Apparition of Jack

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 :

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)

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.

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.

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

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.

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 🍅

Any genuine attempt to understand the world’s problems inevitably lead to a progressive outlook. Capitalism as it stands has turned into a nightmarish leviathan that exists to suck the life out of modern society. Being a moderate means to live under the delusion that somehow this leviathan can be tolerated or reasoned with. It can’t. That’s why we got Trump.

Israelis will never give up the land because the Holocaust broke their brains and convinced them only violently holding onto a small slice of territory in the Middle East is the only way they’ll be safe from industrial genocide again. Palestinians will never give up the land because it was their homeland for over a thousand years and the way they were beaten, evicted and killed by the Israelis so their land could be stolen from them by a people they had nothing to do with will never be forgiven. What do we honestly do?

I’ve been thinking about this a bit more, and this the conclusion I’ve come to: The Iraq War was bad because it implies that there are international rules, but the most powerful countries are above them. The Ukraine War is bad because it implies there are no international rules at all. Both are bad but for different reasons. But I suppose in some sense it’s still splitting hairs - I doubt your average Iraqi family affected by the US invasion slept more comfortably knowing that their country was “only” being invaded because the US was powerful enough to get away with it. However, this doesn’t make Putin’s invasion of Ukraine any less ridiculous. Like I said, other Western nations criticised the US for the Iraq War at the time (France famously refused to join in), whereas afaik none of Putin’s “allied” states (if he has any true allies at all) have condemned his invasion of Ukraine. At most China seems to have taken a neutral stance on the conflict, but that’s more out of selfish geopolitical interest rather than any true commitment to international law. Putin’s war is still incredibly dangerous too because it sets a precedent that if he wins, nations can now just invade other nations to settle disputes. If Putin wins, what’s stopping North Korea from invading South Korea to reunite the peninsula? Or Bolivia invading Chile to regain its Pacific coast? Or, hell, even Britain invading Ireland to put the Northern Ireland question to rest? International rules exist to prevent human bloodshed and to encourage diplomatic solutions to geopolitical grievances. If all nations could just declare war on any other for any reason, the world would become a much darker and more violent place in general.

https://apnews.com/article/nobel-peace-prize-oslo-41b6bff88e2d57af0917bcf778e132ad Interesting choice. Obviously Trump didn’t get it, but that was to be expected. I don’t know much about Maria Machado though. On one hand, sticking up for political rights against any autocratic government takes bravery. On the other hand, she’s a Trumpist and seems to be a simp for US hegemonic military power. Odd choice I guess. More on her here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/María_Corina_Machado

True, although just to be clear I still think Russia is more of a rogue actor than Western powers are on the world stage. UK and France have (mostly) followed the international rules, for instance. And America, despite its disastrous invasion of Iraq, is still technically a democracy (the largest anti-war protests in history occurred before the Iraq War, for instance, something that never could’ve happened in Russia) and the Democrats are generally more responsible and sensible when it comes to foreign policy than the Republicans (see: Obama pulling out of Iraq, 2015 Iran nuclear deal, etc.) But yes, ultimately there are no major countries free of hypocrisy, and we need to demand better of our leaders than to just wage war recklessly despite the consequences of those wars. The world isn’t our play thing to mess around with as we wish.

The crazy thing is, this is what empires and superpowers used to do to countries they conquered. Rome might’ve waged war on Gaul, but when the fighting was over they built roads, cities, aqueducts etc. Britain invaded India but they left behind railways, ports, bureaucracies, etc. These days we just send in a few thousand troops, carpet bomb the countryside, leave the nation in ruins, before fucking off back home and patting ourselves the back for on a job well done. And we wonder why no one trusts us anymore, lol

Yeah, agreed. I think the West - and especially America - have yet to fully atone for what they did to Iraq for basically no reason. It’s weird how it was one of the most destructive wars in modern history and yet we’ve barely talked about it since it ended barely over a decade ago. What’s done is done, but the West needs to take a good hard look at itself if it thinks it can just ruin other nations and pretend the destruction we’ caused never happened. We need to be WAY more careful with wielding the power we posses. EDIT: To add to this, look at how we treated the Afghans who helped us in our war over there as soon we turned tail and ran - people who put their homes, livelihoods and even lives at risk, only to literally be abandoned on the airport tarmac as the people who want them dead took over the country. The modern West (by which I mean mostly America) has basically zero concept of geopolitical responsibility.

Both the war in Iraq and Ukraine are massive geopolitical fuckups that have caused untold levels of unnecessary human misery and will continue to have negative repercussions for decades to come. Iraq was the most egregious example of a nation unable to keep its revenge-boner in its pants and unilaterally (and illegally) destroying another nation and hundreds of thousands of lives in modern history. Ukraine was the most egregious breach of national sovereignty, the rules-based world order and basic diplomatic decency since the Second World War, all on the whims of a deluded septuagenarian who will be either dead or deposed within a few years anyway. Both never should’ve happened. War is goddamn awful, especially for flimsy nationalist dick-waving reasons. We should just stop killing each other.

It’s so clear JP isn’t actually a believing Christian though. He’s more like some weird post-modern pseudo-Christian atheist. His video only Jubilee proves that. His daughter, I don’t know though. She’s probably sincere.

In many ways you’re probably living a more holistic life than high earners in the West, since you have an immediate connection to nature / growth / the cycles of life that people in big cities are alienated from. Not saying your life is perfect but at least on a physical / energetic level you’re probably better off than a lot of other people.

You have to also consider that there’s a lot of low consciousness people out there who gravitate towards these celebrities precisely because they let them indulge in these sick fantasies (vicariously or not.) It’s why I’ve always had a problem with weird celebrity obsession and putting obviously bad people on a pedestal. Think about how many people still defense Kanye despite being an unhinged Nazi. Or shit, think about how TRUMP was a successful reality TV star despite widely being known as a sex pest before then. There’s a lot of really dumb, impulsive and sick individuals out there. Humanity isn’t yet at a level of full maturity collectively imo.