Hardkill

Dude, he has both a serious case of schizophrenia and major drug addiction. He is clearly very mentally unstable and has refused to take his antipsychotic medication for his mental instability. This was very likely not some kind of premeditated murder. It was much more likely due to insanity and an extremely poor impulse in that moment.

Yeah, I get that, but they still make a major positive difference for themselves. People with Bipolar disorder, often don't want to take mood stabilizers because they don't want to lose that "high" feeling, but taking mood stabilizers is still necessary for their own good. Patients may also have to do some trial and error with their psychiatrist to figure out which exact medicine brand and dosage is best for them.

Yeah.... It's deeply depressing. What I don't fully understand is why Nick Reiner refused to take his antipsychotic medication when he absolutely needed it.

OP, imagine you are training to prepare for a major battle or war that's coming. Are you willing to do whatever it takes to get ready for it? Are you willing to fight as if your life depends on it? Are you willing to make certain sacrifices to defeat your enemies? Another important question you should ask yourself is "Do I want to be average or below average for the rest of my life?" I know I certainly don't. To be very blunt, I want to be superior to the vast majority of people in the world who are either too weak, too frail, too unenergetic, too slow, too undeveloped, too cowardly, too ignorant, too dumb, too foolish, too dishonest, too useless, or too easily quit doing the most difficult challenges. Besides, it gets easier the more you do something hard again, again, and again. You just have to take it one small step at a time towards greatness.

It turns out that Nick Reiner has Schizophrenia and stopped taking his anti-psychotic medications for it regularly. He's also a drug addict.

We are living in very confusing and very unsettling times.

There is a big difference in intelligence on both sides. Sure, there are a lot of Democrats and leftists in the country who are stupid and naive. However, it's still asymmetrical. There are a lot more Republicans and right-wingers than Democrats and left-wingers in the country who are idiotic and primitive. Also, most Independent voters are still easily influenced by the right-wing media machine into believing that "both sides are equally bad." Furthermore, most people in America are still tradition-oriented, and the Republican Party is still very much the party that represents traditional values more than the Democratic Party does.

This is so heartbreaking. I never would've thought that an Arab would save many jews in that situation like this.

Doesn't mean that the Democrats will win the midterms in 2026 let alone the presidency in 2028. The midterms have an even greater percentage of less informed, less educated voters who are easily swayed by the right-wing propaganda and anti-mainstream messaging than special elections and off-year elections do. Presidential elections, especially have the greatest percentage of voters who are so stupid, so simple-minded, and so uninformed about what the fuck is really going on in the world that they are the most easily seduced by the devilry of the right-wing propaganda, anti-mainstream propaganda, and a charismatic demagogue into still voting Republican over Democrat. What if Tucker Carlson, Dan Bilzerian, or some other charismatic right-wing figure like them actually runs for president in 2028 and runs as another "outsider" populist who promises to burn down the entire system and make "real change"?

That's good to know. I'd like to see how much of a change this will make many years from now.

Every right-wing media outlet since the 1990s has caused media manufacturing consent and blatant media bias for every radical right-wing Republican.

Wouldn't you say that the military and law enforcement are necessary forms of conformity?

I don't think that even the Scandinavian countries are currently solid Green or have Green as their center of gravity, right?

Yeah, I agree with that. The “100 years of neoliberalism” line feels more like a statement about the psychological paradigm than a literal forecast of institutional stability. From a complexity/physics angle, I agree the substrate is already fraying — ecological overshoot, demographic drag, and sheer complexity costs are all pushing the system toward some kind of structural instability that voting alone can’t resolve. Where I’d integrate your point with the SD framing is: even if neoliberalism becomes impossible to maintain on its own terms, that doesn’t automatically mean we transition to something higher. A decaying substrate just opens a fork in the road. With our current level of development, that fork can lead to: – more Green-ish / social-democratic / mixed-economy reforms, or – more Red/Blue authoritarianism, ethno-nationalism, and oligarchic capture. So I’d say: I agree the system is running into hard biophysical and complexity limits; the real question then becomes whether the consciousness is there to channel that destabilization into a wiser order, or whether it just collapses into a more brutal one. That’s where Leo’s “push” point and the whole development piece still matter, even on top of the physics.

I see. That makes sense. So, even if the broader paradigm stays neoliberal/Orange for a long time, it still makes sense for Dems/left-populists to push economic populism as far as the culture will allow, and let that tug-of-war slowly shift things over decades. And you’re not saying we’ve hit some hard point of no return where people care so much about “individual liberty” that they’ll never want more help from government again for the next 50+ years. It’s not like the collective has consciously decided: “No, that’s it, we’re done with the government helping us, we want it totally out of our lives.” It’s more that people are confused, underdeveloped, and pulled by Orange/Blue values, so any move toward more economic populism is slow and contested, not impossible. We of course have already seen how severe but “smaller” crises nudge change even without a full Great Depression: the 2008 financial crisis, COVID + the 2020 recession + the 2021–2023 inflation mess, mass civil unrest like the BLM riots, and lingering systemic stuff like anger over the endless Middle East wars. None of those flipped the paradigm, but they did shake confidence in the status quo and push certain reforms and shifts in public consciousness. So it feels like a long grind of incremental pushing, punctuated by crises that sometimes open temporary windows for deeper change—depending on where development is at. For the time being, that probably means reforms will have to come more incrementally than in the New Deal or Great Society eras, unless you get some truly cataclysmic shock (another depression-level event) plus a very powerful, higher-consciousness movement and leadership ready to capitalize on that window. And on top of that, it depends on how united the political consensus is around those liberal/progressive policies—something that has recently become much clearer to me as a crucial factor. New Deal and Great Society moments weren’t just about crisis; they were also about having enough of the country, elites included, aligned behind a reform direction. Until something like that lines up again, it’s mostly the slow tug-of-war you’re talking about rather than big, clean leaps.