doomer

NYT

Mucus-Covered Jellyfish Hint at Dangers of Deep-Sea Mining

Shipboard experiments suggested that sediment from the exploitation of metals in the ocean could be harmful to marine life.

We really do live in a society, huh?

You'd think I'd be numb to all this shit by now. But I'm just sad.

We broke the 2-degree threshold in global temperature increases recently. Media shrugs.

Covid spike yet again. The media tells us to harden up or die.

Everything fuckng sucks. Wages suck, prices suck.

The people protest, they rightfully don't want to boil from climate change or the genocide of Palestinians. The capitalist government says fuck you and arrests them. Very cool and democratic.

Death, disease, poverty. Everything is falling apart. I feel powerless. Like I'm watching the murder of something beautiful and all I can do is watch. The powers in charge of this are monsters. All they seem to want to do is make everything worse and anyone who doesn't agree with fucking up literally everything is labeled an extremist.

Shits traumatic.

it's not just you, literally everything is worse now

I know there are more people struggling, but it's really fucked up that a single apartment complex could end homelessness in my city.

Instead we have parking lots, franchises that go out of business, and encampments that get routinely cleared out.

I know it's more than indifference to human suffering. It's spite at the thought of anyone else catching a 'break.' It's the belief that being an eyesore is worthy of the death penalty so long as they don't have to see it.

It's the result of a lack of class consciousness. It's social murder in slow motion.

Bruh, maybe it's the commuter apartments and the bloated police budget and not the panhandling that's the problem.

I saw a sign that said 'keep the change' as I left a grocery store, discouraging people from giving money to people desperate enough to use change to survive.

I hate that there's this delusion that people carry about homelessness that it would never happen to them. One day they'll say they're blessed and lucky, but then say that homeless people are just ill or made bad choices.

We don't live in a fucking vacuum. Where does someone get treatment for mental health? Why does it have a price tag? What bad choices were freely made and not under the duress of immediate survival in a cruel society?

I give money when I'm able, sometimes when it hurts me. I believe in a world that could cut out all the bullshit middle parts and let people lead lives of dignity. It doesn't even have to be communism.

If they increased taxes by 10 dollar a year per person, that would be $2,000,000 for the hundred people in our recorded homeless population.

Ten dollars a year, and that would make a world of difference in my community. I'd pay more than that, but we're fucking building prisons and sending weapons to countries most people couldn't point to on a map.

It's fucking horrifying to think of the reality of homelessness in this country. I live in a blue state and I still think about the ways summer and winter affect homeless people because they're an inconvenience.

I'm writing this because I'm struggling worse than I have ever struggled in my life and it's not a fraction of what people are going through while unhoused. I'm writing this because I know there are people like me who had two financial hardships happen when I just had one. I'm writing this because nobody in my life wants to talk about it because it's too depressing for them. I'm writing this because things don't have to be this way, but the powers that be need a homeless population to keep capitalism working.

It's sick and I feel powerless in the face of this reality.

Remember those headlines about "90% of snow crabs mysteriously vanish" from a while back?

:desolate:

tl;dr water was too warm which requires more energy (food) for them to sustain themselves, plus too many of them from a previous population boom

The last week has all but confirmed what we all knew all along. We have not one person with a spine in the entirety of our (US) government.

Nearly everyone, everywhere, is baying for blood and genocide.

I was feeling down before because of the medical situation in my family, but, after everything that has happened in Palestine, joy has escaped me and replaced with white hot anger.

Posting this for my own relief, as I know not one person that I have met in the flesh that gives a single fucking shit, at best, they know nothing or are apathetic, at worst, howling at the moon for a fresh sacrifice.

No need to respond, just needed to scream somewhere besides my pillow.

I thought they might just go full genocide. The west has uniformly given them a blank check to do so. Maybe they've got the composure to go through the motions. Maybe they might do the genocide anyways and say "we gave them the choice to run".

The first two paragraphs.

Amid the endless interesting details of the climate and energy fight, I find myself sometimes losing track of the basic outlines of our the dilemma. So let’s try to oversimplify it for a moment, just to make sure we’re at a place we can work from. The key, as always, is the sun.

Right now, thanks to our recklessness, the sun is overheating our planet. And by right now, I don’t mean in this century. I mean, in this month. The global temperature readings for September should have been the top story on every newscast in the world, because they were bonkers. June, July, and August were historically hot—we saw the hottest days recorded on the planet in 125,000 years. September wasn’t quite as hot, of course, because it’s fall. But in relative terms September was even more outrageous. It was, the scientists tell us, the most anomalous month we’ve ever seen, with temperatures so far beyond historical norms that the charts don’t even seem to make sense.

