Apparition of Jack

Leo uses the noob tube

What’s there to refute? You’re a conspiracy loon so lost in the sauce of cynical politicking and his own self-identity that you will poison the waters of any genuinely populist upswell in American politics. I bet you also think the AfD in Germany is a “centrist” party too, huh? 🤣

I stand by my previous statement.

@MightyMind Bro you have brainrot. Get off of conspiracy twitter.

Billionaires didnt fund Mamdani. The vibe shift is real. This plus the countless millions of Americans suffering under cut social services, inflation, tariff insanity, Republican chaos, lack of healthcare, rent insecurity, low wages, toxic environments, and countless other entirely-avoidable social woes means that people are finally starting to wake up. Don’t sell yourself short. Billionaires are not omnipotent. They’re not god-kings or masters. Ultimately the only thing that matters at the end of the day is truth, and the truth is that corporate greed and Republican arrogance are what brought us into this mess. The light will shine through.

Trump is going to get more desperate moving forward. The Republicans have lost control of the narrative and now the walls are going to start closing in. He’ll try to promise the world to voters one moment, then try to crack down hard and rage against any dissenters the next. Don’t let this distract you, the goal is to destroy the MAGA movement for good and ensure a humanist, pro-democracy Blue Wave in 2026/28. Democracy is being reborn.

I think now is when the real work begins. We’ve just achieved a major victory, but there’s going to be a major backlash from all the rotten corporate, nationalist, fascist etc interests that benefit from the status quo of fear and oppression. Basically, we can’t let up. We need MORE protests, MORE activism, MORE grassroots campaigns. Let people know what we stand for. Let people know there’s an alternative. Let people know this isn’t just the “way things are” and that there’s actually some hope in this world. More and more people are going to be convinced to turn on MAGA. Good. I believe now is not the time to reject anyone who may have supported Trump in the past but now sees him for what he is. The tides are turning, and our victory is in sight, but we have to keep fighting for it. We can’t let the authoritarians try and spin this as some sort of loss for America or democracy. Too much is at stake here. But we can do it. Let’s celebrate, take the massive moral W, gloat / sleep / freak out with hopium, then get right back to it. We’ve got a world to save.

MAMDATE OF HEAVEN LETS GOOOO 🔥 🔥 This is a good day for America and democracy worldwide. Finally some actual pushback against the rank corporate corruption that has been siphoning wealth from society for decades We have a long road ahead of us full of hard work and discipline, but for now, let’s reveal in the hopium ❤️ 🇺🇸 🗽🚩 🎆

I already do. So do you. It’s fantastic

@Ishanga This is why I see expanding democracy as so important. The more accountability, the more oversight and public scrutiny to our governments, corporations, militaries etc. the less likely corruption will take hold and the less likely private interests will be able to capture our systems for their own ends. In some sense, what we need is a cultural shift, not just a political one. People need to start valuing their own communities, societies, political rights, health, education etc more than they care about some hypothetical mansion or yacht that, let’s be real, we all know is never going to come. If we valued growth, integrity, survival, culture, art, family, romantic relations etc more than we valued consumerism, cheap highs, social status, sports cars etc we wouldn’t be in this mess. But here we are. The problem is, the systems that uphold these materialistic pursuits are breaking down. Stage Orange consumerism might have worked in the 70s, when an average job could get you a decent house and it was genuinely much easier to work your way up to high wealth, but with the changes in population, corporate power, spread of materialism and status-seeking through social media, etc this “dream” has basically turned into a fantasy. We need to reconnect with our basic humanity. Our basic sense of connection to each other, to art, to intimacy, to the earth, to philosophy, etc. Absolutely no one is happy with our current set up (even billionaires suffer from high rates of depression.) We need to stop seeing the purpose of life as some hypothetical future where we’re all millionaires in Dubai with an army of sex robots to satisfy our every pleasure whilst we upload our consciousness to rocket ships to Mars, and instead recapture our sacred connection to earth, to food, to wisdom, to growth, etc. The way we’re living is slowly killing all of us, for the benefit of no one, yet under our current paradigm we can’t see a way out. We need a shift in consciousness and heart as much as we need a shift in policy and lawmaking.

