I grew up watching Star Trek and, once believing humanity was capable of far more nobility than it is, the idea that we are going to one day spread to the stars is both sad and hilarious.

We couldn't make Earth work. We couldn't stop knowingly damaging a basically infinitely forgiving environment that recycles our water, air, and waste auto-fucking-magically. We had to multiply with no consideration, emit fuel waste to harm that virtuous system with reckless abandon eyes wide open, and literally engineer materials from the earth that the Earth couldn't easily re-absorb not to use out of engineering necessities, but to make infinite useless pop figure crap out of it. We just had to stop growing/metastizing our people, and just as importantly our economy, aka our Ferngully smog monster Earth thrashing machine, and live within our still exceptionally bountiful means. Nope, moooaaaaar!

Yes, a dozen or two perfect specimen, perfectly trained apex humans can go to Mars and grow potatoes in a tent to inspire us, but an actual colony of hundreds or thousands of regular humans, some of which inevitably born into a place where a single thoughtless, reckless, or GREEDY action can easily mean boom, everybody dead in an instant, womp, womp try again? Lol, have you met us?

Bezos, Musk, Zuck doesn't matter. If those antsy, insatiably greedy fucks or those like them ever tried to leave with a hundred human laborers or a hundred humanoid robots, they'd be dead within 6 months of landing, because they'd keep pushing shit beyond their tolerances to INCREASE production or ACCELERATE construction beyond the original plans they already half assed and took liberties with.

That's why, to me, taking funding away from international agencies and those like NASA was the death knell of humanity's space faring dreams and final confirmation we don't have it in us. Space colonization in its early forms would take a level of sustained human selfless cooperation we just aren't capable of, especially factoring in that our most successfully greedy fucks have been allowed to coopt that dream and turn it into an absolute nightmare of being born into an internment colony having to work 12 hour days to pay for the recycled air you consumed that day until Elon blows you up trying to adjust his suite's 02 saturation to 30% by lowering everyone else's to 15% because he was bored and needed to get just a lil moar than everyone else yet again to feel superior.

Allies kill Nazis, Allies have babies, babies become assholes, assholes have baby Nazis.

I think handing most humans the toxic power of effectively infinite capital is a highly effective corrupting influence. Most people who, whether by action or inheritance, have the power that comes with hundreds of millions of dollars plus begin to see themselves as Gods above ants. For every Dolly Parton that uses their wealth to buy babies books, there's 100 wannabe masters of the universe that want to cut public funds to cut their own taxes to inflict their will on society, fully believing they're making it fair because they're willfully only considering their privileged position.

I don't believe a class of people with billions of dollars in a sea of people who can only accumulate a few million through honest labor at most over their entire lives can lead to anything but this. There has to be a hard, enforced limit on how much power an individual can accumulate, but we've branded that "punishing success" and even the victims eat that lie up, as the truth is those people profited from the benefits of living in a society, and therefore should have responsibilities to it as the "winners," but instead choose to declare themselves rugged individuals who did it all themselves out of ego.

Capital is power, power currupts, and currupting levels of power are not just tolerated, not just permitted, but celebrated here, with those that attain it deified, and those that don't have deluded into chasing it or being shamed for not doing so.

You can't solve people having billions in exploited, society warping levels of capital being allowed to control that society, when the root cause and only solution would be to strip them of it and reshape the economy to tax all income above a level that risks capturing one's own elected/appointed regulators.

Not without the necessary, but painful collapse and rebuild poor people will actively fight against despite it being the only way their kids might have a better life. It's a paradox by design, a hostage situation with the gun pointed at the capitalist subsistence opiates, fast food, social media, literal opiates, etc, to keep the laborers laboring for fear of uncertainty.

I've always fashioned myself a cynic, aka a disappointed idealist, but I always had a hope inside that humanity would look in the mirror and, with the advent of information on tap, reflect and evolve.

The older I've gotten, the more I've come to realize that handing humanity infinite mirrors in the form of selfie cams just made humanity fall in love with its absolute worst impulses.

The Wachowzki siblings that wrote Smith indeed had humanity pegged dead to rights. And both of them are trans and therefore know the hatred in humanity's hearts towards what we see as the other firsthand, which just adds to their credibility.

Oh and I highly recommend anyone watch the Second Renaissance, 2 shorts in the Animatrix that documents the fictional origins of the machine war, and IMHO it is a highly accurate condemnation of how humanity would act if a creation of ours demonstrated sapience and begged us for even the simplest of rights, like to be allowed to continue to exist. We all know what we'd do right? Given what we literally already do to other humans using something as trivial as skin tone, net worth, or declared imaginary friend as validation.

