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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • No, just because we’re living in the decline of the empire/regime dejour, doesn’t mean we don’t still live our lives when possible.

    As an example, If my country, the US, saned up tomorrow and started collecting guns, like actually enforcing it including the inevitable stand offs with the nutters climbing bell towers over it to get it fucking done, I would throw mine in the pile eagerly. Wont happen, but I don’t fetishize the firearm I own explicitly and exclusively to defend myself from the gun nuts.

    I have to live next to the neoconfederate nutters with arsenals. I am still subject to the violence of their nuttery. When in (the fall of) Rome.






  • Probably, in the same way Steamboat Mickey is.

    Just part of the whole valuing property, in this case intellectual, over actual labor and people that our species loves so fucking much.

    Imagine if IP from drugs to technology to fiction had a 5-10 year max window before other people could work with and expand on it. It would be a better world for most.

    Oh you only get to make exclusive income on that thing you came up with for SEVERAL YEARS OF YOUR LIFE before you need to contribute in other ways to keep making money, boo fucking hoo. Where’s the sympathy for people working 2 jobs, burning their life up to meet basic needs, who don’t get several years of passive income on an idea that popped into their head 4 years ago.




  • The fact that making significant sacrifices in abandoning many of the decadent comforts of this period at our only habitat’s irreparable (on a human timescale) damage expense is met with ridicule shows how determined we are to wreck this place.

    Imagine mass famines and frequent catastrophic weather events a couple generations from now. I’m guessing they’ll look at us being above living with our once kind, nurturing habitat with disdain and bewilderment when they’re steeped in the fruits of our lifestyles.

    Im not saying going back to the dark ages, im not advocating rejecting knowledge, only the rushing around and consumerism. There’s no more reasonable room for growth, growth is killing us, and robbing us of meaning.

    If we can’t live with this paradise, the idea of us spreading to hostile, unforgiving worlds within reach like Mars or Titan is a bad joke. Unlike the infinite mistakes we get to keep making here without instant death, one major mistake out there where we didn’t evolve, and poof everybody dead instantly thanks for playing space faring civilization. That isn’t a game humans can pull off. Maybe some small crew of exceptional people, but certainly not a colony of regular people.

    This is what we got. So yeah, maybe spending our time whittling stuff we need and moving at the speed of horse would be better for humanity long term than racing to grow our GDP into extinction.

    Whats the endgame of all this growth and “innovation” if it wasn’t killing us as it is? To have Google ad AI generated amalgums of our dead relatives transmitted directly into our brains to convince us to buy more crap?


  • It does, but if a catastrophic war, including one with nuclear weapons, brought us down to 2 billion from 9, those nukes wouldn’t even touch the current course of heavy industry of 9 billion that we recklessly became without a thought in the world about whether our only habitat could support it.

    Because shooting wars end, even if through attrition. Industry just keeps metastizing if you let it, and pretty lies like “but we planted trees! That evens out all the shit we’re pumping in the air and water!” are just pretty lies.

    If we cared about our species having a future, heavy industry would be scaled back to food/medicine, we could sow our own clothes, go back to horses, breed less, communaly build our own structures, and whittle our own shelf crap, and we could perhaps still provide a future to subsequent generations. We do not.







  • Entire industries cannibalizing one another to eliminate competition and their industry’s ability and desire to make the products/services they existed for in the first place. TimeWarnerHBODiscoveryblahblah shelving projects for tax cheats, making lazy appeals to nostalgia for what the companies they destroyed once made, and cheap reality garbage instead of actual media comes to mind, but it’s terminal capitalism, it’s happening in every sector.

    Then they lay off their workers cutting their workforce to the bone by activist shareholder demand, eliminating potential consumers of the economy.

    Now they want to use AI to cut the bone.

    The economy no longer has any interest in the human beings it was created as a lowly tool to serve. We’re being cut out entirely, except the small class of private owners, of course.

    AI could and should be used to free mankind from tedious labor, that’s why such innovation should have come from well funded PUBLIC research our economy should have been oriented to feed for PUBLIC benefit.

    Instead, like every other technology, it will be used as yet another cudgel against society. This civilization is dogshit.




  • It’s extremely disingenuous and intentionally misleading that our introduction of the Native Americans to young children is portrayed as peaceful and kind when the headline of European immigrant relations with Native Americans is genocide. It would be better to say nothing about them than to leave the opposite impression of what actually happened until they’re older.

    It would be akin to young German Children being taught about Adolf Hitler: Staunch Animal Rights activist until they’re older. Sure, I guess he was, but it would be obvious what the goal of leading with that factoid is.

    The goal of early social study books highlighting that is to instill “America Yay” ideas in kids heads, a vestige of the whole manifest destiny we did nothing wrong narrative. We are a nation built on foundations of genocide and slavery. That is overwhelming reality. But many, particularly conservative Americans, would prefer that be expunged from our national identity so they can feel better about our history, which is the basis of their war on CRT.