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.

I used to watch Thought Slime a lot, even donated to them a few times… then started watching videos from the people they’ve “called out” on stream, followed a rabbit-hole of people who were hurt and never apologized to and realized they’re just another youtube dramafarmer clicks-at-all-costs, no discrimination, storyline-crafting liar. Like everyone.

Free yourselves humanity, stop watching streamers.

edit: I know the parasocialism online runs really deep and just saying this is going to get some people losing their shit to defend their fav streamer, I literally don’t care, you have to be aware that every streamer has an army of knights to defend them, and I don’t like engaging that way and am not going to spend my time arguing. I’m not out to change your mind, just explain why I changed mine.

I cannot fucking stand the fact that we live in the year 2024 and we’re having raging debates about if science has value… ON THE FUCKING GODDAMN INTERNET.

This population deserves the hardships coming, and that’s a really, really terrible thing to say, because the coming hardships are going to be bad.

I don’t disagree with anything you’re saying, but it kinda sounds like an engineer trying to make their career/passion into more than a clever trick which comes as a result of learning how to abstract information to better manipulate the world.

“Engineering” isn’t a fundamental quality of the universe, it’s a word we have made up to describe honestly a lot of different things. There’s nothing wrong with calling what humans learned to do “engineering” and it wouldn’t be inaccurate, but I’m saying you can simplify that more, to just the quality we learned, which is how to take information from the past and from right now to synthesize pictures of tomorrow, and then abstract that conclusion to share with others. Being able to share abstract conclusions about future events is a far, far more profound skill, there’s no parallel in nature, not even “kinda” like beaver engineering. Engineering comes from this ability, so I’m just trying to describe the order of carts and horses.

Shame we won’t make it.

I think the invention of engineering is what finally broke evolution

While true, we can be more specific here what quality or trait allowed us to become engineers. Being able to engineer is by itself something that can even exist in genetic memory, instinctual. There are a lot of animals that do engineering, but have never come anywhere close to what humans do. Beavers, birds, ants and termites arguably are better engineers than most humans on an innate level. (I’ve also known some engineers who are incapable of some very basic life skills.)

What separated us from evolutionary processes and also allowed us to become engineers is the capability to abstract information and use those abstractions to predict the future, extending our “reach” of influence into the further future than most animals can calculate. This required us to develop strong continuity of thought and experiences and with this also came the ability to analyze and compare complicated events to find patterns. This gave us a huge edge when we were surviving around predators that were able to easily dominate us. Nowadays these abilities mostly cause of mental health conditions as we try to use tools designed for navigating glaciers to navigate a world of social media, zoom meetings, Tinder profiles, electric car recalls and democratic electoral politics.

No mention of the giant rocket that left the surface of the earth and the video footage of both that and the surface of the moon itself?

This is why conservatism and conspiracy go hand-in-hand. You can’t believe the things that “feel” true if the “true” truths keep interfering with this pesky reality.

I can tell you the plain, clear answer but you’re not gonna like it. Nobody does when I tell them.

Hold some yard sales.

For real. Assuming you live in a neighborhood and there are people around and it’s safe to do so, this is one of the best ways to get to know the people who live around you. People go to yard sales to talk about shit and gossip, so it’s a great way to know who’s doing what, how everyone feels about their current neighborhood policies, who is running the school and who the local police or sheriff are, who is running for what position in local city, county and eventually state seats.

Having a grasp of your local political landscape gives you the power to get involved and educate people and get to know who is representing you, what the values of your area are, and you can influence elections or even challenge incumbents who often run uncontested. Any kind of local community organization and involvement is a pushback against the powers that be.

This is all because a lot of the people we have in seats of power in the USA did not earn their power fairly, they often have run without competition or were placed there by political organizations. These are the people who support the larger governmental powers. These are the people who cut checks, who receive checks, who write the bills that let the companies do the things they want to do to make more money.

Candace Owens is a product of this system that wants you to turn away from science and follow an authoritarian, because this is good for business. If you want maximum profits, get you a population that has no time, education or capital to change anything and get them angry at people who look different than themselves instead of their own government leaders.

If we purge the nobodies and clowns and paper-tigers who uphold this vision of America, we also get rid of their mouthpieces like Owens. She is not some passionate thought-leader, she’s just a spokesperson for a bunch of rich fucks who want to keep squeezing blood from the population.

