Hypernormalization is the phenomena of people continuing to behave as if society is still functional even though it’s clearly not. It was first observed in the Soviet Union during its deterioration and collapse, but is also seen in the US, such as when people expect they can call local law enforcement to deescalate a local dispute, even though police are now notorious for escalating to violence more quickly than ordinary civilians.

Anyway, it’s a thing.

The thing is, this isn’t a curse.

A curse is what happened to Bill O’Reilly, to Tucker Carlson, to Glen Beck. Either there’s a scandal reckoning, or the guy believes his own rhetoric a little too much and says something kooky or too far out the Overton window, or draws the stupidest chalkboard diagram and someone in FOX notices his average viewership is 72 years old, and retires his show.

They take a serious demotion in popularity and a pay cut and all but retire. That’s how witch’s curses work when they do.

However Kirk did suffer one of Charles Dickens’ many curses. ( …Charlie Dickens – Charlie Kirk – coincidence?) In A Christmas Carol the chapter on the visitation of the Ghost of Christmases Yet To Come. Wealthy people who have not empathy with nor sympathy for the rest of us folk eventually die and then are not grieved when they’re gone (except by those who have to gain by presenting a sad face). Kirk wasn’t one of the moguls, but he spread their rhetoric and was one of their ruthless minions.

Not soon enough.

Narrator: The problem wasn’t the kids it was the US.

Clarification: venues getting shot up is a specifically elevated problem in the US (exacerbated by availability of guns, but that’s not really the root of the problem). The thing is, the root of the problem (right-wing-leaning low-information constituents – lumpenproletariat in left-wing speak – suffering from precarity sometimes turn to violence) is being visited on European nations where two-party systems have taken root, and neoliberalism has set in. It’s the old King Log vs. King Heron problem. We’re seeing violence and counterviolence in the EU, just with less frequency and fewer guns, but it will catch up to them.

But sure, go ahead and keep sharing memes on Lemmy about how bad orange man is

It’s not an orange man bad meme. It’s a liberals ain’t doing nothing meme, which is actually a true and valid problem. We have to find ways to sabot the gears of the autocratic oppression machine. As Helen Cox Richardson notes, if you got an artistic bone in your body, get to artting!

Also Knitting Cult Lady did a video ( on YouTube ) about how Orange Man’s orange makeup is the same thing as Queen Elizabeth I’s make-up (white leaded paint, which, yes, did poison her) to signal that she is a living god. In the queen’s case it was a means to get England to recognize a woman as a legit ruler (rather than pressuring her to find a husband to take over).

Orange Man does it because he wants to be a cult leader (which is essentially the same thing), and we don’t find his facepaint absurd enough to throw him from his podium or think of him as a clown.

This is how we know human beings are the evolutionary equivalent of a lowest-common-bidder project, the minimum amount of reasoning necessary to build a rocket and touch the moon. Otherwise, we are still brutal animals, and apes as silly as the ones in the jungle.

I’m not sure of the correlation but I’m reminded of the quiet rebellion through Nazi-occupied slavic states (Poland, the Czech Republic, etc.) to hat-tip Jews whenever they were encountered in the street, which specifically pissed off the German garrisons, especially the SS.

It’s the same as owning the libs albeit directed towards the far-right.

In the 20th century, false flagging (in this case, dressing using cultural indicators of a group you’re not) was used to call out propensity for calling out black or latin persons.

An opposite effect came with a young black artist saved his pennies to get a Harrod’s belt, and police arrested and booked him for stealing it until proven otherwise.

Everything I can is scant little. But some people object to my removing my footprint entirely. While I separate out my recycling from my landfill, perhaps you can explain how I can better encourage multinational corporations to consider sustainability as something other than a marketing tool.

Yes, we have bacteriaphages which serve as treatment for XTR Tuberculosis, but things like this do scant little for people who are infected as autocratic interests work to dismantle the global disease control state. Yes, young people are better learning left-wing politics as our education systems in the US are being systematically dismantled around such efforts.

I am sure you can find small ways things are improving. After all, we are closer to manned Mars expeditions even if they’re decades away. We are closer to fusion power even if it’s still approximately the same thirty years away it was in the early 1990s. There will be a point we can stuff hydrogen into a power plant and get a net energy output by fusing it into hydrogen, but that is a long way away, longer than our time left if our international community doesn’t take immediate action.

