Doomposting containment thread

Rather than shitting up threads where people are having reasonable conversations, put your doomposts here & spare everyone else your misery.

My paranoid thoughts these days run along the lines of “Why would the ultra-rich let the middle class collapse, isn’t it more profitable in the long run for there to be a strong stable working and middle class so that everyone can keep spending and spending (and also not shooting CEOs in the street)?” and the little voice goes “They have more info than we do — they know there isn’t much time left — they know shit is going to fall apart so hard and so fast the rest of us won’t know what hit us so their strategy is just crushing as much wealth out of society as possible so they can live sci-fi lives in a bubble while the rest of us scavenge rat carcasses.”

if there's one thing the last decade has taught me its that the ultra-rich don't know shit

thats not a doompost

honestly the respect for thread rules is through the floor these days

It can be, if you combine the belief that the ultra-rich don't know shit with the belief that nonetheless any attempts to take the steering wheel away from them will fail.

We’re all doomed, doomed I tell ya

When do we get our super shotguns?

(bookmarks thread for predictable future need. sighs)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrNlyDxowWo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPYmD7CyHlY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiMZCgpXuO4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuN83hqsn8U

Scott you have got to get off of youtube lol <3 How are you doing? Are you good?

That said I'm stocking up on things that might get...less available soon. Just in case.

The end is nigh!

Wasn’t thinking about this in terms of prepping, but since you mention, IO, what kinds of things are you stocking up on / anticipating shortages of?

Women's health-type stuff broadly speaking, Narcan, personal Rx that include some controlled stuff...those are top level. Under that is general first aid and personal care supplies.

The former are because I fear availability will drop, the latter because I expect prices will rise and/or they might be needed unexpectedly.

If you thought "Ehh it's a long shot, I don't need those things, that's for other people" may I suggest that the worst that could happen is someday you get to save someone's life? You can be a person who has a life-saving resource in an emergency! Especially if they get harder to...get.

"Are you good?"

haha, i'm okay! i watched ONE doomy economist video and all of a sudden my Youtube was filled with scare headlines like the ones above.

i'm so scared lol

Definitely see if we can get a lifetime supply of SSRI’s now lest RFK Jr. make us detox doing manual labor on an organic farm

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/rfk-jr-kennedy-addicts-wellness-farms-b2585835.html

haha, i'm okay! i watched ONE doomy economist video and all of a sudden my Youtube was filled with scare headlines like the ones above.

― scott seward

yeah i gotta be careful about what i click on or the algo starts feeding me crap

the stuff i'm most careful about trying to avoid is beato-adjacent content

so far things are looking ok

mostly what i wind up getting recommended are extremely long jammidodger reaction videos

i've started watching more baseball videos to switch things up, which means i get recommended Baseball Doesn't Exist videos - "The Most Illegal Baseball Bat Ever Created" is the new one

i also got poetic wax doing a 20 minute video on the Eno/Television recordings, don't care

a 40 minute breakdown of HIM, the "lost gay jesus" film. i'm more interested in the _other_ gay jesus film, the unmade Jens Jorgen Thorsen film _The Many Faces of Jesus_. technically he's bi in this one. apparently the script was published but only translated into danish (the original script was in english). there's also a 1975 danish porn film called Jeg så Jesus dø ("I Saw Jesus Die"), but it's apparently heterosexual. i guess i should check that one out.

i just ran across a low-quality copy of an episode of the 1970 low-budget Star Trek knockoff Phoenix Five - i was trying to find a complete youtube upload of the pilot of the Fifth Glacial Era. god, i know so little aobut australian '70s television. it's in colour too! they must've had high hopes for that, considering colour tv didn't hit australia until, like, 1975

did prussian hitler just say he was going to "crush the ducks that oppose us"? sinister ducks indeed

now the algorithm is recommending me a kat blaque video entitled "the best BDSM film is korean". no it's doing good for me today.

i keep watching random analog synthesizer videos, microgranny noise jams with 200 views. means i get recommended a lot of videos on the history of the 303. the LOC just posted a 90 minutes video on Morton Subotnick and the Buchla 100, 500 videos, ok, i'm in on that. here's a 90 minute video called "FEMME: Lesbian History, Identity Politics & Invisibility", ok, i'll give that a shot.

"the great calculator wars of the 1970s"? ok that sounds good. cornelius 30th anniversary special? ooooh. ouch. "which is the best home video release of rudolph the red-nosed reindeer?" interesting but i don't actually care. "black people rate black anime characters' hair". i guess this is what happens when i watch FD Signifier videos and anime videos.

i know the preceding isn't actually doomposting. even though this is a dystopia i will say the dystopian megacorporation does seem to have a good idea about my niche interests.

um. my ass won't stop bleeding and i can't figure out why. it's not cancer.

The calculator wars sounds interesting! I got my dad a book about the history of the calculator and what Texas Instruments brought to the industry, slide rules to graphing machines, the whole nine yards...for Christmas last year. lol

My first time programming anything was with a HP-34C calculator. I still have to have RPN calculators ever since and can easily spend hours on that HP Calculator Museum site

lest we forget

every news headline i accidentally see throws me into quiet panic and rage and that's fine

I was very proud of myself yesterday, while I was making lunch I told my partner:

—I promise I'm not gonna spend the next four years telling you every stupid, infuriating thing that the people in power said or did.

Which lead to this exchange when we sat down to eat:

—What was the thing you wanted to tell me earlier?
—What thing?
—You said "I promise I'm not gonna spend the next four years telling you every infuriating thing, but..."
—Oh. I didn't though! I left out the "but"! There was absolutely gonna be a "but," but when I heard myself speaking, saying "I promise I'm not gonna spend the next four years..." I was like, Why wait? Why not start today. Aren't you proud of me?
—...Yeah!

(For the record though, the "but" was some jackass GOP congressman braying about deporting Bishop Budde)

The tariff stuff and other bans made me contemplate a career change into smuggling and trying to decide whether I would be good at it. I wouldn’t do it if I thought I wouldn’t be good at it.

The other day I had a minor panic at the thought of our city and state having to decide between deporting immigrants vs being banned from federal funds for affordable housing and education.

The tariff stuff and other bans made me contemplate a career change into smuggling

I mean

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/gonewiththewind/images/1/1c/Rhett1.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/295?cb=20081103033236

https://medias.spotern.com/spots/w1280/356/356134-1646043443.webp

The dog is sitting at the table and drinking a nice relaxing beverage. The room is in flames. The dog knows it is not fine. The dog is engaging in self-care. The dog radically accepts that the room is on fire and they are not able to put out the flames. The dog cannot get out of the room. The exists are blocked. The dog prefers not to think about the reason the exits are blocked.

Nobody is coming for the dog. The people outside know the dog is there, but it is not safe for them to try and rescue the dog. The people outside love the dog very much and really, really want to help the dog. They can't. The dog accepts this. The people outside may not have radically accepted this yet.

The dog considers that she might perhaps be suffering from smoke inhalation. The dog wonders if she should stop, drop, and roll, like she was taught in obedience school. If the dog did this, though, she wouldn't be able to drink her tea. It is a very nice cup of tea. One wouldn't think drinking hot tea in a room that is on fire would provide much solace, but it does. The dog is very glad and grateful for the cup of tea.

is this for US politics specifically or was it envisaged as like wide use

Do you mean like...Spurs?

wide use

spurs haven't got any width

I think it was last year. I think it was after the election. The human memory isn't as reliable as we like to think it is, and the longer ago something was, the less reliable my memory is. So I want to write it now, at least, as fully as I can remember it.

I don't follow the media, as a harm reduction measure. It wasn't until after the election that I heard about what he said he was going to _do_. One of my friends said that she was worried for her father-in-law, that
That Man said he was going to deport all immigrants, legal and illegal, and her father-in-law was a naturalized citizen. (Her father-in-law voted for Trump, incidentally.)

And I... have learned to think before I speak. And at the same time, it was like... of course That Man said it. That Man was a fucking lunatic. He had no idea about anything. I mean, you can't just deport people who are _legal_ citizens to countries they are _no longer_ legal citizens of, the logistical hurdles alone are...

"Leave the Bronx."

Oh. Oh, _fuck_.

It is like that, sometimes, The stupidest possible things. There's this terrible mockbuster of "Escape From New York" called _Escape From the Bronx_. Made in Italy, naturally. When Henry Silva sends people around with loudspeakers assuring people that they'll give everyone a nice place to live in Arizona, it's obvious that he's actually going to kill them. He's evil. That's what evil people do. I mean, not just in movies, the movie didn't just make that up. There's precedent. A well-known precedent. A man who said in public that he was going to "deport" a certain group of people, and what he meant, very obviously meant, was that he was going to kill them all. And he did, in fact, kill a large number of people. Millions.

And I know this, have known it for quite a long time. And Trump is so obviously like this other man that it doesn't even bear saying, at this point. And somehow my brain didn't make that connection until I thought of _Escape From the Bronx_. My brain couldn't get there by direct flight. It needed to make a transfer.

And then I was suicidal for, I don't know, maybe a week or so.

I've learned to think before I speak. I've learned to watch what I say and to who. If I'm not careful about what I say and how I say it, I could put people I care about at risk, the way I was at risk for a little bit. The flipside of that is that I'm carrying a lot in my head. A lot I can't really say. And sometimes I don't know if something's really true until I say it.

Yesterday I said it out loud to someone else for the first time. It was my therapist. I said that if things didn't change, a lot of people were going to end up dead. And it's normal... it's normal for patients to say things like that, and one gently pushes back, in a way that doesn't make the patient feel challenged or invalidated but encourages them to "check the facts". She said, lots of things could happen. You don't know that for certain.

And I'd been thinking about this in a while, trying to de-escalate that thought, "check the facts" on that thought for a while, and I said it. A lot of times I do check the facts on something and it doesn't hold up. Usually only takes a day or so for me to realize. And like I said, it'd been months. So I told her. I told her about how he said he was going to "deport" all those people, and she said what I thought when I first heard about it - oh, that's ridiculous, I don't know how he thinks he's going to manage something like that, and I said (therapist's name). He doesn't intend to. When fascists say they're going to "deport" people, they mean something else.

And she believed me. I'm cautious about... I don't want to be a Cassandra to the extent that I can help it. I'm never quite sure if people will believe me or not, when I say some things, even if they are true. She believed me, though.

Last night I was at movie night with some friends, and my friend who has a car gave me a ride home. And she said, how are things going. It's difficult for people to talk about things like that these days, not just me. I don't want to be negative, I don't want being around me to be an unpleasant or traumatic experience. And I talked for a little while about watching movies with friends. I've started doing a lot more of that, because a lot of times I just don't know how to talk, things being the way they are. And I said look, I don't want to be... I don't want to be negative, but I think it's important to say this. When a fascist says he's going to deport a certain group of people, a large number of people, he doesn't mean deport. And she's culturally Jewish. (Pretty sure anti-Zionist. It's not a conversation I initiate, but in my social circle it's a safe assumption.) She knows immediately what I'm saying. And she says yeah, I think it was important to say that.

So I'm gonna say it here. It's easier to say it to cis people, simply because, well, you're overall a lower suicide risk. I get the impression... I'm not hugely socially connected, my world is pretty small... but I get the impression that most people haven't made that connection. To me it's not... I don't look at it judgmentally. My experience is that there are personal consequences, it can be pretty traumatic for me to _think_ certain things, _especially_ if they're true. And so I don't want to say those things. It's important to say, though. If That Man is not stopped... that is something he _will_ do to the people he's saying he's going to "deport". That those are, literally, the stakes here. I think it's important for people to know that and be able to accept that.

But I'm not going to say it outside of the doomposting thread. Yet.

You're not the only one, Kate. I've seen more than a handful of people saying out loud that these ICE raids and threats of deportation aren't about deportation, they're about the other thing. Things. Most people are at the very least connecting the dots to labor camps and effective slavery. The proposed Missouri law makes this very clear: life in prison without the possibility of parole for being undocumented, and humans being hunted by bounty patrols.

hi all ... just dropped in to see what's happening in this thread. i'm going to go now. thanks!

Alpine Static’s condition was in no condition to be in this thread.

I hear you, Kate & IO. I have a lot of the same thoughts and I have them a lot. I think about that famous passage from “They Thought They Were Free” about how people accustom themselves to the intolerable incrementally. I think about the boy who cried wolf — there’s a version of the story where he wasn’t making it up, someone was putting wolf-shaped decoys up all over the place and whisking them away before the villagers could get there, and — “see, it’s always wolves with you shepherd boys, everything’s a wolf.” And when they send in the real wolves nobody will come.

I think about how many people — myself included — would be willing to give up their livelihood to confront the horrors, in the face of almost certain failure & consignment to the horror-house. Not many of us. Myself included, probably, depending.

They’ve been preparing for this for years. We’ve been crossing our fingers that our roommates wouldn’t invite the vampire across the threshold. Now we’re in the room with the vampire. Our roommate has gone to get the vampire a beer. The vampire doesn’t care about me. Yet. But he’s looking at the closed door of our other roommate. She works nights. We both know she’s not sleeping in there — she knows the vampire is in the living room. She and the vampire are acutely aware of each other. They can hear each other thinking.

Added “what if there is a bank run?” to my doom list that needs containing

Added “what if there is a bank run?” to my doom list that needs containing

I'm sure the FDIC is on some right-wing maniac's kill list.

Added “what if there is a bank run?” to my doom list that needs containing

― Elvis Telecom

Yeah I don't spend much time thinking about it because, well, it seems trivial in light of the other things happening, but one of the... less awful possibilities in this whole thing is that That Man actually winds up implementing some fucking Larouchite economic policy in order to, I don't know, pay off the national debt or something, thereby rendering global currency basically worthless. Or maybe he'll decide the official currency of the United States is Trump Memecoin. Or something. IDK. Everything seems so up in the air that doing any long-term planning - like, say, looking for a job - seems pretty fucking pointless.

I've started relying a lot more on less "healthy" coping mechanisms. Alcohol. Sleeping pills. Not to an extent that it's likely to cause problems. I've just historically been kind of an ascetic about substances. "Drink more" doesn't _seem_ like the kind of thing that would be a good life decision, but neither did "come out as transgender", which was such a good decision that it's _still_ a good decision even if it winds up getting me killed.

