Somebody_Else

It seems like U.S. politics is about instability and collapse at this point,

The unfortunate reality is that Fascist regimes are inherently unstable, and fascist regimes run by drug fueled narcissist’s are the worst of all (in terms of stability).

Since the Neo-Nazi party is in charge in America, the short answer is that its very likely that the US will collapse.

That said, the Roman Empire “collapsed” over the course of several generations (200 to 300 years).

Is this really what life is? Just watching every good thing disappear? Being born into a mostly-functioning society just to watch it fall apart? Being promised a stable life and career all throughout school only for the rug to be pulled at the last minute?

Kinda?

So there is a quote that I think is pertinent here. (Michael Parenti from his book Fascism in a Pinstriped Suit)

“The concentration camp was never the normal condition for the average gentile German. Unless one were Jewish, or poor and unemployed, or of active leftist persuasion or otherwise openly anti-Nazi, Germany from 1933 until well into the war was not a nightmarish place. All the “good Germans” had to do was obey the law, pay their taxes, give their sons to the army, avoid any sign of political heterodoxy, and look the other way when unions were busted and troublesome people disappeared. Since many “middle Americans” already obey the law, pay their taxes, give their sons to the army, are themselves distrustful of political heterodoxy, and applaud when unions are broken and troublesome people are disposed of, they probably could live without too much personal torment in a fascist state — some of them certainly seem eager to do so.”

Assuming there is not a massive change in the next election, it seems likely that Fascism will win in America. But as noted above, you can live under fascism for a decent amount of time as long as you keep your head down and dont complain too loudly.

As to this one

Knowing you’ll have to weather every struggle alone because people only care about themselves?

Republicans are only some 40% of the population.

There are people out there you can make friends with, who will genuinely care for you, and the manosphere has lowered the bar for men so far that just not being a raging asshole is enough to make you noticeable to women. You dont have to be wealthy to get a girlfriend, im moderately successful (I have a solo apartment, and my car is paid off, but im hardly rich), and I have managed a more or less steady string of girlfriends for the past 10 years or so.

If you can manage to avoid the manosphere, the mens rights people, the redpill idiots and the Christians, you can actually be a decent person, and that’s honestly all it takes nowadays. You arent going to jump into bed with a supermodel just being a decent person (probably), but as long as your standards are reasonable, its not that hard to find a relationship (as long as you avoid advice from the above groups).

And its probably teaching kids that the trail of tears was named that because of how happy the Native Americans where.

There are three parts to this answer.

1. What the average supporter thinks.

The Average supporter for this kind of rhetoric has built their whole life around believing that they are special just for being who they are. In America you have the south, where white people are special, they are the “salt of the earth” they have the “common sense answers” and if everybody would just listen to them, they would rule everything justly etc…

And then that doesnt pan out, and they figure out that just being white and from the south doesnt make them the destined king of everything, and they need somebody to blame. Obviously its not their fault, they are perfect. Obviously its not the politicians who are telling them how special they are, those guys cant be wrong. It must be because X group is conspiring against them.

So they want to punish X group for conspiring against them, and opressing them, for stopping them from taking their obviously deserved place of privilege and power.

2. What the average supporter wants to believe they think

The average supporter desperately wants to believe that they are so smart that they could never fall for populist propaganda. And they are such good people (good Christians), obviously its logical that x group is causing all these problems (remember, it cant possibly be the politicians telling them how special they are, those guys cant possibly be wrong).

So it must be logical that the problem is that “those demonrats are wasting millions of my hard earned tax dollars to give medical care to illegals” and therefore they need to get rid of those “illegals” who are stealing all their hard earned money, and everything will be right with the world.

They dont want to think they want to hurt anybody, they just think that if all those illegals who are taking all the jobs and all the money went somewhere else, everything would be better.

3. What the average politician pushing this rhetoric thinks
   “I cant believe that I just have to pretend to be as racist as those rubes, and tell them how special they are and they will let me do anything”

There isnt an end game, getting the power/money is the end game.

Train lobbies exist in both Japan and America. Americas car lobby was particularly successful, in large part because of how much everyone hated the train companies. Train companies in Japan simply didnt get as much hate as in America.

There are other factors, the Car was first made in America, and had a huge amount of popularity post WWII, given the economic boom post WWII in America, and the rapid rise of conspicuous consumption, not having to share a train car with other people was seen as a huge status symbol (and was made affordable by assembly line tech).

Prior to selling information, Browsers either where paid for, or bundled with something else

Cello (one of the first Graphic Interface Web Browsers) was just a paid product.

NCSA Mosaic (the first web browser that had integrated images / txt) was probably the first “freemium” software, in that the basic version was free, but more advanced stuff required a paid license.

Other browsers (Netscape, Internet Explorer) just straight cost money, windows eventually made IE free (with Windows) to gain market share, having control over the most popular OS and the most popular browser would (and has) given Microsoft an enormous amount of power that they could use on the back end to make back the investment. (Pay Microsoft or your website/game/program wont work on windows/IE).

