Apparition of Jack

Hot take: Robots like this will be way more useful as companions / personal vent machines than any sort of real physical assistant (at least for the next decade or so.) Does anyone seriously think we’re all going to be sipping martinis while servant robots do all of our work by 2030? No, of course not. But what could happen is that robots invent new ways of communicating, relating to one another, opening up, etc. Take this meme for instance: While a funny joke, I also think it belies a sense that we as humans see robots as a sort of helpful, non-biased third party in any sort of conflict or misunderstanding. Having a “person” that is incapable of emotional feeling is powerfully disarming, and it’s often easier for people to open up to some sort of “robot helper” than it is even to a close friend or therapist. Basically, I feel like people are yearning for C3PO to come and tell them things will be alright, and that’s what we’re gonna get

Excuse the religious imagery but feel free to interpret that phrase whichever way you suits you. But fuck, I can’t believe this feels like such a radical idea these days. I don’t know about anyone else, but I remember growing up in the 90s and 2000s and being taught that democracy works, that every person has value, that racism is cruel, etc. I feel like the basic lessons we learned from WW2, the Civil Right’s movement etc were all self-evident and that it just made pure human sense (as well as being the right thing to do) to build a world that cares about everyone, regardless of race, gender, class, sexuality etc. I seriously struggle with how alien it feels this belief has become. And I’m not even saying we have to build some sort of utopia and all sing kumbayah, obviously there’s room for nuance. But I feel like the most basic and human impulse has always been to just look out for one another coz otherwise society goes to shit. I mean, if you DON’T think everyone is deserving of basic decency, aren’t you just saying you genuinely want a more cruel world? Aren’t you saying youre OK with violence and oppression if you personally benefit from it? It screws me over just thinking how corrupt and cruel so many millions of people have become. It’s genuinely incomprehensible to me. If you don’t want crime, you feed people right? If you want peace, you talk to people different to you in good faith right ? So why are we so quick to resort to condemnation and violence? It’s like there’s this sick, twisted undercurrent where people actually REVEL in misery. Not just the usual “well you have to be cruel to teach people a lesson” nonsense, but actual “I want as many people to suffer as possible for shits and giggles”. Help me out here guys. Why the fuck did we get so evil? What the fuck is so wrong with our lives that we need to turn into absolute cretins against our fellow man? We don’t lack resources. We don’t lack ideas. We’re just become absolute monsters for no goddamn reason. What the hell do we do?

The current economy still runs under the assumptions the boomers had, which is a basic high school qualification (and/or college degree or trade certificate) was all that you needed to get a good-paying job, which was enough to buy a proper house, a car or two, and yearly vacations without too much stress. The problem is things have changed drastically since then. Housing has in some areas increased by over ten times in price, and inflation means even things like rent, groceries etc take more out of someone’s paycheck than they did in the past. Someone working a basic IT job on let’s say $65,000 a year is never going to be able to afford a house if the median house price is $800,000+, let alone finance a car, clothing, bills, etc without some serious financial stress. Not to mention, the consumer culture has changed dramatically too - things like the rise of the subscription model means that people are easily paying over $100 a month for entertainment, when before a movie ticket would genuinely cost like $5 and things like TV, music, etc werent all paywalled behind $20+ subscription fees. (Of course, it’s possible to avoid paying for these things with some discipline, but that requires more conscious decision making, when often people are simply too tired after work to manage all their subscriptions responsibly and just want to watch the latest Netflix drama or whatever. Not to mention that so much of online consumption is based off predatory practices like addictive mobile game purchases or loot boxes for video games, making it easier than ever to drop $50 for something online that you’ll never really use afterwards.) Basicallt, I think we need to rethink our economy entirely. We should support policies that give renters more rights (considering how much more common it is to rent these days,) invest in large public housing projects, open up land for new sustainable housing developments, consider some sort of UBI, pass universal health legislation so people aren’t struggling under crippling debt, etc. The problem is too many unelected interests have too much financial interest in keeping things the way they are (landlords, private equity firms buying up new housing, health insurance companies charging ridiculous prices for basic care, etc.) so the political will is slow and resistant to change. I’m seeing some positive trends to change this though, such as the rise of AOC/Mamadani, but for now we’re still deep in the thick of it. I guess for now just keep being as financially responsible as possible and pushing for more conscious change in government to create a more equitable economy in the future.

Forgive the spam but this is basically the future of America :

For the record, I’m of the opinion that the ship on preventing mass immigration has long since sailed and Americans need to get used to the situation that they themselves created. 2024 was their last chance to exist as some sort of quasi-nation-state, but by voting for a rapist fascist based off of collective lies and delusions, they gave up whatever lingering moral authority they had to not be considered a fundamentally weak and sick society that could reform itself out of this chaos. What we knew of America is dead. Something new is emerging. Y’all are not ready.

