Nukes will be used again one day. And it will not be pretty.
this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2025
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No amount of peaceful protests and organizing peacefully will result in any amount of meaningful change. The only way to get this rat fucked world to be not ratfucked is to fix it by force in a very violent and bloody way.
Why do you think the super wealthy are so keen on robots and AI? When even the police officers can’t “have had enough” there is no rebellion possible, ever again.
Most people are complete idiots and will rather burn the world for a bigger flatscreen TV than to save it for their children.
It’s all getting worse and I can’t see any way to stop it.
Well, not all of it but many parts that will unfortunately affect me.
Evil is inherent to the world. All light casts a shadow.
I think there's not that much actual evil, as in pure intent to inflict pain and suffering. There is a lot of focus on short term, personal gain though. Sounds the same, but the latter has a purpose and can be controlled using that purpose.
I think evil is an underlayment, not mere will to harm, but the force that moves towards destruction. The distinction of actual evil against some psudo-evil is false, a way that it hides itself. When we deny it it's because we fear its nearness, as we should, because it is even within us, and good doesn't always win.
But OP was asking for cynical takes.
Cynics are dupes who are easily utilized by the forces which deliberately made them cynical. The foundation of conservative politics.
Meta 🤌
Talking to Normal students in high school and in university in Australia (considered to be an imperial core country). I realised these people just really don't give a fuck.
Most people don't want to gain class consciousness, they think the current system is the best they can ever have and they wouldn't want to risk it. Or they just refuse to reconise capitalism as the root problem.
Most people are too buzy with what ever that is happening near them that tragedy someone else are suffering on the other side of the world is just not important enough for them to take any action to try and change it.
Unless capitalism serious affects their ability to feed themselves or ablity to distract them from their misery (religion, social media, hobby etc), they won't be bothered to do anything.
That UN Climate Change but-don't-touch-our-oil-business conference a few days ago.
Catharsis. As on the individual level of "get it out of the system", the angst and anger also needs to be let out in societal level. Seeing as where the world is heading, the Pandora's box has already opened and there is no way of putting back the angry genie. It will become worse before it gets better.
If I had access to all of the televisions and radios in Imperial America, I would get somebody famous like Zohran Mamdani to read a paper detailing how the upper classes not only facilitated the rise of Fascism in Europe, but also profited from the Axis’s war crimes and survived the twentieth century almost completely unpunished. At the end, he would say something like ‘As I speak, hundreds of thousands of workers are going to seek and despoil the upper classes with the understanding that there is no other way to make them pay for their crimes, and that this course of action is far more preferable to leaving them unpunished.’
I suspect that few people, if any, would take action.
We love to blame the big corporations and governments for where we are, but both are products of our society and people. George Carlin said it best, selfish ignorant people vote for selfish ignorant leaders. All of this is a product of a society who allows it. Big tech and corporations exist because we as a society give them money. Social media algorithms and ads and everything exist because they work. We sit here and preach linux, and preach getting off of it, but we are the minority. The majority don't care and happily go along with whatever is given to them, and they vote and purchase just like it.
Climate change is a big one for me. I see people every day saying we need to hold companies accountable - and we do, but goddamn if we all stopped using oil every day, natural gas for cooking, choosing to bike or take a train over driving or flying you know what? Those companies would be forced to change because they wouldn't be making money off of us. If even just 40% of Americans stopped using Oil the "big oil" companies would be looking at bankruptcy or minimum desperately trying to modernize to stay on top. We can't shift all of the blame on them, we continue to purchase their products because it's easier. Everything in the end is a consumer good, and if we voted/purchased differently as a society then things would change. The fact is is that people either don't care, or worse don't want to change.
yeh but nah
they infiltrate our environmental groups. legally and illegally coerce us & our our "leaders". have been systematically attacking, undermining & removing funding for renewables & climate research for decades. environmental protesters are "legally" assaulted, kidnapped, beaten & sometimes killed by their hired goons, meanwhile neo-nazis march with impunity.
it's not simply a matter of them offering one alternative and just letting the market decide. they engage in unbelievable levels of corruption, coercion, deception, even genocide to steal natural resources from first nations people.
meanwhile the public, barely keeping their heads above water, exploited, subjugated & worn to the bone, oftimes struggling to survive, make almost the only non-choice they can barely even choose from.
yes the majority are to blame, for alot, but also recall we're talking about an average, likely poorly educated person going up against billion dollar brainwashing machinery (oftimes utilising research paid for with our tax dollars initially performed for therapeutic use, now weaponised in a twisted perversion of their original intent)
like you aren't wrong. but there is alot more to the story.
carlin is certainly on point in his quote you cited, and you are right this is perhaps the most difficult to reconcile aspect.
let us weigh this alongside another poignant quote of his:
The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you.
The irony being their pov is just regurgitation of propaganda by these companies that consumers are to blame.
