organically desire something else. Besides, AI is going to take all our jobs anyway, we might as well find some use for our time, lol. So yeah. Evolutionary times ahead. It’ll be different to what we’ve been used to but it certainly won’t be worse, put it that way.

People say America is going through its “fall of Rome” moment but I disagree. I think it’s going through its “Crisis of the Third Century” moment. America’s problems are huge, don’t get me wrong, but not to the extent that they fundamentally threaten the structure of the entire system itself, and nothing that can’t be overcome through some visionary, high-energy leadership. In Rome’s case, this was done through Diocletian’s reforms (moving power away from the decaying city of Rome itself, and towards more important and prosperous regions) and later on the new social glue of Christianity under Constantine. A similar process is happening in America - the old, vested capital interests are proving unable and unwilling to address the vast needs of the people of the nation, but a new, highly mobalised grassroots version of democracy is taking shape to resist it (enabled by the rise of social media and spearheaded by figures like Bernie, Mamdani, AOC, and even liberals like Pete Buttigieg and John Pritzker IMO.) Likewise, as Rome’s situation in the world changed, so too will America’s. Rome went from being an expansionist-minded empire dependant on a highly stratified chain of command, to a more stability-minded empire with a focus on more local command chains with more nimble soldiers. America will go from being the absolute, globally-minded hegemon to a more regionally-minded, diplomatic outlook. Culturally it’ll also shift. As mentioned before, Rome managed its increasing social tensions by abandoning unresponsive paganism and lethargic elites and adopting the more egalitarian and civic-minded Christianity. America will shift out of 1980’s style Wall Street orgies and bravado and to more communal-minded civic participation and celebration. Again, the worldview espoused by Bernie (“not me, us”), Abundance liberals etc will be key to this. I have reason to believe that things are going to get better for the West, but we won’t be the sole imperial hegemons that we once were (which honestly is probably for the best.) We’ll still have challenges, sure, but the social energy will be there to not only tackle them but radically rethink how we overcome them too. What all of this looks like in practice though, I can’t say. We’ll figure that out once Trump is gone and MAGA is dead. But I do know it’ll be the long-awaited reprieve we’ve all been waiting for.

https://apnews.com/article/government-shutdown-congress-trump-641e7e2324f261da72395b604d9540e8 Not sure what to make of this. On one hand, it’s basically a political win for the Republicans, because it lets them gut healthcare without offering anything in return. On the other hand, things like FAA workers not being able to direct flights was really messing with the country so the shutdown had to end at some point. Also, even though it’s coming to an end, the discourse has been around how bad the Republicans are on healthcare from what I’ve seen, so the damage is done. Thoughts? Did the Dems cave too early? Is it time to get rid of the old guard of Dem politicians who keep letting the Republicans ruin America, or was this agreement justified?

I’m like a ghost 👀 a very soyboy ghost

Stirner strikes me as more Orange if anything. Yes he pointed out how much society is based off superstitious cultural norms (religion, nationalism etc) but that was more a response to stage Blue, not stage Orange and higher. If he were truly Yellow, he would’ve probably wouldve integrated the need for collective action (something stage Green excels at), rather than jump the gun and just accept some sort of “individualist utopia” would be possible without any meaningful large-scale reforms to the society he lived in.

Didnt Jeffrey Epstein assault girls who were like 13 and 14? Whether that meets the strictest definition of “pedophile” or not feels irrelevant to me; these girls were for all intents and purposes children who being were preyed upon and abused by full adult males for their own sexual gratification. Like, this isn’t a case of an 18 year old sleeping with a 16 year old going to the same school - it was almost textbook definition rape/predation/child molestation. How many women alive today are still living with the trauma of what Epstein and his cabal did to them? Some have even taken their own lives. I do agree sexual ethics is complicated and we’ve kind of loss some of the nuance of consent, intimacy and legality in favour of just “icky vibes”, but this wasn’t icky vibes. This was genuinely human evil manifest. If you wrote a Hollywood spy movie of a guy uncovering what Jeffrey Epstein did it would be criticised for being “too unrealistic.”