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

We're not a virus. We're a rash.

We're not a virus. We're a rash.

when you think about it, a rash is just a place for a virus to put his stuff

saw one of those vids of a dolphin doing cool tricks to impress humans and my first thought was "if only they knew the shit we were up to" and my second was "hmmm this could be AI generated", I really don't think it was but the fact that it's a thought I have to have sucks

Oh the dolphins are onto us

i feel some elements of “degrowth” is also eco-fash adjacent.

My new thing is that consciousness (at least at the human level) is actually a bad thing

you should read cioran, i don't agree with him (i genuinely enjoy being alive) but he's funny. best shitposter of the 1950s.

Self-trepanation is highly underrated.

I enjoy being alive, too; I just don't think it makes me (or my species) special. I bet deer enjoy their lives, from their perspective. I know crows do. They're laughing it up all the time.

Funktionslust: the joy of doing something you're good at.

(I remember reading someone speculating that non-human animals probably experience that, and further suggesting it's an analog for human emotions. I find the speculation incomplete at best - surely we have way more axes of commonality than just that one.)

Oh I enjoy life. It’s more what our level consciousness has led us to as far as destroying our environment. I was reading some book, only a few pages, that mentioned how long homo erectus survived as a species. The author’s theory was that Homo sapiens would not get anywhere near that. Not that homo erectus lacked consciousness. More that they operated within their environment in a less harmful way. I dunno. Sometimes I wish I had the brain of a deer or something instead of all the anxiety about how to live in this world.

Anyway I’m a happy dude. Just not sure our brains are leading us in the right direction as a species

Yes, H. erectus had a good 2 million years and I think H. sapiens has had 300K to maybe 500K if you take it back to the most archaic developmental level, so H. erectus has us beat by at least 4 times chronologically.

species are kind of an illusion when you think about it. i think that when we're truly able to see that out separateness is an illusion, we leave behind the mindset that allows us to destroy our environment and ourselves

One thing I like to do when I’m around a lot of Christians is to say that man fucked up when we decided God was sent as a man. Most societies worshipped natural things from the world around us. Once god became man, we separated ourselves from that

god is a cat

In fact I did this around my cousin who is a very liberal thinking Christian not realizing his kids were listening and apparently it was the first time they ever heard anyone doubt that god was real. I felt bad but that’s what families are for

The Greek, Roman, and Norse gods were always depicted as looking and acting pretty darned human. the Hindu gods are often quasi-human in form and characteristics, too, if you can look past the blue skin, tusks, or multiple arms.

Yeah I’m mostly trolling when I do this

solar deities or gtfo

I believe in one true god. And he lives in this lake.

"i strongly suspect that less than 15% of americans ilxors can provide any sort of coherent response to that question."

Fixed.

https://i.postimg.cc/sfTPdzt8/images-(5).jpg

Lol

I enjoy being alive, too; I just don't think it makes me (or my species) special. I bet deer enjoy their lives, from their perspective. I know crows do. They're laughing it up all the time.

― Instead of create and send out, it pull back and consume (unperson), Thursday, January 22, 2026 5:29 PM (yesterday)

oh noooooooooooo

do we want to talk about therians? have you heard of therians? even if we don't go that far, i know deergirls. i also know puppygirls, the puppygirl plague. i guess i'm portraying some bias by putting it that way. yes i know human beings who love their pets and treat them with more unconditional kindness and love than human beings are seen as being _worthy_ of, but me personally, i think there's some major fuckin' selection bias there. i think they're not looking realistically about what life is like for most dogs.

i like being human, fundamentally. i like being sentient, even if it causes me a lot of problems. i got... ok, i got my own heretical take on the garden of eden story. eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil wasn't the problem. i know it's easy for people to think that, oh, if we hadn't eaten of that fruit, everything would be fine, but no, things would _not_ have been fine, they just would've continued to be ignorant of their own suffering, of the causes of their suffering. i've been ignorant of things, and not being ignorant of them anymore, well, that makes my life a lot harder, but looking back, was i happier when i was ignorant? no, i was fucking miserable. i was miserable because i was in deep, deep pain and i didn't know why.