But yes, I’m bitter. In the 1980s when I was a student and young worker I was expected to give 110% (despite that is oxymoronic, it was the rhetoric of the time) and since then I learned that our leaders, our representatives, our officials don’t even bother to act like adults while holding office and allegedly conducting their duties.

We are watching the decline and fall of civilization. USSR went, now the US, and the EU and China stages are already destabilizing, and that’s not merely from climate change, but our refusal to distribute political power.

So I can’t be entirely sure, my friend, but it appears from over here, from my (granted, cynical) eye that you are missing the forest for the trees.

The climate crisis is only the first of great filters humankind is imminently careening towards and has yet to show effort towards navigating. We are rapidly turning into the example for future intelligent species of what not to do… assuming they can discover that example from the geological layers, determine how we killed ourselves and then actively choose a reasonable response where we failed to do so.

But I don’t say this as a doomeristic / beatnik approach. I’m saying this as a sober assessment. We’re not going to get to enjoy the benefits of 2020’s era progress for very long, assuming we can hold it as autocrats wreck all we’ve wrought for their own personal gain, and the world literally burns.

This was discovered in the US shortly after the COVID-19 lockdown thanks to The Great Resignation when furloughed workers took to hobbies during lockdown and some of them found ones lucrative enough they decided to quit their (often toxic) jobs.

In fact, there’s been a strong effort by both principal political parties and the ownership class to memory-hole what happened 2020-2022 in which ordinary people were given enough material support to define for themselves their societal role, rather than having it defined for them by major commercial interests (who want them as cheap labor).

This is also how an unconditional socialized or community-centered system would work. (We might even call them socialism or communism if those were not the worst of all slurs in the United States). People can couch-potato and binge-watch TV for about two weeks before cabin fever sets in and they either start fixing and building. Those of us (like me) who can couch potato for longer than that suffer from mental illness (and in my case, have been diagnosed since my early twenties). I stayed in bed for nine months, often without the capacity to literally lift a finger thanks to my avolition. No one wants to be that lazy.

No, the current system is a grift, a scam to force people to engage in menial labor for super-cheap while they suffer abuse by their superiors, hence the RTO mandates, and how crunching development teams in AAA game development is still a thing.

Yes, I’m bitter, but Trump’s autocratic movement may be the last gasp of neoliberalism, and either we’re going to see steps towards a new New Deal or we’re going to see our Tech-Bro oligarch masters try to fascism all of the US and the reprisal will be even more revolutionary (and more violent).

We’re running out of water for agriculture. The zoomers may be middle aged, and the alphas, adults, when the climate crisis fully catches up with us. And if the human species is lucky, it’ll happen first in the US or Russia or one of the old-guard powers, and the new order can use their renewable energy surplus to create new desalinization technology.

But current estimates (by those few climatologists willing to say other than it’s going to get very bad. ) estimate the upper limit of the sustainability projections are a global population of about a billion people, if the international community chose to act today on all fronts. (Obviously that’s not happening in the US, or in autocratic regimes, who imagine – falsely – they can create a self-sustaining colony on Mars – we’re a century or more from that).

That is a best case scenario unless we discover some miracle technology.

All other scenarios get worse than that, from a population in the hundreds of millions to human extinction. There is a ray of hope near the bottom, since Homo Erectus had at least one period of tens of thousands of years with a population under 10K before they would populate the world again, until they were out-competed by other hominids (e.g. us. Homo Sapiens). So we might have a tiny society that survives for an eon, but don’t expect any culture (from wet burritos to Beethoven’s Fifth to the 道德經) to survive. And a fuckton of science will have to be rediscovered.

So seriously bad shit for all of Human society is, at this point, for all intents and purposes, inevitable.

Let them scrape. AI as it currently is, is still autocomplete with extra steps, and still prone to hallucination. As it is it will be usable to make cheap, passable content, but not hit those moments of inspiration of human art (yet – there are real AI groups looking to make AGI)

It is a bubble which will pop and AI will be seen as a tool (a resource-costly tool) that requires its own set of experts independent from the experts that use ACAD or write editorial copy or do investigative work. Id est, it’s not the replacement of employees that boards of directors want it to be.

And AGI is centuries from being efficient enough that you can make Rosie the Robot who cleans your house and makes a good upside-down pineapple cake.

