Thank you!

These overreactions are reminding me of the J6ers, though.

Ah, yes. Truly a classic. “The people angry about the blanket pardoning of all the violent insurrectionists are just as bad as the violent insurrectionists!”

Lol.

But, the beautiful thing about hitting rock bottom is that the only way to go from there is up. All of that to say that maybe (yes, I’m being optimistic) Trump is what this country needs to hit rock bottom, do some self reflection, and pull ourselves back up to a better place. The biggest takeaway I learned way back when is that no matter how bad things get, the world keeps spinning

These are unfortunately contradictory ideas. It sounds like you had a positive journey in the end, but there are many individuals - especially people struggling with addiction - who will tell you that there is no rock bottom. The world does keep on spinning. And as long as you are alive, you can go lower. There is no point where you go so low that you hit bedrock and the world stops spinning.

Plenty of people think they hit rock bottom and later discover that what they thought of as their lowest point eventually became a time they now think of as “the good days”.

There is nothing inevitable or guaranteed about hitting rock bottom and climbing your way back up. It is hard work, and it sounds like you know that personally. Whatever comes next will be a terrible struggle for all of us, and there is no guarantee of success. But we do have to try anyway.

That’s very interesting. Do you know where I could learn more about that decision? I tried searching but its 2025 and any phrases I could think of just returned websites offering nearly identical collections of flag emojis…

True! It’s just another of the many ways that evil is counterproductive to its own interests.

Helping groups of humans that bigots don’t like would literally result in less humans that bigots don’t like in the world.

But they can’t help the wrong humans! Oh no! They have to hurt those humans! And so they leave those humans in the socioeconomic conditions that maintain exponential population growth indefinitely

In a broad sense this is inaccurate - war has been around as long as humans, and yet we were on an exponential population growth curve until the demographic transitions started.

Over the last century we as a species have significantly reduced child mortality, improved education, infrastructure, overall quality of life, and established reproductive health initiatives that supply condoms and sex education!

These advancements cause the local mortality rate to plummet. Then the following generation gets to reproductive age but has much less offspring, and the reproductive rate falls farther than the mortality rate did.

This is called the “demographic transition” and has occurred across dramatically different cultures, environments, and economies.

This is not universal or inevitable across the globe but the impact is so significant that global population as a whole is currently heading towards a plateau!

Therefore condoms, reproductive healthcare, and distributed economic growth are more effective at reducing population growth than bombs and bullets.

Developing a nation is literally more cost-efficient than destroying it. For the species. Not for the people selling the bombs.

As much as theists would claim that their morals were handed down from divinity, ultimately an athiest would understand those morals to be originally handed down from humans, and therefore humanistic.

Doesn’t mean they’re good morals of course, especially when corrupted by motives of power, but bad morals can be handed down by secular sources as well. The point being that theistic origins do not necessarily mean the morals themselves are flawed.

In any case, fundamentally the ethics of AA’s 12 steps are technically theistic in origin and nomenclature but humanistic in nature, in that they appear to really dig down into the psychology of humans in a way that deviates significantly from their christian roots.

According to Mercadante, however, the AA concept of powerlessness over alcohol departs significantly from Oxford Group belief. In AA, the bondage of an addictive disease cannot be cured, and the Oxford Group stressed the possibility of complete victory over sin.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Alcoholics_Anonymous

The original christian prayer group believed that through God, addiction could be cured. AA has maintained from the beginning that addiction cannot be cured - a recovering alcoholic is and always will be a recovering alcoholic. Faith in God alone will not deliver salvation because addiction is not sin, it is illness, and should be treated by more than just prayer.

It could be more complex than that. It could be an average number of vampires preying on an evolutionary disadvantage - hospitality. Vampires cannot cross a threshold uninvited, but Italians are famous for welcoming everyone and their mothers to dinner. It was a recipe for disaster until they found the holy bulb.

Ever wonder why Italy has crosses in every home? Why the Vatican formed there? Could it have been a long and storied history of the rise and fall of romans and religions? No. Vampires.

It was more obvious when they all had big bellies, but have you ever noticed that the Pope sitting in his white outfit and hat looks like unpeeled garlic?

