Uriel238 [all pronouns]

We live in a YAF dystopia that is way less cool than most of the storybook ones.

And while every kid’s story is their chance to veer away from the usual fate of becoming a corporate cog (laborer or soldier) in a billionaire vanity project, most will just end up stuck like Winston without his nook, or will get imprisoned or will just go homeless.

We’re pretty sure it’s the Monsanto pesticide and anyone who suggests it is hit with a litigation threat. Curiously, as we’re speed-breeding domesticated bees the wild bees are dying out faster, so as the bee population dwindles it also becomes more domesticated and less wild. I know that’s a bad thing, but I am fuzzy on the why details.

I’m a brown thumb, and plants wilt as my shadow falls on them, but if you’re a green-thumb, plant pollinators, which will help the bees.

Also plant milkweed for the monarchs.

Yeah, but the police don’t hover over us in Spinners as in Bladerunner. They still have to chopper from helipad to airport and ride off in air traffic, so less in our faces.

Their superfluous greenhouse emissions fit the cyberpunk vibe though.

It my current state of five months into a long-term psychotic break, I have the joy of feeling lonely, walking to where people are, and needing to leave immediately, and feeling lonely by the time I get home again.

What a marvel the brain can be!

I’m glad we got ubiquitous smartphones instead of only rich people having flying cars.

Still, I’m promoting way, way more punk in our cyberpunk.

The point of The Terror was to burn the Révolution into the skulls of generations to come by making it so horrible the ownership class would be terrified into treating the working class nicely (this was before class consciousness, so it was the Petit Bourgeoisie that actually formed the Assemblée nationale representing the third estate. They, too, are ownership class, once Marx sorted it all out.)

This is why heads had to be piled high. We were supposed to be scared into civility. But as the early 20th century demonstrated to us, it didn’t work, and we still have people voting for far-right parties in order to vote against neoliberalism (which is happening a lot in Europe right now, and is a sound explanation of why Trump still got so many votes.)

Screaming from the far left, there are a lot of people in scarcity or precairity in our society, a society that would collapse if they all suddenly fell incapacitated from their want.

It is our fucking duty as fellow citizens to stabilize them.

Conservatism at its core is ignoring their need in the name of tradition. To the ninth charnel circle of Hell with that.

65% of life forms on the planet engage in parasitic survival strategies. This was a risk we took when we started using agriculture, allowing for specializations other than chieftain and shaman. (Everyone else was a generalist.)

Our instincts are still the same hunter-gatherer stuff from 25,000 years ago. Which includes behaviors antithetical to large, complex civilization.

One of those is a bias towards obedience to authority, and to loyalty to clan, over principle (creeds, laws, codes of ethics). We tend to want to obey the chieftain who commands us rather than challenge them when they demand the unconscionable.

Demagogues, who exploit these biases, were known in classic Athens, hence we have a Greek name for such people, and Athenians tried to recognize and shun them.

The bible has a lot of proscriptions against manipulative tyrants and priests. It also has many decrees to uplift the widow, the stranger, the immigrant, the destitute. This tells us the problem of dudes seeking to consolidate social power (money and authority) and then abuse that power has been a problem throughout known human history.

Obviously we haven’t fixed it yet and still want high tech water, sewage, power and information infrastructure.

We need a movement that is willing to assert its collective power not just for a few concessions but until we have an ironclad social contract that distributes political power widely, and does not tolerate surplus when there is scarcity and need.

Diffusion of Responsibility

It’s a Wikipedia day, today.

Similarly, the Shamrock, (☘️) an important symbol for Saint Patrick’s Day has three leaves where most SPD kitch sold in the US features four-leaf clovers (🍀) an unrelated good luck symbol. I dont object because I feel Ireland needs a better iconic saint (and a better holiday) than the guy who brought the imperialist religion under which the native Irish would be subjugated.

They need someone like Joan of Arc who ran the English out (of settlements in France).