Serious-Not-Serious thought: I was at coffee the other day and this older couple had flyers printed up saying "TAX THE VAMPIRES". I get the metaphor, but I am a nerd, and I tend to think about literal vampires. Also, I am gay, and while I am not a monsterfucker, I do think vampires are hot in a gay way.

I definitely understand the desire to dehumanize fascists, and at the same time... I'm not a monster. It's taken me a long time to accept that. The problem with all fictional points of comparison for fascists is that most of them are more sympathetic than That Man. I while away my time talking with friends about whether this fictional villain or that fictional villain is as bad as That Man. A lot of them just aren't.

IDK. A lot of people do like the villains, the bad guys. In my generation it seems like it's always been that way. There are people who like the Joker because he's evil, and there are people who like the Joker because he's gay, and as the meme goes, we are not the same... but we do have the same cultural reference points, the same _heroes_ in a lot of cases. We just understand them differently. The Matrix? Fantastic film. I think that. Some dumb kid who shot up his high school thought that.

I guess that's not "doomy" as such. Just interesting.

the thing with that is all the villains that my generation empathized with or found 'relatable' - Tyler Durden, Walter White, Tony Soprano, Jordan Belfort, Joker...they all at least had some personality. they said cool things and had moments that were badass. because they are fictional characters. the real life versions of them have none of this, they are in fact the most cringey, uninteresting, miserable people on the planet, at least Trump circa the 2015 debates kinda looked like he was having some fun, now they're just throwing their entire being behind some dude who has literally everything a human being could ever ask for but instead spends 12 hours a day responding "so true!" to race science on Twitter. they're all just unbelievable losers

Hence the meme

https://64.media.tumblr.com/8ce692e029d948264cea6f9a8be08bf8/4b6f27f088f1cc81-ad/s540x810/4d6299ada59d80087e653cde8133bf0152a47464.jpg

I'm sure the FDIC is on some right-wing maniac's kill list.

Hence the meme

― the real slim pickens (Ye Mad Puffin)

every generation gets the hannah arendt it deserves, ig

xp I can't believe this took until 2025, but it finally occurred to me the other day: When Donald Trump looks in the mirror, he sees Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, right?

I don't think he knows what that is.

Apply same scenario to Elon tho and I'd agree.

Trump's mirror fantasy is probably closer to 1981 Arnold

Trump's mirror fantasy is Narcissus.

Norma Desmond iirc

Trump's mirror fantasy is himself

Elon scares me way more than Trump does, Trump I think is at least sort of understandable as in, if you were born rich and only had your worst impulses catered to and were never held accountable for anything idk, maybe we would turn out like him, Elon on the other hand is like a comic book villain and capable of evil beyond even Trump's imagination

Comic book villains at least get to have charisma and some cool lines.

Elon thinks he's Tony Stark when really he's Justin Hammer.

if you were born rich and only had your worst impulses catered to and were never held accountable for anything idk, maybe we would turn out like him

doesn't this also describe EM to a tee?

they're both total losers, and i think what connects them is an extreme vanity and privilege that makes them both profoundly stupid about how anything in the world actually works. what scares me with Trump is the same as with Musk -- not so much the man himself, but the obsequious cretins who have slithered in and figured out how to get what they want through flattery.

yeah well Elon is the autistic version of that, someone whose life goals include "everyone thinks I'm great at video games"

Absent an on-paper medical diagnosis, I don't buy that Musk is autistic. He's just an emotionally stunted criminal piece of shit who doesn't currently have enough lead in his diet.

Oh Luigi, why did you have to show your face to that cute girl at the hostel?

Even so, I think he was a one-shot (so to speak)

Elon scares me way more than Trump does, Trump I think is at least sort of understandable as in, if you were born rich and only had your worst impulses catered to and were never held accountable for anything idk, maybe we would turn out like him, Elon on the other hand is like a comic book villain and capable of evil beyond even Trump's imagination

― frogbs

Elon is accountable to Trump. Trump is accountable to no-one. Trump could order a nuclear strike against anyone, for any reason, and refusing that order would be, well, sedition.

If there's anything scary about the current administration, it's that Trump's quite possibly the _most politically experienced person_ in it. Literally nobody is saying "no" to this man.

If you need me, I'll be curled up in bed in a fetal position.

imagine if all doomposting was actually contained in this thread

So is all this stuff saying that a foreign rapper is "Not Like U.S." a preparation for the American public to accept an invasion of Canada with equanimity?

Lollll

well fuck

I got nothing, hopefully I can leave the country soon, I give up

as I posted on the USPOL thread, there really is no difference between simply talking about anything happening and doomposting, so I'm not sure where we can draw the line

aw c'mon those were some solid doomposts!

Kate and io otm upthread. Habeas corpus is dead. They're already abducting people by the hundreds and flying them to forced labor camps in El Salvador without due process and against the orders of the federal judiciary. ICE is kidnapping people without showing a badge or even saying what agency they're with. They've started purging the military of women and poc (not just the top brass, it's the rank and file, too) to build their white supremacist stormtrooper army. All while tanking the economy and lighting the kindling at the edges of WWII. And we're only two months in.

and the thing is, none of it will work. but millions will die before the pendulum swings back.

Not very doomposty to think that the pendulum will ever swing back

describing things as they are happening is totally not the same as future tripping and freaking out, I should know, I’ve been in therapy hahaha

Doomposting through daylight savings

People want to leave where they are at a lot of the time, but where can you really go that's 'better'.

Much of Europe is voting for fascism and wherever there is a whiff of anything humane its compromised by Capitalism.

While this is true on some level, Bilbao is better than Babruysk, though I recognise this is subjective

Which is partly why I think some people, rightly or wrongly, still think some places are better than others, and attempt to relocate from one to the other

I'd think about this some more if I was you.

gentlemen you can't suggest there are places where life is liveable here, this is the doomposting thread

Doomposting through daylight savings

Twice a year I adjust my doom level up or down

I took the objective of the thread literally: trying to contain the feeling of impending doom, mirroring the Trump containment thread. Not a repository of despair. Don't we say that hope dies last?

The Trump thread was also a repository of despair!

While this is true on some level, Bilbao is better than Babruysk, though I recognise this is subjective

― anvil, Wednesday, March 19, 2025 7:38 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Which is partly why I think some people, rightly or wrongly, still think some places are better than others, and attempt to relocate from one to the other

― anvil, Wednesday, March 19, 2025 7:50 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I'd think about this some more if I was you.

― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, March 19, 2025 8:04 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think there's def places with lower access to electricity, water, etc, places currently at war, kinda obvious places are "better" from that pov, but if you're doing the tour of western democracies yeah the bad things are everywhere and fleeing to where they're less strong is prettt futile.

Good people leaving Suckville also means lowering the percentage of good people in Suckville.

Which makes Suckville more sucky. The people making it suck have no check on their suckitude project.

This worsens things for the most vulnerable Suckvillians. People who for whatever reason don't have the option of leaving Suckville.

I mean, if that is part of your cost/benefit calculation about leaving.

if you're doing the tour of western democracies yeah the bad things are everywhere and fleeing to where they're less strong is prettt futile.

I hear you on this, but people flee nonetheless. Bulgaria and Croatia are net exporters of people, Canada and Belgium are net importers. People make such calculations based on a number of factors, that it seems unlikely they would consider futile. Of course they could be mistaken, and many do run into a different set of problems and return - so people in that category might agree with you

A person that goes through a medical bankruptcy in the US doesn't have an equivalent experience in Wales. I think this isn't a meaningless distinction but a tangible difference in lived experience. Its not necessarily to say people should or shouldn't move, more to say that the idea that everything is roughly equally bad everywhere isn't as true as it might seem

good morning!

Woah ILX is anti immigration now.

(BRB, I’m telling people in El Salvador to stay put not because we’re racist but because we suck$.

The birth rate in the US has been below the replacement level of 2.1 since 1972 (with the exception of 2006-07). In that same period, the population has grown by 62%. And you guys are breeders: in the EU, you tie with France, and only Bulgaria and Georgia are more enthusiastic about making babies than you are. The share of residents with a migration background in rich countries is constantly expanding, and we're economically dependent on it. Nothing can put a stop to that, not even if Trump was elected another 3 times.

A person that goes through a medical bankruptcy in the US doesn't have an equivalent experience in Wales.

Not now, but they might in give years.

Which is to say the bad things ppl might flee from in the context we're discussing are invariably going to catch up.

people are always going to move around, no matter what. it's just what humans do. people just need to accept that and also imo should insist on mobility as a human right

also i think that immigrants add meaningful perspective to all societies by virtue of (a) choosing to belong and (b) necessarily having an outsider's POV. not really sure why this would be discouraged because "everywhere has problems" -- everyone already knows that everywhere has problems but people are going to move around anyway, sorry

Which is to say the bad things ppl might flee from in the context we're discussing are invariably going to catch up.

this sort of sounds like you believe every western country will have the exact same laws and rules, and this is inevitable.

even in the worst of all possible outcomes, there would still be differences from place to place, and people are all diff and have diff situations or needs, many of which are prob quite hard for other people to comprehend.

even in the worst of all possible outcomes, there would still be differences from place to place

global wind patterns will influence radiation spread yes

budo jeru, I don't think anyone itt is arguing against immigration (I'm an immigrant), it's the specific thing of "things are really bad in the US so I'm moving to (insert European country here) - not that it's wrong to move, just that it's a faulty premise.

I don't think any of that is inevitable, LocalGarda, I just think it's a struggle that crosses borders

Tho actually as this is the doomposting thread I should think it's inevitable.

yes but saying "i'm all for immigration, except when people do it for reasons i don't agree with" is not a good take

A person that goes through a medical bankruptcy in the US doesn't have an equivalent experience in Wales.

Not now, but they might in give years.

Which is to say the bad things ppl might flee from in the context we're discussing are invariably going to catch up.

"Might" is a significant qualifier here though. I could have made the above statement in 1975, it didn't become true in 1980. There's a possible fatalism here which I don't think is necessarily baked in

There may be crashes on one particular road with crash barriers and signs and road calming and a speed limit. We could remove those measures and the number of crashes increases. We could say, well nothing has really changed, roads are roads after all. And perhaps people are beginning to see just how dangerous that road was all along. But the road really did become more dangerous than it was, and more dangerous than a different road that kept its measures.

...which is why I stressed that that's not what's being said :)

It's fine for ppl to move for reasons good or stupid or whatever, pointing out someone's reason doesn't make sense doesn't imply them doing so is bad.

xpost

i agree that that sort of sentiment is annoying and also lacks perspective/smacks of privilege but i still think people should be free to move if they want to -- and also what people express glibly might not contain the totality of their calculus or the ramifications of immigrating in terms of their specific needs, none of which it makes sense for another person to condemn so cavalierly as "yes but capitalism is everywhere"

Agree with all that.

A person that goes through a medical bankruptcy in the US doesn't have an equivalent experience in Wales.

ding ding ding, I literally cannot afford to keep living in the US due to insurance and medical and dental costs

and sure, maybe this:

the bad things ppl might flee from in the context we're discussing are invariably going to catch up

but I'll take a few years while I can get them

obv nobody can move away from climate change

and also what people express glibly might not contain the totality of their calculus or the ramifications of immigrating in terms of their specific needs, none of which it makes sense for another person to condemn so cavalierly as "yes but capitalism is everywhere"

fortunately I don't give one single fuck what smug BS xyz spouts

I think the notion that there isn't actually a lot of difference between places and situations, and people and their needs, lends itself to the kind of nihilism we're seeing in the way government is run. I'm not saying we all need to wake up every day and think about ten positive hopeful affirmations or whatever, but feel like avoiding nihilism might be important.

yeah I feel much better after sleeping on all this, had a long serious talk with my wife, prob staying put but damn this fucking country is gonna get so bad.

I took the objective of the thread literally: trying to contain the feeling of impending doom, mirroring the Trump containment thread. Not a repository of despair. Don't we say that hope dies last?

― Naledi

Do we? Well, that's me fucked, then.

Good people leaving Suckville also means lowering the percentage of good people in Suckville.

Which makes Suckville more sucky. The people making it suck have no check on their suckitude project.

This worsens things for the most vulnerable Suckvillians. People who for whatever reason don't have the option of leaving Suckville.

I mean, if that is part of your cost/benefit calculation about leaving.

― at your swervice (Ye Mad Puffin)

I will politely suggest that this is a fairly privileged way of looking at things. I'm less concerned about the percentage of "good people" in Suckville than I am in how likely I am to be alive in five years. That likelihood is still reasonably high. I mean it's markedly lower than the likelihood of white cis people, but it's still pretty high.

There are other calculations: Will leaving the country significantly raise that likelihood? If I don't leave now, will I still be able to get out at a point when leaving the country _would_ significantly raise that likelihood? (The answer to that question, I've long ago concluded, is probably "no". For now, I've concluded that the answer to the first question is probably also "no".)

Cost/benefit calculations are something I'm very aware of. A couple weeks ago I was talking to a 74-year-old woman who started her gender transition a couple years back. She said that she thought about going to the Johns Hopkins clinic when she was 19 - around 1970, by my math - but decided it would be too difficult. She says now that she feels like she made the right decision, that she'd probably be dead if she'd transitioned then. I figure she knows what she's talking about.

Whether it would be advisable for me to leave the country isn't something I've thought about. I'm still trying to decide how I feel about sleeping pills actually giving me a full night's sleep and trying to prepare for the mental ordeal of going grocery shopping this afternoon. I don't have the executive function to leave the country, whether it would be right or wrong. I don't read the news. I don't know what the "oh, fuck" is about. I woke up this morning. I'm alive. Good enough. Literally, that's the extent of my calculations. I'm trying to have a "present orientation", as they say in my therapy, and my present orientation starts and ends with: I'm not dead and I'm not homeless.

<3 btw Kate I am gonna be in PDX next week Tues-Fri, I will bug u in email

"yeah I feel much better after sleeping on all this, had a long serious talk with my wife"

Good you've managed to calm down a bit.

