a caveat that maybe state and municipal government is still somewhat democratically functional, like at that low level enough of the day to day of administering people's lives is delegated to actual democratic authority maybe
but then i look at stuff like the debate (i didn't actually watch the debate i respect myself too much) and i look at how stuff happens and how it like doesn't seem to matter at all who is in power for the average person. Like it's pretty obvious that there is corporate and wealth buy-in for domestic policy, and think tanks and stuff that set a social agenda to some degree, and I guess the democratic apparatus serves to enable that buy-in, but on the federal level it really feels like voting happens at all merely to provide a democratic legitimacy to stuff that's actually decided entirely by unelected bureaucrats and moneyed interests that are either employed by the state or privately, right?
everything connected to voting is there to give social consent right? if you vote you assent to the legitimacy of the government - and this is like, its sole function? because if not enough people did that, and people actually didn't believe in the legitimacy of the government, there might actually be a problem I guess?
Like how can we think it actually matters which of these guys [the goo brain prez candidates] ends up elected from the pov of an average person? womens and queer rights are dissolving before our eyes regardless in most places, labor rights movements get stomped the fuck out the second they start to do anything interesting, and the few state bastions of safety come from the fact that local governments still sometimes represent citizen priority in some limited sense.
like foreign policy is gonna be the exact same in most cases, like there's no voting mechanism that will end the genocide in gaza - there's no mechanism to get the MIC to stop bombing random places and sending demonic spec ops raids wherever, nor will the steady stream of funds that go into toppling any government that so much as hesitates in its fealty to the us - so ideas that democracy is the answer is meaningfuly deluded, right?
federal politics feels like a really boring kind of WWE thing where the stage are national elections and their personalities and horse races, the kayfabe is the idea that a vote translates into anything meaningful other than the governed consenting to the process, whereas WWE's actual function as entertainment and a RNC pipeline is somewhat obvious, liberals are an entire class of people who actually stake their identity on its sincere legitimacy.
I know this post is long and probably sucks, but this all reeks to me and I'm so tired of seeing people care when the actual options for positive change are narrow, unpleasant, and sometimes illegal to voice.
I want people to disengage, start building parallel structures and outright refusing to live as if this farce is legitimate and even if i'm wrong about the particulars, that feels unreproachably noble and needed.
they really need to discover electric guitars. [non country] guitar music was the glue of our society and now that guitars are largely irrelevant in popular music, everything has gone to shit. it's no coincidence. ZOOMERS: PICK UP A STRAT AND START CHUGGA-ING
Anybody propping up israel in word or deed should be destroyed
I think I realized how much these cartoons sucked when they left my life and absolutely nothing got worse, and I didn't feel as though I was diminished for their absence.
My partner really doesn't like most pop culture, and especially early in our relationship, we were sharing spaces intended for a single person - single rooms in an apartment and stuff - so we had to agree on a lot of what we consumed - it meant my "adult" cartoons and shit fell to the wayside. South Park, American Dad, that kind of pablum.
Once we got enough space back that i found myself able to more comfortably revisit this stuff, it never really landed again. It felt irrelevant. It felt shitty. It felt, at times unkind, but really mostly just irrelevant. Most of them have the voice of the older men who make them - a viewpoint I no longer share nor aspire to - and It's just like... each episode is 20 minutes of my life I could have spent reading, or doing literally anything more interesting.
The X shit is gonna be one, maybe two seasons of garbage nobody asked for - just another sign of the rising irrelevance of gen x probably.
For me, I was watching this shit out of some kind of inertia - it was how I had always filled my time, from the earliest days when sneaking south park was a subversive act against my parents - till those early days realizing my partner's happiness was more important to me than continuing to watch them - I bet anyone still attached to these garbage shows would have a similar experience if they had a similar extended break. It's just so non-essential.
Unless these morons are hiding an honest to god AGI in their back pocket, they're fully insane, and it's boring at this point.
Even if they do, it's probably a mechanical turk somehow. I don't believe these dunces capable of making an actual gestalt organism
I was in love with this girl for a bit in highschool. I'm kinda glad i was too fucked up to really land a relationship, there was a fleeting moment when I might've had something with her, but my Gender shit was out of control dysfunctional back then, and any romantic partner I might've landed would've been dealing with that directly, and I was just too immature besides. I wasn't the creep though.
Instead I became a fairly close friend to her, and got to watch her boyfriend at the time gaslight and mentally abuse her. It escalated to it inducing an attempted suicide that landed her in the hospital for several months and almost delayed her graduation. She tried to leave him, and he wouldn't let her. It got around he had a sadist streak in his intimacy as well, which was actively making things worse for my friend.
It escalated to a point where several nobodies in particular who considered her a friend, and boyfriends of said - felt they had no real choice but to have him go nowhere in particular under the guise of hanging out, where he was given a very, very clear message about what he was to do, and how he was to comport himself - away from her, forever - lest really interesting things happen to him.
He wasn't dumb, he listened, and fucked off. As far as I know he grew the fuck up and has a functional family now - quite the turn around i guess, i'm glad he was smart enough to go down a road where that was possible.
What kind of violence is theoretically possible against ai infrastructure right now, asking for myself
This weirdo seems like the wrong kind of person to have any power, no matter how insignificant, invested into them.
call me crazy
This AI shit sucks and the fact that every clown ultimately answerable to a gnostic Archon is running full tilt towards it is depressing and I want it to fail more than I want the sun to rise in the morning.