Personally, I think both theories can be true. It is hard to corroborate dates for our records. Immortal bodies that burn away in sunlight pose some archaeological challenges.

But consider this:

What if Italy had a significantly higher number of vampires than normal? Before they learned the secrets of Allium, and faith, and a big wooden spoon always close at hand.

2075. A world where fast and foreign foods dot the Italian countryside. Faith has been abandoned, crosses discarded. Their traditions are forgotten. But their traditions have not forgotten them.

Only one grandmother remembers the past. Cross on the mantel. Big wooden spoon. Garlic in the sauce. One big dinner, every week. Everyone’s invited.

Coming soon to a theater near you:

Nonna: No Blood Before Supper

They want to use military planes because they can hide the cost of this program in the “whoops it’s too big to audit” defense budget. The cost of civilian contractors would be publically disclosed.

This person’s outright sadistic blindness or trolling aside, anyone reading this comment with good faith and not immediately having an aneurysm should remember that the once and current president once said, and I quote:

I like taking guns away early. Take the guns first, go through due process second.

I don’t believe I have treated you with hostility, but please forgive me if I have.

But I must ask - does “not voting” discredit the illusion of democracy? To who? How?

Do you think there is a meaningful number of people who currently believe the statement “American democracy is working” but would cease to believe that when faced with voter turnout statistics?

Not voting is absolutely both a symptom and a cause. How do you think we got here, if not by voting for the people who won the elections for the past century, and by not voting for the people who lost the elections?

Voting won’t fix the ruin that is the neo liberal project and the debt its forced us into.

Again, almost everyone knows that. For most “radicalized” people that are actually doing things, voting is openly acknowledged as a stalling tactic designed to give us more time to do what must be done for real change.

What exactly will not voting do? Who will face the consequences of not voting? Who will be helped? Who will be harmed? Do you honestly think the wealthy will be harmed by you not voting?

I never said that, nor did I ever think that. But you have made clear that this discussion is unwanted, and I will respect that and say no more on it. Farewell.

Did you? To me? Where?

Please don’t feel that the best thing you can do is shut up! You deserve a voice in the matter, even if it is much harder for you to use it the way others can use theirs.

Besides, not everyone can always be or even needs to always be the person who spreads the message. We need people to help figure out what the problems and solutions are just as much as we need people to share those problems and solutions with the world.

It is usually a necessary evil that we have marketers to sell the things that wouldn’t exist without the engineers to produce them.

I already told you what I didn’t agree with and why I didn’t agree with it several times

I didn’t and still don’t see any explanations for why you disagree, other than “being athiest” which I do not believe is sufficient explanation in and of itself. There are plenty of athiests who find reasons to agree or disagree on this topic beyond that single belief.

I apologize if my approach seems insistent that you need to agree with me. I only wanted to explore the topic further, and am happy to discontinue that if the desire is not reciprocated. Farewell.

I have no idea how to interpret “improve our conscious contact with God” any other way.

… All they’re really doing is using their imagination to simulate a being greater than themselves and then asking “what would that being want for my life?”

This is a secular interpretation of “improve our conscious contact with God” that doesn’t actually involve “communicating with a God”

Is there something about this interpretation that you don’t understand or disagree with?

You are missing the point, voting in a party that has been moving slowly right isn’t a way to fix it.

Most of us are well aware voting them in wasn’t going to fix the core problems of the United States.

However, most of us are also well aware that voting them out is making the core problems worse. One need only apply a blindfold and throw a dart at any of the executive decisions made over the last week to find incontrovertible evidence of that.

Accelerationism is nothing but supporting facism. There is no magical moment where fascists run a nation into the ground, the system collapses, and somehow you get to decide what happens after.

What comes after can be just as bad - if not worse - than what came before. And you will do nothing - less than nothing - to stop it by choosing not to vote.

I’m not questioning the value of non-electoral political action. That is just as - if not more - important. Get involved. Use your voice. Donate. Rally. Please.

I am only challenging this naive idea that “not voting” = “protesting”. You cannot protest by staying home. You cannot protest by sitting out. Not voting isn’t action, it’s inaction and no revolution will ever, ever start with inaction.