This is something we have to work out as a society. Even among the far left total-inclusion total-equality community (anyone else? anyone?) there are people who are contemptible, whether for being social renegades, for being exceptionally violent, for being perversely interested in taboos (pedophiles, for instance), for being too rich or too poor, for being the wrong kind of sick or disabled (we crazies get a lot of flack), there are still some we resent.

Fifteen-year-old teenagers are a big group. We want to lock the girls up in the basement and maroon the boys on an island. I’ve heard podcasters recognize that teenage incels in the alt-right-to-MAGA pipeline are being totally abandoned and led by society to join Trump’s War Boys. But fuck those guys.

We need a society that respects the rights and protections of everyone, no matter how despicable or ugly or contemptible or rude they are.

For instance, when investigating violent criminals in the 20th century, we started allowing for illegally obtained evidence, searches made without a warrant, coerced confessions and such, but since the perp committed heinous crimes it was just too difficult to allow them to walk, given what they did… And with time, that set precedent for black guys possessing a gram of crack or paraphernalia, even if they had no record of violent crime or even property crime.

And now the US has, by far, the highest incarceration rate in the world.

So when we start again, rights and protections have to be guaranteed to absolutely everyone. Sustenance sufficient to live has to be available to absolutely every last person. No exceptions, even when they really don’t deserve it. (In fact, by being a human being, they do.)

Until we figure out how to assure the inclusivity circle doesn’t leak, every society will drift toward autocracy. Again.

We may well be. As we careen towards great filters like the climate crisis (and running out of fresh water for agriculture) we may drive ourselves to extinction, or (if we’re… lucky?) close enough to extinction that all our present culture and most of our scientific knowledge is lost.

The version in which one out of eight people survives, is the good ending. Then we might be able to adjust our institutions to the smaller population. But expect all the Horsemen of the Apocalypse to put on a show, and claim their due.

But here we are under Trump dealing with the same kinds of problems that arose under Hitler and Mussolini and countless other dictators. We’re going to keep doing this thing where we let small factions game the system for themselves until we figure out how to effectively prevent it. If we don’t figure it out then in a hundred-thousand years, when the atmosphere has healed and the plastic has mostly been cleared from nature and we start populating again, we’ll still have the same problem… or maybe not. Maybe we’ll have evolved a bit.

(Homo Erectus experienced a similar period of scarcity and a population of less than 10,000 until the world got more habitable, and they got pushed out by competing hominids like us.)

We need to end the war of kings and resolve our grievances so we can face the ice zombie army from the north… and unlike Season 8, we’re pretty sure killing the Ice King isn’t going cause an ontological collapse the way killing Sauron collapsed the organization structure of the goblins and they fled back to the mountain caves. (GRRM was all about subverting fantasy tropes that didn’t mesh with real-life experience)

I wasn’t meaning to imply that restricting societies to small states is the solution, only that once a state gets larger than a village there’s going to be factioning and rivalry (and hence renegade behavior either to harm or subvert institutions).

Just as we found an alternative solution to infectious disease (centralized disease control, when we give it a proper budget) we need to find an alternative solution to factioning and subversion than keeping groups small. We just don’t know how to do it. Yet.

SMBC once posited a gamification of being nice to each other, in which society was self policing because everyone behaved with benevolence for the points. So I’m not the only person who’s thought about this.

Plenty of women – teenage parochial schoolgirls, specifically, get impregnated as virgins when the definition of virgin is not having coital sex or having an intact vaginal corona (hymen). When boys and girls who love each other very much make out and get overly involved, yet their pregnancy concerns (and guilt) keep them from engaging in actual coitus, even a small amount of jizz on her vulva might make their way through the vaginal canal and cause conception.

Plenty of medical doctors have encountered unexpected pregnancy of women who’ve never had sex and who had intact vaginal coronas.

However at the beginning of the common era, virgin was assumed of any unmarried woman unless known otherwise, and was a shift of property value of the woman to the father or husband. Mary who was unmarried, would be a virgin by default as a young woman. Though her pregnancy is evidence that she isn’t a virgin.

Too be fair, in Hellenic culture Zeus raped me was a common excuse when a young woman fooled around without license, and ended up in a family way, and before the era of the Olympian, Poseidon was the one going around having his way with young women. In fact, the classical myths teem with children sired by gods. This isn’t new.

I’m still waiting for the complete U.S. Senate report on CIA torture, the full 6,700 page report that was suppressed until Trump ordered it destroyed in January 2017. We hope there’s a surviving copy.