Edit: they want you to be less social. They want you to retreat to your discord friend-groups and social-media safe-spaces. They want to keep you from organizing, from connecting, from uniting and forming groups with a shared voice. This is how you beat them, with shared voice.

“But I’m not sooooooooooooociaaaaal!” You cry.

I don’t fucking care. Adapt. It won’t be the hardest thing you ever do.

The impact of human fertility cycles ("concealed ovulation’) and human evolution is a vast, deep field of study and speculation in itself, but I am making some very sweeping generalizations here, referencing people’s capability to choose when to reproduce on the broadest levels, not that there was a period or specific instance of this having an impact… more like, it made a difference over very large scales of time, as evident by the fact that our breeding cycles are nothing like most other mammals.

We had the tall stride thing going, we had the super-endurance thing going already, we had gotten good at tool-use like many other primates, in that we could use sticks and rocks to beat things and poke things, just like modern chimps and apes. (Modern primates also throw stones, it’s not the evolution-killer on its own that the meme is making it out to be.)

No, the REAL thing that soared us beyond all members of the animal kingdom is how we started abstracting information and sharing it. IE: language, writing, and the cognitive processes behind those skills that allow us to plan ahead. Not just planning ahead, but being able to set up actions far in advance, like planting seeds because we know a plant will come out of it. Moving our camps to where animal herds migrate to so we can stay close to the food, and just the day-to-day actions like preparing a fire in advance so you can see when it gets dark, bringing things with you to use later, having an idea how to ration food, being able to share your plans with others, communicating your movements to other hunters, and yes, all this made us exceptional hunters. When other primates were still mostly foraging for plants and bugs, our ancestors used this “thinking” thing to start getting massive doses of meat. Amino acids, proteins, high-density fuel, food for growing brains.

Not to mention, we’re the only creature that chooses when to reproduce. We used this foresight to plan our futures and our families. This is a massive changeup from how nature has handled reproduction. For the vast majority of life on Earth, breeding is just this thing that “happens” at certain points and everything leads to that event, and nothing really has control over how that event plays out.

Breeding is still a big deal for us, just look how horny we all are, but we decide when we’re going to have babies, and while it doesn’t seem a big deal here and now, it was a game changer when we were migrating packs of hunter-gatherers, following the seasons and the herds of animals.

Our story of how we got here is without question the most fantastic story ever. You are the product of over four and a half billion years of uninterrupted successes. A family tree going back a thousands of millions of years without break, surviving apocalypses that have turned our entire globe to ice, to fire, to water and other unimaginable catastrophes that sometimes lasted for millions of years.

So now you made it, your billions of generations of ancestors secured your survival against all odds, whatcha gonna do with it?

Mods finally took it down along with a lot of his other BS. Just waiting for the wounded screaming about censorship.

I love the ringing silence as they chew on their own tongue trying to decide to even respond to actual data.

There’s a lot of data and hard work in that article from the CDC, I bet a lot of people worked very hard and seriously to assemble that information and give it to the public. Shame how many people will put their own sources: conspiracy blogs and subreddits and AM radio shows, at the same level. Imagine how insulting that is to people working in these major institutions to have idiots who never leave their couch screaming about far-fetched plots from George Soros.

Half the time these are 17-year-old middle-class white kids with no worries in the world, raging emotional hormones and a desire to “thrash someone with their incredible intellect” and have no real care for the issues beyond that, they just want to fight and they will lie to their last breath to feel like they’re special and smart.

I really feel like if we could see who most of the people are who push back on so many modern social issues, we would have a lot fewer social issues, because we would be able to roll our eyes and close the door on these literal children who are turning every conversation into a debate with children.

I actually need data to make conclusions.

No, you don’t. I can prove it.

If you get emotional reactions seeing other people make choices about to wear on their faces, you’re dumber than horse shit, you are a toddler, a child, a baby who needs to grow up.

See? That wasn’t hard, no data needed, just plain ol’ simple “common sense.”

Aren’t you guys all about “common sense?” I think It’s common sense to let people make their own choices and not get so hyper about someone else’s political agenda that you have to chime in about… mask bans. It’s just awful. I can’t imagine doing that and looking at the mirror and saying “Yeah, I am making the world better.”

Okay but that addresses no part of my comment, why do you get mad when you see people wear facemasks? Isn’t that kind of strange? Is it helping anyone?

Doesn’t it make you feel manipulated to have others able to make you start having emotional reactions to things you see that you wouldn’t have thought about before?

it never went away, it was just removed from sight.

