I know we are not monkeys and are closer related to apes.

I know monkey has been used as a racial slur.

It just sounds better than ape.

That said, I think if used holistically towards the entire species, and I do myself included, Monkey ticks all the right boxes because it immediately cuts down our species’ unearned God complex about being somehow above just another animal mutation cohabitating on this world. We aren’t, we’re just the shittiest conceivable roommates.

We crow about our vocal chords. We crow about our opposable thumbs. But really, our species should just go down as monkeys/apes with a runaway ego mutation, nothing more. That’s hitting us where it hurts, our inflated sense of specialness and self-importance, literally the only remarkable trait about us.

Of course we would we’d just have more!

And buy really expensive ketchups for it… Like Dijon ketchup!

🔥La la la 👉🤑👈 not listening 🔥

Batman Returns is in my holiday movie rotation.

I take great solace in knowing that for all the dirty tricks we play on one another to fuck each other over and get moar, greed made climate change itself cannot be bribed, discredited, scapegoated, cut in, threatened, me too-ed, or divided into attacking itself instead. That shit only works on other humans but it’s hilarious to see humanity try anyway, because it’s all we know to do for our problems.

I feel bad for all the innocent species we’re taking with us, and the ecosystem for the next 2 or so million years while the earth recovers from us as it has with other runaway metastatic mistakes of evolution that threatened the whole, see the trees of the carboniferous period, but Im glad our reign of terror on this world, the creatures on it, and each other will end soon, and no amount of human bullshitting will save us.

Bullshit, billionaires are too greedy and morally bankrupt to leave exploited money on the table.

They won’t close the highest producing stores and effectively kill a revenue stream out of conviction in something that isn’t money, because if they had any beliefs or values above “gimme gimme gimme moar moar moar” they wouldn’t be billionaires.

It’s not a matter of not needing it, no shit, they have a socially encouraged mental illness.

It would be better for the new socialist stores if they did vacate the market, but they won’t. They’ll even pull a Walmart and try to do some loss leaders to convince idiots that der free merket menes lower prices for as long as they can stomach it until they find a vector to make the state stores illegal and Jack those prices back up forever.

In philosophy, It’s a core concept called solipsism.

The encouraged answer to it is don’t think about it and best to move on, even within philosophy, because asking the questions that actually matter about the nature of the mind and existence, are a terrible drain on productivity and GDP, and those are most certainly real and totes important things that must exist 🤣

Ah yes solipsism, the principle that we cannot actually know… anything at all… beyond knowing that we ourself exist in some form because we are presently thinking about it, be it as an algorithm running in a simulation, or a brain in a jar being tortured with hallucinations on some 5th dimensional being’s shelf.

I remember chuckling to myself upon learning that the answer to this situation is just don’t think about it because it isn’t productive.

Problem with that is It seems like a perfectly rational argument against the pursuit of productivity.

Still miss baconreader

As an atheist raised roman catholic, I disagree.

There are rules and tenets and ideals of the religion. It’s not about meeting them, but it is about wanting to and more strictly attempting to.

It’s not even a no true Scotsman fallacy, because there’s a book no flavor of Christianity I know of openly rejects while claiming to be Christian, even if they have adendums like the book of Mormon. The rules are defined.

They aren’t only not trying to live up to those rules and ideals, they aren’t only just paying them lip service, they are actively, jubilantly, and studiously undermining and working against the most belabored edicts of their belief system without end and calling that Christianity.

Cheering for the torture of the meek, demanding cruelty upon people from foreign lands and calling oneself Christian, ie Jesus of Nazareth as written in the New Testament, is like claiming to be an academic because you burn a book every morning and brag about how illiterate you are.

“What you have to know how to read and… read books instead of burning them to be an academic?” Actually yes.

Go topless or the misogynists win!

🔥🇺🇸🔥

Am I the only one who can conjure younger versions of myself in my head for a check-in in meditative exercises?

I’m 40 and 19 year old me’s only real shock is that I’ve let it go on this long. We’re still largely on the same page, and understand the nature of the few discrepancies, even if I don’t necessarily agree with myself.

She donates her considerable money to anti trans causes.

Capital at scale is capable of far more damage than any other individual action can be.

A billionaire funding conservative aka cruel causes is being more effectively harmful than literally any serial killer in history, and depending on the cause, in some cases every serial killer in history put together.

A billionaire lobbying to maintain the American Healthcare system, aka our murder for profit confidence scheme industry, has a body count that would make Jackthe Ripper blush.

To be fair to serial killers though, their murders are artisinal and hand crafted, not mass produced.

