Our obsession with owning land and borders will be the death of us all.

Like, without hyperbole, if we all die, it will be because of our attachment to the concept of “owning land” and having to draw imaginary lines across ground and rock and water to signify who owns what.

But when you step back and really think about it, it makes zero sense if you actually care about an equitable world where people aren’t hurting each other. It makes zero sense from a cosmic perspective, as this is a rock flying around a star, it has been here longer than us and will outlast us to a degree that our presence here, no matter what we do, will be a brief blip in cosmic time. We have no legacy, no real connection to the dirt below us other than how it gave us life. And yet claim ownership over it?

It makes no sense from a material perspective either, all borders do is reduce the flow of goods and services, creates artificial limits on who can go where creating “pressure zones” that eventually explode over and become migration disasters, and of course the people who pretend to rule these patches of dirt and rock and water and will send millions of people to death to preserve this roleplay. And we all cheer and defend this concept with all our heart.

Make it make sense.

I used to watch Thought Slime a lot, even donated to them a few times… then started watching videos from the people they’ve “called out” on stream, followed a rabbit-hole of people who were hurt and never apologized to and realized they’re just another youtube dramafarmer clicks-at-all-costs, no discrimination, storyline-crafting liar. Like everyone.

Free yourselves humanity, stop watching streamers.

edit: I know the parasocialism online runs really deep and just saying this is going to get some people losing their shit to defend their fav streamer, I literally don’t care, you have to be aware that every streamer has an army of knights to defend them, and I don’t like engaging that way and am not going to spend my time arguing. I’m not out to change your mind, just explain why I changed mine.

I cannot fucking stand the fact that we live in the year 2024 and we’re having raging debates about if science has value… ON THE FUCKING GODDAMN INTERNET.

This population deserves the hardships coming, and that’s a really, really terrible thing to say, because the coming hardships are going to be bad.

Imagine a world where corporations that aren’t even involved in your life can decide where you can and can’t go, where you can and can’t live, if you can receive medical care or not, what you can and can’t eat, and so on. If we can break every aspect of society down to a system of “fees” to have basic services, we will rapidly have an entire nation of shanty towns, with about 0.1% of the population living in fucking castles on the mountains.

And this is what they want. Because the people pushing this tripe always think they’re the ones who will live in the castles.

Not saying the current system is good, but replacing it with a “libertarian utopia” will be even worse. At least the system does the bare minimum work, we do have roads, we do have medical care, we do have trash pickup. It’s not much but it’s enough for most people so you would have to do a lot better to convince people why they should topple their comfort and pleasures.

It all sounds like it makes sense but it’s not realistic. Rapidly we will end up in a situation where you have pass through 200 different forms of toll/fee collection to get to work, because without strict regulation of all companies, both public and private, they are going to exploit your lack of options. I haven’t had anyone explain to me why we should expect a society of hundreds of millions of people to all suddenly be able to say “That’s enough, line doesn’t need to go up anymore.” It’s not how humans function.

You would need a central authority that would audit and review all these “fees” that pay for our roads and medical care and fire departments, and make sure they are allocated where they’re supposed to go. And if we’re doing that, why not just send the money to this central authority to begin with so there’s no hiding shit? And now guess what we have. We have the system we have because it’s how things evolve.

Our argument isn’t that we should do away with a central authority that distributes our work, it should be that we want that work to pay for things we actually want, not the things that a few defense contractors and banks want. I don’t want to do away with government, I want one that makes less self-interested decisions with the money we lend them. And so far all the alternatives save one or two, they just make it easier for these people to make self-interested decisions.

barely being taught even basic math under the guise of homeschooling.

yah that was me.

There was no actual “schooling” it was just a cover-story so people didn’t pry and learn that my parents were too crazy/drunk/high/delusional to properly raise children. The first couple decades of my life I basically just wandered in the desert alone around my parent’s “religious compound” a couple hours from the nearest town and tried to get my hands on any actual scientific or rational reading material that extended family members managed to smuggle in.

It had disastrous impact on my adult life. I did go to school later and excelled and soared through AP college classes… but with my life so handicapped from the start, I was unable to continue higher education due to poverty, unable to land a stable career, and worst of all, severe depression and anxiety from the CPTSD of basically spending 20 years of my most important developmental years isolated with two toxic, hateful, abusive parents and literally NOBODY else. I became non-verbal for years, people thought I was autistic. I have been in and out of therapy, on and off meds, and have had long, extended struggles with substance abuse, depression so bad I can’t move some days, and thoughts of self-harm.

My parents were absolutely convinced that biblical prophecy was real and was about to be fulfilled, they saw themselves as actual prophets or chosen ones that would play a part in the coming apocalypse, and for years of my life I was also convinced that I was part of some greater destiny.

