Exactly. It isn’t Intelligent Design, it’s Natural Selection. By which I mean there’s no grand plan, it’s just a vicious, bloody system.

Speaking as someone with a PhD in Biology, nature usually sucks. There’s horrifying parasites, predators that will eat you while you’re still alive, and even herbivores can eat themselves into extirpation if not outright extinction.

The metaphor breaks down because there’s a lot of beauty in nature, and I think we need to protect it, but it’s not something we should try to emulate at a societal level. Natural selection doesn’t think ahead, it just happens, and most living things suffer out in the natural world. Most of us are smart enough to do better, I hope.

That’s one of the most frustrating things about this right wing populism. They’re correctly pointing out problems: wealth inequality, expensive housing, warmongering, etc. The problem they then cause is that they blame the source of these problems squarely on some scapegoats and then do things that only exacerbate the existing problems they diagnosed in the first place.

Billionaire donors gaining even more power and stripping the few checks against said power, doing shit all to make groceries cheaper, and now they’re out there blowing up boats in international waters and committing large scale violence against people in this county. Yet… crickets from the folks who voted them in. Just maddening. They just wanted to shit on the scapegoats

Wrong one! I had to do a double take, but I’m pretty sure it’s actually Leavitt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoline_Leavitt

This is not solely a news community.

Right? No childish nicknames, no rage-fueled late night social media posting, no off kilter diatribes during an unrelated speech. He’s just, transparently cool with a child trafficker. It is so mind numbingly damning I’m split between being horrified and fascinated by how his supporters refuse to connect any dots.

I imagine a lot of shit teachers keep their jobs simply because there’s usually not a huge pool of candidates for replacements. Higher wages would help fix that issue, too!

Indeed, it’s good to see what resonates with people who are actual humans and not just bots. Many have been quieter since all the Epstein backtracking, because they were sooooooo invested in it before.

And recently a dude I knew has two posts in a row that are incredible: one is literally cheering for the death of all the venezuelan people blown up in a boat (flag emojis and all), then the next post is him recounting how horrific it is that a political pundit was killed, and people cheering for death like that need to unfriend him. In the second post he is also going on about how Christian he and all these pundits are, which…bruh

I’m not claiming the US is being punished: that was a metaphor.

My point was critiquing folks who are gleefully reveling in the suffering of folks in the USA because of the actions of despots. It’s easy to do when it’s the USA, but when applying the same reasoning to other regions, it’s more obviously shitty behavior. I have empathy for Persians suffering under the Iranian regime. I have empathy for folks living in El Salvador dealing with an autocrat abusing power. I have empathy for the kids growing up in Mississippi. I even have some amount of empathy for the redneck down the street who is too fucking stupid to understand that their Republican “leaders” are taking advantage of them. Just like despots around the world. Plenty of innocent enough folks still live in terrible regimes, and IMHO we shouldn’t be happy about those folks suffering because a majority of their neighbors are assholes. We should…you know…help those minorities? Not just paint them with a broad brush and bask in their suffering?

TLDR I can have contempt and empathy at the same time, and I’m not going to cheer for the suffering of decent folks who just happen to have been born into a shitty regime, or who’ve had one foisted on them.

This kind of emotional response is why there’s an active genocide in Gaza right now. Hamas killed some folks, they technically represent the population, so…COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT. People yearning for suffering because some portion of a heterogeneous population is terrible. Go back to the 1930s and say “kill all Nazis” and I’m on board. If you say kill all Germans, though…it’s a lack of nuance that at the very least borders on genocidal.

Plenty of us in the USA have suffered and fought our entire lives. We are a nation with an actively oppressed underclass. Even for those with the chance to leave (as I have in the past), we have friends and family here who don’t have the means to leave even if they would. Many people are also brainwashed. I know people who had almost no fucking chance growing up. Living in a dilapidated trailer, Fox News blaring on TV, no good education, etc. Yes, people can get out of that, but when your parents are terrible shitheels, and you’re surrounded by terrible shitheels, there’s a big discussion to be had about how much of a chance someone has to pull themselves up by their bootstraps…and I don’t just mean that in terms of improving their economic conditions, but literally the way they think. We need to teach class consciousness worldwide, not consider a large percentage of a population just collateral damage. I don’t think it’s moral to just consider a quarter of a population to be thrown to the wolves, or even another quarter that’s apathetic because of the systems they have no control over brainwashing them into compliance.

Source?!1?

See also: politically correct (PC) and social justice warrior (SJW)…all just fancy ways to call someone a commie pinko bleeding heart socialist. The Red Scare never really stopped, and neither did the Lavender Scare

I especially like that it’s a recurring bit

There’s plenty of people beyond saving, that’s for sure: but I think people aren’t so immutable. I think people are being made more monstrous by the capitalist system we live in, and the people at the top who exemplify avarice as a path to success. I’m not going to be buddies with ex maga unless they’re really going the extra mile to make up for the damage they’ve done, but I hope at least some can be decent humans.

Yeah, and it also feels “forever ago” when you’re that age. Literally half their lives. So I could understand them thinking it’s “old news”, but when you’re an old and crusty 40 year old, you know that a 60 someone saying heinous shit means that person is deeply twisted.

Also a content warning for a couple slurs, but the point from Patton Oswalt a while back is roughly the same: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkKo1_RP_0c

Fascinating, isn’t it? Does he think the Democrats just “hate all things fossil” so much that there’s some kind of integer overflow and it flips negative, and oil businesses do just fine entirely by accident?

It’s truly astounding how well right wing propaganda gets folks to believe things that are so completely at odds with his own lived experience. None of us are immune to propaganda, I know, but that whole statement is just…fascinating

Oh that’s her, I was just trying to be insulting haha

Oh I’m totally agreed! It’s all capitalist, jingoist garbage, same as it ever was.

Yeah, I was just on a flight and saw a dude across the aisle that was mainlining all the worst people on twitter. Space laser lady, the racist cat, the nazi automaker…this dude was just liking everything and replying frantically. He was flipping through everything and replying so quickly that I felt pity as much a loathing. It was absolutely pathetic. Dude’s brain is melted.

That was the NFL being political though, this is them being patriotic…is what my troglodyte relatives will say.