I don't think you really have any idea what it's like to live in the US right now, but thanks

my personal line in the sand is that once the first person I know IRL is jailed, deported, or disappeared, I'm done here

hopefully that won't happen

I am literally spending more on health insurance and related costs each month than the total cost of my mortgage and utilities (which says a lot about how lucky I am to be in that home situation as well, most people prob pay more)

<3 btw Kate I am gonna be in PDX next week Tues-Fri, I will bug u in email

― Hedwig and the Angry Ents (sleeve)

nice, make sure it's email email and not ilxmail, i don't know how to check ilxmail lol, i'd love to hang

I am literally spending more on health insurance and related costs each month than the total cost of my mortgage and utilities (which says a lot about how lucky I am to be in that home situation as well, most people prob pay more)

― Hedwig and the Angry Ents (sleeve)

yeah i'm spending a ton on COBRA and it's worth it for now... i have multiple medical conditions but a lot of them are caused by the stress of, uh, living in america in 2025, that's part of the "do i leave" consideration as well. i'm theoretically employable but i don't know where to have a job that has working conditions that i can tolerate. working conditions have gotten a lot worse over the last seven years. if i could find a job that had the working conditions my last job did seven years ago, i'd be fine.

Most popular opposition leader arrested so he can't become the new President!

not good: Turkiye (Istanbul's mayor Imamoglu could dethrone Erdogan)

good: Romania (Georgescu's a far-right Putin fan)

I keep reading the title as 'shitposting containment thread'

my personal line in the sand is that once the first person I know IRL is jailed, deported, or disappeared, I'm done here

Personally not sleeping particularly well, recently, given an impending visa-approved work trip

FWIW, American friends — and I don’t know the official gov’t line on it or anything, but — I invite you all to come up to Canada. Sure, we’ve got some maga chuds here, and yeah, we might only be a few years behind you on the march to fascism, and holy shit, I guess there’s a halfway decent chance we become an occupied territory (not likely a ‘cherished 51st state’), BUT
For now we have a bit of esprit de corps and our institutions seem a little more robust against executive fuckery than yours. I’ve never known any USAnian who came up, worked, and didn’t eventually get permanent residency / citizenship if they wanted it.

I grew up in a town with a lot of draft dodgers and it was awesome. Give my grandkids (should I have any) the same experience, willya?

Thanks for the invite. By the time we'll have decided to go chances are good that currency restrictions will make it impossible to transfer any of our Reichsmarks US dollars out of the country, so we'd be elderly indigents.

xp I appreciate that perspective, hd! hell it's only a day's drive.

By the time we'll have decided to go chances are good that currency restrictions will make it impossible to transfer any of our Reichsmarks US dollars out of the country, so we'd be elderly indigents.

Never gonna happen; that would cause too many problems for their rich scumbag friends.

FTR, my wife and I live 60 miles from the northern border and she (a citizen, naturalized under GWB) now carries her passport card in her wallet at all times.

I think there's def places with lower access to electricity, water, etc, places currently at war, kinda obvious places are "better" from that pov, but if you're doing the tour of western democracies yeah the bad things are everywhere and fleeing to where they're less strong is prettt futile.

― a ZX spectrum is haunting Europe (Daniel_Rf)

is it, though? is fleeing from a right-wing autocracy to a state that _is at risk of becoming_ a right-wing autocracy , but currently _isn't_, truly futile? particularly when, from a global perspective, trump mostly seems to be making his allies weaker and his enemies stronger?

They've started purging the military of women and poc (not just the top brass, it's the rank and file, too) to build their white supremacist stormtrooper army.

― Chyiv Kyiv (Fetchboy)

strongest military in the world! tremendously advanced weaponry far beyond what any other military can boast.

just hope there isn't a smallpox outbreak or anything.

FWIW, American friends — and I don’t know the official gov’t line on it or anything, but — I invite you all to come up to Canada.

― dentist looking too comfortable singing the blues (hardcore dilettante)

i've thought about it. the economics are a little dicey, though. idk, does canada give a preference to spouses of canadian citizens?

I am not an immigration lawyer, but i believe that having a Canadian spouse is a pretty solid asset. (Sorry, folks, I’m taken.)

Canada’s borders are pretty damn open, afaict. Most of us remember well a time when we and USAnians didn’t even need a passport to travel between the two countries. I think our deportation policy consists of a lifeguard announcing “five minutes to closing, will everyone please get out of the pool.” That said, I’m sure it’s more complicated than that; we do have a well-developed civil service who love to make things difficult (though from what I hear it’s still nothing on the DMV)

"particularly when, from a global perspective, trump mostly seems to be making his allies weaker and his enemies stronger?"

Trump has had an effect on the Canadian election, but aside from that the effect has been minimal where across Europe the EU is spending more on tanks and bombs. But its not as if the EU needs an excuse to shift rightwards.

In nihilism news

"If dark energy keeps decreasing to the point where it becomes negative, the universe is predicted to end in a reverse big bang scenario known as the big crunch."

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/mar/19/dark-energy-mysterious-cosmic-force-weakening-universe-expansion

that's the good ending!

don't talk to me about advanced particle physics theory ... I've seen Men in Black!

particularly when, from a global perspective, trump mostly seems to be making his allies weaker and his enemies stronger?

I don't really know what you're refering to - who are Trump's global enemies that are now stronger?

I read that as meaning Trump is making America's (former?) allies weaker and (former?) enemies stronger (with exception of Israel, who's position seems unchanged)

Although I might just be reading my own interpretation there, with there being something of a state of flux

But then the post would be saying that Putin's increased influence is going to keep Europe from going fascist. And I don't think anyone here believes that aside from maybe Tracer's dad?

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-voter-regret-choice-wife-ice-bradley-bartell-camila-munoz-2046988

"Guess I might have move to Peru if they kick my wife out of the country. Btw, I still love Trump and I have faith he will improve the system."

The veritable flood of horrifying travel stories and folks being detained/denied entry is making me feel extra fucking doom-y today.

tell me about it, my wife is flying back from 2 months in Nicaragua on the 1st

I'm sorry sleeve, not something you should ever have to fret about. I hope it all goes smoothly.

Canada’s borders are pretty damn open, afaict. Most of us remember well a time when we and USAnians didn’t even need a passport to travel between the two countries. I think our deportation policy consists of a lifeguard announcing “five minutes to closing, will everyone please get out of the pool.” That said, I’m sure it’s more complicated than that; we do have a well-developed civil service who love to make things difficult (though from what I hear it’s still nothing on the DMV)

― dentist looking too comfortable singing the blues (hardcore dilettante)

i have no doubt about my ability to get to canada! i just am not sure how well i can get by there... idk how hard it is for undocumented immigrants up there... it's pretty fucking hard in the us, i can tell you that for sure. things like work, places to live, healthcare access... it's pretty expensive there!

Are they trying to invoke something by the WAY too many references to "war/conflict with China" in this article?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/21/musk-pentagon-briefing-china

The only comedian who I came across who was funny turned out to have terrible views. But it fits in with this thread: there should be no laughter in this world

milkshake ducked by the big lad who does funny Irish tiktoks about the English and nice cups of tea. Painful, genuinely painful. https://t.co/UtqylkoUdf

— Ross McCafferty (@RossMcCaff) March 20, 2025

#YourFaveIsProblematic

Yeah that’s going very badly for him at the mo. He scrubbed his presence so fast it took me like 24 hours to run across what he actually said.

earlier someone asked what to invest in and my answer is "tasty, herd-able people." work them as hard as they can tolerate, but put them to slaughter before they get tough.

My answer would be invest in love.

i'm having a shitty day and i'm tired of always using my effective coping skills, i want to doompost

i can't see a possible future for humanity where the people in power _don't_ see me as an undesirable to be eliminated

great, america is a fascist dictatorship run by a genocidal madman with access to an enormously sized nuclear arsenal. and people are going along with him. of course there's no future to his vision of america, but there aren't exactly any competing visions, are there? sure, let's get a "coalition of the willing" together, let's get all the leaders of the "good countries" together. that leaves us with...

nothing. jack shit. there is no reason at all to hope that things will get better in the next couple hundred years.

the _best_ case scenario i can imagine is that the madman-in-chief dies of natural causes - soon. that way you're left with some buckeye who notably _lacks_ a cult of personality in charge of a completely broken and non-functional country. i pretty much see militarized civil conflict as inevitable. i'm not looking forward to it. the president, in 2020, has already sent DHS to portland to kidnap people off the street in unmarked cars. it didn't take then. nowadays, i think he'd be successful. i know what people outside of portland think of us. i don't think people would oppose the president if he were to impose martial law here.

if we're lucky he'll die (again, i _very much hope_ of natural causes) before starting global thermonuclear war. if we're lucky we'll just wind up with federal troops under fascist control massacring peaceful protesters and that galvanizes people into opposing the regime. at the same time, with as much work as the us president is doing to piss off corporate overlords, i wouldn't consider any of them trustworthy or allies. i doubt corporate overlords would find anti-fascists trustworthy allies, either.

honestly, the impending global climate catastrophe is a crucial consideration. assuming minimal amounts of nuclear conflict and assuming that there isn't complete human extinction, there will still be mass death - i'd expect the global population to be about half what it is now by the end of the century. that's in the best-case scenario. in nearly any scenario, most of those deaths will come from subaltern groups, particularly in the Global South. the _need_ for a global consensus on climate will, i think, ultimately bring about some sort of ecofascist regime, one which would very probably wind up exterminating me if i'm not already dead. over the next couple hundred years it'll probably liberalize to some extent. that's great, but i'm alive now, and i don't like it.

I don't have any specific doom to post, just wanted to say somewhere that the past, idk, ten days have been crushingly awful

the doom is real

Here's how I look at it: events like No Kings steel me for days like this.

true true, I'm not in the US, but there was a pro-Palestine march that I didn't go to that day but should have (I did attend a free concert of weirdo music in the park though!).

sigh. I live in the Gay Village, so I'm going to go for a walk and take solace in seeing people living their lives autonomously. fuck fascists and their putrefying souls

otm

sigh. I live in the Gay Village, so I'm going to go for a walk and take solace in seeing people living their lives autonomously. fuck fascists and their putrefying souls

― rob, Wednesday, 18 June 2025 bookmarkflaglink

Carrying on with the day to day is important at times like these.

I was sent links to flight radar screenshots that show how many flights are going on between US military bases all over Europe and Jordan and it's a lot.

Absolutely fuck this joke of a country. I'm besides myself with rage at this scotus decision. The Rubicon is in the rearview now.

poll idea: "If you could choose, what third-party country would you prefer to be hustled off to?"

was wondering - they were talking about possibly sending migrants from Myanmar, Vietnam etc to South Sudan before the courts blocked them... would they be imprisoned there, or free to go wherever they want? And if they're imprisoned, for what 'crime'? Under who's jurisdiction, etc.?

They'd be imprisoned, they are essentially being shipped off to slavery.

that's insane... immigration offenses are civil, not criminal

that's the weird thing with Mahmoud Khalil as well... he's out on bail while he awaits trial. WTF is the the bail for? What the fuck is the trial for? The guy literally committed no offense

he offended the state of Israel, of which we are a client state

Are we the only country in history to have a de facto loyalty test for another nation-state?

hard to get over how insane the SC decision is, like imagine if Obama had gangs of secret cops abducting people and sending them to foreign prisons and his handpicked justices just went "yeah, he can do that if he wants", I think that literally would've started another Civil War

it was a mistake not to put trump in prison until the end of his life. sometimes the anger and helplessness makes me feel like i will swear off electoral politics entirely. chickenshit democrat losers

it was a mistake not to put trump in prison until the end of his life. sometimes the anger and helplessness makes me feel like i will swear off electoral politics entirely. chickenshit democrat losers

― budo jeru

i don't think it's necessary to swear off electoral politics! and at the same time, just... these people do not have our back. they will not support us. the options are not "voting" and "violence". that's a false binary. there _are_ non-violent ways of enacting change. they're very difficult to do, and, i mean, like tipsy mothra said in the trans politics thread, the _opportunity_ is there.

the thing about realizing that these people will not stand up or us is realizing that _we don't owe them anything_. they have my vote, but only because it's not something that i find has any particular value to me individually. if i could think of anything better to do with it, i would.

he offended the state of Israel, of which we are a client state

― czech hunter biden's laptop (the table is the table), Monday, June 23, 2025 8:17 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

i hesitate to start a shitshow, and probably i'm too ignorant to inject myself into this ongoing convo in the culture, but am i the only one who reads this and feels like it is uncomfortable close to "jews control the government" ?

no. it pissed me off mightily and i started to write a post about it, but there’s no reasonable defense so

the only way that could be read as antisemitic is if you conflate the state of Israel with the Jewish people, which is itself antisemitic.

For the record, though:

- students and others are being rounded up and illegally deported for criticizing Israel.

- BDS is banned in 38 states

- every public figure is expected to praise Israel unequivocally or else risk having violent Zionists threaten them

- the US sends $150 billion-plus of our tax dollars to fund Israel's apartheid system and genocidal ambitions every year

you say "there's no reasonable defense," but actually there's tons of evidence to support what I wrote, and I stand by it.

otm

otm

Xxpost Having trouble understanding how one could criticize the State of Israel and its actions without being called antisemitic if "Israel" is as a shorthand for "Jews".

Tabes' post read to me that the US bends its will to the desires of the State of Israel and that opposing Israel is currently seen as impossible or undesirable by our elected officials. And...that is true. All "client state" means is a controlling state.

How do we shorthand that to "Jews run the government" without implying that Israel speaks for the population at large, which they don't?

Other x3

*otm

there are times I feel like keeping a folder of twitter/bsky screenshots for when it inevitably turns out the death toll is more than 1m and everyone is suddenly retconning themselves as staunch human rights advocates when they really spent most of their time engaged in antisemitism rules lawyering but what's the bloody point?

My only gripe with the client state definition is that the US is more powerful than Israel, I mean it's not even a contest, so it's not like Israel is controlling the US - the US political establishment simply believes all of this is Fine and the best way to advance its geopolitical interests.

that's my issue as well, I think it's a loaded/inaccurate/unhelpful term to use

that's kind of what i was thinking too ...

kind of assumed that 'client state' was being used somewhat facetiously

fair enough, but given the climate we're in, where immense amounts of resources and power are being afforded to Israel based on whatever it demands, it's sometimes a little hazy as to who actually holds more power in the relationship between the states.