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The desire of intelligent, hardworking people to just live their lives and be left alone means we're eternally condemned to be ruled by those who are absolutely unfit for the job. Anybody smart enough to be a good leader wouldn't have the job.
Come on man, isn't Lemmy cynical enough already?
The boot of capitalism is on our necks, but I'm not sure my countrymen are worth fighting for. Americans may be too far gone. Maybe I should just leave.
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It's not an uncommon opinion, but:
People are horrible by default. We are generally mean, stupid, and crazy and have to learn to be otherwise, and most of us never achieve such mastery.
I actually hold the opposite opinion; that most people are generally good, or at the least, focused on their own problems most of the time.
This isn't just personal experience (I'm old so have a bunch) but one example is that I watch a lot of travelling vlogs, mostly motorbikes. Whenever a rider has a breakdown, even in the middle of nowhere, someone will be along and will help. Even allowing for a general positive bias of the media, those who would take advantage of that situation are a tiny percentage.
What does happen though, is that those who aren't good can abuse the goodness of others to gain power and influence, so are statistically more noticable.
If you only saw a bear in a circus you would think it's nature was to ride a unicycle.
Humans have had to live in brutish/nasty conditions; including the present day, where many of us are drowning in debt, two paychecks away from homelessness while a few are trying to make more money than they could ever spend.
I'll counter and say that it's culture/conditions-based. Humans have a range of available/possible behaviors/thought patterns and they are reinforced/shaped by their surroundings/the system they live in. There are and have been egalitarian societies that aren't full of "mean, stupid, and crazy" people.
"The idea that the key features of successive societies and human history have been a result of an ‘unchanging’ human nature [..] is a prejudice that pervades academic writing, mainstream journalism and popular culture alike. Human beings, we are told, have always been greedy, competitive and aggressive, and that explains horrors like war, exploitation, slavery and the oppression of women. This ‘caveman’ image is meant to explain the bloodletting on the Western Front in one world war and the Holocaust in the other. I argue very differently. ‘Human nature’ as we know it today is a product of our history, not its cause. Our history has involved the moulding of different human natures, each displacing the one that went before through great economic, political and ideological battles."
"The world as we enter the 21st century is one of greed, of gross inequalities between rich and poor, of racist and national chauvinist prejudice, of barbarous practices and horrific wars. It is very easy to believe that this is what things have always been like and that, therefore, they can be no different. [...] The anthropologist Richard Lee [said]: "Before the rise of the state and the entrenchment of social inequality, people lived for millennia in small-scale kin-based social groups, in which the core institutions of economic life included collective or common ownership of land and resources, generalised reciprocity in the distribution of food, and relatively egalitarian political relations." In other words, people shared with and helped each other, with no rulers and no ruled, no rich and no poor. [...] Our species [..] is over 100,000 years old. For 95 percent of this time it has not been characterised at all by many of the forms of behaviour ascribed to ‘human nature’ today. There is nothing built into our biology that makes present day societies the way they are. Our predicament as we face a new millennium cannot be blamed on it."
-Chris Harman - A People's History Of The World: From The Stone Age To The New Millennium*
edit: and adding a short video https://youtu.be/Est6nay4Z5E?t=18
edit: some books that are on my TBR that might be worth checking out:
- Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil
- Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness
- The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World
- Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis ("shows how new findings in psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology cast human nature in a radically different as the supreme altruists and cooperators.")
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There's a well-known quote about how capitalism seems inescapable, but so did the divine right of kings. The problem I have with it is that we didn't get rid of kings. If anything, men like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, they have more wealth and power than kings could ever even dream of. All that's really happened is that royalty has been obfuscated; they no longer need to be the face of the kingdom. They can buy elected leaders to achieve their goals, purchase media companies in order to control the narrative of the peasantry, and they never need to step in the spotlight. It makes me think that humanity will ultimately never be able to rid ourselves of these parasites; there will always be dragons.
The problem I have with it is that we didn’t get rid of kings.
Moreso that we replaced kings with a new form of ownership, and therefore new owners. And, in every era, the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas - the idea of the divine right of kings seems to have been replaced with the divine right to profit, and to use "earned" money however one wants, with no regard for society.
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- The most meaningful reforms, like large-scale climate action, won't happen until citizens present a credible threat to the owning class's dominance, making reform the appealing compromise.
- The owning class, at least a large section of it, along with loyal reactionaries will wage violent open war before ceding power leftward. They have the option to decide if a peaceful road forward exists, and historically, then tend to mass murder citizens instead.
I believe we live in a very duplicitous world were greedy old people don't mind seeing the world burn if they can get richer. The more you learn about the world the shittier it seems. I expect humanity will go extinct either because of climate change or due to achieving AGI and everyone being rendered for materials to make more money.
The disorder we see isn't proof that the world is doomed. It's proof that those old bastards don't have the reigns like they used to. They're cracking down not because they have unending strength, but unending fear.
