It’s powerfully written and just a shame it had to come from a child rapist.

I find it a bit interesting that you used the HVAC field as an example. I’m assuming that you are perhaps in the field and have felt some kind of sting in your day to day operation.

It’s a field I flirted with, back before I banked on college, thanks to a bunch of “Vocational Training is better than college because no debt!” older neighbors and high school advisers. I watched a few friends go through the ups and downs of the field, and it wasn’t pretty. Needless to say, the cushy office job with the six figure salary in the recession-proof health care industry ended up being the better choice.

But I’m not going to piss on my peers who took the other road, or suggest they are somehow slackers or losers or lesser people because they took a different set of hot tips from a bunch of blowhards. Downturns come for us all, one way or another.

Every move I have made was in the service of my family. Which is why I find it hard to sacrifice an inch in order to supplement the lives of other families.

I moved a lot because of my family. My dad worked O&G and we changed states several times before I eventually graduated high school. It fucking sucked, but it was the nature of a boom-and-bust industry. One thing we couldn’t do was reach back home and support the families of my mom and dad, precisely because we were so far away and my dad’s work consumed so much of his life. I got to watch the toll that took on extended family - that net of support torn apart by the push and pull of global economics - on both sides. My mom was the full-time caregiver, because we didn’t have grandparents / aunts / uncles / cousins around to help. And when her mom got sick, she couldn’t be there in turn. She had to book a red-eye flight just to hold her hand as she died.

The fact that we submitted to free market economics was fucking horrible for everyone… except our employers, who profited handsomely (and strangely enough would brag about how they were Sixth Generation Texans! without considering how they could afford such deep roots).

When I got into health care IT, one of the benefits was that I didn’t need to travel and I could spend time close to my family. I did get to be there when my dad passed. I did get to hold my mom’s hand. I did get to have a big family wedding, because everyone we knew was nearby. And I’m happy to have my mother in law home with my son right now, while I’m just down the road paying the bills.

I don’t find it hard to sacrifice because I’ve accrued more wealth bonding with my extended family and long term friends. I have more to give because I’ve needed less to spend.

These people live in a world with unlimited information right at their fingertips.

Unlimited inputs, certainly. But the signal-to-noise ratio is absolutely fucked. It is easy enough to be fully insulated from useful information, and easier still to be insulated from actionable information. That’s before you get into how all the old-guard liberal(ish) news sources - your 60 Minutes and NPR and local papers of record - have been gobbled up by right-wing advertisers or shut down by corporate cartels.

The propoganda machines are to blame for a lot of our problems, but that doesn’t let the assholes gobbling it up off the accountability hook.

Sure. At some point, you’re the guy in the DHS detention camp sodomizing an eight year old with a night stick because your ex-IDF police trainer told you it builds character. Or you’re a billionaire in your ivory tower, shoving ketamin up your nose and screaming “The Wokes want to destroy me!” at your third wife. You’ve given up even the pretext of your own humanity and we should treat you like the monster you’ve become.

But for the millions of middle Americans in states with failing infrastructure and polluted air and water and far-right mass media blaring into every eye and earhole, the demand that they line up to vote for Charlie Crist over Ron DeSantis or Jim Justice over Bill Cole or Eric Adams over New York Republican Placeholder Candidate becomes a fucking farce. The dogged insistence among Chuck Schumer liberals that we need more Liz Cheneys and Michael Bloombergs in the Democratic Party to save us from the Ken Paxtons and Pam Bondis of the Republican Party is fucking mental. And if people don’t go along with it, I can hardly blame them.

That, even though they looked ahead and made all the right decisions, they are still wrong and should shoulder the burden to supplement the lives of everyone else at the expense of their own families?

If you’re a military contractor who gets to enjoy the benefits of a recession-resilient Pentagon budget despite the downturn in the overall economy, and your response to a civilian construction worker or an HVAC repair guy or a restaurant waiter out on the unemployment line is “Suck shit, asshole, you should have made the right decision to drone strike overseas daycare centers, like me”, I won’t say I’m surprised.

But when the wheel turns, and those angry voters say maybe we don’t need USAID or the latest model F-35 or the VA, I’m not sure you get to be the first in line to complain, either.