The Biden administration wrote up a comprehensive immigration bill last year that would provide both amnesty for migrants already in the US, whilst reducing the number of available visas and providing funding for border enforcement. Donald Trump shot it down EXPLICITLY for the purpose of making re-election of the Dems harder. These people believe in NOTHING but their own power. I cannot stress the depths of the evil they will succumb to for their own pathetic, selfish whims. They have zero credibility on this issue, or any other. Fuck em. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_policy_of_the_Biden_administration?wprov=sfti1#Bipartisan_Border_Security_Bill_(2023-2024)

I sometimes wonder if the age of the nation-state is coming to and end, and that we’re entering some sort of new, legalistic-pluralistic age that hasnt yet fully formed. Remember, the nation-state, where one peoples lives in one self-governing country, is a relatively recent phenomenon, only really coming about during the French Revolution and later at the end of WWI. Before then, most large countries had multiple peoples all living side by side, often of different religions / ethnicities entirely. Look at say, the Ottoman Empire. It was a state that, before the rise of things like human rights and individual equality, had Orthodox Greeks, Sunni Turks, Sephardi Jews, Druze Arabs etc all living side-by-side in (relative) cooperation and peace. Obviously I don’t want to say that it was some sort of multicultural utopia; throughout its long history there were periods of ethnic oppression, discrimination and violence, but on the whole most of its subject people accepted that their neighbours might speak a different language or follow a different religion, yet they were all part of the same broader “cultural sphere / world” etc. I honestly think it’s time we rethink nationality, identity, religion etc in a way that accepts that very real cultural differences exist (I highly doubt a progressive lesbian lawyer from NYC is going to see eye-to-eye with a traditionalist Moroccan immigrant), whilst also not undermining the basic human rights and rule of law our modern civilisation is built off. What would this look like? I don’t know. I think being openly honest about our differences and disagreements is a good start (and this would require stage Green to accept that you can’t just push hundreds of different cultures into the same room and expect everyone to get along), but also under the intention that we can find common ground and that it is possible for us to have, say, a white Protestant, an Indian Hindu and a Jewish secularist all live side-by-side in the same city / country / society without us constantly wanting to deport the other and bickering like children, lol.

95% of our time goes to meeting our survival needs. We work to earn money to buy food and pay rent, but work is so stressful we spend whatever little money have left on distractions and coping mechanisms. Even if you live in a good country and/or are financially secure yourself, at most you could probably be some kind of leader in your industry or an academic, still distracting yourself all the while due to living in a decaying world. We are all so removed from nature that something that’s literally been free for all of human history - the natural world - is now incredibly expensive to access as you have to find enough time and money to draw yourself away from the cities to access it. No one seems genuinely happy. Some turn to religion to find meaning, but modern religion feels mostly about condemning fringe groups than actually connecting to God. Some turn to progressivism and hedonism, but that leaves one’s limited social and psychological impulses as the only fulfilment in life. There’s nothing wrong with being gay for instance, but if your own purpose in life is to be vaguely nice to everyone without truly accessing something deeper, it ends up feeling shallow and inconsequential. Politics offers no answers. Pop culture offers no answers. Religion offers no answers. Everything feels so pathetic and meaningless. There’s got to be more than this, right?

Republicans have also hamstrung every Democratic effort to pass meaningful immigration reform, most recently being in 2024 for the express purpose of making life worse enough for everybody that they’ll vote Dems out (really, look it up.) At this point I genuinely wonder if this isn’t some weird psychological impulse in Republicans to deliberately make society as chaotic as possible. They will not support aid in other countries to prevent people from migrating in the first place. They will not invest in communities in America to make the shock of immigration more manageable. They will not find border enforcement until it’s 10 years too late. It’s hard not think that these people LIKE having a bunch of “others” in their country that they can blame all their problems for whilst oligarchs loot their country, lmao.

Apparently elections don’t matter because you can just lead a riot and kill a bunch of people and still get elected President.

Politically speaking, Russia is a shithole, sorry man. For you to make great changes in Russia you’d have to be prepared to deal with a lot of threats, intimidation, violence and even death. I don’t know your situation, but I’m assuming you’re young and still planning your future. I’d say don’t jump into national politics just yet, instead focus on study, keeping yourself away from the low-conscious corruption within your country, finding likeminded friends and maybe quietly supporting politics on the side. Learn to play the social game and tell people your ideas without coming off as some radical Western degenerate. Establish yourself so you’re more free to pursue your own ideas without outside pressure. Learn to find optimism in dark situations and also practice kindness and compassion, without becoming a doormat either. These are just my ideas, in the end it’s up to you. Good luck.

This isn’t some radical leftist conspiracy either. You can be a dyed-in-the-wool conservative and admit this. He led a deadly insurrection against the US government that got five people killed after he lost the 2020 election. The man is a tyrant. He needs to go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capitol_attack

The Dems under Obama were always going to have an uphill battle because having a black man for president broke too many people’s brains who then became utterly committed to having something like that never happen again, decency be damned. I honestly believe what we’re witnessing is the slow, chaotic, pathetic death of white supremacy in America, and that all the absolute insanity from people on the right is coming from their psychological inability to accept that white =/= superior anymore. The more people get put off by the obvious sadism and corruption of this administration and the more people realise having black (and brown, and Asian, etc) people run the country won’t lead to literal armageddon (as what every idiot conservative in 2008 was predicting), the more sanity will be restored and the more the world will be able to build an actual decent society, only this time all races will be included.

Can you tell me which thread?

Tomayto-tomahto 🍅