Fast forward through my adult life, and I’m clearing out my parent’s belongings after they drank themselves to death, wondering what the fuck happened and what my real future is going to look like. Do you think AI is going to replace grocery baggers? Because I fully see myself at 80 bagging groceries.

I don’t disagree with anything you’re saying, but it kinda sounds like an engineer trying to make their career/passion into more than a clever trick which comes as a result of learning how to abstract information to better manipulate the world.

“Engineering” isn’t a fundamental quality of the universe, it’s a word we have made up to describe honestly a lot of different things. There’s nothing wrong with calling what humans learned to do “engineering” and it wouldn’t be inaccurate, but I’m saying you can simplify that more, to just the quality we learned, which is how to take information from the past and from right now to synthesize pictures of tomorrow, and then abstract that conclusion to share with others. Being able to share abstract conclusions about future events is a far, far more profound skill, there’s no parallel in nature, not even “kinda” like beaver engineering. Engineering comes from this ability, so I’m just trying to describe the order of carts and horses.

Shame we won’t make it.

I think the invention of engineering is what finally broke evolution

While true, we can be more specific here what quality or trait allowed us to become engineers. Being able to engineer is by itself something that can even exist in genetic memory, instinctual. There are a lot of animals that do engineering, but have never come anywhere close to what humans do. Beavers, birds, ants and termites arguably are better engineers than most humans on an innate level. (I’ve also known some engineers who are incapable of some very basic life skills.)

What separated us from evolutionary processes and also allowed us to become engineers is the capability to abstract information and use those abstractions to predict the future, extending our “reach” of influence into the further future than most animals can calculate. This required us to develop strong continuity of thought and experiences and with this also came the ability to analyze and compare complicated events to find patterns. This gave us a huge edge when we were surviving around predators that were able to easily dominate us. Nowadays these abilities mostly cause of mental health conditions as we try to use tools designed for navigating glaciers to navigate a world of social media, zoom meetings, Tinder profiles, electric car recalls and democratic electoral politics.

No mention of the giant rocket that left the surface of the earth and the video footage of both that and the surface of the moon itself?

This is why conservatism and conspiracy go hand-in-hand. You can’t believe the things that “feel” true if the “true” truths keep interfering with this pesky reality.

I can tell you the plain, clear answer but you’re not gonna like it. Nobody does when I tell them.

Hold some yard sales.

For real. Assuming you live in a neighborhood and there are people around and it’s safe to do so, this is one of the best ways to get to know the people who live around you. People go to yard sales to talk about shit and gossip, so it’s a great way to know who’s doing what, how everyone feels about their current neighborhood policies, who is running the school and who the local police or sheriff are, who is running for what position in local city, county and eventually state seats.

Having a grasp of your local political landscape gives you the power to get involved and educate people and get to know who is representing you, what the values of your area are, and you can influence elections or even challenge incumbents who often run uncontested. Any kind of local community organization and involvement is a pushback against the powers that be.

This is all because a lot of the people we have in seats of power in the USA did not earn their power fairly, they often have run without competition or were placed there by political organizations. These are the people who support the larger governmental powers. These are the people who cut checks, who receive checks, who write the bills that let the companies do the things they want to do to make more money.

Candace Owens is a product of this system that wants you to turn away from science and follow an authoritarian, because this is good for business. If you want maximum profits, get you a population that has no time, education or capital to change anything and get them angry at people who look different than themselves instead of their own government leaders.

If we purge the nobodies and clowns and paper-tigers who uphold this vision of America, we also get rid of their mouthpieces like Owens. She is not some passionate thought-leader, she’s just a spokesperson for a bunch of rich fucks who want to keep squeezing blood from the population.

Edit: they want you to be less social. They want you to retreat to your discord friend-groups and social-media safe-spaces. They want to keep you from organizing, from connecting, from uniting and forming groups with a shared voice. This is how you beat them, with shared voice.

“But I’m not sooooooooooooociaaaaal!” You cry.

I don’t fucking care. Adapt. It won’t be the hardest thing you ever do.

Do you think people become more conservative with age or is it society becoming more progressive and leaving them behind?

I am getting up there in years and seeing this play out over and over.

I think every generation wants to be more progressive than the last, but we tend to carry baggage of fear and insecurity through the generations. Or more specifically, older people tend to gain the political and monetary capital needed to affect policy and shape our societal outlook and attitude. They will always be more conservative than the younger generation who will want more freedoms and personal rights, inherently, and as the ruling class will clash with newer sensibilities, over and over.

What we’re asking here, is the conservatism reflected in our elders and leadership now broadly more harmful or helpful? Are we out of the touch or is it the kids who are wrong?

I think it’s a mix but mostly it’s not our real problem. Our real problem is that no matter what our age, we have greatly misunderstood how our own existence works. Most people have been taught that they have brains designed to exercise logic and reason and that brains are the best thing ever if you use them and make them smart.

