I'm saying that human civilization, and especially puritanical societies of this civilization of which we are one in the US, have walled away the core of what we are, animals that want to fuck, trained us through a prism of shame to loathe that part of us, that we darkly call being civilized, and filled our days generating things that will provide us no meaning, as the closest thing to meaning that can be derived by our biology is getting as much dopamine and serotonin as possible through physical human connection, and we spend most of our time being told the greatest lever for that is shameful and harmful usually because it doesn't make strangers richer, which is ridiculous in an age where if we had the correct priorities we would be able to do for fun as procreation that comes as a result is now chemically optional.

My point is humanity spends a whole lot of its time being miserable, toiling for widgets, to pursue or accept sexual partners in a roundabout way because we've made that that a small, token, conditional cookie for doing the "important" stuff, which I find sad and fascinating to observe. The point being used as a bargaining chip for the pointless, and then all parties wondering why they're still anxious and depressed because they either didn't come to terms, or because they did and it turns out all the plastic, silicon, and tea in china can't provide even a passing shadow of the fulfillment of genuine, physical human connection can, and even that physical human connection is tarnished being turned into just another form of currency or coercion for stuff that doesn't matter at all. How much does humanity toiling for that does not matter instead of fucking?

Tldr humanity would be happier if we were trained to see sex as connection with one another and not that dirty, evil thing of which we rarely speak and if we do it is with the utmost sense of serious danger. It's too late for most existing humans though, as you can't go to full grown adults steeped in that cultural stigma and say "oops we fucked up, our sexuality isnt some taboo evil thing with no place in society." The damage is done. My hill is that shouldn't continue that harmful culture going forward, but I recognize I'll die on that hill as a tiny minority that sees the harm it does.

Sexuality is the point.

We spend a lot of time pursuing staggeringly and self-evidently pointless and stupid shit while suppressing and teaching being ashamed of sex and sexuality, to the point many just categorize their sexuality under potential trauma if engaged.

If we spent a lot less time grinding for nothing of import and more time fucking one another rather than fucking one another over for paper simulacra of supposed value, our species would be far more well adjusted. Even the difference between less prudish Europe and the puritanical US in general mental health is extremely apparent.

The way we treat sex, as something to shame behind close doors rather than celebrate, as we glorify plastic and silicon garbage, is beyond ridiculous and leads to shame and trauma in girls who become women and anger and resentment in boys that become men. We aren't economic value producing machines, we're fucking machines. We denied that at our peril, and now very few are happy with the state of things. Breathtakingly bad priorities.

I think a big part of the problem is that we've made a place that isn't worth saving long before Trump came along to loot its corpse.

Let's go back to normal so the normal politicians can tell us the economy is great as we live in subsistence with no time or wage to live lives, where we're murdered for private profit with government's blessing, where millions of Americans die of homelessness as other Americans condemn their very existence for lowering property values. Trump is dandy with all that, but that's been the US under both parties my entire life.

We haven't lived in a society for as long as most everyone here has been alive, just a rigged competition against one another to the death for capitalist scraps.

Then you tell us the Fascists are here and we should... Risk our lives to... save that cesspool of avarice and casual sociopathy? Because people other than the poors are in the shit now?

This is the consequence of the hyperindividualist and avarice stoking values of the US, values our people are still miles away from abandoning no matter how much they get hurt by it, because they want to be a big winnah one day. We made a place where it was everyone out for themselves. Those values poisoned any sense of nobility towards this cesspool.

Here's a dark reality, not individually but as a nation, given our actions and practiced values? Donald Trump, who I voted against out of harm reduction for the record, is the PERFECT representative of the United States. It's like the US took human form. He's an accurate caricature of all we are, all we value, and all we idolize in practice.

...Oh say can you see, pew pa pew pew pew pew pew... 🔥🇺🇸🔥

As bad as things are, it's cathartic to watch the old guard, bourbon sipping Republican party that originally weaponized misinformation to further the agenda of big corpo (faux news since they existed: "Herp derp climate change is a hoax for scientists to sell books") realize that though their long in motion coup worked, they lost control of it in 2015 when King confidence scheme scam artist stole their grift out from under them by saying the dogwhistles they used to string their racist base along out loud with a dumb little dance.

Its not helpful, but knowing Mitch McConnell and John Roberts know they sold out their entire society's future not even for their benefit or the benefit of the right small room of classy old money bigots, but for some crass asshole that's as belligerent and willfully ignorant as their sucker voting base to take the reigns of post democracy machiavelian power they so carefully curated since the 70s as they watch powerlessly, and IN FEAR no less?

