Rather Errk’d

sorry but this video is like a parasitic species to me

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It's a goddamn blitzkrieg. All of the big tech psychopaths are shoving meaningless, borderline useless shit down our throats because they recognize that they stand to save a lot of money doing so. Fuck the rest of us who aren't on board with AI taking over entire industries. Fuck the rest of us who still want our entertainment to be made by humans. Fuck the rest of us who don't want every facet of our lives dominated by AI.

I lived in perpetual fear of any one action of mine being my undoing, and that sort of religious paranoia does a number on a person's mental state. Even more so if that person is a child, as millions (or more likely billions) of Christians begin their pursuit of faith as.

Ultimately, it was that very fear of Hell which served as the loose thread that would unravel my faith. I came to the same conclusion as the second-to-last tweet from the above picture. There is no way to reckon a God who claims to love us more than anyone in the universe who will also cast you into the lake of fire if you don't repent from your sins. They are fundamentally incongruent ideas.

I always find it odd that we can say: "Hey, life actually doesn't need to suck this bad, we can do things differently." And the response is always some derivative of calling us socialist, communist, marxist, anarchist, soyboy, liberal cucks. Because, for some unholy reason, just because we've always lived life this way, that means the we always have to live life this way.

You suggest that healthcare should be a right for all people so that your employer can't hold it over your head? Socialist. You advocate for a four-day work week so that people can squeeze just a little more enjoyment out of their lives? The founding fathers would have hated you. You dare to imply that people should be paid enough money to live comfortably after working full time hours? They want you lined up on a wall.

On the official WhiteHouse.gov website.

Not a campaign page.

Not an RNC graphic.

The government’s actual website.

They’re listing reporters by name.

They’re accusing news outlets of “offenses.”

They’re stamping “EXPOSED” over every independent newsroom.

They built a leaderboard for “repeat offenders.”

Like journalism is some sort of crime and sport.

This is not “messaging.”

This is not “spin.”

This is state-run media targeting,

and we have never seen anything like it in the United States.

Ever.

They’re calling Mark Kelly’s PSA “follow the law” sedition.

They’re calling journalists who report it criminals.

They’re building narrative infrastructure for repressing dissent

All while a former TV host is being accused of unlawful killings.

You don’t put reporters on a government enemies list unless you’re planning to do something with the list.

This is authoritarian architecture.

But the fuckery that the Trump administration has been getting up to has revealed to us just how weak our institutions, and even our constitution, really are. They existed this long because the people in power more or less agreed that they should exist and didn't touch them. We didn't need some megalomaniacal super genius to covertly dismantle our government from behind the scenes. We only needed a bigoted old man with the intellect of a toddler surrounded by hordes of yes-men for our country to begin circling the drain.

However, if you'll excuse my optimism, I don't believe this spells the end of our country by itself. Yes, to be clear, this is horrible and shouldn't be happening. But I personally believe the sycophantic fascists that make up the Trump administration lack the brains and spine to go whole hog on this deal. That isn't to say that they aren't doing immense amounts of damage, because they are. They're also hurting millions of people with their stupid-ass government, and that's unforgivable.

But Trump himself is a doddering, geriatric, fossil with not much gas left in the tank. And none (and I mean NONE) of the other people in the administration have even an ounce of his charisma. The MAGA "movement" doesn't have a leader after Trump. The only choices that makes sense to follow him up would be either his couch-fucking vice president, who no one likes. Or one of his utterly forgettable, sauceless children.

There are people who willingly give their spare time to volunteer to help others, like at soup kitchens, or tend community gardens for example. There are people who hike, run marathons, live at the gym, or compete in triathlons just because they want to. And there are people, like OP said, who feed birds, or volunteer at animal shelters, or give as much to charity as they're able to.