If anything short of the entire annotated Epstein casefile is not released, even if it’s lightly redacted, I greatly hope it might spark the downfall of the US federal government, the rise of a European led provisional state and the breaking (if temporary) of the states into multiple factions that don’t get back together until we fix the Constitution of the United States (Version 2) to provide equal protection and equal inclusion for all, probably the process of about eight to fifteen years. In a century the US will be the model of democracy on which new states model theirs.

Maybe it’s a system of sortition. Yes, I’m getting carried away with this fantasy.

That way it goes down in history that a bunch of aristocrats fucked around, tried to cover it up and the resulting outrage changed civilization for the better.

That is a valid concern, one that was not as great when the funerary rites were first invented.

At this point it’s a clear problem of human bias. We love our instincts so much that when we have sufficient power, we’ll assure that people never challenge them, even when the offices we hold require reason contrary to those instincts.

The whole bit about bullshit jobs serves as an example, because our upper management desire to hold court and have courtiers and garden hermits buzzing about them like components of an orrery (I’m teaching my spellchecker words today).

In the media industry the process of crunching developers to make deadlines (even though it kills productivity and slows the rate of progress) is another example, and yet all the AAA game development companies do it… or are doing it so long as they exist. Our private equity firms are now doing to the big ones what was once done to Toys 'r Us, leaving a sinkhole of debt and bankruptcy where there was once a reputable company.

Our inability to see our community past our top fifty Facebook friends (or fellow villagers) prevents us from thinking in terms of cooperating with society, rather we deign ourselves part of the true Americans (or Belgians or Maoists or whatever), and so we fail to recognize personal greed as a mental disorder, rather a moral failing.

In a Star Trek society, someone who hoarded liquidatable assets would be regarded similar to someone who filled their house with junk (and hopefully not as they are abused on Bravo), we’d intervene, put them in a rehab center for a year, where they learn to exist in the comfort of minimalism. But in our own world, extremely wealthy people are regarded as a a higher strata of person, given power and authority to command PMCs, and eventually swarm-armies of killer robots managed by AI.

Currently, our tolerance of human billionaires is killing us, and it poses a global catastrophic risk not just of the human species but of 90%+ of all species on the planet.

Fix’d.

When you cremate your remains and then seed the ocean with your ashes, it feeds the bottom of the ecosystem.

CORRECTION Cremated remains have all organic compounds broken down and is a process used to stow or preserve remains (since it’s mostly carbon, it can be used to make an artificial diamond). Also someone I know who planned on this as his return to earth funerary choice was misinformed.

That said, there is a tradition to carve a cadaver up and grind the bones and make sausages for the local wildlife, who will happily partake. In fact part of the ritual is noisy and consistent so as to inform the locals that dinnertime is coming.

Just drop the body into the wilds and the local fauna (mostly invertebrates) will do a fantastic job of utilizing your remains, and reintroducing the material back into the ecosystem. Avoid permafrost places like the Himalayas, seas that are lifeless (like the Dead Sea). Deserts will just desiccate you quickly.

Planting your body under a sapling (without formaldehyde or any other preservatives) will make sure you’re literally worm food.

I don’t, and Karl Marx explains this is the inevitable outcome of a capitalist system in Das Kapital.

Right now the EU is trying its hand at it by making a regulatory system that is difficult to influence. It’s happening, and some countries have devolved into neoliberal parties vs. far-right (monarchist) parties, showing us that Marx is once again right.

If I were to get a soviet (lower case) committee of scholars to hammer out a workable system, I’d avoid capitalism in favor of a post-scarcity socialist / communist state (and if we don’t have the means to kick off with one, then we’d lay out a tech-tree path towards one.

But that’s not how societies work. We have to work towards a world in which people are given the liberty to live as they please, and not be burdened by want of essentials. We can’t seize all the property today and have food kiosks available tomorrow.

Also, I’m not even a poli-sci graduate, and I’d defer to those who’ve actually learned the history and checklists. But I could see a country deciding to invest some taxes in a massive potato growing project, and offering free potatoes to everyone; as much as they need. And then following up with other extremely common, extremely useful products (pencils and paper)? Lumber in standard sizes? Steel wood screws? Eventually, the state would offer protein bars and issue bog standard smart phones.

We’ve already seen ur-programs like this, from government cheese, food stamps and SNAP to the electric companies offering flourescent bulbs and later LED bulbs to get all households on the same page.

That said, these are all guesses. I can’t predict the future and how we advance.