Selfishness is labeled as such a horrible quality, yet so many perpetually online people only care about their own situation.

Selfishness is a state of nature, as you have varying limited exposure to other people, but you spend 100% of your time with yourself. It’s something you have to learn to grow beyond.

But what I see online isn’t selfishness nearly so much as it is tribalism. They form social niches and empathize with one another. That can be a source of strength when they recognize a communal source of aggrievement. But it can also be a source of weakness, when marketers and propagandists exploit a superstition or common gullibility. The era of Big Data has revolved around industrial manufacturing of consent and delusion.

That’s not a consequence of any single individual’s failure. It is a systematic psychological attack on communities at-large. It is a strategic effort to alienate people from one another, to weaken them, and then to consume them - devouring their accrued wealth, their free time, and their valuable human labor - for the profit of the industry sponsoring the deceptive content.

I will not let someone take that from me just because they want it without putting in the work.

If you see unemployment as a consequence of laziness, I suppose that makes sense.

But if you see unemployment as a consequence as a form of industrial lock-out, in which business conglomerates and cartels force down the price of labor by deliberately understaffing and overworking a fraction of the population…

This isn’t a matter of someone taking from you because they want it. This is a matter of someone withholding something from you through violence, because they can extract more of your wealth in exchange.

My mom can’t flood the Earth killing everybody.

Ask the kids of Andrea Yates whether they can tell the difference.

My take from this meme is that Zoomers and later are more “captured” by a few big platforms than previous ones.

Steam games have been around for a lot longer than 10 years. So has Nintendo. There’s no reason a Zoomer wouldn’t have played Stardew Valley or Undertale or Mario Odyssey or Wii Tennis.

Like, my aunts and relatives are trapped on Facebook sharing Trumpy memes. Kids younger than me seems to be really into ultra-short videos or mobile-ish games. The only people I know that know how to use a desktop PC, beyond the bare minimum for work are… about my age?

I keep seeing this complaint. I’ll never understand it. I definitely know family that have mired themselves in Facebook memes. But its silly to pretend my Blessed Lemmy-4chan-channel is materially better than their Barbaric Facebook-4chan-channel. Honestly, just amazed they finally came around on computers at all. So many of my parent’s generation couldn’t even check email twenty years ago.

Similarly, the Office Space Millennials seem to have completely forgotten that their non-technical peers exist. Like they’ve never met an auto mechanic or a plumber or a doctor their age who has struggled with using a computer. I used to do IT for a physicians clinic and it was the Medical Assistants doing all the office work. The RNs and MDs couldn’t do shit. Which was ironic, because so much of the IT upgrade was about reducing staff size… but the MAs were the ones who grasped the tech the fastest while the actual medical staff avoided tech like the plague.

And sure, kids half your age don’t know DOS commands because they don’t use DOS. But there’s no shortage of Zoomer/GenA computer geeks. I ran into a gaggle of robotics club Alphas in downtown, near the local convention center, just last week. Every year my office fills up with interns who built their own PCs and threw up their own home PLEX servers for their parents who are my age.

Some of you are just so damned cloistered, insisting the three 14 year olds you know aren’t doing Angelina Jolie shit from Hackers in their basements before they’re even old enough to drive. But pull down your reading glasses, squint a bit, and you’ll see plenty of tech savvy folks younger than you.

The city of Rome still exists but the Roman Empire does not.

Absent that brief ill-conceived stint at empire under Mussolini, sure. But the roadways and the ports and the political connections and the religious iconography that centered Rome within the ancient world continue to persist. It isn’t the center of a sprawling intercontinental kingdom, but it holds a privileged place within the modern sprawling intercontinental kingdom of NATO.

Just like in Russia, I also expect people to eventually have to play along - or lose their job, house etc.

Russia’s in a peculiar place precisely because brain drain and privatization and punitive sanctions and the latest round of pointless horrifying bloodshed has sapped it of so many talented and driven young people. But the dictatorship - the bourgeois dictatorship, anyway - came under Yeltsin, following the Gorbachev coup. It brought in an entirely illegal dismantling of public industry and services, a looting of pensions and public reserves, and a fire sale of military hardware which set off a wave of ugly overseas wars in Africa, Oceania, and Latin America.

