Photuris

If monotheism cures sociopathy and narcissism (i.e., evil), then the Middle Ages - when the Universal Church ruled Europe and placed religion into every aspect of public life - would have been a Golden Age of peace, brotherhood, and loving kindness.

Alas, it was not. Creepy assholes just moved in and ran the Church and the State. And it all started with Constantine (“hey, Jesus visited me and told me that he’s real, and that I should be running everything by threat of violence. How neat is that?”). And continued on from there - justifying violence and exploitation through divine fiat (“trust me, God says the land and gold all belong to me.”). That’s how it works.

It’s the perennial Problem of Evil (or, in modern terms, the problem of Cluster B Personality Disorders).

And nobody has ever been able to solve it. Not religion, not moral philosophy, not civic or moral education, not political philosophy, none of it. The sociopaths and narcissists will always infiltrate, corrupt, and eventually corrode, any institution, public or private, wherein they find they can gather power, prestige, and wealth.

Discover a cure for Sociopathy and Narcissism, and you solve 95% of humanity’s problems overnight.

I got banned after 12 years for advocating for the punching of Nazis, and calling Elon Musk a giant cunt.

Good riddance.

Stock up on old physical books

I was like you. Rubik’s looked like magic ever since I had one as a kid. So, as an adult, I hit Google, then I went to cubeskills.com, paid them $10, watched their videos and read their PDFs, and learned “the beginner method.”

It took me about a week (I have a family and a job, so).

I can solve now in under a minute most of the time, and that’s good enough for me.

So, “solving” a Rubik’s is just a matter of memorizing a set of algorithms (move patterns). That’s it.

Now, figuring out how to solve a Rubik’s cube from scratch, by determining what those move algorithms are through months of trial-and-error, that would be quite the feat! That’s what you attempted to do. I did not do that, nor did most people. We ain’t got the time or patience for that.

Anyway, if you haven’t already, get your kid a nice Gan cube (the one with magnets). Well worth the money. If he sticks with it, he might hit sub-15 or sub-10.

It blows my mind that there’s anybody out there who would want a king.

Americans would be far less easily susceptible to influence and spun up about these culture war issues if their basic material conditions were better met, and fewer people lived in fear of running out of money before payday or going bankrupt due to unexpected medical expenses.

Wealthier (non-billionaire, non-sociopath) people have the luxury of feeling liberal, progressive, generous, cosmopolitan, tolerant, open-minded, and rational. Their day-to-day isn’t filled with fear for survival.

Poorer working people are deeply stressed, constantly exhausted, and, frankly, shit-scared, so it’s easy for right-wing media and religious groups to come in and constantly smash that lizard-brain fear button and feed them a queue of “others” to blame.

It’s fine to criticize the party you vote for and participate in, because we’re not in a cult, and we’re not into leader worship.

There’s a reason we don’t typically see democrats flying giant Biden or Harris flags on their lifted F-150s - because we’re not completely fucking nuts.

It’s ok to criticize Harris and still cast a vote for her in the general, against a far, far, far more horrible opposing candidate. No human being is perfect or infallible, and the job of US president shouldn’t be taken lightly at all. Someone running for that job should be able to handle a little bit of criticism.

I’m not sure Biden or Harris were our best of all possible choices. I said so. And I still encouraged people to vote for them in the general election.

Ok that’s cool

I have high hopes

If only we can somehow figure out how to bring back something like the web of the ’90s

Imagine if any other type of organization had this sort of systemic problem with child abuse.

“Wow, there sure are a lot of pedophile employees at Apple Computer abusing their customers’ children.”

“Dang, the US Department of Transportation sure does have a kiddie diddler problem.”

“Holy shit, what’s the deal with all the abusive perverts working at Ronald McDonald House?”

Sounds absolutely bonkers, right‽

If any secular organization was having this kind of problem at scale, we’d all be calling for their blood. Yet the church gets a pass somehow. A few complaints, a few lawsuits, some big scandals, some negative press, but fundamentally nothing ever changes.

To hell with the church.

Brilliant

How can we fix it if checks and balances are gone, the legislative branch is steamrolled by executive order, and judicial rulings can be completely ignored by the executive branch?

There may not be elections anymore going forward.

It’s not despondency, it’s realism. They’re working the Nazi playbook. This is how liberal democracies die.

I genuinely appreciate your optimism.

I submit that once they’re finished dismantling our institutions and rule of law, they won’t need popular support anymore.

We’ll see. I hope I’m wrong.

Horrible

That’s cool, but Republicans don’t give a shit.

Look, with Biden, we knew there was an entire cabinet and group of career professionals quietly working behind him. No good leader does everything alone.

There are people behind Trump, too. But those people are terrifying, actually far scarier than Trump himself. Do you want a President Vance? Are you ready for a Yarvinian/Thielian cyberpunk dystopia “Network State”? Ready to invade Greenland? Ready to carpet bomb Gaza? Ready to ship off liberals and “communists” to El Salvador for “terrorism”? Ready for some Handmaid’s Tale shit?

For fucks’ sake, man, “Trump being old” is not the same thing as “Biden being old,” because the people behind Biden were more-or-less normal people, not Machiavellian loyalists, and certainly not a weird coalition of religious wingnuts, evil nerds, eccentric billionaires, and pro-Russia sycophants.

I don’t know, things going how they’re going, how we’ll manage to defeat fascism and recover without violence, but I hope I’m wrong.

I talk big on the internet, but I am not ready for violence, and it’s not a road I want us to go down. But options appear to be dwindling, tragically. Without Rule of Law, where do we go from here? Judges can issue rulings, but without enforcement, we have fascism. What then‽

Ultra is SO GOOD