Apparition of Jack

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

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.