No, our brains are not logical tools. We are not a rational species. There was no “age of enlightenment.” It’s all a hoax. Our brains are tools designed to write a story to explain how you feel. And that’s it. It doesn’t even have to make sense. When we all learn how our brains actually work we will collectively make better decisions, have more compassion for each other, and likely sink into even deeper despair as we all start to realize we have no free will.

I too am taking advantage of the summer sale and am about 20 hours in and still wildly infatuated with this weird, weird amazing game.

After a while you start getting a slightly better idea of what’s going on, but that doesn’t make it more “game like” if anything, the more you learn about the game, the more it reveals itself to be a giant tool to explore meta-narratives and there are some moments of conversation regarding this that are absolutely chilling.

The impact of human fertility cycles ("concealed ovulation’) and human evolution is a vast, deep field of study and speculation in itself, but I am making some very sweeping generalizations here, referencing people’s capability to choose when to reproduce on the broadest levels, not that there was a period or specific instance of this having an impact… more like, it made a difference over very large scales of time, as evident by the fact that our breeding cycles are nothing like most other mammals.

We should all be learning that we’re all children. Some of us, over time, gain a lot more baggage and issues, but that shit just layers right on top of the “child” parts so we’re all just basically children with complex problems.

The brain doesn’t “prune” itself. The brain you had when you were 12, you have that same damn brain. It doesn’t change. Stuff just gets added to it.

Almost anyone with an irrational political stance betrays their youth.

Political ideology has always captivated the passions of youth, but isn’t successfully implemented or even internalized except by people with age and experience and emotional regulation.

Bears can be trained to drive cars and communicate through various means, it’s thought they may be as smart as great apes like gorillas. This is why they were a choice circus animal for a long time.

Yes, this should be terrifying information.

We had the tall stride thing going, we had the super-endurance thing going already, we had gotten good at tool-use like many other primates, in that we could use sticks and rocks to beat things and poke things, just like modern chimps and apes. (Modern primates also throw stones, it’s not the evolution-killer on its own that the meme is making it out to be.)

No, the REAL thing that soared us beyond all members of the animal kingdom is how we started abstracting information and sharing it. IE: language, writing, and the cognitive processes behind those skills that allow us to plan ahead. Not just planning ahead, but being able to set up actions far in advance, like planting seeds because we know a plant will come out of it. Moving our camps to where animal herds migrate to so we can stay close to the food, and just the day-to-day actions like preparing a fire in advance so you can see when it gets dark, bringing things with you to use later, having an idea how to ration food, being able to share your plans with others, communicating your movements to other hunters, and yes, all this made us exceptional hunters. When other primates were still mostly foraging for plants and bugs, our ancestors used this “thinking” thing to start getting massive doses of meat. Amino acids, proteins, high-density fuel, food for growing brains.

Not to mention, we’re the only creature that chooses when to reproduce. We used this foresight to plan our futures and our families. This is a massive changeup from how nature has handled reproduction. For the vast majority of life on Earth, breeding is just this thing that “happens” at certain points and everything leads to that event, and nothing really has control over how that event plays out.

Breeding is still a big deal for us, just look how horny we all are, but we decide when we’re going to have babies, and while it doesn’t seem a big deal here and now, it was a game changer when we were migrating packs of hunter-gatherers, following the seasons and the herds of animals.

Our story of how we got here is without question the most fantastic story ever. You are the product of over four and a half billion years of uninterrupted successes. A family tree going back a thousands of millions of years without break, surviving apocalypses that have turned our entire globe to ice, to fire, to water and other unimaginable catastrophes that sometimes lasted for millions of years.

So now you made it, your billions of generations of ancestors secured your survival against all odds, whatcha gonna do with it?

I have this feeling that the “X months” we have, as well the other periods of special recognition, serves a primary purpose of just setting people off.

For real, the ONLY people who really have a strong reaction to things like Black History Month are racists. The ONLY people who really care that there’s a “Gay Pride Month” are the frothing homophobes. For everyone else, particularly the people whom those days or months celebrate, it’s just Tuesday. Or some such normal day where nothing changes and they still have to constantly look over their shoulder.

If all it does is make some backwards, broken asshole lose his mind and rage about how “unfair” it is that nobody is giving them their special day, then it’s a victory. If all these recognition periods do is remind us all that there is a sizable segment of our population who hate you personally then it’s actually doing good on the long-term, because we can use it as a barometer. We can use these days and months to gauge how much more work we have to do squashing nazis and purging hate groups, and how much protection our friends and neighbors still need simply for existing outside the “white CIS straight male American” spectrum.

a guy who claimed trans people had their minds rotten by the porn industry.

Holy shit that projection, and how they can’t disentangle their kinks from human beings with human experience.