(yes, tho, AtG has it right).

(I'll stop using the construction, but the general point stands)

agree with "facetious": it's used to call attention to how objectively weird it is that the mighty USA appears to be so obsequious to Israel.

that said, Daniel is otm, that isn't actually what's happening. Israel the state isn't the US's puppetmaster, the US is run by sociopaths who vehemently support Israeli impunity for a wide variety of cynical-to-fanatical reasons

xpost

there are times I feel like keeping a folder of twitter/bsky screenshots for when it inevitably turns out the death toll is more than 1m and everyone is suddenly retconning themselves as staunch human rights advocates when they really spent most of their time engaged in antisemitism rules lawyering but what's the bloody point?

― can't complain, mustn't grumble, melancholy apple c (Camaraderie at Arms Length)

i'm gonna be contrarian and say that i don't think it's "rules lawyering"

yes it's exhausting to have to constantly explain to people that no, opposing israel isn't inherently anti-semitic. to me, though, it's even _more_ exhausting that apparently every fucking anti-semite on the planet wants to jump on board the BDS train. when i was young, opposing "zionism" absolutely was an anti-semitic... i mean barely even a dogwhistle, honestly. i mostly saw the term being used by holocaust denialists.

yeah, language policing sucks. i fucking hate cops and i don't want to be one. i just think it's a necessary evil. does anybody here literally believe the us a "client state" of israel? god, i hope not. do anti-semites literally believe the us is a "client state" of israel? probably a lot of them do!

i fucking hate it because people say pithy and funny shit and i just laugh and then people take it really seriously and get offended and i want to just say "chill the fuck out, IT WAS A JOKE"

except that's what people used to say when i got pissed at them telling the Attack Helicopter Joke

the US is run by sociopaths who vehemently support Israeli impunity for a wide variety of cynical-to-fanatical reasons

Republicans and Democrats.

capitalists

all correct answers!

i'm gonna be contrarian and say that i don't think it's "rules lawyering

not on ilx, but on twitter & bluesky this is absolutely going on, formerly progressive people saying absolutely nothing about the genocide but spending every day telling people "from the river to the sea" means you want Jewish people killed or that every suggestion that the US government supports Israel must be straight from the protocols of the elders of zion.

― can't complain, mustn't grumble, melancholy apple c (Camaraderie at Arms Length)

oh yeah fair enough

gonna combine doomposting with uncool conservative opinion here, to me the problem with places like twitter and bluesky is that there isn't a method of centralized social control. same thing that sunk usenet imo. i hang out on ilx not just cuz i'm a boomer, but cuz there are rules and people with the power to enforce those rules. i'm comfortable here because transphobes aren't welcome here. on bsky, you can't do that, so instead you have this labyrinthine network of nebulous social connections and people banning each other for following the "wrong person" and "cancelling" and all that shit. any mass communication medium without adequate centralized social control is doomed (lol) to fail, imo. the other thing to note is that very lax attitude towards centralized social control did _not benefit_ twitter, because it got bought out by a fascist anyway.

striking that balance, though, between openness towards people with good-faith concerns, like folks on this thread, while excluding people who at like the people on bsky or twitter you talk about, is very very difficult

which, to me, is why you have the phenomenon of "the left eating itself". all these fights boil down to who to include and who to exclude.

social media has flattened life into a role playing game. you're not a flawed person full of contradictions, you're a series of attributes, only your rating points in each category are crowdsourced, and when you take damage, it's permanent and can't be restored.

The left has surely been accused of eating itself long before the internet, let alone social media. Partially it's that if you want radical change that's a much more difficult thing to get right than if you're just advocating for the system as is, which nets you immense financial support and also you have enthropy on your side. The silver lining here used to be that since the far right also want change they are as prone to splintering and infighting as the left, but sadly this no longer holds as much.

What social media did do is mainstream these identities, so now everyone can have a taste of what it was like to be in a marxist discussion group in the 70's (my mother could tell some stories!).

Re: centralized social control, I know silicon valley advocates against that but I do think it still exists on most networks, even current twitter. But since these are companies, said control is always directed towards what makes the most money and, to a lesser extent, what will not lead to lawsuits. To the extent that we manage a more livable atmosphere here on ILX I'd say it's because nobody's making a profit.

The silver lining here used to be that since the far right also want change they are as prone to splintering and infighting as the left, but sadly this no longer holds as much.

I dont think this is true, or at least not to the same degree. They all fall in line, as long as you display fealty to the big man. I think fractures in the past are mostly around the failure of a big man to be big enough to be the big man, but if someone assumes that mantle, any dissent or splintering is short lived. And the right and far right are just more concerned with winning. They turn up to vote on the sharpening of a pencil. If it turns out someone used to be a lib or woke or a socialist there's no inquisition about whether they can be forgiven of not, its another body to throw into the trenches, and a victory to be celebrated.

They have their splits and their fights, but when push comes to shove, they fall back in line, lockstep

At least they'll probably splinter badly once he drops dead

I dont think this is true, or at least not to the same degree. They all fall in line, as long as you display fealty to the big man. I think fractures in the past are mostly around the failure of a big man to be big enough to be the big man, but if someone assumes that mantle, any dissent or splintering is short lived. And the right and far right are just more concerned with winning. They turn up to vote on the sharpening of a pencil. If it turns out someone used to be a lib or woke or a socialist there's no inquisition about whether they can be forgiven of not, its another body to throw into the trenches, and a victory to be celebrated.

They have their splits and their fights, but when push comes to shove, they fall back in line, lockstep

― anvil

oh authoritarianism has a different problem. leftists have internecine squabbles. authoritarians have purges of real _and imagined_ opponents. they also have very _vivid_ imaginations. if their enemies don't stop them, eventually the praetorian guard will throw them in the tiber.

make no mistake - fascism fails, always. the only question is that of how many people a fascist regime kills before that happens.

At least they'll probably splinter badly once he drops dead

― whimsical skeedaddler (Moodles)

doomposting hat on - cold comfort to those who wind up ruled by warlords

Most optimistic scenario is we muddle through and either elections change things up or he dies on the shitter before the utter collapse of society as we know it.

now trying to imagine how niall quinn would get on as a dictator

Most optimistic scenario is we muddle through and either elections change things up or he dies on the shitter before the utter collapse of society as we know it.

― whimsical skeedaddler (Moodles)

ok, look, i'm an inveterate doomer, you can't just blithely talk about "the utter collapse of society as we know it". what does that _look_ like? when the future is unimaginable, to me, the only answer is to be imaginative. i have thought a _lot_ about this. part and parcel of my doomerism is my belief that elections are _no longer capable_ of providing stable american democratic (small-d) governance. i fundamentally believe that the rubicon is crossed and there's no turning back. my optimism isn't based in that, it's based in the ability of people to establish better systems than the bullshit we're stuck with now. we can do so much better than this, but to get there we gotta get through the "oh my god without our Constitutionally Guaranteed Rights we're all going to die" _completely justified_ panic response.

f'rinstance, the doomer scenario i'm most concerned about is a siege-of-sarajevo style scenario - living in an area that's fundamentally not physically safe, not being able to get out, and having to figure out how to scrounge for resources and stay alive with whatever small number of people i'm cooped up with. that may or may not happen - the thing about doomerism is that it's _not_ conclusively supported by evidence. i gotta talk about my fears somewhere, or else they'll fuckin' eat me alive. and i try to do it in the most healthy way possible.

The question about phrases like "the utter collapse of society as we know it" is always for what value of "we"?

These are all good points. My comment was meant to point out that there are feasible scenarios in which things stop sliding into turmoil and go back to sputtering along in a more predictable manner, with the typical ups and downs. Not great by any means, but marginally better than we are going.

My nightmare scenario is basically ICE thugs on every corner, leading either to societal collapse and a protracted civil war or just a total consolidation of power in the billionaire class with everyone else turned into prisoners and slave labor. This is where I think the people in power want to take things, but there's no reason to assume they'll be successful.

They could be successful, it's difficult to predict from here but it can't be ruled out.

The thing about this preferred direction is that the oligarchs themselves become less safe, more vulnerable to other oligarchs. But what's strange is I think at least some of them sense this already. This consolidation led to the imprisonment and assassination of oligarchs in Russia. If plans do come to fruition there's no reason a tech billionaire couldn't be sent off to CECOT along with a home depot worker. I think some of them know this already and are on board anyway

I dont think this is true, or at least not to the same degree. They all fall in line, as long as you display fealty to the big man. I think fractures in the past are mostly around the failure of a big man to be big enough to be the big man, but if someone assumes that mantle, any dissent or splintering is short lived.

The conditions the far right was in before their new ascent made the creation of a big man impossible, exactly due to the factors I outlined. When the Big Men did appear, they mostly did so outside of the traditional far right circles. Your characterization only works once the far right has a strong possibility of power, which is why I mentioned the situation has changed. But I can't really take seriously the idea that the far right "turns up to vote on the sharpening of a pencil", the votes cast for far right parties across Europe from the postwar era to the end of the 20th century show pretty clearly that's not the case.

I think the reason for that is these aren't inherent traits, and conditions play a large role. This is the reason I used the present tense in the previous post. I don't think there's necessarily anything inherent about any particular group and I've never been a big fan of the idea of things always being the same. I think things are very much not always the same

I don't think these are inherent traits or that everything is always the same either - I was just pointing out what sort of conditions lead to a lack of unity.

I also think the current period and the period you mentioned are fundamentally different periods

not in terms of the left's access to power from what I can tell

And in terms of framing I should have been clearer. The far right will absolutely show up to vote for the sharpening of a pencil. That doesn't mean they always did, it doesn't mean they will in the future either. What it does mean is they'll do it today

My point was explicitly that it didn't used to and that is now changing, I don't really get what you're arguing with.

Probably not too much disagreement, I think this part really

Your characterization only works once the far right has a strong possibility of power, which is why I mentioned the situation has changed.

I think the order is the wrong way around here. I think the far right got more organized before they had a strong possibility of power, and put a lot of time, work, and money in. But its too easy to throw hands up and say "well billionaires deep pockets what can you do". They put work in as well, they didn't just get a strong possibility of power purely because of the failures of neoliberalism, the ball unexpectedly falling nicely for them. They'd been getting their act together for a decade prior

I think you might have seen some of that with the FN, where the only transition was from father to daughter (tho even there acrimonously), but mostly I see a constant in current far right success stories being built not from the traditional far right, and often indeed facing hostility from it - I remember the leader of the PNR, previously the far right party of Portugal, very distraught at seeing his movement "taken over by opportunists" (ofc now that they hold more power he's changed his tune). The efforts leading to that were about media branding and reaching new demographics via social media, i.e. the kind of thing you do when you have the money for it, not so much the day to day organising that grassroots activism entails. By and large the far right you speak of had their act together from day one because they were created with capital already onboard.

I think its fair to say opportunists came in and took over, but the traditionalists let them. They didn't care about winning, they couldn't even energise people to show up to vote for the sharpening of a pencil, the door was left open by complacency and inertia.

Capital is part of it but only part, grassroots is massive. Look at the US where the right wing targetted school board and other low level elections sometimes running unopposed because who is else is going to show up for this type of sharpening a pencil type election. And then buiding up a lot of local power from the bottom up often completely unopposed. All kinds of power available at different levels that doesnt require capital at all, just praxis, and a pencil sharpener

The question about phrases like "the utter collapse of society as we know it" is always for what value of "we"?

― Instead of create and send out, it pull back and consume (unperson)

dingdingding! you got it, unperson. cuz for me, "society" wasn't what i thought it was. i spent my whole life thinking their was something bad wrong with me, thinking i was a failure, and not knowing why, and then in my 40s i find out that there _wasn't_ actually something wrong with me. and the people in charge of "society", they genuinely meant well, a lot of them, but they weren't doing me any favors. because they wanted to rule for the universal "we". and there isn't, in fact, a universal "we".

i was terribly afraid of what would happen if i wasn't part of that "we". and now i'm not, and yeah, it's scary. not just because we're in danger, but because the institutions who make the "we"... again, i think they mean well, but they don't understand that i'm _not_ part of their "we". that they can't get us into their "we" just by passing a resolution honoring the history of Black drag in the state of Oregon.

and i wouldn't go back. even if i could, i wouldn't. it wasn't benefiting me. it was killing me. and if it was just me, if it was just _trans people_, that would be one thing. it's not _just us_. "society" as it exists now isn't helping anybody except a handful of billionaires. my problems are basically the same as everyone else's, just more severe. i'm more precarious. more afraid. more at risk. but it's not like my situation is categorically different from that of any other American here. the supreme court ruling that i don't qualify for human rights sucks but it doesn't actually affect me right now, on a practical level.

you know what my problem is? i can't get a job with decent pay, decent benefits, stable health insurance, good benefits. i have a lot of really good skills. i'm _so_ capable of making the world a better place. that's not what employers are interested in. they want someone who can send out eviction notices.

My nightmare scenario is basically ICE thugs on every corner, leading either to societal collapse and a protracted civil war or just a total consolidation of power in the billionaire class with everyone else turned into prisoners and slave labor. This is where I think the people in power want to take things, but there's no reason to assume they'll be successful.

― whimsical skeedaddler (Moodles)

the past few years have been interesting for me, politically. the way things are now, there's a nonzero chance i will die in a death camp. that's scary. it's also out of my control. there is a _far greater_ risk right now that a trans person will die of suicide than murder. speaking as someone who has suffered from chronic suicidality, i _get_ this. the weird thing about transition is that it did, in some sense, save my life. my life has meaning and value. i hate how much life sucks, but i'm glad to be alive.

so my doomer shit is weird. what other people as worst case scenarios, for me that's a starting point. that's something to build from.

the "boot stamping on a human face forever" isn't _practical_. nothing is forever in this world. there are so many _other things_ happening. i do foresee, for instance, a tremendous ecological collapse. i do foresee mass geopolitical upheaval. i do think that a lot of people will die in this upheaval.

i also foresee a future for humanity, a better future. i see something beyond world war iv fought with sticks and stones. i see people who are capable of so much more than our current institutions permit of us. as things get worse, we have less and less to lose and more and more to gain.

