Feeling pretty doomy right now, lemme hear some positives! Generally positive, specific to your life, whatever you got. What’s something good going on that makes the future seem a bit brighter for you?
Any day now, Donald Trump will die.
and its entirely possible Mitch Mcconnell is dead!
Some day a mortician gets to glue his lips shut.
i mean… it’s hard to imagine to go any further down after that, but i also don’t see much potential to go up.
Renewables and EVs!
Despite humongous efforts by us politicians and their corporate owners, adoption of renewable energy and electric vehicles is speeding up.
Even further, the basic idea that the poster child for anti-future, Trump, may be doing irreparable harm to the US in many ways but is unintentionally key to speeding up the transition in the rest of the world.
Mango Mussolini has cemented his place in history as the worst ever President, the most corrupt, the most damaging to the country’s position, the most harm to the citizens, the worst so far in running up the debt. However history will also talk about his inadvertent role in other positive changes
Happy Cake Day!
Thank you! I can’t believe I’ve been here three years already!
EVs?
Yay, let’s continue with building cities for cars! Van you imagine, allowing human beings to just gasp walk around? Or *clutches pearls" drive bicycles? Ew! Worst of all: public transportation, oh noes!
I know you probably didn’t mean it like that but can we PLEASE focus on livable cities that are firstly designed for people, and lastly for cars where there isn’t another choice?
I so fucking miss the Netherlands, you can cycle everywhere, you can walk everywhere and sure, cars can get around where needed (still way too much, but at least there is some balance)
Design livable cities with goog cycling infrastructure and good public transportation and you can get rid of most cars in most cities
“Its not perfect! No improvement until it’s pefect! No harm reduction unless it’s perfect!”
This is how one ends up making no progress.
But there is no silver bullet that cures everything, or we can’t wait for utopia before we begin, or don’t let perfection be the enemy of better. I would also prefer cities designed around people: I live in Boston because it’s close to best you can get in the us. I am all for making most cars obsolete, but until then, we need to do better
The reality is the Netherlands still has cars and there always will be a need for at least some cars. The other reality is that we can switch to EVs in a handful of years, significantly reducing our impact on the environment. And the most unfortunate reality is redesigning cities is a continuous process over many decades: we can’t just do nothing until then
My point was mango Mussolini accidentally speeding up the global shift toward electrification and EVs, despite grasping for the opposite. However he has had no positive effect on transit or walkability, even accidentslly
The global population is united in revulsion at the genocide and nevetending war carried out by Israel, even if the politicians are owned. That gives me hope that justice will prevail.
Cosmically, we’re nothing. Like, not even insignificant. None of this shit really matters. Yes, nihilism, but we can’t even comprehend how little we matter in the scale of the cosmos. Mote of dust and all that. Use your time wisely.
This is my hopefull thing too. It comforts me knowing we can only fuck up so much as a species, and there’s a whole universe out there that we’re not part of.
I like imagining other the life out there doing its thing and maybe it fucks up too, maybe it doesn’t.
And the sheer scale of our universe means that it’s very unlikely that any of these other life forms, each in their respective metaphorical corners of our play pen, can impact each other.
So even though we’ve fucked our sphere of influence beyond any and all salvation bar deux ex machina, it doesn’t mean we’re taking the whole experiment with us when we go.
On a long enough timescale humanity will almost certainly go extinct, ending human suffering and the threat of human violence against any peace loving intelligent species in the cosmos.
I take joy imagining a slightly more balanced universe once our ignorant, violent species isn’t part of it anymore.
User name checks out.
Twice a week I play disc golf with some good friends. We get some good walking in, support each other when someone makes a great shot, joke around, insult as necessary. And it’s all free.
Afterward we get a bite to eat, then go to our favorite coffee shop for some dessert. Then sometimes I head to my sister’s house to go for a swim to finish things off. It’s truly wonderful.
Disc golf slaps I love that for you
Thanks, mate!
I saw a child hug and comfort another after they tripped and fell. Pretty cute. The kids are alright.
My neighbour got back from hospital and is up and about again. Health declining isn’t fun, but we’ll have several more weeks of summer to sit out and chat in the sun.