I think often about it. To me there's the life that happens to you, and it's not necessarily a life that you want or choose. I think most people accept what life brings them, and are largely passive observers of their life. Its not some innate thing like "NPC" language implies - but I think our society is built on people not being too active in choosing their own destiny. for those of us who have "destinies" and circumstances that are contra to our own desires, there is a dysphoria present.
Overcoming the inertia of life and the expectations present at every level of lived life isn't easy - at times it demands lurching into uncertainty, danger, and facing the unknown in a way that humans get conditioned to avoid at most costs. But I think I would personally rather die than submit to the mediocrities on offer for my compliance with late capitalism. It's too much of a spiritual death, a soul death, to bear. There is true living and love for life where finding a destiny we can all abide.
I don't have specific answers, but i know the feeling and i know that comporting myself to the influences of the world as it is fucking sucks and is loser behavior
proof to me that democracy is fake and that foreign policy has nothing to do with electoral politics because no elected official actually has meaningful say in what we do abroad
just a different kitchen worker here chiming in to say that Bourdain's book may have been your window, but people live that life every day and most of them don't get to write a book about it. I'm a dishwasher and prep cook by time worked, and more than half of that meme relates to me without ever having read some dead asshole's book
tbqh if you're not conceptualizing these sorts of people as an honest to God enemy, like the kind you actually go to war with - the kind that represents an existential threat to you and everything you love - you need to be.
can we please, collectively, do more than nothing while EVERYTHING continues to get worse?
I've been in exclusively male spaces, i've been in exclusively female spaces, i've been in mixed queer, and mixed het spaces. Just a product of being in the closet and cis passing, and later out of the closet and trans - it's all complicated, but I feel like, in terms of what can be typically expected, the cis male spaces were the most emotionally constipated ("I feel safer talking to a tree..."), but in general cis culture doesn't seem to provide a lot of space for real emotional availability? Like to be quite honest I didn't start learning how to be truly myself until I began to feel at home in queer spaces - cis white western culture is a place where people are wound the fuck up and masking several layers deep, and generally scared to be themselves, and there is almost always some mal-adjusted fucker, no matter the group composition, that'll use vulnerability against you in any given social space - so people get scared to be authentic.
There's something deeply unwell if most people feel like a tree has more to offer them emotionally than another human being, no matter what though.
Honestly can't say this validates electoralism without qualifiers, as beating a nazi within an inch of their life is explicitly direct action; electoralism coming in for the utility save and getting her immunity is an asterisk'd W at best
controlled opposition sure looks weird in the uk
"
I'm longposting and there's nothing you can do to stop me.
It really is quite the coup, a cultural victory for liberalism and conservative values that there are a ton of people who think they understand politics because they plug into a few places, like the cable news giants and places like NYT, and the associated internet sphere. Like, they obviously don't have any of it in fact. If you try to discuss politics with any depth, setting aside any kind of marxist tendencies I have - just discussing politics, morality, philosophy - how unread everyone is. Like, the ignorance of the average liberal is profound. When they do read, it's the people that are allowed to be platformed on those media outlets, so nothing that doesn't already confirm their own worldview, and nothing of any intellectual substance - anything that might confer intellectual rigor is mysteriously absent (it's so those on the lower rungs economically are not empowered to realize liberals are taking them for a fucking ride).
There is a caste of them that know exactly what they are - they hold identities that the far right desires to exterminate, or they have loved ones in that category, but are otherwise deeply conservative people. They may or may not be in denial about that, but that denial doesn't change anything. Their empathy extends exactly as far as where their own self interest lies - but these aren't even the norm - the norm are people who think they can navigate politics with nothing but their own reckoning and the slurry of bad takes and platformed liberalism, along with the conditioning they're fed to distrust anything outside of that bubble - they're conditioned to stay in place and never actually challenge their own views - to take it for granted they've got it figured out already.
Liberals get uniquely gassed up by their media to feel like the smartest, biggest adult in the room, which is a position that, as a feature, does not require self reflection, introspection, or further education. You're already at the apex, the only thing left to do is force other people to receive your Maddowian Wisdom, and it would be funny if it wasn't actively choking off left-wing inroads into popular culture and (more importantly) political gains - electoral and otherwise.
The far right leans into messaging that weaponizes and even exalts ignorance - and where it has any intellectual investment - is spent similarly exalting their big boys - but seeing as this cohort is expressly an enemy, they're an uncomplicated problem to deal with. Liberalism, on the other hand, is an active menace to the left, and in tandem with infiltration/suppression, is the main weapon in preventing any meaningful political gains by the left.
It fucking sucks. But if you want to tear them down, you kind of need to start with the ways in which they make themselves intellectually unassailable. Most aren't open to it, but I've managed to radicalize more than a few - it just takes work and patience.
while you were learning skills and hobbies, or going outside and talking to actual human women, i was jerking off to anime girls and AI generated porn so much that it twisted my brain into gooey mush and now i think a normal looking, quite beautiful middle aged cis woman is too masculine or ugly or whatever and I promise you, I am merely the harbinger of what is to come. You people are not ready for the world we will build. 