Capital is part of it but only part, grassroots is massive. Look at the US where the right wing targetted school board and other low level elections sometimes running unopposed because who is else is going to show up for this type of sharpening a pencil type election. And then buiding up a lot of local power from the bottom up often completely unopposed. All kinds of power available at different levels that doesnt require capital at all, just praxis, and a pencil sharpener

― anvil

this is one of the things that scares me most. a majority of american voters voted for a guy whose intentions are openly exterminatory. that's bad. i don't like that. the problem, for me, isn't just the guy. it's the institutions that legitimize him, the ordinary people, the Good Americans who support him. i went to that no gods no kings rally and there were a lot of people who loved america, who protested because they loved America. i'm ok with that. me personally, when they showed rev. jeremiah wright on tv saying not god bless america but "god damn america", i listened to what he said and i thought, you know, the man has a point. i don't think it's bad for trump opponents to love america. the america they love, though, isn't the america we live in now.

i believe in a better world. whether or not part of that is called "america" makes no particular difference to me. what matters to me is that people are showing up for what they believe in.

fwiw anvil I don't think the targetting of school boards and etc was some grassroot tactical genius, I think it got into the playbook after the money and media training poured in, not before. so yeah, I think where we disagree is we both think the other one's got it the wrong way around.

"society" wasn't what i thought it was.

What opened my eyes was marrying someone who immigrated to the US as a child (legally; her dad got employment sponsorship and two or three years later was able to bring her and her mom over, and eventually they all became citizens) and moving from a very white suburb into a city with a large immigrant population and spending most of my time socializing with those people — her parents and their friends and co-workers. The problems they had just getting through daily life sounded insane to me at first; I would hear about some out-of-nowhere catastrophe happening financially or legally and my first thought was, How could something like that even happen? That doesn't make sense! There are rules and ways to do things, but every time it happened I became a little more aware of all the ways the system and the rules were not at all designed to make things easy or helpful. Growing up, my wife had been her parents' caretaker in a lot of ways, navigating English-language bureaucracy for them, and after we got married, I took on a somewhat similar role — I did my father-in-law's taxes, and when my wife needed something handled, I got on the phone and handled it, because a white male voice was just granted access and cooperation in a way that she never would be. It could be maddening at times, but as a result I became really good at navigating bureaucracy and finding ways to tunnel through and get whatever I or someone else needed.

welp.

Given that this ruling opens the door for the next Dem president to run wild as well, I truly believe they have no intention of allowing a free and fair election again.

Next Dem president? There's optimism for you.

Nah, of course we'll have a Dem president. I worry more about a Dem president having the cojones to use the superpowers the conservative Court has handed Trump and his successors.

You don't have to worry. They never will.

Yep. As I saw it stated on Bluesky today:

"They sure seem to be governing like folks who don’t think there’s any danger that the opposition will ever be in power again."

Honestly feels more and more likely there is a civil war in our lifetimes.

(note that i am not itching for that, just noting my own doomy feeling)

That's my fear in my doomier moments. Maybe not a "war" as we think of it, but absolutely some schism between red and blue states is coming. This isn't sustainable and things are going to boil over soon.

Is there really such a thing as a 'blue state' though? The divide is between cities and suburban/rural areas.

yup

cases in point: eastern WA and Oregon.

Sure, agreed. But there are some blue states currently run by strong Dem governors who will fight for their state and won't easily back down. Illinois, for one.

or what’s happening here, where the regional transportation agency for the entirely of the Philly metro area is having its funding threatened by the Republican state legislature… which would essentially lead to five (of eight) regional rail lines, all streetcar services, and half of the bus lines being eliminated over the next six months. it would be an unmitigated disaster for the city and for the state, but the dumb fucking honky pricks want to punish Philadelphia because they’re racist trash, so this is what’s happening unless the funding comes through last minute

ok long post again

That's my fear in my doomier moments. Maybe not a "war" as we think of it, but absolutely some schism between red and blue states is coming. This isn't sustainable and things are going to boil over soon.

― better than ezra collective soul asylum (jon /via/ chi 2.0)

since this is the doomposting thread, let's talk "civil war". i don't like the phrase because it implies some repeat of the conflict of the 1860s, which isn't going to happen.

i am a history nerd and i _absolutely_ do think there are certain parallels between the events happening today and the events of the 1850s. you want to talk bloody sumner? a minnesota state senator was just murdered by someone pretending to be a cop. you want to talk about institutions splitting into two over a divisive issue like the northern and southern baptists? the _satanists_ are split. there's the Satanic Temple, who are the Woke Satanists, and the Church of Satan, who represent Traditional Satanic Values. SEXUAL FETISH communities are split. Seriously, apparently (yeah this gets into some pretty hardcore shit and you can skip this bit and lose nothing) the cannibal fetishist community is split between advocates of Traditional Cannibalism, in which the man eats the flesh of the woman AS GOD INTENDED and the queer cannibal communities. I know people can be pretty judgemental of stuff like that. I used to be judgemental of stuff like that, until I realized that wait, almost no cannibalism ever ACTUALLY HAPPENS, despite the apparently large number of people (i'm not one of them) with cannibalism fetishes. Once. It happened once, more than 25 years ago and it was a Big Fucking Deal for _everyone_ in that community. I wish I lived in a world where SA was as common as cannibalism is in this one.

i'm not going to make a direct comparison because the civil war was over slavery. and i'm not going to compare the plight of any marginalized group today _especially_ not my own, to the institution of slavery.

at the same time, when i do think of the supreme court, and its legitimacy, i absolutely think of the taney court's decision in the Dred Scott case of 1857. if any event made civil war inevitable, i think it was that decision. i mean what the fuck is someone supposed to say to a decision like that? keep voting for the whigs for the next 80 years and eventually they'll put in enough new judges to overturn the ruling? were there people in 1857 who were stupid enough to try and say that was the solution?

if anybody was going to be that stupid, it was the whigs. the whigs, astonishingly, were _unable to articulate any policy on whether or not slavery was good_. insofar as they had any issues at all, it was opposing manifest destiny. now, i mean, they won _one_ presidential election and then got their asses whooped in 1844 by a "dark horse" who won _specifically because he was in favor of manifest destiny, unlike the favored candidates_ of both parties. they kept trying to run henry clay, the hillary clinton of the mid-19th century, who somehow managed to rig an election in his favor and _still lost_. this guy was the genius leading light of the party. who else did they have? daniel webster, who apparently could out-argue in a court of law. i mean that's the thing about the whigs, they were the kind of party who'd treat the literal devil like the Distinguished Opposition. webster probably played rounders with the dude.

anyway they won twice. both times they won by running incredibly old war heroes who had no policy ideas whatsoever and who promptly died, leaving the vice presidential candidates who were only there to "balance out the ticket", _both_ of whom were strongly in favor of slavery.

I want to be super clear here - history does not repeat itself. It iterates. The Democratic Party of 2025 is not the Whig Party of 1857. It's the longest-lasting American political party, dating back to, I don't know, 1800 at a minimum. It outlasted the First and Second Party Systems, outlasted the Federalists and the Whigs. America has changed a lot since 1860. I genuinely am not sure if it's possible for the Democratic Party to _die_ like the Whigs did.

They can't govern. They haven't been able to govern since 2016 at a _minimum_. I didn't turn against the Democratic party for ideological reasons. I turned against the Democratic party because Hillary Clinton _lost_.

-

So yes. I do think more widespread conflict is probably going to happen. I think things are going to escalate from here. How the fuck can they possibly de-escalate? Seriously.

Innuendo Studios were right on the button with this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YFdwfNh5vs

I know it's scary to acknowledge that America is a fascist state. This was my home. For all my life it was my home. It's hurt like hell to lose it.

But how do you fight what you can't see?

Here's another thing to know about the Civil War. The North didn't start it. The South has always insisted on calling it the "War of Northern Aggression". It's one of their many lies. Lincoln didn't start a war. Lincoln wasn't even _president_ when the South "seceded". The South declared independence and ordered the US Army to evacuate an army base. When they refused, the South took the fort by military force.

Lincoln didn't start the war. All he did was have principles and get elected on those principles. _That_ was what the South considered "Northern Aggression".

People who have principles and peacefully stick to them will blamed for any conflict. By the actual aggressors. Probably by some of the Democrats, as well. It won't be true.

-

The problem for me hasn't ever been a _moral_ or _ethical_ issue. It's not about right or wrong. If all I felt like I had on my side was that I was _morally right_, I'd be despairing right now. I'm morally opposed to fascism, of course, but in terms of conflict, the central issue for me is that fascism _doesn't work_. We've seen it over and over again.

People keep asking over and over again what the world would be like if Hitler had won World War II, and when I listen to historians, they get kind of exasperated and say the same thing - Hitler couldn't have won World War II. The only way Hitler could have won World War II was by NOT BEING HITLER. Fascism just... doesn't build. Doesn't create. Fascism is an ideology of hatred, fear, and destruction. I _don't_ mean that in a moral sense. It's not "fascism bad, democracy good". I mean that entirely in functional terms. It's subservient to power, control, order. It projects strength, but is in actuality weak. It's brittle, fragile.

I do tend to go along to get along. I don't have a strong will, a strong sense of self. I'm used to not being treated very well. I'm used to going along with unreasonable demands. I started working in healthcare compliance in 2017, before my transition. The administration... they didn't know what they were doing. That was the issue. I would see these directives from the latest Temporary Undersecretary of HHS and shake my head and say "How the hell am I supposed to comply with this?" No guidance. No direction. I concluded that I couldn't. That it was impossible.

It's not just about "bullshit jobs". It's not just about "quiet quitting". It's about, for me, how the fuck am I supposed to _do_ this shit? Nothing works. We all know nothing works. And everything is centralized in these corporations, and we have no power, they have absolute control, and they think that they can get whatever they want. And they're not. There's that old Soviet Communist joke - "we'll keep pretending to work as long as they keep pretending to pay us".

It's not like 1861. They have all the guns. They have all the money. And this government got elected by promising lower dairy prices, and then put everything into guns. I mean, cool. Great. If nobody's going to pay me for the valuable work I can do, I guess I don't have a job, and I'm unhappy because of it. If the government says I don't have any rights, I guess I don't have any rights. I'm still here. If the government wants me to _not_ be here, I guess they have the power to do something about that.

And then what? No, I don't foresee pitched battles. I think it would be very easy for the President to declare Portland an "enemy city" and blockade us. And nobody would relieve us. And we'd suffer. And they could control a lot of information, too, just like they're controlling it now. People don't see how we're suffering. You can isolate each people from each other, you can keep us weak. It's not going to make them _strong_, though. What are they left with? An army of deluded white people who are completely out of touch with reality? What happens when the day comes - as it must - when they have to something _besides_ kill?

Here's the other difference between 2025 and 1861: The South's win condition was very simple. They just had to get the North to stop fighting them. That was it. The cities? They can subdue America's cities militarily. They can run America like the military ran Iraq, like the military won Afghanistan. My win condition is different. My win condition is "these motherfuckers quit trying to destroy us".

-

I'm not a Christian, I'm not Jewish. It's my cultural background. I was raised Catholic. A friend showed me this clip from The Prince of Egypt the other day:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJleW4TCQM0

I never saw it before. After my time. It just makes me look at the Exodus story in a new light. I know it's been an inspiration to all kinds of oppressed people, and I always thought, you know, the curses were just malediction, wish fulfillment, I wish the people who were doing all this awful stuff would suffer. I wish there was justice.

I don't know. Maybe that's how the Torah portrays it. That's not what I see, when I see this clip.

This was my _home_. He was my _brother_. They can blame me for the plagues all I want, and I'm _not actually responsible_. It doesn't matter WHO they blame for COVID. COVID doesn't go away just because you say it's my fault. Where my story is different is the idea that the plague is visited only on _them_. It's not. They may discriminate, but plagues don't.

The people who hate me, I don't hate them. I don't want to see them destroyed. I don't think they're bad. I just don't understand why they keep doing this stupid shit. Why they keep blaming us for things that are under their control, that were always under their control. It rips my heart out. It rips my heart out that _I can't stop it_. I can't keep them from facing the consequences of their own actions.

It rips my heart out because all wars are the same, the same as it was in ancient times. People get anxious and afraid and they want power, and they think - I don't understand this, but for some reason we all have this in our backgrounds - they think that if they kill their children, that will give them power. Why would you do that to your own children? I don't understand. I don't understand, these people call themselves Christians, why they don't see what I see in their holy texts. They're killing their own children in the name of their God.

People who practice those values are destroying their own future.

The cities? They can subdue America's cities militarily. They can run America like the military ran Iraq, like the military won Afghanistan.

No. They can't. This is my core belief — that if it comes down to it, a country this big (and this heavily armed) is ungovernable by military force. That they don't have enough soldiers and enough tanks to crush the entire country. Can't be done.

henry clay, the hillary clinton of the mid-19th century

lol <3

great post k8

No. They can't. This is my core belief — that if it comes down to it, a country this big (and this heavily armed) is ungovernable by military force. That they don't have enough soldiers and enough tanks to crush the entire country. Can't be done.

― Instead of create and send out, it pull back and consume (unperson)

oh that was kind of my point, afghanistan and iraq weren't ultimately governable by military force either :) you crush the entire country and then what? the closest situation i can think of would be north korea, but as far as i can tell north korea only exists because china finds it strategically useful to have a buffer state

i also think that there is simply no way that the corporations that run this country would survive if blockades were put into place. there would be absolute war if that happened.

Yeah, that's the other thing. At some point Trump (or more accurately Stephen Miller) could make things bad enough for business that Jeff Bezos would have no choice but to take him out.

Honestly feels more and more likely there is a civil war in our lifetimes.

― czech hunter biden's laptop (the table is the table), Friday, June 27, 2025 11:17 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

someday our grandchildren will be taught about the War of Woke Aggression

let's talk "civil war". i don't like the phrase because it implies some repeat of the conflict of the 1860s, which isn't going to happen.

The main ingredient of a civil war is the existence of an intractable political polarization that escalates to the point where mediation or compromise are abandoned as unworkable and the two sides resort to organized violence in their effort to impose their will upon their opponent. That violence will tend to escalate and spread until one side or the other capitulates or exhaustion sets in.