But the people who segregated water fountains and chose where people should live based on their skin color? They’re still alive and kickin’ and making laws and business policies and decisions that impact us all. They have learned how to change their language but they have the same exact values that they did decades ago, or the same attitudes and values that their parents did. They have learned to hide in plain sight while also making sure that we remain divided and afraid and deeply obsessed with the superficial appearances of society.

America is funny, we tend to forget anything beyond about a 5-year window when events are still current, otherwise a lot of people here think that women and people of color have had rights here for like, a century or more. To the average liberal American, the idea that there are full-on, hateful nazis living next door to them seems radically unthinkable, and this is why they’re getting so comfortable taking off their hoods.

Racism is so America right now always.

Not only are you correct, we will never have any real sense of scale of just how correct you are, since we’ve only been exposed to about less than 0.01% of life that’s ever existed on Earth in the last several billion years.

For all we know there were clans of synapsids that were exclusively homosexual for terms of child-rearing and had complicated social systems with language and structured hierarchy, etc.

The idea that we can even remotely determine what this world’s natural systems have been like from looking at a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of the total picture is once again peak human hubris and self importance.

This planet has been a thriving source of life in the universe, maybe the only one like it for far, far longer than any human alive can comprehend. In the last several billion years nothing complained about homosexuality. Humans will be here for a brief blip on the larger picture, and there will be no record nor impact from anyone’s hate or fear of sex acts. Earth will keep spinning through the void, life will keep evolving. Protest signs and hateful messages will dissolve back to the systems that created them.

All you people screaming and crying about “woke” this and that, and who get confused by terms like LGBTQ+, it doesn’t matter. You will be dust for far, far longer than you will be a human screaming about what’s “natural.”

The strangest part of this was how conservatives used to be the ones pushing for wearing masks as alternatives to vaccinations, because the mindless fear of needles goes waaay back. See, chances are I’m older than you, so I’ve seen these cycles repeat themselves over and over. You’ve only seen it once or twice tops.

What happens is that a politician will dangle a new fear over you, and you will attach to that fear because that’s how our brains work. I am talking universally, not specific to one party or ideology, this is how we ALL work, and leftists are equally guilty of grifting their base the same way.

But you HAVE to understand where this came from, why you’re fighting with people about this, where this came from.

Never mind that people have been wearing face covering for millenia to reduce spreading disease, we have paintings and etching of lepers and plague victims going back thousands of years wearing something to prevent accidental spreading of saliva or body fluids. This isn’t a complicated idea, and a lot of people wear face coverings anyway to prevent illness or for safety around immunocompromised people. This isn’t new, this isn’t something that was planned or contrived, the ONLY reason you’re having arguments with people about face masks of all things is because someone out there knows how to connect your brain to a story to explain how it feels. To make you expend your energy on this, not making our world better or focusing on your elected representatives and what they’re signing into law, and I bet it works great. I bet you don’t get involved in your local politics. Nobody does, nobody spends as much energy on their actual neighborhoods as they do arguing online about props.

See, like with a lot of other things, a lot of us were unsure and worried about the future, so a lot of people trying to get power used masks as their props to fixate that insecurity on. I am not even going to talk about their effectiveness or not, it’s like wearing a hat in the sun, sure it won’t save you from sunburns but it’s just a thing we do to try our best to protect what we can, it’s not a big deal.

Your brain is not a tool of logic and reason, that’s an illusion. It’s a tool to tell you a story to explain how you feel. And it LOVES when someone provides a story for it. Because your brain wants a story that makes sense, not one that’s accurate. There is a difference. A lot of things can make sense and not be true.

It should be a giant, glaring alarm that someone is fucking with your brain when you start feeling contentious about what other people wear on their faces. That HAS to trigger something deep inside that makes you wonder why you’re so emotionally connected to this “debate.”

You got chains around you and they’re going to keep attaching chains until you realize how deeply you’re playing in the WWE theater of political rhetoric. Let this one go, just walk away, it’s objectively a nonsense campaign designed to distracted you.

The outraged reply you’re already pounding out in your head is part of that distraction. You are giving your soul away to others to use as they will. Doesn’t that bother you?

You mean you don’t have to like Kamala? I’m voting Kamala.

Not fond of her, but she’ll do better than Trump by leagues and miles and make history while not rocking the boat or affecting any meaningful change. Libs will love her, she’ll be a democrat party darling. I bet she gets a second term.