just having a good time at this point

take up space, read the plaques, get the audioguides. you are just as entitled and right in being there. visit museums, boycott museums, be expressive about your opinions about museums.

a lot of museums are free, or discounted for youth and students. take advantage of that. check your local art museum. check your local history museum. museums are there for you, they are there to educate the public, not to distinguish between class. it isn't a private collection, it's a public exhibit.

They're preying on insecurities to do it. Yes, you can write an essay - but can you write a good essay, they ask you. Do you not want to improve your output? Do you not want people to think of you as competent and very clever? Why go through the mortifying process of failing and failing and failing until you succeed if you can just skip the "learning" part of doing, and simply generate a ready-made product?

I'm preaching to the choir here obviously but it's a concerning thing to witness nonetheless. My kid is 6 next week and I've been teaching her that failing at things is morally neutral and in fact necessary even before the advent of AI, but it's becoming ever more important that we teach the kids that criticism and failure and discomfort aren't necessarily bad things, but just a part of the growth process.

He didn't do it.

The cops very clearly planted evidence on him because they had to make an arrest because all eyes were on them and whoever actually did the deed was making them look stupid.

Why would the real killer hero have kept the weapon on his person and traveled two states over while carrying it and a manifesto in his bag, conveniently turning the crime into a federal matter? The same guy whose bag they found in a park, filled with monopoly money? Why did the police turn off their bodycams, take Luigi's stuff, drive a block away, turn their bodycams back on, go back into the restaurant, and then arrest him?

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that being said, we actually do have to take a critical look at the amount of water used in agriculture too. we grow a low of corn in north america that isn't even for human consumption—either for ethanol or for livestock. that seems stupid, doesn't it? we grow large amounts of specific water intensive crops in traditionally parched areas. that also seems stupid. maybe we don't need to eat as many almonds and avocados as we do and getting used to having access to an abundance of certain foods all year round has damaging downstream effects to the environment and overall life on this planet.

a society that is disconnected from its food sources is a society that has no idea the damage its causing to itself and will just drunkenly stumble itself into collapse. of course, this is reflected in nearly all consumption—especially fossil fuels.

all in all, capitalism is stupid. and it breeds stupid choices. its like organizing a society without any brains. its a chicken with its head cut off. most of the structural and logistical organizing is around how much profit can be extracted, how much capital can be created, how many “jobs” can be created, and purely metaphysical emotional bullshit like whether stock market chuds are calm and happy, and not around whether anything we're doing is economically or environmentally sustainable or even like, actually feeds people.

but you see, that is dumb. its a very ignorant way to think.

neoliberalism may have programmed a lot of us to go against our own evolution and conscious judgement but self-serving actions are stupid. they show a deep blind ignorance of how things work and how everything is connected to everything else.

there's a reason why a lot of ancient human wisdom is full of myths and tall tales about self-serving people getting their asses handed to them and its not because these fairy tales make the peasants feel better about their position in some shit hierarchal society. its because we learned this shit over a hundred thousand years ago. we've had a couple hundred thousand years of human societies to show us plainly that hurting others hurts ourselves and we are inextricably connected with our material and social environments.