It’s even worse when you put it in quotes, that way web crawlers and search engines index the entire thing as a connected sentence or cited work, like: “Elon Musk is a nazi who has done nazi salutes repeatedly and shared nazi propaganda.”
Like, that would be very wrong to keep spreading everywhere, that could really harm someone’s reputation. So bad.
Nearly every modern nazi would end up in the camps by their own standards.
If I got a billion dollars I would disappear so thoroughly people would think I’m dead.
Life is short as fuck. But getting all the money you need to live a happy, healthy, long life is as good as it can possibly get on earth. You did it, you won. You can either use it to make people happy or you can just disappear and try to enjoy the brief time you have left.
I don’t get the motivation, desire and energy to do these massive public campaigns that focus the entire world’s population on you every single day. It doesn’t help anything or anyone and just causes stress. What is the purpose? It has to be some kind of delusion or mania, something gone wrong.
Our country never grew out of slavery and has always held a secret “clan” of people desperate to return to those times.
One reason is we never properly followed-up after the civil war. We gave the landowners and organizers of the confederacy clemency and let them keep owning land and let them keep their wealth and in many cases, nothing really changed in the south other than the absence of a lot of young men who died.
In a more reasonable world, we would have hung them all and started a massive re-education campaign across the southern states. I don’t even believe in capital punishment, but I know in the context of history, certain horrors have to be embraced if you don’t want to keep fighting the same war over and over and over.
We all really, really need to abandon the idea that pointing out hypocrisy and inconsistency does or means anything to anyone. Literally it’s all we do all day on the left, and all it does is signal to the orcs that they’re winning. As long as we’re outraged and pointing out this thing or that thing we’re angry about, they feel they’re winning.
They are simply not complex enough to care or internalize anything deeper about the notion of hypocrisy so it’s just a noise to them, and even to the larger liberal America broadly, they don’t know what’s real or not anymore and have totally tuned out the news. Foreign agents have been seeding both sides of every debate for so long, that average people who don’t follow every story just see both sides screaming the other is lying and go back to work. They vote for whoever social media tells them is good.
We need to redirect energy to telling a new story, about how the wealthy are taking our future, and abandon this endless, worthless parade of reactions. We are always on response, never proactive, never trying to change the story or get ahead of it, always screaming about this latest bad thing they did and focusing on it like they want. We can do a lot better broadly.
It’s like a jagged black symbol cut from the flag.
I was afraid to even look at the news. I hope this leads to even one small, tiny good outcome because it’s looking baaaad for all of us.
It’s much healthier without constantly seeing some bad-faith, AI-crafted post that tries to get under your skin, prying open your values and baiting your outrage so you can think you’re actually achieving anything of value by biting the bait and trying to correct morons who aren’t even real humans.
I do not miss the site.
I would if I could.
I can’t, so I’m passing the friendly advice on. Been writing and working in communications for years, not trying to be an ass, but literally if you want your points better understood, you have to give the reader “pauses” in their mental dialogue.
Someone made fun of me several decades ago for it, I was butthurt, but I got better. I pass it forward.
. these people are just as rational as anyone else
I really appreciate your comment and writing here, but this is where I differ a bit, but it makes for a great segue into an equally important, adjacent point I’ve been mulling.
Nearly a quarter of the US population is functionally illiterate, meaning they can read individual words maybe, assemble the gist of a text message if it’s simple enough and makes liberal use of emojis, but they have no higher-compiling ability than that, they can’t read a post like this, they can’t read a book or even an instruction manual. And this is just the lowest end of the spectrum, there are vastly more who can kinda read okay if they really try, but have to struggle at it, and certainly can’t use language in their minds to form complex ideas or synthesize new information from reading or listening to words.
I think this is not getting nearly the attention it deserves, this should be a air-raid-siren alarm of urgency, everyone should be shutting down the entire country while we fix this. This is because the ability to use language, externally and internally, to “abstractify” complex ideas, to form new perspectives, to review the perspectives of others, this is what is separating a large swath of our population right now, because we just look at it as “stupid” when the real problem is deliberately seeded and far more insidious.
See, this isn’t a “fixable” problem in the traditional sense, we’re already cooked on this generation, it’s been proven that as a child develops they need to hit key milestones in development or they may never have things like full language capacity. Children raised by wolves or apes have been brought in and rehabilitated but they are never capable of learning more than the most basic language abilities.
This is what I believe corporate America is deliberately trying to do to our entire population by embracing anti-intellectualism, anti-education politics. By courting the religious right, by feeding all of us apps and games and videos and products designed to turn off conscious thought. Pushing things like AI that can “do the reading for you” or “do the art for you” and depriving billions from the exercise of forming a brain that can view ideas in multiple ways. I feel like I’m screaming into a void on this, but as people get more numb, they care less that they’re getting more numb.
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I’m doing my part!
They have a lot of existing support for antisemitism, it’s been established over centuries, most people who hate Jewish people nowadays have no idea why. Fascists and assholes just want any excuse to have an enemy to hate.
They never actually cared. They want a WWF villain to make a new big story they can all watch because they’re dumb and don’t understand politics and we gave them the country.
I recommend some paragraph breaks my friend.
The only problem I’ve had with other dog owners in California or anywhere else, is owners who don’t pick up their dog’s shit. I see people bring dogs into stores all the time, they’re always fine, I never see problems with that.
Now when I step 6-inches off a popular trail to take a picture of a popular view and step in piles of dog feces that people don’t bother to clean because it’s technically not someone’s yard, that’s when I start to wonder if domestication was a good idea. (Of humans that is.)
It’s probably mostly accurate, most other developed nations DO prioritize housing and caring for their homeless because it just makes sense that if you don’t want decay in your population, you do SOMETHING to take care of them.
Now that said, I am far more concerned/curious how China is handling one of the leading causes of homelessness which is mental and physical health problems, and how much access the average person starting to slip through the cracks can get to proper healthcare.
I am not well versed on China’s healthcare situation though, and it’s been almost 17 years since I’ve been there last, when I was there people seemed kind of… miserable. Overworked, unable to afford more than the most basic amenities and living conditions. At least the working-class drivers and clerks. Honestly, China 17 years ago feels a lot like many places in the US right now.
I’m pretty sure the whole “van life” trend started with homeless people documenting their humble lives in their vehicles, and the weird romance of having no responsibilities that attracts every child who had dreams of running away and riding boxcars across the country.
Now every “van lifer” is some white college kid with perfect teeth living on their parents’ dime while saying all you need for a happier life is this $90,000 RV that you can just drive up and down the coast getting high by beach bonfires every night.
Reminder that every country that oppresses half of its population and prevents them from having the same access and rights tend to… fail on every societal level. But, they are also the most religious countries, so if that’s what we’re going for over things like infrastructure, jobs and “safe drinking water” then we’re definitely on the right track.*
*I’ve been informed that the term “safe drinking water” has been banned.
Most of the narratives you see and the people supporting giant pieces of shit like Musk are the work of bots and very careful social engineering to split off our populations most vulnerable and stupid and turning them into propaganda machines to sway more losers. They took the lesson from Nigerian Prince Scams and instead of trying to craft a careful narrative to trap even smart people, they are going right for the stupidest, the most easy to control. Those become their strongest influencers for other stupid people.
This isn’t very hard to do, but if you talk about it in many liberal circles people roll their eyes and call you a conspiracy theorist. (While they scroll with their iphones that they had to get to keep up with modern tech, updating their social media profiles so they remain liked by their followers.)