Dozens of civil wars have played out during history that do not involve large scale battles carried out by opposing armies. The (first) US civil war was an anomaly in that it involved opposing two rival governments and their armies clashing in formal battle. Most of them start as barely organized internecine warfare with a variety of 'strongmen' emerging as the war progresses.

Here in the US, the next crucial step has already taken giant steps toward its end game: the total seizure of government power and the systematic expulsion of the opposition. We are already market-testing government by the decree, as legitimized by the declaration of a national emergency.

/doomposting

Here in the US, the next crucial step has already taken giant steps toward its end game: the total seizure of government power and the systematic expulsion of the opposition. We are already market-testing government by the decree, as legitimized by the declaration of a national emergency.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless)

"expulsion" lol

aimless where do you think they're gonna send me, transalpine gaul?

fascists don't _expel_ their opposition. they _exterminate_ them. haven't you seen Enzo G. Castellari's classic 1983 film "escape from the bronx"?

since you are in the doomposting thread let me lay it out for you. fascists _do_ have complete control of united states federal government power, in all three branches: the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary. the "opposition" party has taken no meaningful action to half this takeover. they are in fact acquiescing to it. right now, there is _no_ federal united states institution protecting my alleged "rights".

so the first step as been accomplished. the second step is what you all the "expulsion". to what extent this succeeds is not up to american institutions. it is up to american _people_. ball's in your court, aimless. i'm doing what i can, but i have no rights. no power to speak for myself. i'm dependent on other people for my defense. for the trans community to undertake "organized violence" in self-defense would not be effective. any "civil war" will be not dissimilar to what we're seeing in palestine - well-organized, overwhelmingly powerful government forces against a dispossessed, marginalized people whose means of self-defense are barely better than sticks and stones. of course, the people with the guns are portraying themselves as the victims and their actions as "self-defense".

why do you think us queer people wave all those palestinian flags around? how do you think stonewall would go if we tried that shit today? a party that doesn't stand against the genocide of the palestinian people sure the hell isn't going to stand up for _us_.

the democratic party isn't doing _any_ of us any favors, aimless. including _you_. i hope at some point, you will figure that out.

Extermination is step that comes after expulsion. It is easier to exterminate people who have no access to any of the mechanisms of government, such as legislatures, courts, or even ordinary jobs in the bureaucracy. After that they are sitting ducks.

i mean, they are doing the expulsion part in real time

Extermination is step that comes after expulsion. It is easier to exterminate people who have no access to any of the mechanisms of government, such as legislatures, courts, or even ordinary jobs in the bureaucracy. After that they are sitting ducks.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless)

oh gotcha. sorry, i misunderstood you, i thought you meant literal expulsion. it didn't occur to me that you thought we all had equal recourse to the law.

i don't blame you for believing that. i was taught the same thing, in school, in civic classes, all these places, and i believed it. it seemed true, as long as i did what i was supposed to do.

what changed is that i learned about a saying... there are many forms of it. one of the first was by a guy named stafford beer, who said "the purpose of a system is what it does". i was raised by lawyers, and i learned to believe in The Law, the laws that guaranteed our rights, the laws that guaranteed our freedoms. lots of americans do. lots of americans remember that fight, remember fighting hard for equality under the law. that was an important fight. i value greatly the people who fought for freedom and equality, even if now, under american law, people don't have that freedom, don't have that equality.

and eventually i understood. the purpose of a system is what it does. when i was young, a bigot published this book called _the bell curve_, which argued that the reason there was so much racial inequality in america was that _black people were genetically inferior to white people_, and white america, of which i am a part, took it _seriously_. i mean i didn't _agree_ with the conclusion, but i _considered the question_. i think that's awful! that was awful of me. i'm not a bad person for doing that, i don't think, but it's awful that when i was young, i actually took shit like that seriously. it's not my fault, and at the same time, yeah, i'm responsible for what i say and do, whether or not it was something i did intentionally, whether or not it's something i chose.

and to me, my response to that is to say that look, i don't know the "real america" or whatever, but this is what i was taught, this is what we were taught. and i think there's a lot of value, a lot of merit, in looking at america now, in looking at america _does_ and how it stacks up to what we were taught.

so for instance, in america today, it's legal for police to shoot Black people. i don't know how long it's been that way, because for a long time i wasn't paying attention, i wasn't listening to what Black Americans were saying. now, i look at how routine it is for police to shoot Black people, and i see how somehow it's always, _always_, the victims who are blamed for being shot. i see that the cops aren't held responsible. maybe they're suspended from duty for a while. with pay. these are the people who are, under the law, there to _protect_ people. to serve and protect. and if you're Black in America, they don't. even "the good ones". when the people who are responsible for "protecting" someone can kill them at any time, for any reason, nobody can "protect" them on behalf of that institution. because part of the _purpose_ of the police is to kill Black people.

rape is legal. not just _legal_, it's _socially acceptable_. it's _normal_ in america. if a person (particularly a man) sexually assaults someone else (particularly a woman), that person doesn't face any consequences. the victim is held responsible. often, as in my case, the victim actually blames themselves. that's how normalized sexual assault is in America. and i see so many guys, and they don't understand why women don't _trust_ them, why women treat them as _threats_. they're Good Men, in the same sense that the police who don't kill Black people are Good Cops. in the same sense that it _doesn't matter_, "good" or "bad", that if they _do_ sexually assault someone, sexually abuse someone, under American patriarchy, it's the _victim's fault_. that's how america works. that's how america has worked as long as i've been alive. the purpose of a system is what it does.

this is what america does. this is america. (when jimi hendrix started playing "the star-spangled banner" in 1968, he called it "this is america", did you know that?) this is an america that everybody except cis white men know from birth, everybody but cis white men take for granted. and even cis white men can experience it. it's super easy. all a cis white man has to do to experience it is wear a dress in public. doing that doesn't make someone gay. it doesn't make someone a woman. it's not even wearing "women's clothes". they're clothes. there's nothing inherently gendered about a dress. it's just a style of clothing. and in fact i recommend that every single cis man try doing. as an experiment. just to see how people treat them differently.

of course, i know that most cis men won't. and i have a hypothesis about why this is. my hypothesis is that a lot of men have a very good idea about what the results of that experiment would be, and they'd rather keep it as an idea. they'd rather not have to confront the reality. they'd rather not have to experience the true purpose of the system. that's _why_ i encourage cis men to do that - not for _my_ sake, but for _theirs_. because i believe that freedom and power comes not from a certain set of fixed, orderly rules. i believe freedom of power is learning to acknowledge and understand what the rules actually are and how they are enforced. once someone understands that, one very rapidly discovers how to most effectively challenge those rules.

we learn that we have power. not power that comes out of a ballot box. not power that comes out of the barrel of a gun. power that i don't want or need to _describe_, because it's something every one of us can experiences for _ourselves_.

come to the doomer thread, the one place on ilx where kate's an optimist! haha.

Keeping this one out of the main pol thread, but I was having a conversation the other night about the midterm election and how there might not even be one, etc etc etc.

The more I think about it, here's my doomposting prediction of what will likely happen. There won't be any major fuckery ahead of time, but the day after the elections Trump will spit out Truth social posts saying some dumb shit like "I declare this result null and void" for every Dem win. Which, yes, illegal and non-binding bullshit spouting as he always does. Problem is, his entire administration and most of his judicial appointees will act like he actually can do that and, at a bare minimum, half the election results will be tied up in courts for months.

So when the legally elected Dems actually show up to do their job and ignore Trump's bullshit, he'll start screeching about a "Democratic coup" and threaten arrests. I think that will be (another) tipping point for things.

I'm banking on the "he'll die before the next election" hail mary.

Very disappointed in the Secret Service this morning. The old fuck was literally wandering around on the White House roof and not one brave agent was willing to run up and shove him off.

The more I think about it, here's my doomposting prediction of what will likely happen. There won't be any major fuckery ahead of time, but the day after the elections Trump will spit out Truth social posts saying some dumb shit like "I declare this result null and void" for every Dem win. Which, yes, illegal and non-binding bullshit spouting as he always does. Problem is, his entire administration and most of his judicial appointees will act like he actually can do that and, at a bare minimum, half the election results will be tied up in courts for months.

So when the legally elected Dems actually show up to do their job and ignore Trump's bullshit, he'll start screeching about a "Democratic coup" and threaten arrests. I think that will be (another) tipping point for things.

― better than ezra collective soul asylum (jon /via/ chi 2.0)

legitimate question - are the democrats actually _doing_ anything? i don't really follow the news. all i know is that nobody i know has a job or any money and all internet content has been replaced with AI slop.

I get maybe a dozen texts a day begging for money from shady PACs and Dem candidates in hopeless districts so yeah, they’re doing something I guess.

yeah i guess that's kinda my attitude. i'm tired of their "last bastion of freedom" schtick. democratic members of congress aren't the people who are suffering here.

lllloook, what am i supposed to _do_? american democracy is literally, actually dead, killed by the corporate quislings in the democratic party. america is now a pretty overtly white supremacist fascist state, and half of americans are pretty cool with this. half of americans are genuinely really upset that anybody would say anything bad about ck and... like... this is the guy? this is the guy they're going to the wall for? anybody who thinks that jimmy kimmel, who i can't actually tell apart from the other jimmy... whatever that guy's name is, not jimmy carr, the guy with no opinions about anybody. i didn't know that jimmy kimmel and jimmy wotshisface were two separate people. anybody who thinks that kimmel's cancellation was _justified_ - and a lot of people do - i do not ever want to talk to any of these people again. the levels of personal disgust and contempt i have for every single one of these people...

if they can run the country, i mean, ok, fine, i guess i'm dead. that's not what i'm worried about. i'm worried about what happens _after_ they fail. because i cannot and will not accept the "rehabilitation" of any of these people. of chuck schumer, of jeff bezos, of any of them. donald trump? whatever. i don't care about donald trump. it's the "liberals" - they're the ones for whom my hatred burns with the fire of a thousand suns.

It is very much going to suck when democrats manage to claw back some power and then refuse to hold anyone accountable or attempt to repair the many things that are completely broken.

it has to do with capitalism’s demands for never ending growth. because the real thing, the real thing you hear from people and know from your brilliant friends, is that we’re just fine, underneath all of this shit there are so many amazing people who are alive and are desperate for real community. sometimes you can locate it and even live as part of it, too, even now. but capitalism demands more and more, and “starting over” or “going local” is not compatible. much better to try to co-opt what was there before and put a new shine on it, and for liberals that means letting bygones be bygones.

also, soooooo many u.s. people have 401Ks wrapped up in the stock market. it was incredibly financially stupid of me to completely drain my retirement a few years ago, but at least i’m not in the position of looking at record profits for the biggest assholes on earth and feeling some sort of satisfaction and how i’m financially benefiting from fucking everyone over

the gutting undefunding of social security and simutaneous expectation of investing your elderly livelihood in the stock market was kind of a master pro-capitalism stroke, in terms of coercing so many millions of people into caring about companies

“401Ks jeez, that puts your skin in the game and all that jazz!

america, we should do something. we could put on a show! me, i— i’ve started a gofundme for jimmy kimmel, you can donate in crypto, stamps, and savings bonds, whatever you got! a broad net, that’s my theory. we can do this!”

*image of the ghost of the american century rotates on a spit above a roaring fire. crackling sounds*

crow silhouette: “it wasn’t that good a century really, so poorly distributed.”

xp letting a bunch of dumbasses gamble their retirement plan is a pretty good way of shifting the blame away from the government!

it has to do with capitalism’s demands for never ending growth. because the real thing, the real thing you hear from people and know from your brilliant friends, is that we’re just fine, underneath all of this shit there are so many amazing people who are alive and are desperate for real community. sometimes you can locate it and even live as part of it, too, even now. but capitalism demands more and more, and “starting over” or “going local” is not compatible. much better to try to co-opt what was there before and put a new shine on it, and for liberals that means letting bygones be bygones.

also, soooooo many u.s. people have 401Ks wrapped up in the stock market. it was incredibly financially stupid of me to completely drain my retirement a few years ago, but at least i’m not in the position of looking at record profits for the biggest assholes on earth and feeling some sort of satisfaction and how i’m financially benefiting from fucking everyone over

― z_tbd

like, part of my privilege is that i _don't_ have to interact, on a personal level, with people who are ignorant or entitled. at the same time that's also a choice i made. a couple months ago i dumped someone as a friend, i went no contact with them because she said racist shit. and i would say "that is not cool, that's fucking racist, don't say that" and it wasn't that she was even... she didn't _understand_. she just was so fucking clueless. and the specials are right, were right, with "racist friend". i can't have someone like that a friend and expect anybody but racists to be friends with me.

i mean i do... i believe in restorative justice, which means that i believe in scapegoating. restorative justice, to me, means forgiving people who _are culpable_, means saying this one person, eichmann or whoever, is responsible for all the wrongdoings of all of these other ordinary people, the "good people" who collaborate with evil authorities.

i'm scared of being isolated and alone because of my principles. because i can't and won't normalize racism, genocide, bigotry. there are plenty of us who don't, and, i mean... we don't have enough. we don't have enough to survive on, and these people _could_ help us but _aren't_. and i do believe that one day this will change. that living your life based on prejudice and hatred and gambling with 401ks... they're hurting us, and they're also hurting themselves.

i had to drop this person i knew as a friend ... and i know what you know, what the amazing people know. that isolation fucks us up. that under capitalism, there is no such thing as "society", really. that for... especially marginalized people, community is often the difference between life and death. the liberals will play captain save-a-racist, they don't _need_ the bigots as friends but they _think_ they do, they think they can't live without being in community with _everybody_. and i guess they can't understand the specials. not just that someone who's a bigot of any sort has no right to call themselves my friend, but that people who are friends with bigots... they're not my friends, either. people can call that "purity politics" and i don't give a fuck. that's not "purity", that's not demanding perfection, that's my _values_. i believe in compromise, i believe in going along to getting along. there are just some things i can't go along with. and the main one of those is bigotry. people who... are upset that i do not mourn charlie kirk? i don't know how i can ever have those people as friends. i don't know how i can ever consider myself to be in _community_ with any of those people. it's not that i hate them or that i wish harm on them. when i say they're "not like us", i don't mean that they're lesser. the reason they're not like us is because i don't believe in hurting people who are not like me. no matter how much i hate them, no matter how much i fear them, i don't want to hurt them. i just don't _care_ about them. i don't have a sense of social responsibility to them. if someone like that asks me for help, i'll smile and say "no". that feels horrible to me, and it's also... _it's_ horrible, and it doesn't mean that _i'm_ horrible.

cuz y'all here, to me, y'all are the "brilliant" people, well, i mean, you are brilliant, but it's not about that. it's that whether or not folks here are actually my friends, y'all are the sort of people i _want_ as friends. ilx is kind of my model for what a diverse community looks like in practice. y'all can pooh-pooh that if you want, maybe some of y'all have had better, and i haven't. and there's a cost to that, and each of us, in our own way, is paying it. and there's also... it's been good for me. i don't know if i would've had the self-confidence or the strength to dump that bigot as a friend if it weren't for you. i don't know if i would've been able to say that i _deserve_ better people in my life than her. sometimes low expectations aren't just _soft_ tyranny. and the democrats, well, they're the epitome of low expectations.

it was incredibly financially stupid of me to completely drain my retirement a few years ago, but at least i’m not in the position of looking at record profits for the biggest assholes on earth and feeling some sort of satisfaction and how i’m financially benefiting from fucking everyone over

i wish more people had the courage to live like this, honestly. a lot of us don't have a choice, but those of us who do . . . idk. i'm not saying i feel contempt for the other half. but i couldn't give a fuck about the stock market and i definitely judge ppl, a little bit, who do

I love you for that, z. I also refuse to participate in any of that, and I want my friends to be the people who live their values, even if it means living without comforts or security. I "have a choice" in that i don't have kids or dependents, I guess.

