Exactly. It isn’t Intelligent Design, it’s Natural Selection. By which I mean there’s no grand plan, it’s just a vicious, bloody system.

Speaking as someone with a PhD in Biology, nature usually sucks. There’s horrifying parasites, predators that will eat you while you’re still alive, and even herbivores can eat themselves into extirpation if not outright extinction.

The metaphor breaks down because there’s a lot of beauty in nature, and I think we need to protect it, but it’s not something we should try to emulate at a societal level. Natural selection doesn’t think ahead, it just happens, and most living things suffer out in the natural world. Most of us are smart enough to do better, I hope.

That’s one of the most frustrating things about this right wing populism. They’re correctly pointing out problems: wealth inequality, expensive housing, warmongering, etc. The problem they then cause is that they blame the source of these problems squarely on some scapegoats and then do things that only exacerbate the existing problems they diagnosed in the first place.

Billionaire donors gaining even more power and stripping the few checks against said power, doing shit all to make groceries cheaper, and now they’re out there blowing up boats in international waters and committing large scale violence against people in this county. Yet… crickets from the folks who voted them in. Just maddening. They just wanted to shit on the scapegoats

Wrong one! I had to do a double take, but I’m pretty sure it’s actually Leavitt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoline_Leavitt

This is not solely a news community.

Right? No childish nicknames, no rage-fueled late night social media posting, no off kilter diatribes during an unrelated speech. He’s just, transparently cool with a child trafficker. It is so mind numbingly damning I’m split between being horrified and fascinated by how his supporters refuse to connect any dots.

I imagine a lot of shit teachers keep their jobs simply because there’s usually not a huge pool of candidates for replacements. Higher wages would help fix that issue, too!

Indeed, it’s good to see what resonates with people who are actual humans and not just bots. Many have been quieter since all the Epstein backtracking, because they were sooooooo invested in it before.

And recently a dude I knew has two posts in a row that are incredible: one is literally cheering for the death of all the venezuelan people blown up in a boat (flag emojis and all), then the next post is him recounting how horrific it is that a political pundit was killed, and people cheering for death like that need to unfriend him. In the second post he is also going on about how Christian he and all these pundits are, which…bruh

There’s plenty of people beyond saving, that’s for sure: but I think people aren’t so immutable. I think people are being made more monstrous by the capitalist system we live in, and the people at the top who exemplify avarice as a path to success. I’m not going to be buddies with ex maga unless they’re really going the extra mile to make up for the damage they’ve done, but I hope at least some can be decent humans.

Yeah, and it also feels “forever ago” when you’re that age. Literally half their lives. So I could understand them thinking it’s “old news”, but when you’re an old and crusty 40 year old, you know that a 60 someone saying heinous shit means that person is deeply twisted.

Also a content warning for a couple slurs, but the point from Patton Oswalt a while back is roughly the same: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkKo1_RP_0c

Fascinating, isn’t it? Does he think the Democrats just “hate all things fossil” so much that there’s some kind of integer overflow and it flips negative, and oil businesses do just fine entirely by accident?

It’s truly astounding how well right wing propaganda gets folks to believe things that are so completely at odds with his own lived experience. None of us are immune to propaganda, I know, but that whole statement is just…fascinating

Oh that’s her, I was just trying to be insulting haha

Oh I’m totally agreed! It’s all capitalist, jingoist garbage, same as it ever was.

Yeah, I was just on a flight and saw a dude across the aisle that was mainlining all the worst people on twitter. Space laser lady, the racist cat, the nazi automaker…this dude was just liking everything and replying frantically. He was flipping through everything and replying so quickly that I felt pity as much a loathing. It was absolutely pathetic. Dude’s brain is melted.

That was the NFL being political though, this is them being patriotic…is what my troglodyte relatives will say.

No, my entire point is that they are the ones that showed up: hence why we have a more authoritarian president than perhaps ever before. Between the 2020 election and the 2024 election, the raw numbers of votes dropped for the Democrats, not the Republicans. This whole discussion has been about bleeding support from (some) of the Left.

And yes, this is because Harris and the rest of the DNC shit the bed. That they went too hard toward the right is certainly a factor: and again, to be clear,I’m not saying it’s a good idea to move right. What I’m trying to get across is that abstaining is often indistinguishable from wanting a more right-leaning candidate, because then that’s the candidate that wins.

If it was up to me, see my volcano comment. If we want revolutionary change in the USA, I know which party I’d rather fight in the streets against.

I’m sorry that you’ve misunderstood my point so deeply. Let me more explicit. The Cheneys should have been thrown into a volcano. Harris did a shit job. We all need to organize to get milquetoast liberals/moderates and fascists alike out of office.

Unfortunately, over decades they’ve learned who are reliable voting blocks. Not participating communicates that one sees both options as functionally the same. So if anything, it encourages then to move to the right, which is a reliable voting block.

I’m not at all gleeful about voting for them, and desperately want other options. I’m doing what I can to build parallel structures, engage in mutual aid, and in my day job I’m fighting climate change as an environmental research scientist. Unfortunately, we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds, and the tracks of the trolley don’t change overnight.

Well yeah, that’s exactly the idea. Choose the best of bad options, and try to improve things so that the next time there’s better options.

Not choosing either usually leads to the worse option, which makes it harder to improve things.

There are no easy options.

Yeah, a lot of evangelical churches make it abundantly clear that as long as you love Jesus, you can be a giant piece of shit otherwise and still get into heaven.

As a kid I appreciated that line of thinking because I thought it allowed us to strive for better, accept that we’re all flawed, but still understand we’re all worthy of love.

Instead, as I was a teenager watching these same folks froth at the mouth and cheer for blood in Afghanistan and Iraq, I realized it was a way to reconcile any damn horrible thing they wanted to do. A cloak for depravity and hate.