to me, the original sin was that adam and eve looked at themselves, and they saw that they were naked, and they were ashamed. see, it's not like the stuff they did before they ate of that fruit was ok. i have no doubt they both did lots of fucked up shit. looking at themselves naked and feeling that they are _bad people_, though? for creatures who were, according to the story, made in the image of god...

i don't know that i think shame has ever made the world a better place in a real, lasting sense (as opposed to holding people responsible for their words and actions _without_ shame).

honestly, i have yet to see any fucked up shit that's not attributable to the interlocking systems of oppression that are patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism (not adam smith capitalism, the "capitalism" that says that the value of a human being is monetarily quantifiable), and i tend to look with suspicion on anything that broadens the scope of immiseration beyond those particular manifestations of human sentience

here's my take
when someone states "there is no such thing as society, really," it behooves whatever constitutes "society" to reconfigure itself in such as way as to exclude that person

when, instead, that society exalts that person, places them at the center of power, well, the statement becomes a bit of a chekov's gun

similarly, when someone in a position of power operates with total disregard to the alleged laws that regulate that power, whether it be by saying "if the president does it, it's not illegal", or, well... no doubt there are many examples one can think of... the system which exalts such men to power is in a state of lawlessness

or, for instance, when an institution of power declares that another institution of power is "too big to fail", it commits itself irrevocably to its own failure

are such systems capable of being restored? i fail to see how. any action anyone takes would be, in a sense, "destroying the village in order to save it". we thus have a sort of tragedy of the commons scenario - all acknowledge the need for change, but no sane person (and i do consider myself to be, fundamentally, a sane person) would take action which would be directly ruinous to our village. well, it's like the ancients say - "only a ninja can defeat a ninja". i'm no ninja. i don't even know where to buy one of those cool headbands that says "NINJA" across it.

“i feel some elements of “degrowth” is also eco-fash adjacent.”

Yeeeeeep. I heard someone talk about an experience like this where two eco justice groups were trying to work together but one of them was degrowth oriented and the other group was Black women, who quite rightly were like —“You think there should be less of who now?”

imo, being in favor of 'degrowth' is philosophically a moot point anyway. humans are deeply, irrevocably programmed against it and it's going to happen on its own because Nature is deeply and irrevocably programmed to implement it automatically when population growth hits an immovable limit. we won't choose it. it will come find us.

humans are deeply, irrevocably programmed against it

skill issue

Somewhat surprised at degrowth being used as a synonym for reducing the population here, that's not how I witness it at all when it comes up with my French family: they talk about it within a context of rejecting economic growth as a marker of a healthy society. It's degrowth instead of sustainability because it implies we need to actually scale back our capitalist hellscape as opposed to just trying to stay at the level we're at. If you suggested to them reducing the world birth rate could be part of that they'd say that's 1) racist and 2) inefficient.

Not that there aren't tons of eco fascists in France very worried about non white people reproducing but they're not commonly associated specifically to the degrowth movement I don't think.

Yup. There are huge problems with using things like GDP and market receptions of these numbers as signifiers of growth. I've seen some wacky discussion around getting rid of washing machines, and so 'who performs that Labour' comes into it.

At the same time there is a lot of energy waste, with (another example) city offices and advertising boards using power at night. A lot of consumption and waste of equipment made to fail, and its accompanying resources.

Paying any attention to Aimless' theories around human nature is also not it.

Somewhat surprised at degrowth being used as a synonym for reducing the population here, that's not how I witness it at all when it comes up with my French family: they talk about it within a context of rejecting economic growth as a marker of a healthy society. It's degrowth instead of sustainability because it implies we need to actually scale back our capitalist hellscape as opposed to just trying to stay at the level we're at. If you suggested to them reducing the world birth rate could be part of that they'd say that's 1) racist and 2) inefficient.

Not that there aren't tons of eco fascists in France very worried about non white people reproducing but they're not commonly associated specifically to the degrowth movement I don't think.

I was also confused by this— racist population reduction arguments have nothing to do with the degrowth stuff I have read and know about.

Consider the Plague of Athens. 420s BC, the time of Aristophanes.

Old rich people dying meant young people inherited loads of property, and it caused a lot of social change - as you might imagine, there are conflicting accounts of whether that was a good thing or a bad thing.