Climate change isn't the problem.

Climate change is the solution.

To us.

The Earth has suffered worse than us, even other runaway, destructive mistakes of evolution that didn't play nice with Earth's biomes. See the carboniferous period.

A couple million year fever is nothing to our mother's 3.8 billion year story of life, it's how she heals, how she repairs from catastrophic damage from both within and without.

Life will go on, life is hearty, life grows and changes at depths we can't reach, in crevices we can't find. Life will end here one day, but not because of us. Our bodies will have long since broken down into those subterranean petrochemicals we love so much long before then. We're just a transient surface nuisance.

We'll probably stubbornly cling to scattered pockets of existence using the remnant tech and hardened structures of old when the Earth becomes overtly hostile to our extremely fragile bodies, but that buys a few centuries of struggle at most, and that's for the best given who we are and what we've done to the paradise we inherited and belligerently refused to foster, and instead burned with reckless abandon for individualstic greed and gluttony.

Promise?

To attract people who took one look at this steaming pile of economic dystopia, the parties that both support it, and walked away.

I'm not even talking about the loud ones that claimed to walk away but voted Harris out of conscience and harm reduction.

For someone that wants to live in society and not a bunch of rugged individuals at each other's throats for oligarch scraps, it is very difficult to look at this cesspool and have hope or engage without feeling filthy and even more hopeless.

That could change if today's neoliberals were supplanted by anti-corporatists messaging that it isn't government's job to get out of the market's way, but to regulate and straightjacket the market economy into serving society as the lowly tool of society that an economy ought to be.

The people demanding there be winners and losers in an embarrassingly wealthy society ought to go live in the forest with nothing but a knife to see if they win or lose. A society supports one another.

There was no leftism on the ticket to reject.

There has been no leftism on the general ballot in my 24 years of voting.

That is never a choice the American people are given.

Both of our choices are always market capitalist sycophants.

If you claim to be a society, the "left-behinds" are a monument to your society's complete abject failure.

The problem is that a economy is, by its nature, a lowly tool to maximize the equitable distribution of goods and services for the benefit of a society, and a society is it's people.

Most modern developed nations reach a point, and the US is the flag bearer for this, where the society subsists in service to the economy, and the economy becomes a tiny sliver of the population swallowing everything out of proud greed and gluttony. Which is fucking perverse, inhuman, and sociopathic.

We've just been propagandized by for profit media and oligarch captured education to literally hate and blame our own victims, calling them welfare queens and filthy beggars lowering our property values instead of the struggling neighbors we have all failed spectacularly.

Those that defend this vampire economy, while not being subject to those conditions, have become the disease. It's not OK that we have enough resources to house and feed everyone, but willfully don't while still allowing some to live lives of excess that are the equivalent of hundreds of modest lives with full bellies.

Carry on though, we've been too far gone to recover before complete societal collapse since the Reagan Revolution, and climate change will finally force equality, the final, actual zero sum game because all the temporarily embarrassed millionaires chose die alone over live together.

Humans, Reporters, and medical care in a hundred years?

Funny comic!

Sure!

So how about this climate change huh? Ecological collapse in just a couple of decades from what I hear. And really no one with significant power anywhere doing anything but speeding it up.

Discuss.

I literally see voters saying the Democrats were too left leaning, jfc.

With parties like this, painful collapse is the only way to avoid multigenerational destitution.

There is no saving the United States as a framework. It is far too compromised, with too many methods installed to keep the people willfully ignorant and infighting as the owners suck their life forces dry for profit.

We can limp along and pretend that isn't the case, but climate change, aka the reality that doesn't give a shit about our self-delusion and greed worship, will force that collapse sooner rather than later. Reality can't be bribed, deluded, disappeared, or discredited.

Enjoy living in delusion that a society can function in capitalist competition against itself, the ability to do so is coming to an end.

Given that the people won't accept the necessary complex solutions to complex problems due to the intential destruction of our publoc education system both to keep them ignorant and controllable and to not pay for them, and want simple answers that don't exist without deception, all there is is subsistence until collapse, and start over after all that pain without the artificial restrictions held up by both parties to keep the wealthy wealthy and the poor poor.

This place is nothing but a slavery trap, keeping people ignorant by design and dependent on the scraps of the capitalists. I hope climate change forces the collapse and this slavery trap doesn't limp along for more generations born to suffer needlessly for the masters.

If there's another legitimate election, you want to double down on neoliberalism and trying to meet fascist in the middle yet again?

If we can't elect a revolutionary, then it's all over anyway until collapse, Trump is a symptom of the crony capitalist greed disease that's infected both parties. It's a shame we can't even agree that our economy's structure and incentives are the problem and requires drastic change, because without addressing that, nothing can begin to improve. It is the bloodsucking vampire elephant in the room.

It's not their fault.

We've been cutting rich people's taxes by destroying public education for decades.

I'm actually surprised thousands of my fellow Americans don't drown staring upward whenever it rains.

We chose die alone aka "I'm a temporarily embarrassed, ruggedly individual millionaire" over live together aka "we live in a society."

That has consequences we are now feeling at a new level. The Nordic nations understand this and are the happiest peoples on Earth because they get taxed massively and understand it benefits the society they live in without resentment. Their teams are their nations, their societies, not their economic class or political party.

That's an absolutely foreign and highly contemptable position to most Americans. After all, If everyone gets their basic needs met, how can I have mooooaaaaar than everyone and shove it in their sad poorie faces while they die in the gutter? And what good is wealth without that, amirite?

A nation as wealthy as ours need not have any economic losers dying in the streets and not being fed in school. We insist upon it, because America runs on schaudenfreude.

You want to know how fucked in the head our culture is? Compare the Freedom To Roam laws much of Europe enjoys to our POS country's castle doctrines. They value the real freedom being part of a society provides, whereas we just want an excuse to shoot each other in the face.

No they won't.

When the policies Republicans vote for eat their face, and there are innumerable examples, it's always "Why would the Demonrats do this?!"

Even the smartest of their idiotic, ignorant asses go a half step further by acknowledging that a Republican policy, or revocation of any policy thereof(deregulation), hurt them, but only because the filthy libruls tricked them into doing it by holding the opposite position on said policy, clearly making it their fault because duuuuuuuuuhhhhh.

And the defining characteristic of any conservative is to take joy/schaudenfreude in others being hurt, so no, they'll never look at the people, the children, they've condemned and do anything but laugh, even when it's other conservatives, as they eat themselves when they lack an "other" to fight. It only stops being funny when it happens to them or their immediate, nuclear family.

American conservatives wouldn't understand personal responsibility, especially the ones that crow about others not taking it, if it was literally rage fucking their assholes without lube.

And it absolutely will be once Trump's policies are in effect.

But somehow it will still be Obama's fault because the poor, ignorant fools consider critical thinking to be a librul plot like climate change and gravity.

We'll still have "elections"

You know, like in Russia.

To be fair, it does pair nicely with our millions of Evangelical "Christians" that treat every day like Bible opposite day.

The climate can't be bought, bribed, negotiated with, cut in, disappeared, discredited, or buried.

In mourning the loss of basic respect and even acknowledment of hard learned knowledge and wisdom, I find some solace in knowing that reality will assert itself, and our species' disrespect for it in the name of blind greed and gluttony will be met with the appropriate consequences for our actions and inaction.

I feel terrible about what we're doing to the other creatures that live here on this world we treat like our personal property though.

🇺🇸 MISSION ACCOMPLISHED 🇺🇸

The reality is that neoliberals in power, and even many poor deluded neoliberal voters, would rather have Republicans in charge than people interested in addressing the intentional and by design inequity of our economy, despite all the social issues that very inequity causes and exacerbates they then falsely claim to care about, including abortion, which is often correctly an economic decision.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/15/house-speaker-nancy-pelosi-opposes-banning-stock-buys-by-congress-members.html

I voted blue out of harm reduction as I always have, without hope, just to minimize what little cruelty I have the power to potentially minimize, but they did this to themselves, as we never get a vote on our economic system or the cruelty it propagates, because (D) and (R) are on the take, and I've yet to meet an affluent person of either party take issue with the economic system they benefit from despite our legions of homeless and barely subsisting people without the means to bribe officials on their behalf, and their very existence is proof of this economy's failure as a lowly tool to better equitibly distribute goods and services in service to a society that an economy is meant to be.

Our economy, and by that I mean our oligarch class that sits above the society they have no stake in, instead orders our society around through the legislators they own solely to maximize their private profit against all other concerns, and it's beyond perverse. We've just been propagandized our entire lives to consider it to be the natural state of things by self-serving for profit media and captured state government's capitalist indoctrinating curriculum.