Those examples stand in stark contrast to the horrible, depraved picture painted by those who say humans are naturally bad. If you ask me, I think this line of thinking has deep roots in religious trauma. As an ex-Christian, I was taught for the majority of my life that human beings, at their very hearts, are desperately wicked. And because of our sinful nature, Jesus had to die on the cross to absolve us of our sins. And I've spent my entire adult life trying to unlearn the inherent self-loathing that those sorts of religious values instill in a young person.

For what it's worth, I think human beings (broadly speaking) want to be good. They want to do good by themselves, by their friends and family, and even by strangers. I'm not saying that every last human being who has ever existed was an inherently good person, you don't need to look far to debunk such an idea. But I really don't believe you can paint humanity as wholly bad just because some of us have done bad things.

His journey led him through the fiercest of environments, past erupting volcanoes, through the Everstorm, and over the Impaling Peaks. He had searched every library, from the rinky-dink libraries of the common villages, to the Grand Athenaeum of the royal capital, and yet it was nowhere to be seen. Draiocht had nearly lost all hope of ever finding the fabled tome when he received a tip that it had been stowed away in the last place someone would ever think to look for it.

Draiocht found himself in a provincial village on the outskirts of the empire, a town of no consequence. On the periphery of the town, nestled in a small grove of trees stood a dusty old schoolhouse, with only the faintest remnants of red paint clinging to its wooden frame. He swept his way through the rows of discordant desks, and over to the small bookshelves which were in the process of collapsing under the weight of their own age, and the books they contained on their shelves. Draiocht felt a wave of rage crash over him as his fingers brushed the spines of every book on the shelves. Still nothing, only books for school-children.

Draiocht felt as though he'd been given a bad tip, and resolved himself to locate that overly chatty bard and fill him with as much lightening as he could conjure. But just before Draiocht stormed out of the worthless schoolhouse, he spied a small leatherbound booklet peeking out from the dark recess of one of the desks. As unlikely as it felt, Draiocht felt that his luck couldn't possibly have gotten any worse, and so he reluctantly reached for the small book, and wiped the dust away from it's cover.

In scratchy, unkempt handwriting read the title: "Drochmheas Uachtarach". He had found it! The culmination of decades of strife had finally been realized, and in such an unlikely location. Draiocht was awash with giddy excitement, much akin to the childlike glee he had felt when he set his first squirrel on fire. He opened the book and began to read.

Various spells were written out in different hands, though all were equally repugnant. There was one which transformed every orifice on someone's face into a puckering sphincter, another which turned the hair of one's target into venomous snakes, and yet another which could mend any two separate pieces of flesh together... That last one didn't seem so bad to Draiocht, and even seemed like it might have some use in healing injuries. That was until he observed the crude diagram sketched next to the spell which depicted an intergluteal cleft being permanently shut.

But the right-wing's obsession with telling people to leave if they don't like the objectively bad conditions of the country we live in will never cease to amaze me. They use the fact that we're not technically a third world country to attempt to invalidate the fact that we live in financially horrible times for the vast majority of citizens. The economy is only working well for the people who already have all the money. The rest of us? We're lucky to have some money leftover at the end of the month that we can spend on non-essentials. Most of us don't even have that.

I'm used to Ben Shapiro having god-awful takes, that's his brand. He's the same guy who told people who live by the coasts to sell their homes if Global Warming causes the ocean levels to rise high enough to flood their cities. But it's awfully telling that these folks are never willing to engage with the material conditions that lead to people voting for someone like Mamdani, and instead just tell you to pack up and move somewhere else. As if people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck suddenly have enough money to move to a different city/state. Moving isn't exactly something a financially struggling person can just... do. That shit costs money.

The people we elect to public office are supposed to make our lives better. That's the point of a representative government. That's why we vote. Has it been working like that for the past few decades? No, obviously not, which is funnily enough, why people voted for Mamdani. He promised to work towards improving New Yorker's material conditions, and wouldn't ya know it, New Yorker's liked the sound of that. Meanwhile, Mamdani's closest competition, Cuomo, essentially told New Yorkers that nothing would change under him, because nothing needed to change. Are we, perhaps, connecting the dots as to why Mamdani won?