AOL Explorer had a brower built in, but AOL was ofc selling internet connection (and other) services, so they wanted you to have a reason to use the internet, and to stay within the AOL ecosystem.

Later browsers came out for free for a variety of reasons, Chrome wanted to harvest your data to sell more adds, IE remained free because Microsoft wanted market share back (and to compete with Chrome). Safari was an attempt by apple both to gain market share, and to have more control over the internet experience.

America is run by the Neo-Nazi party, and following their idols more or less to the T.

Israel is running a widely known genocide, and the world doesnt care.

Global Warming is going to start killing crops en masse soon enough, while removing the amount of livable land.

The American Neo-Nazi party is speed rushing the great depression, and WWIII at the same time.

China is the next largest power in the world, and they arent much better than America.

Its fantastic for what it is, its meh at what a lot of people try to make it, its garbage for a lot of stuff.

As a group chat, a place to hang out, or for a community that is looking for breakout rooms, its fantastic. I have a discord that’s just friends of mine, we have like 20-25 people, it gets 4 or 5 messages a day, unless we are actively having some discussion, sometimes people jump online and make an impromptu video hangout. Its fantastic.

Similarly, its fantastic for the magic groups I am in. Sure the meme page gets flooded, but thats what its for, you can post an lfg to the lfg channel, and find a game fairly quickly, then you jump over into a dedicated room and have fun.

Im in a couple of groups that organize for large events (think burning man groups), and its great for that. Discussions tend to be focused, we make breakout rooms for specific things (like camp layout, shift rotation etc). There are a couple rooms that are just for general chatter, but we only have like 20-30 people, so convos dont move that fast, its rare to have more than 3 in a week in the general hangout rooms, and rarely more than 2 at once.

Its meh as a community hangout, I am part of several board game store or magic store discords, and all of them are kinda…meh. You can occasionally set up for big games on them, and they tell you when tournaments or events are, but with too many people it becomes unfocused, individual stuff gets lost in the noise.

Its terrible as a forum, or as a general social media, searching for history sucks, nothing has permanence unless it is saved off of discord (its great for having a meeting about camp layout, but somebody needs to actually save the camp layout documents or they get lost).

Coming from a world where the word itself is not even widely know, the idea of being raised as child without any explanations about the world or comforts to be held, scares me.

I would rather teach a child the truth about the world than try and feed them some bullshit about a magic man in the sky that wants them to worship him.

I always heard on the internet of people leaving their religion as teenagers when they were raised by their parents religiously.

Raising your kids religiously is effectively child abuse

But what of a child. I am a very anxious person(as i have come to accept). Being told that there is nothing after death or that no one really knows, would have send me spiraling.

I mean, it sounds like you needed psychiatric help, not religion.

That said, logically, people have done it(even if i can’t picture it) so i am also wondering how people/parents grappled with this and struggles they faced, what solutions they come up with

My parents didnt raise me religious, they said it was way easier than trying to be religious.

When I asked questions, they either found actual data, or they told me they didnt know the answer.

When I babysit for my cousins, I give them real answers when I can, or I tell them that I don’t know the answer. Sometimes they ask really stupid questions, and that’s fine, the key is to take the question seriously. Its also ok to briefly cover things that are too complex for them, when they ask why do people need to breath, I tell them that we need oxygen, I dont try to explain how cellular respiration works.

Also, on the opposite of the spectrum, what happens when your child converts(?) to a religion.

Statistically unlikely, but hypothetically possible. Generally, I don’t really care what somebody believes privately, id be disappointed that they went for psuedoscience and hatred, but that’s their decision.

So.

Star Trek was genuinely groundbreaking when it aired. First was that basically no other sci-fi story had a hopeful vision of the future, so it was instantly different. Star trek was a meritocracy, it was post-scarcity, characters where hailed for being competent moral people, instead of morally bankrupt nepo-babies.

Second was that the show treated people like adults, a lot of the storytelling involved significant moral conundrums, and included scenarios with no easy answer.

Finally, the shows sci-fi setting let it tackle ideas that otherwise would be untouchable. Racism was shown to be absurd not by having black people and white people, but you could see a whole planet where people half-white and half-black would oppress (and be horribly racist) towards exactly the same people, but who had the white part on the other side of the body.

Finally, the casting for the show, and the characterization was amazing. Kirk is (imo) a boring character, but the dynamic of Kirk Spock and Scotty made for genuinely interesting interpersonal dialog.

Granted, its been done again and again, and done better (Notably, TNG is better in almost every way IMO), and so the formula got stale, and you cant help but compare Star Trek to the copies, several of whom inevitably did certain parts better.

A lot of the hype about Grease is nostalgia, no doubt about that.

But a lot of the rest is that a loooot of the songs are both catchy and very easy to understand. The movie also forms a social dynamic that is easy to understand for kids.

We learned to sing “Summer Nights” in school, and then friends and I would sing the song over and over, adding more and more childish humor that we found hilarious (because…kids). We also instantly got the implied social dynamic (boys just want to get sex, girls want to have mushy romance).