Only after the country had been hollowed out economically, by a cartel of untouchable oligarchs, did the public warm to the idea of a new singular strongman dictator. And the call for dictatorship was, at its heart, a plea for someone to drag the cartels back into line as part of a national project.

People have to play along in every system, because we’re not self-sustaining little monoids. We are hugely interdependent and most efficient when we are working together in concert as collaborative specialists. What we’re searching for is leadership. But all we seem to be offered is different flavors of oligarchy or autocracy.

It’s probably not productive or helpful or change inducing, but boy, can I.

Alright, fair enough. But you cannot see the symptoms of the problem as the root of it.

It doesn’t change shit but at least I don’t have to bottle all that up.

No, no. Sorry. I definitely get that. But at some point you need to look past the guy in clown makeup dancing around your neighborhood to the clown college that’s churning these people out.

It took Rome 1000 years to collapse.

I mean, if you want to get extra snarky, Rome’s still there. Still one of the wealthiest cities on earth, to this day. The infrastructure is what makes the city and that can be repaired or rebuilt, improved even, as generations come to their senses.

More people started living from the survival mindset and actually getting sick impacted their brain. Dictatorships help people feel safe.

I pin this far more on the toxic media atmosphere than COVID, although the pandemic definitely took its toll. That said, the current hysteria around migrants and Woke feels a lot more like the post-9/11 moment than COVID. Democrats rolling over sheepishly while a Republican wields unitary executive power to disappear dissidents and intimidate

What folks on here don’t want to accept is that this isn’t the first time we’ve had a President behave like this. Its not even the first time in our lifetimes (for the most part - sorry teenagers). This is more normal than not, in fact. Reagan’s War on Drugs, Nixon’s War on Crime, Eisenhower’s Red Scare, and FDR/Truman’s Japanese Internment echoed all the same fascist tendencies.

What’s really changed in 2025 is the abysmal long term economic outlook. Liberals in 1984 could duck their heads and glare at the rampant poverty around them and mutter “If those hippie slackers had earned an education rather than smoking dope and fucking around, they wouldn’t get picked on by the police”. But now… fucking kids at Columbia University are being targeted. Surgeons are getting targeted. Judges are getting targeted.

Literally the only thing you can do to avoid these purges is Be MAGA. And “Just be MAGA, you won’t get hurt” isn’t something liberals can quite bring themselves to do yet (although keep an eye on Gavin Newsom and Richie Torries and Andrew Cuomo, because its coming).

Dictatorship isn’t making people feel safe. It’s making them feel terrified and helpless.

It’s not an issue of believing/not-believing politicians nearly so much as it is a media environment that’s fully saturated with right-wing propaganda.

What do you tell a person who has been listening to AM Radio for 30 years? What do you tell a person that was taught Ayn-Rand-o-nomics in High School while the teacher clutched a copy of Atlas Shrugged alongside her Bible? What do you tell a person who has never actually been involved in the higher levels of business management, because our economic model is so subdivided and the commodities so fetishized?

You can’t get mad at the loyal acolyte of a cargo cult for praying to the cargo gods if that’s all they’ve ever known. Neither can you simply ignore the Cult Leader, who has been blaring the message from a megaphone into everyone’s ears, for their entire adult lives.

I have immense sympathy for people who are pre-programmed to get hoodwinked by this shit and I count my lucky stars every day that I only get hoodwinked some of the time and mostly on things that don’t obliterate my quality of life when they come due.

But more than them, I feel awful for the people who come after us, because we at least got to enjoy that World’s Greatest Middle Class Life while it was on offer. The next generation is going to be fed all the same propaganda, but they’re going to be doing it from in the pod while eating the bugs.

The Internet will continue to function just fine, just as it has for 50 years.

Sounds of intercontinental data cables being sliced

I’m a little surprised a paper like The Guardian is talking about it at all, given how fixated Starmer has become in sucking up to the Trump Administration. Have to wonder how long until someone from DOGE or the State Department gives the PM a call and asks him to tell his papers of record to cut that shit out.

Biden spent 4 years cleaning up Trump’s mess

I mean, I’d argue one of the reasons Dems lost was that they didn’t clean up the mess. He focused primarily on relieving tensions in the private business sector while largely neglecting the public sector - leaving Dejoy to ransack the Post Office, failing to boost SS COLAs to match record inflation, focusing more energy on funding conflict in Ukraine than financing debt relief for student borrowers or underwater home owners, leaving a litany of crooks and cranks unprosecuted and unjailed so that they could go on to prop up the next fascist administration - which was great for the banking and tech sector but miserable for everyone else.

That’s actually a trend for Republican presidents in general.

Well, its been a common baton pass since the Nixon/Ford Administration. Republicans fuck up the economy on a national scale. Democrats bail out private business at the expense of the public sector, then privatize the parts of the public sector that are failing in order to justify the next generation of private bailouts.

The housing sector reveals this in spades. From Nixon/Ford to Carter to Reagan/Bush 41 to Clinton to Bush 43 to Obama to Trump to Biden, we see a very obvious pattern of public housing becoming public lending becoming private lending becoming private bailouts and foreclosures. And the end result is a steady collapse in the share of homes owned by the people who live in them, while the debts these people owe to private banks (along with the interest revenue on those loans) inflates to turn the FIRE sector into the backbone of the national economy.

Democrats have their role to play in this, but it largely boils down to bailing out failed businesses and “innovating” public-private partnerships, saving capitalism from itself. They’re medics who resuscitate a dying man, stuff him pockets full of cash, and then send him back out to have another bender.

Turns out the Basilisk was just Rich People.

For decades, the Woke Left has complained that we live in a bifurcated society of privileged middle class professionals and trod upon lower class manual laborers. But Donald Trump is resolving the contradiction. Now everyone gets to enjoy the hyper-surveillance, the stochastic violence, and the suffocating revanchist propaganda once reserved for poor people.

Parents aren’t all powerful.

From the perspective of a newborn, they might as well be. Everything you need to be happy, healthy, and comfortable is actively managed by the parent. You don’t understand anything about your condition or your history or your source of care. All you know is the id-based impulses to complain when you don’t feel good and the soothing release of your feeding, playing, and sleeping cycles.

So it could stop any war, any disease, any pain, … but does not.

What would that look like, from a practical perspective? Imagine trying to explain to a baby that you’re going to stick a needle into its skin in order to prevent it from suffering a disease, when it has no conception of disease. All you know is the pain of the needle. Must you conclude, from that pain, that your nurse is fundamentally evil for inflicting this upon you? And that, by extension, your parents are evil for bringing you to this nurse?

“If parents were truly worthy of my attention, they would have found a better method of vaccinating me than this needle!” is the sort of thing you get to say as a child, precisely because you do not understand the underlying nature of the world you live in. All you know is the scolding language of a parent cajoling you into this immediate superficial pain.

Should humankind be incapable of performing wars? What does that look like? Should humankind be incapable of contracting disease? What does that look like? Should humankind be incapable of experiencing pain, even? Is that what you really want? An eternal numbness of being? Is godly perfection just being a particularly resilient tree?

Either it’s not all powerful or not good.

One can be both exceptionally powerful and exceptionally good without needing to draw a distinction between the two. One can be beyond comprehension, as well. But the argument that a single person experiencing a single moment of discomfort disproves a benevolent deity seems to throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water.

Kinda like blaming a President at war for not saying “thank you” to its “benefactor”

What’s crazy about this line is how frequently Zelenskyy has done the “America A#1, you’re the best!” media tour in the run up to this meeting. How many clammy-handed, rictus grin photo-ops does this guy have to do for you people? How many trips does he need to make to DC to say “Hello from Ukraine, I love you!” to Congress? Dude’s entire career as President has just been going abroad and brown-nosing for NATO support.

This reminds me of the British journalists who will cut an Arab liberal off in the middle of an “I am here to condemn Hamas and ask for release on behalf of the Palestinian people” automated response to grill them on why they haven’t condemned Hamas. It’s all just bullying at an international scale. I’m amazed Trump didn’t drag Zelenskyy into the restroom and try to give the man a swirly.

I mean, setting aside the “We’re from the Government and We’re Here To Help” liberalism that American conservatives reflexively recoil at, I do find it disorienting to pretend a heavily rural American breadbasket would need agriculturally scarce Europe to send food aid.