I’m saying that human civilization, and especially puritanical societies of this civilization of which we are one in the US, have walled away the core of what we are, animals that want to fuck, trained us through a prism of shame to loathe that part of us, that we darkly call being civilized, and filled our days generating things that will provide us no meaning, as the closest thing to meaning that can be derived by our biology is getting as much dopamine and serotonin as possible through physical human connection, and we spend most of our time being told the greatest lever for that is shameful and harmful usually because it doesn’t make strangers richer, which is ridiculous in an age where if we had the correct priorities we would be able to do for fun as procreation that comes as a result is now chemically optional.

My point is humanity spends a whole lot of its time being miserable, toiling for widgets, to pursue or accept sexual partners in a roundabout way because we’ve made that that a small, token, conditional cookie for doing the “important” stuff, which I find sad and fascinating to observe. The point being used as a bargaining chip for the pointless, and then all parties wondering why they’re still anxious and depressed because they either didn’t come to terms, or because they did and it turns out all the plastic, silicon, and tea in china can’t provide even a passing shadow of the fulfillment of genuine, physical human connection can, and even that physical human connection is tarnished being turned into just another form of currency or coercion for stuff that doesn’t matter at all. How much does humanity toiling for that does not matter instead of fucking?

Tldr humanity would be happier if we were trained to see sex as connection with one another and not that dirty, evil thing of which we rarely speak and if we do it is with the utmost sense of serious danger. It’s too late for most existing humans though, as you can’t go to full grown adults steeped in that cultural stigma and say “oops we fucked up, our sexuality isnt some taboo evil thing with no place in society.” The damage is done. My hill is that shouldn’t continue that harmful culture going forward, but I recognize I’ll die on that hill as a tiny minority that sees the harm it does.

Sexuality is the point.

We spend a lot of time pursuing staggeringly and self-evidently pointless and stupid shit while suppressing and teaching being ashamed of sex and sexuality, to the point many just categorize their sexuality under potential trauma if engaged.

If we spent a lot less time grinding for nothing of import and more time fucking one another rather than fucking one another over for paper simulacra of supposed value, our species would be far more well adjusted. Even the difference between less prudish Europe and the puritanical US in general mental health is extremely apparent.

The way we treat sex, as something to shame behind close doors rather than celebrate, as we glorify plastic and silicon garbage, is beyond ridiculous and leads to shame and trauma in girls who become women and anger and resentment in boys that become men. We aren’t economic value producing machines, we’re fucking machines. We denied that at our peril, and now very few are happy with the state of things. Breathtakingly bad priorities.

That phrase is again just the perverse villainization of the social contract and being a society, and it ultimately only benefits those that want to extract wealth from societies instead of being a member of one.

I’m sorry that it sounds like you’ve internalized that capitalist aggression meant to keep our citizenry undermining one another instead of lifting one another up. If you’re disabled, your society should be judged for failing to give you adequate aid.

If you’re a member of this society and disabled, society should take care of you, otherwise it’s a shite society.

The problem is our society is hostile towards the concept of… Society.

We’ve been poisoned to believe individualism is strength when it is weakness. We’ve been propagandized to resent Americans when they fall on hard times, angry when they draw on herp derp muh tax dollars so as not to die when they lose a job or get an illness.

The US has a profound, deep rooted culture problem. We’re more a gaggle of wannabe rugged individuals undermining one another for oligarch crumbs than a society. That’s why I want this place to collapse, as both parties want that hyperindivualism poison to keep running us, because only under that die alone, sink or swim, winners and losers race to the bottom national ethos can the owners continue to exploit us to death for ever moar profit that’s still never enough.

It’s brought nothing but misery, it’s destroyed the social contract, and it’s destroying the planet. If we do not end our worship of the individual and the pursuit of avarice, it will end us.

We have no leftwing party in the United States

I phone banked for Sanders on 2 campaigns.

I don’t see Neoliberals or Fascists as winning, just different degrees of losing.

I no longer have the slightest hope of ever “winning” a prosocial government here. We’re too oligarch captured.

I talk and comment to maintain my sanity in an insane capitalist hellscape I lack the power to change.

You say that as if there is any hope under them.

There is not. Best, best, best, best, best case scenario, the Neoliberals take back the white house on four years, but will do nothing to reign in our oligarch capitalists, leaving the table set for fascist takeover again in 4 years.

https://apnews.com/article/business-nancy-pelosi-congress-8685e82eb6d6e5b42413417f3d5d6775

If you have any hope that doesn’t begin with painful collapse, you’re deluding yourself. The most likely outcome of all this is a couple decades of fascist control until climate change, that thing still going unchecked were only beginning to feel, takes civilization behind the shed and does what needs to be done.

At this point im kind of grateful climate change is beating all models and projections, because the thought of generations being born into this greed prison hell, born to suffer for a few sociopath families, that would be worse.