Poetry.

🎻🎻🎻

As bad as things are, it's cathartic to watch the old guard, bourbon sipping Republican party that originally weaponized misinformation to further the agenda of big corpo (faux news since they existed: "Herp derp climate change is a hoax for scientists to sell books") realize that though their long in motion coup worked, they lost control of it in 2015 when King confidence scheme scam artist stole their grift out from under them by saying the dogwhistles they used to string their racist base along out loud with a dumb little dance.

Its not helpful, but knowing Mitch McConnell and John Roberts know they sold out their entire society's future not even for their benefit or the benefit of the right small room of classy old money bigots, but for some crass asshole that's as belligerent and willfully ignorant as their sucker voting base to take the reigns of post democracy machiavelian power they so carefully curated since the 70s as they watch powerlessly, and IN FEAR no less?

Poetry.

🎻🎻🎻

As bad as things are, it's cathartic to watch the old guard, bourbon sipping Republican party that originally weaponized misinformation to further the agenda of big corpo (faux news since they existed: "Herp derp climate change is a hoax for scientists to sell books") realize that though their long in motion coup worked, they lost control of it in 2015 when King confidence scheme scam artist stole their grift out from under them by saying the dogwhistles they used to string their racist base along out loud with a dumb little dance.

Its not helpful, but knowing Mitch McConnell and John Roberts know they sold out their entire society's future not even for their benefit or the benefit of the right small room of classy old money bigots, but for some crass asshole that's as belligerent and willfully ignorant as their sucker voting base to take the reigns of post democracy machiavelian power they so carefully curated since the 70s as they watch powerlessly, and IN FEAR no less?

Poetry.

🎻🎻🎻

I wasn't implying the empathy deficit was from those with autism, but from most of the US population, and by design.

I think we're mostly on the same page.

I'd just add as someone who was a practicing psychologist that it has been conclusively proven that empathy is learned, it usually needs to be learned young if it is to be learned at all, it is easily tought, and our culture chooses to teach the opposite in glorifying/inflating individual potential with disdain for considering the needs of others.

Which had led us to this collapse as the rugged individual peasants tear eachother down instead of bringing power back down to earth.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/introduction-2/

If it were up go me, this experiment would be required curriculum for all young children, but modern American parents would burn schools down if a teacher DARED to tell half a class that kids with other color eyes were better than them for a single day (and then doing the opposite the next day) to safely instill what it feels like to be deemed less important by others. That's how anti-empathy, and thus I'd argue antihumanist, Americans are TRAINED to be.

After all, when my kid grows up he needs to COMPETE AGAINST and BEAT your kid so he has MOAR than them. 🇺🇸

They should be identified by the rest of society and treated differently.

PREFERENTIALLY every time all day every day. Trying to indicate they are no different goes in the wrong direction on that. Like so many things in this county, the problem is a culture that fails to, from childhood, educate people, in this case educating to seeing a disadvantaged person and going "how can I make their day easier" and not "eww gross and weird." Same thing we fail to educate Americans on with regards to poverty and homelessness.

I don't think it's healthy for them to not consider themselves different fron the mean, as is often pushed. They are different from the mean. Self-delusion is a blight, choosing ignorance is always wrong. It hurts them when reality comes calling, and only those of means can make it from cradle to grave avoiding facing reality.

I subscribe to the school of George Carlin on this.

It helps no one, including the afflicted, to dress up a disability.

It doesn't help a single disabled person walk to be called "handicapable," and it's both society's failing and pointless to, for example, rebrand a term like crippled which had no shame attached to it for a long time to handicapped, etc as if that society has malice in its heart it will shift its anymous to whatever term you want.

A disabled or amputated leg isn't just different, it's an extra difficulty for that person outside the norm that their society should pick up the slack for them on through assistance and accommodation.

A brain that can't orally communicate, can't self-regulate emotion, can't grasp simple but important social constructs as those with severe autism can't, isn't simply different or beautiful. It often appears like hell to live as even with infinite financial resources and therapies, and that kind of talk diminishes the severity of their disadvantage, which just as the slow march from battle fatigue to post traumatic stress disorder, has a negative effect of minimizing the help that disadvantaged person needs.

