Apparition of Jack

It kinda feels like the last five years of human history has seen a mass regress of human behaviour towards purely base, self-interested survival / power / ego etc. COVID, Trump 2.0, social media etc all see to have contributed to this. What can be done about this? How do we get people to stop acting in purely selfish, materialistic terms and start acting in thoughtful, human-centric and conscious terms? I feel like we’ll make no real progress until we get people to wake up out of this haze that they’re in.

Commodification, commercialisation and financialisation of society have rotted our brains. Rather than focus on growth, life, beauty, truth, community and connection, we’ve been conditioned and encouraged to see everything as a “me vs them” zero-sum game of ego, dominance, greed and pursuit of individual wealth. We’ve fallen under the delusion that money alone is whats important, no matter the cost to obtain it (social stability? environmental health? human lives?) Our media, entertainment, politics, and just basic common culture is dominated by shallow, narcissistic peacocking and endless culture wars. Rather than see the basic humanity in others, we’re instead encouraged to see everyone as a threat, an enemy, someone to conquer and, fundamentally, someone to destroy. It’s pure social insanity. Something SERIOUSLY wrong has gone on in the human psyche. I don’t know what it is, I don’t know where it began or where it came from, but I know that it’s here and it’s turning even basic, everyday people into unrepentant narcissists. I try not to get caught up in it. I try not to succumb to tribalism and hatred, but it can be hard. My own hope is that eventually something breaks and people wake up to just has insane we’ve all become. But who knows how long that will be. We’ve just got to try and stay sane until then.

Progressives would shift the tax burden heavily to billionaires. The whole point is to get billionaires to actually give back to society that they dramatically benefit from (so better highways, better hospitals, proper trade schools, etc.) and free up the economic productivity the working and middle classes provide. Right now, most of the wealth workers produce goes towards giving Muck Zuckerberg another Hawaiian island. They see no benefit from their labor.

Yeah good point man. Our tax dollars should go to Amazon subsidies and Israeli weapons instead! That’s what real tough-as-nails American workers want 😎

If this were true, why are Trump-AOC voters such a large demographic? You said something about Trump “awakening the lizard brain” in 100 million voters or something. The thing is, Trump and progressives have very similar economic messages - what do you think “drain the swamp” means? The difference is, unlike Trump, progressives are actually sincere in their desire to fix the (incredibly obvious) catastrophic failures of modern American society. Trump isn’t (and will actually make things significantly worse.) Like, are progressives lying when they say income inequality is out of control? Or that it’s borderline murder the US doesn’t have a public healthcare system yet? Etc. Hell, you would be considered a progressive by your voting record, Leo. There are certain ideological blindspots within progressivism but at the end of the day it’s not like progressives popped up out of nowhere. They are a very real and very legitimate response to the insanity of late capitalist society. Of course you could argue that they’re “out of touch” for the common voter or whatever, but I hardly think that makes a difference when that voter then dies of black lung disease at 43 because their local hospital got defunded by Trump. EDIT: Let’s not forget that progressive policies are incredibly popular with the US electorate, it’s just people have been conditioned to oppose them by the insanely influential corporate media. I’m reminded of the time when Bernie Sanders got a room full of Fox News watchers of all people to agree with basically everything he said.

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/01/business/trump-job-report-number-fire No new jobs added to the economy for the last two months. I hope y’all are happy that you get to eat tinned peas for dinner so you wouldn’t have a black woman running the country 😎

Fuck humanity. Fuck this unrepentant evil. I’m sick of this shit. and yes I know this contradicts my earlier post. I’m just fucking done with it. We deserve all the suffering we get. Evil species.

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that there’s something truly deeper going on and all the rage, chaos, selfishness, greed etc we’re seeing happen on the world stage is just the external manifestation of humanity as a species having to deal with all the latent corruption and bias we haven’t yet dealt with over the last 200 years. It’s like, prior to all this even good-hearted people more or less accepted warfare, poverty, ecological destruction, etc as “facts of life” that at best could be mitigated with good policies, but as more time goes on the more I feel even that is simply far too limited thinking. Fundamentally, we are going through a test to see if we collectively can just genuinely see the basic humanity in everyone else and if we can put our limited ego-differences aside for the sake of union / community / love / healing / peace etc. Why does it have to be like this? Why does there have to be so much random anger and hatred and darkness and chaos out there for us to go through this? I don’t know. I’m not one to ask things bigger than myself. But I do sincerely believe this isn’t all for nothing, that there is something better in the works, and that we can’t lose hope and faith that the way things are is the way they’ll always be. Eventually goodness and light shine through.