Climate change will kill q huge part of the world population within the next 50 years and we've known about it being a thing for over a hundred years and yes nobody could be arsed to stop it.
And stop it was literally what they could do. Cars could have gone for electric much sooner. Public transportation should have been much, much bigger. Bicycle first cities
So much that could have been done but wasn't done because that would not make a select view anti social rich
Soon most of us will die from climate change effects
You think electric cars are some sort of solution? They are part of the problem, not the solution. Making things worse but not quite as quickly is not making things better.
Truth is we could never stop it without radical global abolition of high energy activities. That's impossible given the short term gains of breaking ranks and the unpopularity of that level of denial. We didn't have to destroy ourselves as quickly, but the path was set when we had the industrial revolution.
Are electric cars a net improvement?
I've heard that they are, because electricity can ve produced more efficiently and pollution can be better handled than individual car exhausts
That's less bad, that's not fixing anything. There is no universe when using energy to move 1.5-3 tonne private vehicles around for transportation is sustainable. I've heard numbers typically in the 40-60% region for the lifetime energy use of electric vs ICE. That is not fixing any problem, that's making the problem worse less quickly.
Less bad is good, right?
Obviously, stuff like better public transportation will be good
Electric buses, trains etc
Have been hearing about China's solar adoption and them looking into thorium reactors.
My country, India, seems to be looking more into solar too.
I think it's a correct direction. Though, the pace needs to be a bit faster
Less bad is good, right?
Is it? If a serial rapist goes from 10 rapes a month to 5, have they done a good thing?
(and obviously, driving a car is not comparable to rape - just illustrating that less of a bad thing is not a good thing)
Less bad is good there too
And as you said, not a good comparison.
Pollution going beyond the capacity of our environment is the issue, right? Every decent improvement is a good thing there. Not that we should stay silent with that, but we should be cheering for improvements and encouraging them.
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It can be expressed by a graffiti that I saw on the side of a bike path in Montreal, in French: "L'humanité ne court pas à sa perte, elle y va en voiture". Or something like "Humanity is not running to ruins, it's taking a car".
As much as I want to blame giant corporations and capitalism for a lot of our societal problems, this sentence resumes so well how common people also enable all of this by refusing to change and just going with the easiest option. I know we won't reach our climate change goals. I know because when I say I organized my life around the fact that I don't need a car, everyone tells me that they couldn't live without a car, that it's very useful, and that I should get one. I'm not even a real adult as long as I don't have a car. I'll feel so much freedom when I'll have a car. I should just get a car! Just get an electric one! Like, instead of encouraging people to live without a car, the vast vast majority of people will actually encourage others to get one.
So yeah, we're not "running" to our loss. We're wasting energy to move our fat asses in individual motorized multi ton metal cubes to go there faster. It's so useful! So practical! So fast! There's no time to waste. Like Marge Simpson once said: "Outta my way, Nature!"
It's a giant metaphor for the rest of our society. Same with all the AI hype, food delivery apps, and over consumption in general. We're digging our graves out of excessive "convenience", and cars are one example of this.
Capitalism made almost everything the same big pile of shit. No matter the language and culture, in the end, it's the same shit.
Historically, the only thing we've found that lowers wealth inequality is inevitably large scale war and death. And i don't expect that to change before the next time it lowers.
The only way any of this shit could matter is if everyone were on a level playing field.
This vile reality can't even agree that everyone should have working bodies. So forgive me if I think it can go to hell along with everyone who thinks they're all that.
Evil never dies, goes broke, or completely loses grip on all of us.
Nothing will get better.
The Assholes will always win
Ethan Cohen's poem "The Drunken Driver Has The Right Of Way":
"The loudest have the final say, The wanton win, the rash hold sway, The realist’s rules of order say The drunken driver has the right of way.
"The Kubla Khan can butt in line; The biggest brute can take what’s mine; When heavyweights break wind, that’s fine; No matter what a judge might say, The drunken driver has the right of way.
"The guiltiest feel free of guilt; Who care not, bloom; who worry, wilt; Plans better laid are rarely built For forethought seldom wins the day; The drunken driver has the right of way.
"The most attentive and unfailing Carefulness is unavailing Wheresoever fools are flailing; Wisdom there is held at bay; The drunken driver has the right of way.
"De jure is de facto’s slave; The most foolhardy beat the brave; Brass routs restraint; low lies high’s grave; When conscience leads you, it’s astray; The drunken driver has the right of way.
"It’s only the naivest who’ll Deny this, that the reckless rule; When facing an oncoming fool The practiced and sagacious say Watch out — one side — look sharp — gang way.
"However much you plan and pray, Alas, alack, tant pis, oy vey, Now — heretofore — til Judgment Day, The drunken driver has the right of way."
Reporting and fining drunken drivers need to speed up in the location.
Humans are the cause of almost every problem on the planet and wont and don't deserve to survive the great filter. The universe is better off without us.
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