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Rome always falls in the end.

Entropy always wins sooner or later.

The Roman Empire fell to corruption and decadence, and telling various groups whatever pretty lies they want to hear, rather than uncomfortable but necessary truths of our terminal capitalism driven social, economic, and environmental collapse falls firmly under that umbrella.

The first step to staving off such a collapse would be mass recognition of the problem, and since no one with power and few without are even willing to entertain that reality, collapse it is.

The quest for RECKLESS growth/metastasis is quite literally ushering in a new dark age of glorified ignorance.

This is just capitalism. NBC wants to give the ignorant right what they want to hear to grow their profits for their private shareholders. Nothing wrong with indulging the profit motive, amirite? /s

This isn’t being done because of the fires of fascist hatred, though it will assist the fascists. No, this is collapse by the detached, sociopathic ice of unapologetic, insatiable greed, our society’s absolute core value which is every bit as destructive as hate, and historically far more effective at accomplishing and maintaining that destruction generationally. A fascist will murder you, but a capitalist will keep you, your children, and your children’s children in subservient subsistence, and they don’t even care to know the demographics of their victims.

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Republicans only pretend to value life when it doesn’t cost them anything while they get to shame women.

They’ll then insist to starve that poor child and blame the poor parents for that sweet, sweet dopamine hit of schadenfreude.

Their intent is entirely malevolent.

Trump is giving way too much credit to his supporters, who openly don’t care about his previous 6 bankruptcies, and have even ridiculously tried to spin said bankruptcies to their GodEmperorDaddy’s credit.

The tragedy of humanity is that we know we can be better than non-sapient animals responding out of emotional, knee-jerk survival instinct that is necessary in the wild but destructive in civilization. We have sparks, inklings, we can see the higher path, the path where our sapience has created the ability/technology to feed, clothe, shelter, educate, and even facilitate self-actualization for EVERYONE.

It’s right there, some even do it on a small scale, very rarely humanity makes a step in that direction before taking a step back.

But most of the time, that inkling is extinguished. Our higher, sapient, empathetic mind still not quite evolved enough to overcome our lower brain that sees everyone else as competition and a threat that can only be defeated, ensuring individual survival, by hoarding moooooaaaar than them, and keeping them away.

Juuuuuuust barely smart enough to split the atom with concerted team effort, but still so dominated by our base, animalistic impulses that we did it explicitly to first and foremost make big boomie boom rival monkey tribe.

I look up to Rick because he refuses to delude himself into seeing the dystopia our species has made for itself with rose colored glasses. I respect those that prefer the unvarnished truth over happiness, as it is an exceedingly rare quality. He even openly hates himself on the merits of who he is.

I also appreciate his coping mechanism: Nihilism, because it’s based on objective fact. The sun will eventually continue to heat until all life is extinguished, the universe will suffer heat death, and billions of years before that, humanity will destroy itself, and if we somehow, beyond astronomical odds don’t, we will recklessnessly use our technology to alter ourselves in every conceivable way for every conceivable reason to the point that humanity will no longer apply.

I find peace in recognizing the futility of what everyone finds so important. That doesn’t mean I don’t or can’t enjoy the temporary beauty of it. As Rick said to his daughter trying to save a universe that didn’t want to be saved from an Evil empire that would just be replaced by another, “don’t forget to have fun.”

Conservatives have an equivalent lore.

It’s called Handmaid’s Tale.

As do libertarians.

It’s called Mad Max.

All we’re talking about is reveling in the future our respective philosophies want to see.

The peasants of the world should take notes from the French.

Governments should be terrified of their people, not the other way around as is near universal in the developed world.

Which, as anyone could have predicted, has led to really dystopian results. The people should be the point, not the apparatuses that entrench the power/capital of the citizenry’s most effectively selfish sociopaths.

As it is, governments are more concerned with maintaining their economies, what should be lowly tools that exist solely to benefit the society they serve as a method to equitably distribute goods and services to the citizens of said society, and that should be continously optimized in service to that goal alone.

The US would bomb its own citizens if Wall Street thought it would somehow goose GDP. Look what we do to our citizens who don’t play ball with what our glorious economy demands of them.

We let them die of exposure, when our police capital defense forces aren’t brutalizing them from one ditch or underpass to the next, while a large portion of our most disgusting citizens hiss at them for lowering their fucking property values by selfishly continuing to draw breath. Great fucking “society.” 🖕

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Greed should be punished, pro-social vocations rewarded.