As Carlin said, changing the name of the condition doesn't change the condition. This is, to be clear, an argument FOR society moving heaven and earth to make life as bearable for their struggles as can be done, precisely because they have a profound disadvantage and a society should care for its members in order of most disadvantaged.

The neoliberal "solution" to real problems is relabeling it with detached and/or optimistic language and walking away. It solves precisely nothing, but it doesn't cost their robber baron bribers a cent so there you go.

Which is exactly what China said when they stopped at 125% and said they're done playing stupid chicken and we can knock ourselves out raising them to eleventy bazillion percent.

The Chinese government has their own sins, behaving like petulant children isn't one of them.

That phrase is again just the perverse villainization of the social contract and being a society, and it ultimately only benefits those that want to extract wealth from societies instead of being a member of one.

I'm sorry that it sounds like you've internalized that capitalist aggression meant to keep our citizenry undermining one another instead of lifting one another up. If you're disabled, your society should be judged for failing to give you adequate aid.

If you're a member of this society and disabled, society should take care of you, otherwise it's a shite society.

The problem is our society is hostile towards the concept of... Society.

We've been poisoned to believe individualism is strength when it is weakness. We've been propagandized to resent Americans when they fall on hard times, angry when they draw on herp derp muh tax dollars so as not to die when they lose a job or get an illness.

The US has a profound, deep rooted culture problem. We're more a gaggle of wannabe rugged individuals undermining one another for oligarch crumbs than a society. That's why I want this place to collapse, as both parties want that hyperindivualism poison to keep running us, because only under that die alone, sink or swim, winners and losers race to the bottom national ethos can the owners continue to exploit us to death for ever moar profit that's still never enough.

It's brought nothing but misery, it's destroyed the social contract, and it's destroying the planet. If we do not end our worship of the individual and the pursuit of avarice, it will end us.

Avarice and individualism got here.

To the point many still consider both to be strengths and not the weaknesses they are.

Dems are a far right party that only look centrist if you squint looking at them from inside fascist crazy town.

To basically anyone in the developed world, of which we are not, Luigi murdered a mass murderer, to any fascist or neoliberal here, we have to let murderers for profit let the free market decide who gets life saving healthcare, as just 1 of innumerable examples.

Neoliberals don't squee like little girls at the hello kitty store when people suffer and die needlessly when it facilitates private profit as the Fascists do, but they don't see it as the social fabric betrayal and atrocity it is either. "free market forces, mr dying homeless person, but I support your right to die in the gutter of hunger and exposure as any identity you choose!" Because it's free to, but people need their basic survival met first, and that takes resources that go to them and not the robber barons that pay off both parties.

I phone banked for him on his 2 most possible runs. He's way too old. AOC is the only half decent insider option in all of DC now.

After a lifetime of voting for the lesser evil to make the ship sink a little slower, voting blue from Kerry to Harris in the general after primarying for the most leftwing candidate available, and feeling dirty every time, either they can give me a candidate that isn't actively choking as they fellate oligarch dick, or I'll watch it all burn from home.

MTG is far more welcome in her party than AOC is in hers.

The neoliberal DNC sees the Republicans as their esteemed opposition, as they are on the same take and have the same orders on Economic policy. They see spoilers like AOC, who are not on the corpo bribe train and for profound economic policy changes, as their enemy.

https://apnews.com/article/business-nancy-pelosi-congress-8685e82eb6d6e5b42413417f3d5d6775

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/04/15/nancy-pelosi-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-481704

The Democrats, almost all of them save a couple of spoilers, aren't the fascists themselves, but they've spent the last half century enabling the fascists. The Democrats don't care about entire industries of confidence schemes murdering Americans like our deathcare industry, they don't care about poor kids getting a good education, and they dont care about millions of our most betrayed neighbors dying in the streets. As the bad cop Fascists brag about how much they love the schaudenfreude of the pain those people are in, the good cop neoliberals shrug "free market forces, sorry! But I do affirm your identity, homeless dying/lifesaving healthcare denied person!"

That's why there really isn't hope until we collapse, hopefully by our hands in revolution and not by oligarch made climate change in a couple decades. Best, best, best, best case scenario, we have a real election in 3. 5 years and the Neoliberals gain power, do NOTHING to reign in the oligarchs, income inequity, or our sociopathic, murderous capital markets as they're gleefully paid not to do. Fascism is the takeover of the state to serve big capital's need for ever moar, and so the table will remain set to go back on the fascist march in just another 4 years.