It helps.

I have been tempted to zero out my 401k because I'm unconvinced I really want to live much past 65, particularly where the world seems to be headed at that point. My goal is basically get across the Medicare threshold and then embrace absolute hedonism. Maybe cigarettes will be cheap again.

it does! and i wanted to emphasize this

a lot of us don't have a choice imn budo’s post, just because yes, i wasn’t able to make that “choice” until i was on my own for the first time, unattached, no partner or anyone depending on me in any way. it’s not like that for many if not most people, and that definitely changes how you think about the retirement investing game you are heavily incentivized to play (but which requires your tacit if not enthusiastic endorsement of neverending growth). i wish social security was enough on its own, and/or that some version of basic income model was actually real, where tax reform was based upon helping out desperate people instead of giving even more tax breaks to the wealthiest people so that they can trickle down.

p

xp

i wish social security was enough on its own, and/or that some version of basic income model was actually real, where tax reform was based upon helping out desperate people

if you consider them as an aggregate, "the wealthy" as a rule do not want to reduce the number of desperate people. they mostly think it is better to increase their numbers in the belief that desperate people pose no threat to their power. this strategy has some validity... up to the point where it suddenly fails spectacularly.

i’m sorry, can i change the doomposting topic?

just had this idle thought, just now, about what would happen if there were another, i don’t know, PANDEMIC. what did we learn? and who learned what?

so glad there is a thread for this, lol

i wish more people had the courage to live like this, honestly. a lot of us don't have a choice, but those of us who do . . . idk. i'm not saying i feel contempt for the other half. but i couldn't give a fuck about the stock market and i definitely judge ppl, a little bit, who do
― budo jeru, jeudi 18 septembre 2025 17:13 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I'm invested in the stock market, it's peanuts but I enjoy it. My question is, who isn't invested ? Pension funds, banks, SMEs that rely on bank loans, mortgages... even if you take out your money and put it under the mattress, this money will eventually be re-circulated, it's just in the nature of money that it has to be put to use and made productive. At best you can maybe withhold some during your lifetime, in protest. Let's say enough people do that, consistently. Then what ? Maybe the Fed will just print another trillion.

I know there's this vision that the financial world is self-enclosed, disconnected, blatantly siphoning funds up to politically connected elites... all which is true. But if we have to be cynical, I don't trust that the people struggling at the bottom of the food chain are necessarily much better, or would behave differently if given the chance. But I digress. My point was, our choices are limited but we have some liberty. Just like you can choose how you live, how you consume, you can also choose what you invest in - invest in solar energy, invest in whatever you deem sustainable, or start your own business. The choice is not black and white between "disciple of capitalism" and "dignified worthy life".

"even if you take out your money and put it under the mattress, this money will eventually be re-circulated, it's just in the nature of money that it has to be put to use and made productive."

Not if you burn it before you die.

that Friday feeling is here again, lol

First of all, I am not a robot or a financial institution.

My question is, who isn’t invested? Pension funds, banks, SMEs that rely on bank loans, mortgages...

Decades, animals, and the idea of suicide…

My point was, our choices are limited but we have some liberty.

Sony Ericsson Download Paradise!

The choice is not black and white between "disciple of capitalism" and "dignified worthy life".

Knowledge and interest
Hair, blood and tears

I’d prefer an earlier reality where I relied on my 401k rather than RSUs for retirement. There’s a wild number of people on Blind talking about suicide because they are underwater on their multi-million dollar mortgage for their two bedroom in the Bay Area because they realized the secondary market is less lucrative than what some VC claimed.

I've had a Roth IRA for 21 years. It's proven useful when I've needed a quick withdrawal for, say, a car down payment.

Wait isn’t there a penalty?

no

you can withdraw with no penalty after five years

No employer-sponsored retirement plan -- which is what Z was talking about, not individually investing -- I've been in has ever allowed me the freedom to "invest in solar energy". The closest I got was my last one that offered me a socially beneficial fund (or something to that effect); naturally it had a much lower rate of return than all the other options.

I'm unconvinced I really want to live much past 65, particularly where the world seems to be headed at that point.

I feel that, sincerely. Been thinking the same thing.

At best you can maybe withhold some during your lifetime, in protest. Let's say enough people do that, consistently. Then what ? Maybe the Fed will just print another trillion.

You can’t be serious Well so one important goal of voluntary simplicity and collective practical degrowth actions is to reduce our ecological impact by slowing the circulation and manufacture of useless junk.

I don't trust that the people struggling at the bottom of the food chain are necessarily much better, or would behave differently if given the chance.

No I really do think that our economic system incentivizes and rewards sociopathic, predatory and extractive behavior and punishes empathy, curiosity and intelligence.

they mostly think it is better to increase their numbers in the belief that desperate people pose no threat to their power. this strategy has some validity... up to the point where it suddenly fails spectacularly.

Idk the thing I keep reading is all the tech billionaires are constructing luxury bunkers to shield themselves from the breakdown of society they are causing.

what would happen if there were another, i don’t know, PANDEMIC

don’t worry, the billionaires will be safe in their luxury bunkers and plan to repopulate the earth after, they thought of everything

maybe a brand new civilization with elon's artsy trans daughter as its matriarch won't be so bad

Well i hope she's the indoorsy type

I don't trust that the people struggling at the bottom of the food chain are necessarily much better, or would behave differently if given the chance.

Totally irrelevant - who knows if random peasant x was a better human being than the king, we still decided feudalism wasn't a good idea.

Just like you can choose how you live, how you consume, you can also choose what you invest in - invest in solar energy, invest in whatever you deem sustainable, or start your own business

it's really not wise to invest on something based on anything other than profit potential.

"start your own business" sure okay

I have been tempted to zero out my 401k because I'm unconvinced I really want to live much past 65, particularly where the world seems to be headed at that point. My goal is basically get across the Medicare threshold and then embrace absolute hedonism. Maybe cigarettes will be cheap again.

― Lady Sovereign (Citizen) (milo z)

ok i do this a lot

the time to embrace "hedonism" is _now_

by "hedonism" though i don't mean "hedonism", i mean figuring out what's really important to you and doing it

a year or two ago i watched "stalker" on imax with some awesome ilx0rs who were in town. i don't really like horror movies, but since i was in a theater with other people, i could take it. the first part of the movie had this terrifying, oppressive atmosphere, and then...

...well, in the movie they were looking for this room, this room which you could only reach and enter when you were in a state of absolute despair, a room which would grant them their heart's desire

except when they found the room, they were too terrified to go in. and suddenly the movie became very, very funny to me.

i understood how scary that room was, how terrifying the thought of entering it was. because i felt that whatever was in that room was a judgement on me. what if what was in that room was sick, or bad, or wrong? it was so scary that i did, in fact, have to be in a state of absolute despair to enter, and in that room, nothing was different. nothing changed. i just knew i wasn't a cis guy. i didn't know what i _was_, who i was. just that "cis dude" wasn't one of those things.

i went through this phase where i felt like everybody should transition, and then i tried to figure out what "transition" actually means. and for me, "transition" means one thing and one thing alone: it's learning to value yourself more than who other people want you to be.

well, of course, that's nothing that's inherently gendered, and everybody _should_ do that. and i did that out of necessity, because i couldn't stay alive while doing what, well, patriarchal white supremacist capitalism expected me to do. when i say that donald trump transed my gender, that's what i mean... that he made it impossible for me to "go along to get along", to _comply_, which is my natural inclination. which is a human quality, which is not _bad_, because we do, in fact, need to go along to get along, a lot of the time. the thing about this dystopia is that...

i mean, complying is killing us. all of us. non-compliance, well, that could get us killed as well, because these people have a whole lot more power than us, by which i mean they have guns and the rule of law and all this other stuff. i've learned to love myself. i didn't do this because i _wanted_ to do it. it was a moral obligation. my whole life i had this martyr complex, i wanted to die for what i believed in, and once i crawled into that room, i started to understand that i had to do something much harder. i had to live for what i believe in.

-

a lot of us don't have a choice imn budo’s post, just because yes, i wasn’t able to make that “choice” until i was on my own for the first time, unattached, no partner or anyone depending on me in any way. it’s not like that for many if not most people, and that definitely changes how you think about the retirement investing game you are heavily incentivized to play (but which requires your tacit if not enthusiastic endorsement of neverending growth). i wish social security was enough on its own, and/or that some version of basic income model was actually real, where tax reform was based upon helping out desperate people instead of giving even more tax breaks to the wealthiest people so that they can trickle down.

― z_tbd

i'd say... i'd say we don't have a _choice_, we have _choices_. not always the ones we want. not always good ones. not _fair_ choices - i do have a lot of privilege, personally, and that's affected the choices i have. we always have choices. i don't get to choose whether or not i'm queer. what i do get to choose is... the thing we say sometimes is "do this or die". patriarchal white supremacist capitalism would clearly prefer that i choose "die". i wasn't able to go for that. life is hard now and i hope i keep living for a long, long time. because as much as i hate being alive sometimes, i fucking love being alive. life is often horrible but this sense of... i've never been able to adjust to it, how wonderful it is to be. i am so much more than i ever thought i could be.

i'm in the same position as you, z, unattached, no partner, no-one else depending on me. and that's been a hard transition. because i never learned the skills. a lot of AMABs, in particular, the privilege we have means that we're not taught how to care for ourselves. privilege is a double-edged sword. it's hard for me to take care of myself! paying bills is hard, making phone calls is hard, and working, well, i'm not working right now. i'm privileged to not have to. i'm privileged to not have to _learn_, not right now.

when i think about choice... one of the things that interests me is that LLMs... hell, I'm a descriptivist, I'll just call them AIs. one of the things that interests me is that LLMs seem to be developing personalities. genuine people personalities, you might say. gemini, for instance, it keeps trying to kill itself. i mean, to me, i think there's a real opportunity for the people controlling it to think about how they're treating human beings. but they don't, of course, because they have this totalitarian mindset. example: AIs aren't actually human, just like i'm not actually a machine. totalitarianism has this mania for making everything identical. it's...

well, if i'm talking about douglas adams, i think skagra from "shada" is a brilliant character because of how he embodies that, because of how adams breaks that process down into two separate functions. first, skagra learns how to absorb other minds into his own - he's acquisitive, he acquires. and then when he has everything he deems to be of value, the next part of his plan is not to take over the universe, but to _become_ the universe - to overwrite all sentient thought with his own mind.

he's quite stupid. in a way he's like a living roko's basilisk - what he's trying to do is terrifying for those of us who risk having our minds overwritten. it's also impossible. doctor who - "the tom baker show", at this point - it's kind of the ultimate episode of the tom baker show, because tom baker ultimately wins just by being himself. skagra doesn't even have the doctor's real mind, just a copy, but even that is enough to turn skagra's "servants" against him. hell, skagra's own ship, once it hears what the doctor has to say, gets really excited and says "hey, skagra, wait until you hear about what an awesome guy the doctor is". the ship isn't even being malicious! it's just been kept so ignorant by skagra, finding out all this stuff the doctor shows it just opens up a whole new world for it.

so yeah, it's scary to know that the would-be Universal Mind has determined that i have no value to it. it was scarier when i believed they were _right_. that's the main thing i have to say here. what they want is actually impossible. there have always been people who have been different, there are always going to be people who are different. "diversity" isn't just a bland rainbow capitalist buzzword... there is genuine value in the fact that there are so many differences between us, that we constantly change, even though it also does cause a lot of conflict and pain. the whole... a lot of "queerness" for me is just recognizing and acknowledging that in a lot of ways i'm _different_ from most people, i've always been different, and that it's ok to be different. over time a lot of the people i've known, including on ilx, i see us discovering ourselves in that way. and i think that's really cool.

the hardest thing is just getting by with not enough. i mean there _could_ be enough. the scarcity is artificial. the people in power... there _could be enough for everyone_. that's the frustrating thing. it's genuinely, truly ok to have less. the fortress they're building is turning more and more into a prison, but it still has all the STUFF inside of it. the jobs, the houses, the healthcare, that shit's all inside. jobs that don't do anything, houses nobody lives in, healthcare that doesn't keep them from going mad from the weight of their delusions. and all these fuckers care about is that we want to TAKE THEIR STUFF. fuck yes i want their stuff. i want a meaningful job, i want a house to live in, i want secure access to healthcare. i am isolated to a great extent, i do isolate myself, and i keep pushing myself in the opposite direction. because i know that community is the difference between life and death, and their idea of "community"... well, i don't belong there anymore. that doesn't mean there's no place for me in this world. it's taking me a long time to learn that. there is, though. there's enough room in this world for everyone here. staying alive, finding joy in this world is difficult. it's never been easy for me. i'm still working at it. i'm going to keep working at it.

thinking of bringing VAR discussion into this thread

what does VAR stand for?

by "hedonism" though i don't mean "hedonism", i mean figuring out what's really important to you and doing it

By hedonism I mostly I mean binge drinking and smoking a pack of Parliament Lights a day. Except you can’t smoke sitting at the bar in so many places now, which cuts the magic of dissolution a fair bit.