Greed is a an antisocial force more effective in its destruction than even hatred.

Fyi, I didn’t mean to diminish your joke, I just had a pedant moment, apologies.

To hell with that.

It’s only growing a spine if it risks costing you power, pence has none and is losing none. Glad he came out against the fascist, but all that might indicate is some small, at least partial return to and recognition of the rational world. He’s patting himself on the back about how virtuous this may make him seem in history, nothing more.

A sitting Republican Congressperson or party official with no intention of retiring would be demonstrating bravery coming out against the fascist.

Can they do it? Yes they can!

But because we let open bribery into our politics, how does that profit them?

Live by capitalist greed and competiton against one another, collapse by it.

Just as long as some people had the opportunity to win and live above others.

I appreciate that, sincerely.

I’ll never forget what elevated him into mainstream discourse, a game show literally about “I’m rich, so kiss my ass for half an hour” that somehow made him popular. You aren’t supposed to like Gordon Gecko/Mr. Potter. They are to be hissed for their antisocial greed. Our people celebrate it. Many who hate him for his violent rhetoric today still loved him for his proud celebration of greed then.

I’ll also never forget what singular event took him from paying extras to attend his rallies to basically owning the Republican party:

“We’re not allowed to punch back any more,” Trump lamented. The billionaire said he missed the “good old days,” “You know what they used to do to a guy like that in a place like this?” Trump said. “They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.”

https://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/donald-trump-punch-protester-219655

He’s a fucking monster, yes. But what does that say about US that the above elevated him, through public popularity, to basically being worshipped as a God(GodEmperor as some called him) by 40% of the electorate, while making still more consider his message?

I’m voting for Biden, as I did last time and Clinton before, but I can’t help some dark part of me knowing he does represent the US and is practically our mascot.

The embodiment of greed and gluttony, reveling in schadenfreude, cartoonishly shameless, crowing about who he beat and who he’s enjoying the suffering of, and drunk on wholly undeserved vanity. A sociopath who stands against the very concept of empathy for others. If someone is suffering, he’ll tell you what they did to deserve their suffering and suggest ways to really turn the screws. 🇺🇸

I’m ashamed of being an American precisely for all the American traits, that are also destroying us from the inside btw, that Trump unironically personifies. He’s more American as America actually is, not all the pretty lies we say about ourselves, than Apple pies or school shootings.

I wish more Americans would look in the mirror that is Donald Trump and be ashamed of who we are, because we can’t begin to do anything without recognizing what monstrous values we have.

The Republican brand is hatred, and has been as long as I’ve been alive.

Not exactly stable bedrock for fostering cooperation.

I always think people like Santos and Menendez getting in trouble for bribery and fraud is hilarious.

Political PACs make political bribery perfectly legal and the US hates when boring, honest people run for office, they never get anywhere, we demand bullshitters that tell us we’re pretty.

Do it to be sure, but why stop at single digit Congress people? There’s like 10 between both chambers that aren’t on the take.

I believe the first paragraph except colonizing space, at least not without hundreds of years of new technology at the human pace of invention.

We humans cannot even minimally adequately care for one another or this habitat, the one we evolved from, the most accommodating, self-correcting(to a point), resilient habitat that humanity will EVER know by far, and we’ve been fucking this easy situation up like breathing. Earth isn’t even the “enter your name” part of the interstellar civilization test, that would be colonizing our local moon. No, failing the Earth test is basically taking the test to the bathroom assuming it to be toilet paper.

Everything else in non-multigenerational reach will be completely and totally unforgiving. Even in the best circumstances, one person going stir crazy if we’re talking about sending real people can literally get everyone else killed, one major failure everybody dead, one major accident everybody dead.

Sorry, I know most of us are deluded into believing salvation comes from reckless attempts at ready fire aim growth, but if we don’t get this world fully squared away from the consequences of our reckless actions, find homeostasis and successfully meet the needs of the humans here on easy mode Earth, the idea that we can make colonies of hundreds or thousands on our Moon/Titan/Mars is a bad joke.

We can send 5-20 HIGHLY TRAINED perfect specimens to Mars or Titan to plant a flag and grow potatoes for a few years, and I’m all for that as a human rallying achievement, we really need one of those, but that isn’t the same thing as developing a true, sustainable presence on another world. We’ll have either long since decimated this habitat or pulled out a miracle of finding equilibrium with it long before we’re ready for that.