This reminds me of the 90s US effort to do welfare politics in West Africa, by dumping millions of tons of excess agriculture into Trans-Atlantic wholesale markets. The flood of “free” food (with tons of political strings attached) shifted the balance of power to the African urban centers, as local agricultural markets collapsed and people flooded to the industrial centers to get food at below the domestic production cost. Political leadership capable of controlling the influx of foodstuffs rapidly consolidated power within major port cities. This gave rise to authoritarian governments, political purges, and ultimately two horrifying Congolese Wars (the second often referred to as The Great War of Africa).

Obviously, more complicated than this. Along with food “aid” we also delivered a surplus of “military aid” to our regional allies (a list that was constantly shifting between US and African administrations, particularly during the fallout of the failure of the Soviet Union). Then there were a host of local tribal conflicts and score-settling that got ramped up to eleven with the sudden glut of foreign wealth.

But maybe I’m drawing lines where none exist. Can you really imagine how the US economy might be upset by a sudden shift in who controls the supply of cheap imports? Can you imagine what our country would look like if it was flush with small arms or if we had a bunch of local land barons with short tempers and delusions of grandeur? Can you conceive of an America that had a bunch of poorly defined interior borders that suddenly become flashpoints of political tension?

I certainly can’t. Bring on the flood of EU eggs!

the horrors god would be responsible for if god is in control

You’re forgetting the counterfactual. Namely, that we live in The Best Of All Possible Worlds and what you describe as horror is actually the nicest things can conceivably get. The standard Christian argument is that, without God, existence would be significantly worse. Also (depending on your flavor of Christianity) the mortal life is a proving ground not a final destination. Life is a trial one experiences before being eligible to enter the Kingdom Of Heaven, where God is fully in control.

The horrors are a consequence of Free Will mixed with the corruptive influences of evil spirits sent out to tempt mortals to sin. And they are transient, while the Christian Reward is supposed to be eternal. You see this best in the Story of Job, during which he suffers a litany of torments but holds firm to his faith. This faith is ultimately rewarded, not just through the restoration of his material pleasures, but through the promise of an eternal blissful afterlife.

You could replace “God” with “Parents” to the same effect.

But arguing that a parent is evil because they see a child committing an error, know it is an error, and decline to intercede doesn’t rationally follow. If you helicopter over your kids and intercede every time they make mistakes, they never develop into independent and mature adults. You also induce a lot of anxiety, as you’re constantly interposing yourself between the child’s desires and actions without the ability to convey the wisdom of your decisions. So the kid sees you as the harmful force, rather than the thing you’re seeking to avert.

So what’s a Parent/God to do? Do you puppet your child, never letting them stray farther than the length of a string? Do you lock your child in a padded ceil and hand-feed them every day? Do you hardwire their programming, so they can’t deviate from your design, acting exclusively on a divine instinct?

Is that really what we consider “Goodness”?

There is also the Calculation Problem to consider. A God-like intelligence might be able to observe far more than a human without being perfectly omniscient. Similarly, they might be able to calculate probabilities more quickly and accurately without being perfectly prescient. If a Parent/God knows most of the things but is not omniscient, does that mean they are unworthy of your attention or the reception of wisdom? At the same time, is it the duty of a Parent/God to restrict the actions of the others in their domain to the things they can calculate in advance? This brings us back to the idea of the Child Prisoner or Brainwashed Child. You’re safe at the expense of any kind of growth or personal liberty. God treats you like a farmer treats a veal calf - perfectly unspoiled through inaction.

And finally, there is the problem of Entropy. A God who can foresee everything and recognizes that Evil is inevitable. Is such a God responsible for this Evil simply because it can perceive it? Is such a God responsible for this Evil simply because it cannot prevent it? Is this flaw in God’s power a reason to reject it as a source of virtue?

Consider Odin hanging from Yggdrasil, his eye plucked out in pursuit of a way to prevent Ragnorak. He is not all-powerful. He is not-all knowing. He is routinely makes mistakes and even acts out of anger, lust, or petty vengeance. He is fundamentally flawed as dieties come. And yet his primary goal and function - to prevent the end of the world - seems noble enough to justifiably cultivate a religious following.