Community. This is the overpowered meta that makes our species work and why we have highways and sewage systems and AI and MRI machines and a global logistics network… we did things as a community and it made the impossible happen, far more magic and use than any kind of faith or belief system, but we have a toxic relationship broadly with community. It conflicts with our individuality and we get stuck in emotional states that prioritize the self.

It isn’t wrong, it’s just an obstacle we need to be as aware of same as we’re aware that we crave calories but we need to limit our intake. We need carbohydrates to survive but we also need to balance it.

Our species thrives on narratives, if you could fashion a narrative that pulls in enough people you can literally change the world.

I am pulling my face off here wondering where our better stories are, where the master storytellers for progress and equality are hiding.

It’s just entertainment

Until the people who profit off making fake things seem real use the same tactics to shape policy and undermine democracy. For that matter, some of the very same people who produced the cognitive dissonance of wrestling went on to produce political campaigns, blurring that line in uneducated viewers’ minds further.

I’m not saying you can’t enjoy wrestling or whatever media you like, as long as you understand how entertainment works and that it’s not even a reflection of reality, much less an actual narrative. That’s the difference I’m talking about here, if you know that difference, you need not worry, go have fun.

Sorry, I was going to start giving you actual figures about how much money changes hands for our regular traditions and cultural events across the world, but realized if you’re willing to die on this hill you’re a typical internetist where it is critically important that you call out someone’s mildly problematic behavior or history while we lose literally everything we value in society due to rampant fascism resurging and the idolization of actual monsters, and you think that by making a stand on this one slippery-slope that you’re going to do anything but turn people away from the very notion of being anti-royalist.

Just by engaging with this bullshit it will drive some infinitesimal point up on some algorithm and some Ozzy fan somewhere will read “LIBS CANCEL DEAD ROCK LEGEND FOR NOT BEING WOKE” and all you will have done is make more people angry at the wrong thing at the wrong time.

And since I know you skimmed that and didn’t read it, let me give you the tl:dr: you’re blocked.

Christmas doesn’t affect society in such a way that it costs anyone money

There are materials you can use to research Earth traditions, I recommend it if you plan on continuing to try to blend in with human society.

I never understood wrestling. Even as a child I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I didn’t get what was so fucking amazing to my friends about watching people put on a stageplay and pretend to hit each other in a ring while wearing tights. It seemed cheesy, boring and unexciting.

My friends ate it up, they were screaming at the TV. I tried to tell them it was fake and they got mad. I was boggled how people couldn’t tell it was fake. There was a Hulk Hogan cartoon in the 80’s, I loved cartoons but I was still boggled what was going on with wrestlers being so popular. The cartoon was boring and substandard, even to a child.

Fast-forward a buncha decades and here we are, a whole world of people shouting at the TV and getting exciting over theatrical bullshit presented in overtly fake ways for people to mindlessly cheer or jeer at their favorite heroes and villains… except now it’s the goddamn federal government.

Who cares. Many brits are in a passive, cultural sense, the same way non-christians celebrate Christmas.

Epstein was everywhere in Hollywood and politics, that was his entire business. So we will probably see floods of pictures with him “partying” with prominent figures.

WHICH IS GREAT! It’s likely that most of the people he met or were in the same building with had no “dealings” with Epstein, but the more we can saturate the public with pictures that validate the conspiracist ideas that celebrities and politicians are all involved in some child-eating cult, the more we incite the turn against Trump from his own base. Trump’s administration is fucking wounded right now, we gotta pour lemon juice and sewage into the wound at every opportunity.

If you have a personal web-page or blog, you can easily poison your content just my making white text on white background or something, containing an assortment of prompts and nonsense.

But that’s only for the current models of LLM, next gen might easily bypass those kinds of tricks. We’re cooked, yo.

I lost a friend to religion because he said he couldn’t work out his morals and couldn’t figure out what his values should be.

What was happening is that his family were supporting Trump mindlessly, but he felt uncomfortable with it because he has a young daughter and feels really apprehensive about Trump’s history and allegations among other things.

So his solution? Turn to Christ. His family’s Church said that Trump is chosen by God, so he can now support Trump without a conflict of conscience as long as he “allows the Lord into his heart” so he turned from a cool guy who liked games and rock music and goth chicks to weird, straight-edge, “clean living” disciple of Christ who doesn’t stop preaching and trying to convert everyone around him.

Yes, that was literally his reasoning and his solution, and he is fine with it. This is the average American median voter.

Both of those terms might as well be ancient Pharaoh curses to the average modern American median voter.