I don't know how to live with only allowing some politics into my life. I cannot navigate the extremes of escapism vs awareness.

In escapism and avoidance of news I can be 'happy' to an extent. Surface level. All sugar. Nothing to sustain me. Jumping from one rush of dopamine to the next. Play a game, buy something, drink, smoke, watch another rehash of a popular piece of media. Rinse and repeat until death, contributing nothing but a mountain of plastic to this sick Earth.

Alternatively, I immerse myself in the ills of the world. The sheer amount of suffering surrounding me. Those without a place to call home, ignored or hated by their fellows. The masses who live in that escapism because they feel the same as me, at some level, but turn inwards to avoid confronting it. Convince themselves that things will work themselves out. That the adults are at the wheel and are doing what's best. Or others still, too focused on the requirements of survival for themselves and their families to think about anything more. Knowing in their core that no one will pick them up if they fall.

For all the good I see happening, it seems there is twice as much bad to destroy it. To maintain the status quo. To watch as our world slowly dies or to dump fuel to the fire. The solutions to me are clear, and the symptoms of these problems are widely recognized across the world but the mechanisms for addressing them are blocked. We are told to believe global politic is a zero sum game. That there must be winners and loser and that we cannot cooperate for the betterment of all. Even the understanding that this evil system is circling the drain brings me no joy for it is doing its best to take everything beautiful with it. Extinction after extinction, natural wonders lost to time. A clock rapidly approaching a point of no return.

I don't know how to end this. I want to have an optimism of the spirit, but it is so damn hard. I cannot dedicate the time I want to the things I find important because I'm too busy studying for something I don't want to do while working to make someone else rich in a field that only contributes to the misery of many, albeit many steps removed. I cannot seem to square my morals with my existence while continuing to provide for those who depend on me. I'm decently well off and comfortable yet hate so much of my life because it all feels so pointless which adds to my guilt for not even being able to do something with it.

Anyways, thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

Obligatory Sold a Story podcast link.

I can't help but feel that a lot of this is deliberate, the end result of decades of dismantling the public education system to further divide kids into the upper class in private schools, religious fundamentalists in home schooling, and everyone else abandoned to keep the population uneducated and in worse economic precarity.

Somebody please tell me that the kids are alright

Saw this absolutely disgusting screed today from the American Hotel Lobby Association (yeah, that's a thing). I have some friends in a network who gets these and others, and I wanted to share with folks here too.

This is a real thing that is happening. This is what giving corporations a voice looks like. This is what neoliberal democracy is; organizations grouping together to build lobbying groups that advocate strongly for keeping homeless on the streets (and other horrible things of course).

I dunno I get these sorts of things pretty often, I can certainly share more of these if people want. They make me sad and angry every time I see them. I like to show these to libs to remind them that this is what the democracy that they swear by looks like.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/23/us/saltwater-mississippi-new-orleans.html

I believe that the reason there are millions of planets is the same reason there are millions of eggs. To allow for failure. There must be countless experimental stations like this one. The only thing that is not expendable is the experiment itself. Our notions of our own uniqueness are precisely that. Our notions. We will not be missed. When we have slaughtered and poisoned everything in sight and finally incinerated the earth itself then that black and lifeless lump of slag will simply revolve in the void forever. There is a place for it too. A nameless cinder of no consequence even to god. That man can halt this disaster now seems so remote a possibility as to hardly bear consideration.

The first paragraph

Six of nine critical "planetary boundaries," from climate change to damage to freshwater systems, have been transgressed, according to a new study. The result is that Earth as a system is functioning "well outside of the safe operating space for humanity."

Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm

180mph sustained winds forecast, cat 5 already

I fucking hate this. Its all for literally nothing. For fucking money. Money. Imaginary pieces of paper. Even worse, imaginary numbers on a fucking screen. Data. It's all for fucking nothing. We won't avoid the 1.5 C mark, and it might come in 5 years. 2 C would mean basically the end of any semblance of normal, at all, and the collapse of the global south. Forget even 3 degrees, I'd probably already be dead. They won. They fucking won. No revolution in the Imperial Core is possible. Everyone is a chud, or a lib, or a left anticommunist. We can't fucking win. It's over. The world is over.