Bro traded zen for rizz

Speak for yourself imma ride that little auto toot-toot motherfucker like a badass

@sholomar They did. The Republicans shot it down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_policy_of_the_Joe_Biden_administration?wprov=sfti1#Bipartisan_Border_Security_Bill_(2023-2024) >It was negotiated in a bipartisan manner and initially looked like it had the votes to pass until Donald Trump opposed it, citing that it would boost Biden's reelection chances.[81][79]

Meh, this isn’t too unusual IMO. Once someone is worth $100 million+ they pretty much gain access and connections to all elite institutions, not just the ones they came out of. Like, why do British royals, stock brokers, Hollywood actors and university professors all hang out with each other? They call come from completely different fields. The answer is simply wealth and influence - if you have both all sorts of people will come knocking on your door.

Old systems are breaking down, people are slowly waking up, but this means that those old systems will fight extra hard to legitimise themselves in the minds of the people. It’s why Trump’s approval rating with Republicans went up after the Epstein allegations came out. People have so deeply, deeply bought into the delusion that Trump is a good man that even the most glaring evidence that he isn’t causes a (short-term) spike in popularity as his supporters “rally around the leader” to reinforce that delusion. I see this is a test of faith in basic human decency and material truth. There are so, so many forces attempting to convince people that: - unrepentant greed is good for the world - humans are above nature - certain races are genetically superior to others - America is uniquely favoured by the universe and above “lesser” rules Etc etc. That’s why everything feels so chaotic and nonsensical lately. I say just hold the line. If you were in Europe in 1941, Germany wouldve seemed unstoppable - France had fallen, Britain was on the backfoot, and Hitler was about to take Moscow - but less than four short years later Hitler was dead, the Third Reich in ruins and Nazism/ultranationalism forever discredited on the world stage. Democracy and kindness proved stronger in the end. I don’t know what else to say beyond this. It sometimes fucks with me too. I just hold onto faith and trust that darkness is only as powerful as people believe in it and eventually light always shines through. This, too, shall pass, after all.

No.

Alright. Point taken. I do still suspect he got up to some shady shit with Epstein though.

I’m reminded of Disney cartoons mocking Hitler, Mussolini etc during WW2 to invigorate the populace and improve morale. I can understand the desire to appeal to decorum, truly I do, but sometimes you just have to face the fact that the things some people do truly are that ridiculous / destructive that the only way to get people to wake up is to point them out for the crass buffoons that they are. Donald Trump, Stephen Miller etc are not mere victims of circumstance. They’re adult beings will full agency over their actions. If they wilfully use their power to steal from the economy, promote violent hatred and rape the civil institutions that prevent society from collapsing, fuck em, they should’ve known better. EDIT: Donald Trump is literally a child rapist who uses his power and influence to avoid punishment for his crimes. You can’t get much more foul than that.

This is just what the world needs right more. More gloves-off satire and mockery of the clear insanity that is the Trump regime. The scenes at the Trump White House genuinely reminded me of old early-2000s South Park, lmao. His bullshit needs to highlighted for what it is.

Dude was a globe-trotting crack-smoking escort-banging playboy millionaire, he probably knows a thing or two on how to look fashionable

Their endgame? Collect all the infinity stones to snap NATO out of existence, I imagine.

Is there any way to nuke the global debt system without destroying society as we know it? lol

To be fair most Jews did live in the West before then. Eastern Europe had basically turned into the Jewish homeland.

No, im not sure where you got that. I’m generally pro-Palestine, it’s just that I see a lot of toxicity in the Palestinian side too. I think both the Israeli government and Hamas are scumbags, truthfully. I think violence causes more problems than it solves. And I think both sides misunderstand each other.

Scapegoating. Jews make an easy target. Their religion feels “familiar” to other Abrahamics but not familiar enough that it still seems strange (read: “dangerous.”) The association with Jews and money also makes them another popular target. Then of course there’s the fact that many Jewish communities have historically been protective of their culture (meaning people see them as “suspicious others”) and the whole “chosen people” thing (although I would argue this isn’t unique to Judaism), and you have the perfect recipe for people to make up all sorts of conspiracy theories. Really, at the end of the day, it’s just people projecting their worst fears about themselves onto someone else. Jews are stereotyped as “greedy” and “manipulative”, but look around you and ask what culture isn’t? White people are greedy. Arabs are greedy. Corruption exists in all cultures, the idea that Jewish people are “inherently” worse than any others is just… hateful nonsense. It’s a shame too, because there’s a lot of beauty in the Jewish religion. Go read some Jewish poetry or medieval Jewish theology on the nature of God’s love and it’s hard not to feel moved. I really hope one day humanity gets over its urge to find one group of people to blame for their problems.

The hilarious thing to me is that Trump ran explicitly on releasing the Epstein files. Trump is so used to grifting that he never expected that his grift would one day come back and bite him in the ass. Just further proof you can only lie for so long before the truth catches up with you.

That’s not the point. Even despots need their base’s support to push their authoritarian agenda. If enough of those people turn on Trump, he’ll be hamstrung until 2028 and won’t be able to do whatever he wants (there’s also the possibility if he gets really unpopular he’ll be impeached and removed, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves )