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.

The hot tl;dr of this that is going to get you a lot of angry boys sending you incoherent diatribes is that we haven’t decided as a species that we will stop sexualizing youth.

Yes there are biological imperatives for the sexually aggressive sex to seek out mates that are young, healthy and capable of producing offspring before they become too old to reproduce. That’s all a thing that’s real, but it’s as far distant in our past as most other ancient instincts that we’ve put to rest. We just keep this one alive because we want it to continue broadly. The whole notion of older men predating and sexualizing youthful appearances or “innocence” as standards of femininity is absolutely something that if we all decided together was no longer acceptable, it would end tomorrow. (Or realistically in one generation.) This is not a more natural part of us than anything else we choose to follow or not, because we are well above using any natural response system as an excuse to allow dangerous social norms to continue.

The reason I say this is because there are a lot of men who will secretly or overtly hold the position that since we have biological urges, then it must be natural and acceptable. Meanwhile, ya’ll fuckers completely ignore the thousand other biological drives and standards that we’ve abolished because they’re unproductive, hurt people or just have gone out of style.

For example: body odor. Do you really think we were using soap and perfume when we were packed together in huts and caves for the last thousand millennia? You are genetically identical to the people who used to bury their faces in each other’s armpits to identify each other in the dark, but the thought makes you gag now because you were socialized to feel repulsion at this. (Fetishes aside.) We can socialize ourselves to believe and internalize almost anything, we are far, far beyond the forces of natural selection and are now choosing our evolutionary path. Wouldn’t it be nice if we chose good paths that respected others and protected children.

So it’s boomers surrounded by bots that praise them and share things with them and reward them when they do good. Got it.

This is all just preparing us for when we put artificial nurses and other robots in charge of taking care of our delusional elderly.

I have a gaming group that I regularly spend time with, they are about as diverse as you can possibly imagine. We have back-country gun-toting conservatives playing alongside college campus protesting trans girls, hispanic immigrants, US marines, housewives, people from China and Philippines, midwest American Christians and one extremely loving gay couple who do everything together.

While we do have a few ground rules, more like courtesy guidelines, like no arguing about politics, it’s not something I’ve ever had to enforce or moderate, and if you were to overhear the group on an average gaming night, you would think they are just the closest and tightest group of people who lift each other up, help each other out, laughing together and telling lewd jokes until they laugh so hard together that they wheeze.

This group has been the end-product of years of “distillation” in that the people who have issues with other people’s identity or politics or can’t set aside ego to have fun with people and make new friends, they just have naturally fallen by the wayside, so what’s left is a group of people who are bound together by something much stronger than politics or ideology, and that’s intelligence.

The one common thread that everyone left here has is that they are sharp, they like to talk through issues, they talk about ideas and science and sociology and relationships and enjoy the very simple act of trying to understand other people.

Curiosity about others will carry you through life far, far further than one might think.

If the people who needed to hear any of that the most could understand a word of it, they would probably be nodding along in agreement and ready to do their part to make changes.

Or they would just call you an “elitist commie” and go take out another payday loan.

The economy is doing great.

For the people who manage and control the economy.

The average progressive or even liberal in the US hates hearing this, but the vast, vast majority of Trumpers are actually “okay” people, and you would all get along splendidly in just about any other context.

The problem is though, they are dumb. Don’t get me wrong or think I’m sticking up for them. I just have some amount of sympathy and pity because I grew up out in the boonies in Southwestern USA, I was raised conservative and only flipped in my 20’s after seeing too much horror and war hurt people I cared about, and by extension, I learned to care for more than just the people I know.

A lot of people haven’t learned that. We take for granted that empathy is a learned skill, and we expect others to have it on demand and we tend to resent those who don’t exercise it. My take is that we’re expecting people to exercise muscles they’ve never even stretched. These are people locked in communities that they will likely spend their whole lives in, often times decaying outskirts of America, rampant with drugs and alcohol abuse, stuck in low-wage jobs or jobs that demand them to spend every waking moment working. They have no time nor opportunity to learn how to incorporate “care” into their daily misery, much less political knowledge. Then someone like Trump comes along, someone they only hear clips of and hear their “news station” praise while simultaneously explaining that all their problems are because of people who “hate america” and are trying to destroy families with scaaary things like abortion and gender-fluidity. It makes sense if your brain is desperately looking for a story to explain why you’re so unhappy. Which is how all our brains work.

We all have to remember that the worst people in the world are identical to us. We could have been born in their lives with their ignorance and tunnel vision, and all their feelings of fighting against a stacked-deck and hopelessness against change that will (supposedly) take away their only comforts in life.

I am getting really uncomfortable with the hate the left is directing at people who are simply dumb as fuck. Yes, they are dangerous, yes they are capable of doing better, and on top of that the only examples we SEE of this segment of America is the most horrific and malicious, the people storming the capitol or screaming at rallys or beating up protestors. They are the worst, but not necessarily the rule.

I had family members who were going to vote Trump and JUST needed to see the clips of him speaking that don’t make it to Facebook news feeds to change their mind. Approach this from a place of education and compassion and you will all have better results.

Let’s save our hate for the real evil, the grifters and pundits who are pied pipers for the ignorant. They are smart and know what they are doing and it’s pure evil.

law person

If only there were people trained in law who could function as our representatives in the legal system.

That’s how you build natural immunity.

Not everything you’re infected with gives you benefits, there are a vast many transmissible infectious agents that can literally kill you. While the chances of licking your finger in a grocery store and getting something that bad are pretty slim, it does happen, and your “natural immunity” is working all the time anyway, you don’t need to DO anything to help it along, stop thinking you know better than either medical science OR your own body. If you’re annoyed with how other people handle their hygiene, how about be an adult and keep quiet.

I wet my finger on the drops that fall from the misting nozzles in the produce area. Works every time, no licking. You’re all welcome.

I mean it literally has to be, the whole point of uncovering some conspiracy is to find evidence that the world is not what it seems, this allows one to embrace the stories their brains write to explain why they’re constantly anxious, depressed, hopeless or scared. Conspiracism is a response to emotional states, and in fact most of our beliefs and experience of the world is guided by our emotional states, it’s just that most of the time we can connect together narratives that we can all agree on. Sometimes people split off and decide to start agreeing on new things because they think some hidden truth is the real reason why they’re miserable.

Alternatively, and more realistically: drugs.

This concept can be scaled up to a lot of things, like why most of our systems break down. Nature only maintains what is needed to continue the species, everything that happens to you afterwards, with the exception of child-rearing, will be abandoned by nature unless someone gains some trait from living longer that helps the species propagate.

But nature is kind of silly, it doesn’t make “choices” so some of the adaptations can be weird. Like how our retina’s blood supply formed on the front of the retina so your brain has to always edit out your blood vessels from your vision and you can only see it using special tricks of light and then BAM all the spaghetti appears that’s been there all along.

Imagine what else our brain tells us and shows or doesn’t show us to make sense of what evolution has turned us into.

The more you think about it all, the less sense it makes. Congrats on discovering the tiny seed of free-will we all have inside us.

deleted by creator

This is some boomer facebook shit.

I have a Paypal credit card reader I keep with me because I do commissioned work on the side, it’s the size of a stick of gum, I can take a payment anywhere, I’ve paid friends for dinner or other things with a quick tap and use it at garage sales.

Not saying I WANT a cashless society, nor do I think anyone is seriously pushing this issue because if you did away with cash people will come up with something to use as cash the very same day. But I do think this weird image/article is extremely 1-dimensional and likely published in some Christian magazine to reinforce the right-wing fear that anything will ever change at all.

You’re not going to like to learn what the actual statistics are of how much of what we recycle actually gets recycled.

Now, people are fucked up right now in that if you say “X isn’t as effective as you think it is” everyone’s first reply is always “WHY ARE YOU SAYING NOT TO X!!” so just everyone… calm tf down.

Keep recycling, but can we PLEASE put pressure on our elected representatives that we don’t want to have babies made of microplastics so demand that they uphold environmental regulations in their district. Demand more robust investment in recycling, demand incentives to make alternatives to plastics. Demand money be spent where you want it spent, and FURTHERMORE you can actually donate to the institutions of your choice and have that donation tax deducted and get the state to pay for the things you want either way.

There are smarter ways to do all this, just don’t think “I did my part, I don’t need to do any more.” You don’t get out of responsibility here, I don’t care that you didn’t ask to be here, get to work!

This comment was a bit of a roller coaster but it’s okay. My first crush was Disney’s Maid Marian and I’ve been a lost cause ever since. The social acceptance of furry characters and art has been nothing but a benefit to me, and consequently the human race because it keeps me happy and out of trouble.

I don’t think any of this is even real to them. The same way that a majority of the white-nationalist 4-channers are just roleplaying and losing themselves in the storylines, as a species we tend to do that, we just get lost in a narrative because it explains how we feel.

The tankies are doing the same exact thing. They’re not impacting policy, they’re not marching for anything, they’re not taken seriously and it’s just another in-club that has its own language and imagery and secret handshakes and a unifying message to rally behind (America bad!) and instead of turning that criticism into actionable plans for changing representation and making anything better, they put on WW2 Russian Tanker helmets and have erotic fantasies about a communist uprising that will never happen.

TIL I am actually radicalized because I would prefer catgirls.