My understanding of degrowth is the same as Daniel’s fwiw, I associate it with the likes of Naomi klein rather than Malthusian green types

imo, being in favor of 'degrowth' is philosophically a moot point anyway. humans are deeply, irrevocably programmed against it and it's going to happen on its own because Nature is deeply and irrevocably programmed to implement it automatically when population growth hits an immovable limit. we won't choose it. it will come find us.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Friday, January 23, 2026 8:10 PM (yesterday)

carlyle was right about economics being "the dismal science", but in fact it's only that way because thomas malthus was a fucking racist who came up with his bullshit theory to justify some stupid fucking deeply held racist belief of his

i should take up poetry. i hear that's called the "gay science".

skill issue

― uploading this content requires perseveration (sic), Saturday, January 24, 2026 2:08 AM (four hours ago)

one of the most comforting things to me is looking at these LLMs, these supposedly "better" computers, and realizing that they're fucked up and broken at the same way that humans who try to do what capitalism demands of us are fucked up and broken.

unrelated

i'll tell you a story, true story

in the late 90s my oldest brother was working at a west coast video, video store clerk. and the manager of this video store was stealing from the till. now, the clerks at that video store, they knew if the amount in the till didn't add up to the amount in the cash register at the end of the night, it would be on their heads.

in fact my brother had actually been fired from a video store in the past after he was accused of stealing from the till. they said they had videotapes, but either they were lying about that, or they didn't actually look at the videotapes, cuz, again, he wasn't stealing from the till. this is not because my brother is a scrupulously honest man, but because he's not stupid. he figured that if he stole from the till, he would get caught. i've always said that the perfect crime is one you don't actually commit, but in this case, well, it didn't work out for my brother.

anyway, i know he wasn't stealing from the till both because, well, he's my brother, i know how he acts when he's lying, and also because the guy who _was_ stealing from the till eventually came forward and confessed. not sure why. maybe he had scruples. maybe he felt for my brother when they started talking about criminal charges. well, anyway, that was nice and all but my brother was still fired. it was a pretext, really, a pretext so they wouldn't have to admit they'd falsely accused my brother of something he didn't do.

well, anyway, that wasn't what happened at the west coast video. what happened at the west coast video was that that when the customers paid in cash - people still paid with cash, back in those days - they wouldn't run it through the system, but they'd put it in the till. so at the end of the day, the numbers would add up. my brother, personally, he didn't steal money from the till. i don't know about the other clerks, but he didn't. i wouldn't say he's a scrupulously honest man, no, but he does have scruples. those scruples just don't include being honest with people who aren't honest with him. now, he would take home other things from that store. those single-serving bottles of starbucks iced mocha frappucino? yeah, he'd take a lot of those. or if there was a movie he wanted, he'd just take that. i guess the accounting system on those wasn't as stringent as it was for cash. cuz he wasn't going to throw somebody else under the bus for what he'd done any more than he was gonna get himself in trouble.

nobody did get in trouble, that i can tell. of course the customers at some point twigged on that the employees were taking money under the till. none of the customers really gave a fuck. eventually, though, there weren't as many customers because the selection at that store wasn't that great, compared to other west coast videos. anyway, they closed the store for financially underperforming and fired everyone except for the manager, who they promoted.

that manager's name? jd vance.

no, i made that last bit up. i don't know who the manager was. not jd vance tho.

Yeeeeeep. I heard someone talk about an experience like this where two eco justice groups were trying to work together but one of them was degrowth oriented and the other group was Black women, who quite rightly were like —“You think there should be less of who now?”

― Ima Gardener (in orbit), Friday, January 23, 2026 3:43 PM (yesterday)

when i was younger a friend of mine was into something called the "church of euthanasia", whose motto was "save the planet, kill yourself". of course nowadays people have learned to use more socially acceptable words on the internet when telling other people to kill themselves.

anyway, speaking personally i think i understand where the person behind that group was coming from. i don't understand, though, why she didn't stop telling people to kill themselves when she came out as trans. my whole antinatalist era came to a pretty decisive end when i realized that oh, wait, being born isn't actually a bad thing, i just hated myself. it's not easy learning to love and care for myself, but i figure it's easier than willing the human race into extinction.