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Its not just that the humor is unfunny (and basically just bigotry porn with a side of cringe), its that none of the “friends” in the show are even friends with each other. The whole show is just a bunch of assholes being bigoted assholes and then you are supposed to think that its funny.

I had a similar experience with steak.

For the longest time growing up, I just wouldn’t eat steak, id eat meat, bacon was fine, chicken was fine, but steak made me wanna throw up. My parents would keep throwing all these sauces on it, and none of them worked. Eventually, at my dads best friends 50th birthday, and he had a really nice roast, I tried it (with no sauce), and suddenly I got it. Ate steak all the time after that.

Is Trump V Obama a rivalry? Everything Obama did, Trump has to do…but he just does it so much worse that its hard to say its a rivalry.

Having been a young white dude in the US, ive had all of the various christofascist or conservative terrorism organizations make a pass at me at one point or another.

Turning Point USA was recruiting from my school when I was a senior (right when it was starting up), a couple of the kids at my school were fairly well known for being in the KKK, and they tried to get basically every white kid at the school to come to their events. My college was a fairly small STEM college, so unless the FBI or the CIA count as organized crime, we didnt have a lot. After college the job market was still awful from Bush’s recession, I ended up with a job in a small town where the KKK, the Proud Boys, and the Republican Party held a weekly rally at the towns main intersection and liked to block traffic and generally be a nuisance…but the police chief liked to show up to the rallies (all 3), so you just learned to avoid certain areas on certain days.

Depends on the person, on the favor etc.

Is this somebody whos a good friend and we just fell out of contact? As long as the favor isnt too bad, id probably do it.

Is this somebody I met at a bar, texted once and never heard from again? id not respond.

And given that I am at least capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time, I dont think the test was accurate.

I have.

I have doubts about the veracity of the test however, I got something like a 30 because they changed the numbering on the answer sheet and apparently noticing that is part of the test…

Ive known several MAGA people.

One in particular stands out, she was in charge of processing bills for our company, and she basically got all her propaganda from fox news. The company is/was a civil engineering firm (I no longer work there), we specialized partly in large municipal water projects, dams, water infrastructure, injection wells, large scale stormwater percolation, reservoirs etc.

During the big California wildfires (when firefighters kept not getting water out of the hydrants), the head engineer and the lead technical engineer held one of their once-a-month training lunches, and they decided to go over the California wildfires and the effects on the water infrastructure.

This lady stands up, and interrupts the lead technical engineer (who was going over flow/pressure/friction equations to show why hydrants ran dry when there was so much demand), to insist that the reason California is running out of water is that “Newsom drained the reservoir to protect some stupid fish” and other fox news idiocy. Spent a solid 5 minutes trying to tell a bunch of civil engineers a bunch of “information” about water systems that was so hilariously wrong that it was actually impressive.

That was a very awkward few minutes while HR tried to tell this lady that she needs to let the engineers actually learn how to do the job.

If you havent yet played Portal / Portal 2, together they are about 20 Gigs, and are both very good, genre and generation defining games.

Occasionally i hear the phrase “there is no morality outside of human society”. I believe, what is meant by it, is that you cannot say whether something is morally right or wrong in nature, if it isn’t part of human society.

More or less.

It depends on who says it,. but the general idea is that since morality is defined by humans for humans, we cant really apply morality outside of that.

For example, when a turtle eats a bird (here’s a video about it), you cannot say whether these deeds are “good” or “bad”. It’s part of nature, it’s part of the circle of life, … if these things didn’t happen, the bird couldn’t be alive in the first place.

Correct.

Now, i’ve had some interesting talks yesterday with a close friend about what “morality” really means. They very certainly assured me that morality is simply the construct and the set of rules that society uses to organize itself to make itself more successful. In other words, morality aids the fitness of the group, but not necessarily of the individual. Do you agree with this view?

No, this is a really bad “understanding” of morality. Morality is a system of code about behavior which involves evaluative judgments about actions and the people taking them, and specifically about if a behavior is “moral” or “immoral” with “moral” generally equating to “good” and “immoral” generally to “bad”.

To make it simpler, morality is a collective judgement about if something is “good” or “bad” based generally about how a majority of a population can be expected to react.

And if so, would that entail that the beneficial effects to the group can overwrite the wellbeing of a single individual?

By your friends definition, sure.

Where do you draw the limits?

Very very much depends on the population.

Like if some republicans claim that some women cannot decide themselves who they are/should be in a relationship with … does that derive from that view of morality?

Yes, because by the republican judgement, women having a choice is bad.

When you are speaking about morality, you need to clearly define what group is making the judgement.

What do you respond to that?

Its pretty well known that republicans think women having a choice is bad.

I’m seriously wondering because all these discussions make my head spin and sometimes i wonder truly whether i even know anything at all… How can you find certainty in what’s morally acceptable and what is not?

You cant, Morality is subjective, more or less by definition. What is “good” or “bad” will always depend on who you ask.

Some groups like to make lofty claims about how morality is for the greater good, notice how those people never seem to decide that morality decides they should sacrifice for “the greater good,” and how “the greater good” always seems to mean “what’s good for this specific in-group”