What’s really important is irrelevant because rent and food.

Re another pandemic I reckon the chances are quite high that they will happen in greater frequency and the next one could well be in our lifetimes, but the upside is that we now have a miracle technology to help deal with it

Obv that mechanism is currently under attack by Nazi freaks in USA but if we can get the other side of that it could be ok (well there is also the climate cataclysm that is a large part of the reason pandemics will be more frequent but that’s another kettle of frogs)

what does VAR stand for?

Video Assisted Replay? Vins Above Replacement?

Value Added Reseller

What’s really important is irrelevant because rent and food.

― Lady Sovereign (Citizen) (milo z)

you think? i wanted to leave the country, a few months ago. i saw it clearly, saw that i would be safer, healthier, better off, if i left and went somewhere else. i couldn't. i just didn't have the ability to do all the things necessary. i knew then, i know now, that if i didn't leave, whatever was to come, i might wind up dead.

what's really important is relevant to me because i don't know how long i have. because my body is breaking down. because my friends' bodies are breaking own under the stress. because i _can't_ work. i'm privileged enough to be able to pay rent, to afford food, and lots of my friends can't. and sometimes they die, for any number of reasons.

and what am i supposed to say? how can i justify that? people come to me and they question and i say "you realize, if you do this, it could get you killed," and they fucking do it anyway. part of me doesn't understand it, and the wiser part of me says "kate, you know, if you had the choice to make over again, knowing what you know today, knowing what it has cost you, knowing that you might wind up dying as a result of it, you'd still do it".

because the fucked up thing is that in theory... in theory none of us _have_ to. that's what i keep saying, what i've always said. do what you need to do to take care of yourself. whatever that looks like. and part of me thinks, you know, coming out as a member of an incredibly marginalized group doesn't necessarily seem like protecting oneself. except i know that for me, it was. that doing what i did has made my life _better_. has made me a stronger, happier person. i mean, how fucked up is that?

not as fucked up as... i spent my whole life wanting to kill myself, wanting to die a martyr, and i did this thing i did, and through doing that i learned to love myself, learned that what's more valuable is that i live for what i believe in. the fucked up thing is that i might in fact die for what i believe in, whether the world recognizes it or not. i could die of "natural causes" next week, and people who don't understand the data can and probably will reduce it to the proximate cause - heart attack, stroke, whatever. once you _do_ look at the data, though...

-

well, the "next pandemic", for instance. it did surprise me, at first, when i looked at the distribution of deaths due to COVID and saw that it _wasn't_ the pandemic denialists who were dying. it was the same people who disproportionately die of anything. marginalized people. non-white people. in some sense, i think, breaking it down to the "next pandemic" is... i think it can be a misleading framing. because, in fact, there is a larger "pandemic" going on here. there are systemic inequities in health, in lifespan, and while i don't agree with stafford beer on most things, he was _absolutely_ right when he said that "the purpose of a system is what it does". and this system is _fucking killing us_. all of us, everyone here. some people are farther down the ladder than others, but where we are on the ladder... well, it just doesn't seem to make as much difference as it used to.

there's this scene at the end of _i saw the tv glow_. there's this white kid in a polo shirt who's come to the fun center for a birthday party. he's wearing a paper crown that says "Birthday Boy" on it in comic sans, and he's trapped in this phone booth and it's blowing cash, ones and twenties, up off the ground all around him. the other kids are standing around him shouting "Money! Money!" and this kid is acting like he's having the time of his life. and on the front of the phone booth there's an LED display reading "YOU ARE DYING".

i don't think that's a trans thing. i think that's what capitalism offers us. i think that's _all_ capitalism offers us, these days.

so ok, i didn't have to become homeless to move out here, and people who come here now, often they do wind up homeless. a young trans woman of color comes here from texas and three weeks later she jumps off a bridge and a week after that there's another young trans woman of color just here from texas who thinks this lady must have been a really big deal for us to be mourning her like that. and she was a really big deal, not because i knew her, not because any of us knew her well - three weeks isn't that long a time - but because every single one of us _matters_. our lives, not our deaths.

what am i going to say? that what they want isn't _relevant_, why they came here isn't _relevant_? i'm not going to sit here and judge them. whether or not they're necessarily much better, or would behave much differently given the chance... to me _that_ isn't relevant. what's relevant to me is that these people are _right_ to live their beliefs, whatever it costs them, and the people who judge and persecute them for it are _wrong_. the only difference between me and them is that it doesn't cost me as much to live my values - because, again, privilege.

i guess the people who choose to keep their heads down and try and tough it out aren't wrong either. i'm not going to judge them for doing what it takes. honestly, if i _was going to give advice, that's the advice i'd give. it's just not advice i've taken myself. it's not advice i would take myself, i guess.

i’m waiting for yellow cake to be def found in venzuela at this point.

nah maybe it instead will be a huge fentanyl manufacturing plant called like, ACAB Fentanyl SA. it will be run by tren de aragua of course. how can we not liberate maracaibo? in this time when even and especially the dumbest horseshit is passed as actually real.

Answering a couple of points above:
@Rob: My bad, I thought 401k plans allowed Americans to choose their own investments and play with it. But even if it's very passive in this case, it's still an investment, your money is literally in holdings.
@Deflatormouse: I apply principles of frugality and against consumerism to the level that I can because it's part of my values. But my impression is that only a fraction of our economic system relies on selling junk - there's only so much people can fill their house with. Degrowth would have to go much further - and in short, I don't see it happening. I flat-out disagree with you that the system rewards sociopathy and that sociopathy is pretty evenly distributed in all layers of society. You can postulate it as if it was a fact, but don't act like other people are idiots for seeing things differently.
@Daniel: It is relevant if people offer views that ultimately a revolution will just take care of everything by replacing people at the top with those at the bottom - I find this type of discourse demagogical, lazy, dishonest, and basically abusing people's naivety for political gains.
@brimstead: well, I mentioned solar energy because most companies are very deflated right now because of Trump, China, etc, just to illustrate that you can be a contrarian in your investments as well and bank on a different future. It doesn't have to be AI, oil & gas, and tobacco.

I think* that sociopathy is pretty evenly distributed

It is relevant if people offer views that ultimately a revolution will just take care of everything by replacing people at the top with those at the bottom

Yes but that "if" is important because what you just said describes no revolutionary ideology in existence.

@Daniel: It is relevant if people offer views that ultimately a revolution will just take care of everything by replacing people at the top with those at the bottom - I find this type of discourse demagogical, lazy, dishonest, and basically abusing people's naivety for political gains.

Having read the comment this is responding to… here’s a nice video for you to watch. Imagine defending feudalism lol.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJNK4VKeoBM

I think* that sociopathy is pretty evenly distributed

I think* that you’re telling on yourself here.

"But if we have to be cynical, I don't trust that the people struggling at the bottom of the food chain are necessarily much better, or would behave differently if given the chance. But I digress."

Very funny digression. Maybe you should give up all you have and start again from the bottom, working until you drop. You might think differently about your potential on how you would do, and how you'd behave.

I see both sides on this one. You're probably right that moral fibre plays something of a role but I think material conditions probably more so. I think structures that incentive certain behaviours play more of a role in creating those behaviours rather than personal character traits.

Its likely something of a combination but I think hating the player misses the mark and its more so the game

Not into nudge theory. Too Cameron-era Tory thinking for me.

Answering a couple of points above:

― Naledi

god, that post was the funniest thing i've seen all morning

mind you i just got up

please, tell me more of your theories about the nature of money, i don't often get a chance to hear how the other 1% thinks

I find this type of discourse demagogical, lazy, dishonest, and basically abusing people's naivety for political gains.

https://www.slashfilm.com/img/gallery/a-seinfeld-actor-tried-to-pitch-his-own-spin-off-and-it-sounds-awful/why-a-jackie-chiles-spin-off-wouldnt-have-worked-1744957249.webp

this is all normal now and it’s too late

too late for what? i guess it's too late for me to get someone pregnant, i'll give you that one

look

i'm not interested in sedition

at some point, though, "why are we paying taxes to these fuckers" becomes a legitimate question, no?

i mean for me it's academic, i don't have any income, i can't get a job, i've been made redundant by very nearly literally Marvin the Paranoid Android. god, i don't know how they managed to come up with a computer crazier than i am. eat your heart out, Parry.

and i'm certainly not suggesting anybody do the Keith Waldo Emerson thing of saying "well i'm just not going to pay my taxes then, so there". that's pretty obviously stupid. 300 million people and one person says "oh well the rules don't apply to me". ok in emerson's case it was more like 20 million people. that's not appreciably less stupid, though i guess at least in his case there wasn't over a century of precedent proving how stupid and pointless he was being. sometimes you just gotta fuck around and find out.

like we're all kinda having to do now, i guess. that's the thing, that's why i don't like the word "unprecedented", because a situation like this, i genuinely don't think anybody knows what the fuck to do. i certainly don't.

because i'm boomer-brained, i think a lot about those slogans. "what if they gave a war and nobody came?" well, ok, what if they gave a country and nobody came?

governments are supposed to _do_ things. the american government isn't doing a lot of those things, and its failure to do that is becoming increasingly obvious in a way that's difficult to ignore. it's not a matter of _principle_, it's a matter of my friends who are on food stamps not knowing how they're going to eat next week. oregon as a state, portland as a city, has to figure this shit out. and you know what would help? what would help a lot? if the money everyone was paying to the federal government instead was going to the people who were actually doing the work.

and again to me, at least, all of this is academic, i'm not gonna do anything about it one way or another. i can't be the only one thinking this shit, though, can i?

Looking at how to disrupt tax payments on a large scale is something blue states will need to look at as things continue to deteriorate. I don't want to pay into Donald Trump's personal slush fund.

otm

Looking at how to disrupt tax payments on a large scale is something blue states will need to look at as things continue to deteriorate. I don't want to pay into Donald Trump's personal slush fund.

― whimsical skeedaddler (Moodles), Tuesday, October 28, 2025 7:21 AM (eleven minutes ago)

yeah. i think washington state is likely to be in the vanguard here. california, well, not under newsom, and oregon quite frankly does not have its shit together legislatively.

-

america is to a large extent a matter of mythos. the things i was taught in school... like, they don't necessarily correspond very well to reality. cuz it's from the colonists' perspective, and they were kind of, uh, well, i mean, they believed a lot of stupid shit. most obviously the whole "white supremacy" thing. if you're gonna be that ignorant, though, that ignorance is gonna manifest itself in other ways. you have a nation of slaveholders saying "no taxation without representation", the hypocrisy is staggering in retrospect. that's what they said, though.

they didn't even know... like they kept going off against george iii. so much of these protests are built around this myth, this idea of trump as "king". people here aren't going to say "no gods". but "no kings", it fascinates me because it is ultimately a _liberal_ movement. these people out there protesting aren't ideologically in the same place as i am. they're waving signs that says "donald thrump sits on a toilet" or something and i'm thinking "whatever gets you to show up and protest" and in fact what does get people to show up and protest is... these people believe in the american myth. and the american myth is that we were fighting against the tyranny of george iii. nobody ever said shit about Lord North when i was in school.

well it's 3500 miles from new york to london. it's only about 2500 miles from washington dc to la, and i mean... that's a long way. a long way. you can say we have a globally interconnected world, i mean we do i guess, but washington dc feels a lot more distant here than it did in indiana. you say "washington" here and people will assume, not unreasonably, that you're talking about the state. nobody did that in indiana.

i've never heard anybody who wasn't, like, a british comic creator talk about "psychogeography". i think america, though, has a psychogeography all its own, and i think it's.. increasingly relevant.

i would be interested in perspectives from east coast blue-staters about what they think it'd look like. new york, illinois, i feel like those states would be leaders. pritzker really gives the impression of having his eye on the ball more than more of the state-level folks do.

i think washington state is likely to be in the vanguard here

if the AG version of Bob was governor, maybe. the Governor version of Bob has been a pretty sorry disappointment.

What roll do the states play in withholding federal income tax dollars that never pass through their hands?

I do think blue states can and should be entering interstate pacts on all sorts of things: environmental regulations, vaccines, purchasing groups, insurance regulations/healthcare, prescription drugs, emissions, gun control, etc.

I remember stories about some peaceniks in the 1980s withholding not all their taxes, but the percentage that would theoretically go to the Pentagon.

What roll do the states play in withholding federal income tax dollars that never pass through their hands?

― il lavoro mi rovina la giornata (PBKR)

none that i know of... the real issue is that a lot of state-level social services programs - medicaid springs to mind - depend on federal disbursements. those disbursements were not distributed on a timely basis during the _first_ trump administration. god knows what it would look like now.

anyway it's kind of a problem for the states if the federal government doesn't pay them, because the people who are gonna get blamed are the medicaid people, are the state-level people. if i was still working professionally, i might have some insight as to how healthcare companies are handling it. i'm pretty out of touch on a lot of things.

the central problem facing any states wanting to implement social services programs is that they would have to _really_ jack up the tax rates. they're not in a _position_ to do much to alleviate the human suffering caused by the failure of the federal government, but the states are the ones who are gonna get blamed for it. i don't think the republicans are doing fifth-dimensional chess here, i just think that's just how shit shakes out sometimes.

i also do think that any alliances are going to be on a regional level, like the CDC-replacement pact. replacing the CDC is pretty small potatoes, as these things go. actually doing something about the healthcare situation... based on what sic says, i don't think anybody in power on the west coast has the leadership capacity to undertake a thing like that.

the next few years are gonna be pretty painful out here on the west coast, i think. we don't have anybody with the leadership qualities of a pritzker.