One thing I like to do when I’m around a lot of Christians is to say that man fucked up when we decided God was sent as a man. Most societies worshipped natural things from the world around us. Once god became man, we separated ourselves from that

― Heez, Friday, 23 January 2026 04:17 (yesterday)

Christianity itself (as I understand and practice it) is in many ways an outgrowth of this exact idea. God becomes human like the rabbi in the Rooster Prince story becomes rooster, out of love and creativity and a desire for nearness, not because assuming human form adds anything to God's perfection.

Kate, the kicker to that story almost made me howl out loud in a house full of otherwise sleeping people

Hat’s off!

Kate, the kicker to that story almost made me howl out loud in a house full of otherwise sleeping people

Hat’s off!

― Clever Message Board User Name (Raymond Cummings), Saturday, January 24, 2026 7:22 AM (one hour ago)

awww thanks. i kinda wish it wasn't a true story haha.

Christianity itself (as I understand and practice it) is in many ways an outgrowth of this exact idea. God becomes human like the rabbi in the Rooster Prince story becomes rooster, out of love and creativity and a desire for nearness, not because assuming human form adds anything to God's perfection.

― Tell me who sends these infamous .gifs (bernard snowy), Saturday, January 24, 2026 6:41 AM (two hours ago)

a lot of the younger queer folks i know would just say the rabbi was a furry, but i guess that's not entirely dissimilar

though neither those folks nor, i assume, the rabbi would claim anything like perfection :)

I almost posted this to Bluesky then thought better of it:

“ All of this really does feel like a plot from some thriller novel or movie, some conspiratorial long game to get two generations of young men hooked on ultra realistic war video games and then set them lose with real guns on their actual country”

“ All of this really does feel like a plot from some thriller novel or movie, some conspiratorial long game to get two generations of young men hooked on ultra realistic war video games and then set them lose with real guns on their actual country”

― Clever Message Board User Name (Raymond Cummings), Saturday, January 24, 2026 10:22 AM (two hours ago)

the one flaw in their plan is that these young men are also completely incapable of ingesting solid food, having lived entirely on "monster" gamer energy drinks for the last six years, and spend upwards of 6 hours a day "gooning".

which, to be fair, feels exactly like the sort of master plan rummy would come up with.

they also, incidentally, insist on doing things like going into battle armed only with a Gabbett-Fairfax Mars and "teabagging" the corpses of their fallen comrades.

if you don't know what a gabbett-fairfax mars is, rest assured that i don't really know either, but i am assured by my gamer friends that the idea of someone going into combat with one of those things is extremely funny.

this thread cannot keep up with reality this aint doom

if i encounter one more "we're here because leftists protesting gaza couldn't hold their noses and vote for kamala," i'm gonna explode

if your take in this moment is: electoral politics works fine except for implacable ""leftists"", then a horse needs to kick you in the head

otm all you have to do is look around at who is actually defending our country and lives and who is haplessly wringing their hands to see that that’s exactly the wrong takeaway

And i say this as someone who eagerly voted for Kamala without having to hold my nose

if i encounter one more "we're here because leftists protesting gaza couldn't hold their noses and vote for kamala," i'm gonna explode

if your take in this moment is: electoral politics works fine except for implacable ""leftists"", then a horse needs to kick you in the head

― budo jeru, Saturday, January 24, 2026 8:38 PM (two days ago)

i know someone like that, it really pisses me off when it does that (person in question's pronouns are "it/its" right now, obviously i respect pronouns but "it/its" as pronouns is uniquely grammatically confusing) and it's still basically a decent person who's working hard to unlearn a lot of bullshit. way i figure it is if someone's showing up, eventually they're gonna kinda need to stop throwing leftists under the bus. we learn what we're taught and all

-

idk if this is doomposting or what but my executive function is shit right now. that's the thing i've experienced particularly since jan 2025, how difficult it is to actually _do_ things. that's the source of my optimism in fact, sooner or later things are going to have to start getting done. it took me all of last week to change my phone carrier, for instance. part of that is that xfinity is, well, i don't have to tell y'all what xfinity is like, and also i mean yeah. there are a lot of things i want to do and i'm _so fucking tired of this bullshit_, shoutouts to spacemen 3 i guess

blaming leftists for kamala because gaza is some dumbass and very incorrect shit. budo otm.

kate if u say it’s doom, it’s doom, friend. my doommeter is just set for my doom, your doom may vary.