It's really really weird how the most unifying belief in the American left seems to have become "things are bad and I'm clever for saying so."

Like these days, it seems like in order to be taken seriously in a conversation, you have to believe that billions are going to die from climate collapse, nothing can be done about it, billions will be disabled by COVID, nothing can be done about it, and so on.

Where's the folk who are like, "actually, lets NOT start our political utopia with 'given the removal of the 99.99% of the population by forces beyond our control...'""

Like, I'm sorry, but isn't politics and such there so we can *avoid* getting shitstomped by externalities?

Going from a blind faith in full luxury automated space capitalism, to a blind faith that everyone is going to die except, somehow, you, who will instead be transformed by your hardships into a wonderful leader of men, is not *actually* the rejection of Christian narratives of progress and salvation that it might seem like, on its face.

I just... I hate it.

I was very very early to the "things are going to collapse" game, like, I was there when Greer coined "collapse now avoid the rush" on that forum...

...and it's absolutely wild watching folk who ignored that until it literally cost them a job or flooded their home now going "Hah! I knew it, I mean I argued against it, but I knew it! I was right! And now I'm poor, stressed, and right! Just like a good American should be, which means I'm finally ready to talk politics!"

And so folk who, a few years ago, implicitly believed that no one was going to be wiped out by climate change because Bill Gates was gonna fix it, are now the same folk screaming that Bill Gates is causing it, and like, okay.

Great, change your opinions as new facts come in. That truly is great.

But maybe, use those facts for like, deciding what to DO, not just how GOOD to feel about being RIGHT about people DYING?

----

Personally it jsut sucks, I have put up with, for YEARS, being ostracized, mocked, literally physically beat up, by folk on the left, for saying "Hey, I think this 'hope' thing you cling to? Is actually going to be what gets you to do your most evil shit."

And now here I am, and folk have gone from "hope" to some wicked twisted negative version of it, and I'm *still* the bad guy for saying "maybe don't rely on hope..."

While at the same time, getting treated like an idiot for not accepting the deaths of billions of people as the necessary consequence of my culture growing up and getting enlightened?

---

It's weird, because it's basically treating "solving problems" as a just, spend energy on finding solutions until the problem is solved, and any problem is solveable by spending enough energy on it. (In this case, the "energy" is the populations of the Global South <_<)

While at the same time, acting like spending energy trying to solve problems, rather than just identify them, is a stupid waste of time, like: literally look at how "trying to solve stuff" has become almost a dogwhistle for "evil billionaire".

Someone has an idea? Well, AI and crypto bros have ideas! Smart people only have *fear*

Given that, how the *fuck* are problems going to get solved any way except how energy is being spent to solve them: through death and your acceptance of that death because it's not YOUR death?

----

It's just frustrating watching people with no real idea of the situation put themselves in charge because society gives them the resources to effectively say "no don't do that" to the people around them, and then point to how much worse shit gets for the people around them as evidence that they were so correct and smart to not try.

I get that you're disillusioned on space flights and weird chemistry and change, because the media has been slamming you with stories that everything ever was done by a cabal of pedophiles.

But the thing is, and anyone from outside the mainstream culture will tell you this: That's been true the whole time y'all have been changing shit, and up until quite recently, folk were of the opinion that penicillin and telecommunications were, on the whole, good things.

Now folk seem to thnk that if someone like Epstein even sat in on a meeting where someone asked how to deal with cholera, then we shouldn't move the town well further from the cemetary.

That's so weird! That's like, more hardcore primitivism than some of my anarcho-primitivist friends who literally live in the woods and pull their own teeth.

And it's the belief of people who spend all day earning digital money by moving pixels around on a computer screen!

And they believe it while showing up to places like Fediverse, because at the same time all technology is evil because only rich and famous people ever make technology (hey, can someone tell me the name of whoever made the wheel? or scythe?), it is also the only thing that can ever make things better?

But, of course, radical tech from people who are the bottom-rung of the powerful demographics, that's what makes things better, not supporting the like, many non-White folk who have tried and failed to develop Fediverse apps, but let's keep throwing money and cultural support behind... well, now it's not even a person is it, isn't Mastodon like literally a corporate entity, because the lead dev got tired of being called racist and transphobic for *checks notes* not caring that his technology was allowing people to target and harm folk?

---

Anyway, this post is me being salty about folk who get paid by the people who make things shitty and then use the free time they have because they collaborate with fascism to get on the Web and do their part to convince everyone that everything is bad, no one should try, and the only way things ever get better is if you show up, do what your told, but feel bad about it and complain to your community later.

Because that is not radicalism, it is not helping, it is literally just taking up the space you *say* is for *literally any other type of discussion because you can get that other sort of discussion literally anywhere*.