Do you really complain about every time you drive on a highway that isn’t full of holes (or worse, armed bandits)? Do you really complain every time your house catches on fire and the firefighters show up within minutes, saving all your possessions, completely free of charge? It’s like Benjamin Franklin said, the only inevitability in life is death and taxes. Taxes aren’t the problem, it’s how they’re distributed. And in this case, they’re funded to give corporations even more and more power over our lives, while the things they’re supposed to do (you know, actually provide for us) goes completely ignored. For what it’s worth, I’m not saying our tax system is perfect. Believe it or not, I actually generally support cutting income taxes for low and middle-income workers, precisely because they’re the ones who need more of their own money to pay for necessities. My goal however is to completely upend the current financial system dominated by labyrinthian, unelected private entities whose interests aren’t aligned with humanity as a whole’s. The money exists, it’s just most people never see it.

To add to this, if society isn’t a charity, what is it?

Using Maszlow’s Hierarchy of Needs, we, especially in the developed world, have more than enough raw resources to give everyone the basic necessities of food, shelter and medicine. The Industrial Revolution basically eliminated scarcity as we know I and we’re at a point where we have more food, steel etc than we know what to do with (just look up the Green Revolution for reference.) The problem is we still see these things as commodities to be sold for profit, rather than the base needs that everyone needs to, well, not die. Healthcare, for instance, has made absolutely insane strides in effectiveness over the last 40 years - we could easily give everyone that needs it access to their insulin, physical therapy, chemo treatments without even breaking a sweat, but because, at least in America, these things are locked away behind corporate paywalls for the express purpose of making a profit, countless people simply don’t receive these and too many people die each year as a result. This isn’t about “freebies” or “gimmies”, it’s about upholding the social contract - you support society through your work, contribution, good efforts, etc and in return society looks after you when you need it. Otherwise, whats even the point of having a society in the first place? We may as well return to caveman politics of just killing each other over resources instead. There’s also the basic compassionate argument too - why even have all this explosion of technology, wealth etc if no one even gets to see it? How does handing billions of public dollars to tech oligarchs to buy more yachts and private jets help anyone, other than their limited ego? An alien looking down on earth would be baffled by our current setup. Some of our hardest working and crucial people (nurses, teachers, frontline workers etc) get some of the least amount of social support, while people like Mark Zuckerberg- who literally weaponises human addiction to get people stuck on their phones all day - gets billions of dollars for keeping everyone miserable and paranoid. This is nothing to say of the pure human talent being lost under the capitalist paradigm. I guarantee you, there is the next Mozart, the next Einstein or Ada Lovelace working a dead-end job in a Walmart or factory somewhere, forced to barely keep their head afloat as all their meagre wages go to looking after their grandma with cancer rather than actually providing massive value to the world by following their passion. Basically, this current setup exists to parasitically suck the life out of actual, productive, meaningful work, in favour of pursuing tech-oligarch pipedreams and financial delusions for stockholders whilst the world around them goes to shit. Where is all our new highways? Our new libraries, concert halls, observatories, national parks, public pools, bridges, ports, airports, schools, universities, museums? They don’t exist, despite the economy supposedly “ballooning” over the last 20 years. Why does society become so absurdly productive that even a Roman Emperor at its height looks like a mere peasant, yet it continues to flounder and get worse year after year? Something’s got to give. Too many decent, regular people are starving, getting sick, getting homeless, and dying for this to make any sense. At some point you have to accept the individualist paradigm is destroying society and that if we as a species are to survive and evolve, we have to get rid of our highly antiquated ideas of individual profit selling useless goods that fundamentally don’t make the world a better place. Things can get so much better, we just have to wake up to that fact.

Basically, that’s my entire political philosophy in a nutshell. Republicans don’t seem to grasp this. Money is only a tool for improving life; it is not life itself. We have created more money than ever - by some many millions of multitudes - but what good is all that if your roads are crumbling, your people are starving, your workers are homeless, and everyone is stressed to the brim? Money is useful, yes. It helps distribute resources. But it’s only ever subservient to the main of goal of human survival and flourishing - what good is a society worth trillions and trillions of dollars if your average citizen dies of cancer because they can’t afford chemo? Once you’re dead, you can’t bring your money with you. We need to put people before profit. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

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