I don’t like how we can’t define what being “Decent” even means anymore. Why is it now such a huge problem for people to figure out what’s right and wrong? How did we actually have a Christian pushback against empathy?

I lost a friend recently. To religion.

He revealed that he can’t figure out how to have his own values so he turned to Jesus. He said he can’t tell what’s right or wrong anymore. What was happening is that his family were supporting Trump mindlessly, but he felt uncomfortable with it because he has a young daughter and feels really apprehensive about Trump’s history and allegations among other things.

So his solution? Turn to Christ, his family’s Church said that Trump is chosen by God, so he can now support Trump without a conflict of conscience.

Yes, that is literally his reasoning, and he is fine with it.

This is the average median voter in this country. This is why everything has gone to shit. Because average people look outside themselves for moral guidance.

I was always told how people follow cues of other people for an idea what to do or not, but I never really saw it until I saw a car get crushed by an 18-wheeler on the highway and traffic came to a stop. Someone got out of their car. Picked up a piece of twisted bumper that was in the lane in front of him, moved it aside and got back in and everyone kept driving. (I helped pull the old couple out and they were okay, not another soul stopped. DPS officers said that’s normal, sometimes they will go out to remote accidents and people will have bled out in their car because nobody stopped to check the occupants.)

they didn’t want to spend the money and time to comply with the stupid ass backwards law.

They didn’t want the liability and connection to a government database that will probably start looking for people who are into like, cuckolding or something, since that seems to be what the right is absolutely obsessed with.

“the alternative is primitive tribal life” is classic Capitalist propaganda.

We can have a functional society without rampant capitalism controlling everything if we all really wanted it enough. The idea that it’s “capitalism or stone-age tribalism” is a false dichotomy that reactionaries who hate authority push. Mommy can’t hurt you anymore. It will be okay.

You are absolutely right that we are ignoring community to a disastrous degree, our lack of communal spirit is allowing the worst people to gain the most power because we don’t care about who supports those worst people and only focus on spectacle.

But we still need broader systems, if we just have small communities, we end up with medieval feudalism the moment one community needs something their neighbor has.

We can’t get rid of the human need to “get ahead” it’s hardwired in, even in the most equitable system, there will always be someone who says “I want more.” And they will exploit and game the system until they get it. If there aren’t guardrails and laws and systems to enforce those laws, those kinds of people will immediately resort to force and we have, yet again, armed raiders who then become powerful enough after killing and raping enough of their neighboring communities that suddenly everyone sees them as the central power.

Our problem isn’t that we don’t know how to government, our problem is we’re broadly still too dumb to handle the abstraction required to manage such large systems. We haven’t had that “reckoning” yet that will slap our whole species down a peg and say “You need to value intelligence” and I genuinely don’t know what will do it at this point. We had plagues and wars and genocides and it made people cling to ignorance harder.

I might be peaking on my cynicism here but I am not sure we can rise above our limitations as a species. It might take several thousand more years of people building civilizations and having them reduced to ashes again and again before natural selection creates a species that can work together for a common good. But I kind of don’t think we’ll even be humans anymore at that point.

All decent humans hate pedophiles

There has been a recent wave of online influencers and their ilk suddenly talking about how being attracted to minors is “the most natural thing in the world for all men.”

Combine this with the recent push for removing child-labor laws and you really see what the right’s values are.

They have to comply with local laws. (Fuck them anyway but for entirely different reasons, at least in this case they’re following the law.)

Who do we throw stones at boo mercilessly? Conservatism broadly, the kink-cult that makes everything about sex and denying sex while having the weirdest, worst sex behind the scenes. Making people scared of anything remotely sexual while also championing violence and hate.

In the US, our pedo-in-chief started doing this too and you need to register your ID with the state to get into pornhub and other adult sites in some states. This is a spreading problem that people are too ashamed to push back on.

The alternative is primitive tribal life, I think we can make government work, it’s improved a fuckton in the last several centuries, but it takes a lot more involvement and a lot less apathy than people have been showing about the whole thing lately.

I blame all the people with “purity” kinks who took it so far they actually created movements and entire societies based around denying the most natural and harmless feelings we have as a species.

I mean, at this point the best thing that can happen to our biosphere and atmosphere would be the inevitable AI-driven societal collapse that will be the result of unchecked capitalist crusades to make the best, fastest, biggest line go up the furthest before anyone else, safety be damned.

I used to be the one screaming at people in the transhumanism subreddits that they’re delusional, now I’m screaming that they’re not delusional, no, go ahead, make it smarter, faster, bigger… put the thing in charge of the stock market, it’ll be great bro, I promise.