When I see what wonders NASA does (with their ever shrinking budget), it gives me hope and makes me want to stay alive to be there for their new discoveries and breakthroughs.
Also another thing is this… the Fediverse and the broader FOSS community, we (self insert, lol) do things for the community bec we want to help, not because we are paid to or forced to, we try to make the world we live in a better place by fighting big tech and monopolies, it is truly fascinating to think about.
Imperialism and neocolonialism are gradually dying, while the global south and socialist countries are rising. The old world is dying and the new is struggling to be born, but the process is moving forward.
Yea I see it too
Personally, I’m terrified that the massive, oligarch-sponsored, far-right propaganda machine that dominates US social media and television viewership, in fact, has the United States public by the balls, and is going to have unassailable influence on elections in the US from now on.
(And if the technology, borrowing techniques from marketing and industrial psychology, is not dominating the will of the lumpenproletariat already, it’s still being developed and eventually will.)
However, there are a lot of people whose opinions I respect, including historians like Heather Cox Richardson and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie (who is well studied in US history) who are optimistic about the future of the United States, and even think we can seize the country back from the oligarchy and restore free and fair elections in short order. (Albeit, for now, we’ll still be stuck with the two-party system we have. It’ll take a revolution of the people to change that.)
Meanwhile, Daniella Mestyanek Young aka Knitting Cult Lady is an experts on cults, including authoritarian cults of personality, and was an intelligence officer for the US Army, and according to her, cults of personality that are focused on a single person rarely survive the demise of the cult leader. They can if they create a doctrine of transition to a new leader (see North Korea) or from CoP to a cult of idea, but without preparation by the charismatic leader, they collapse.
And Young seems to know what she’s talking about.
She observes that Trump is entirely not cooperative about facilitating a transition, even to the point of publicly humiliating his natural heirs (that is J D Vance and Marco Rubio). It seems even that Trump may want MAGA and the Republican party to collapse once he is gone.
Work will still need to be done after Trump dies (or faces accountability and is imprisoned) and/or SCOTUS is banished like a demon possessing a child and free and fair elections are restored. We’ll need to confront what happened here in the United States, that we’ve been under the yoke of the ultra-wealthy, and of big conglomerate corporations, and need to ironclad our election processes and our regulatory bodies so that they cannot be subverted or captured.
Can we do this? I don’t know. Historically, the US has failed to follow through every step of the way, from quitting reconstruction to failing to try Nixon after Watergate to failing to address mistreatment of blacks, of the First Nations folk, of children, of immigrants, of every group we’ve exploited for labor and suppressed. But this time, people can get their information from the internet rather than merely through school curricula and published news. Maybe there will be enough voices to pressure change.
There are billions more people that have access to water and electricity compared to 40 years ago. Crime is down across the board worldwide and so was war until just recently.
On a personal note, after renting for thirty years I finally bought a house where my two adult daughters and their partners live. We are all currently in decent health , we all get along, and I just got my second grandchild. The first baby boy in our family which is nice because my son past away 9 months old, stillbirth.
I do the online dating thing. I live in the bible belt, so there’s lots of Conservatives, lots of Christians, & of course often both. It used to be super-rare to see “No MAGA” in a woman’s dating profile, simply because there aren’t that many liberals around. But maybe a year or so ago it started showing up on moderate profiles. Then on Christian profiles. Now I’m even seeing “No MAGA” on Conservative + Christian profiles. It’s one of the most common phrases I see, right up there with ‘dog-mom’, ‘passport stamps’ and ‘no hookups’. It’s like America is finally realizing what a scam MAGA has been.
every time i come home, it two cats are waiting at the door.
first they try to sneak out of the flat, afterwards they brush around and roll on the floor, demanding belly scratches.
yeah, i think as well they got the wrong software ;)
When you talk to people IRL outside of work, some of them are pretty cool and helpful for no other reason than because they want to be.
I’ve lost 80 pounds in the last 18-ish months! I still have a long way to go, but 80 is further than I ever thought I’d get.
Unrelated, but if you want a little bit of positivity each week, I highly recommend the We’re Here newsletter. It’s a nice Friday pick-me-up from Hank and John Green (they’re the Crash Course guys, if you’ve ever seen a Crash Vourse video) that focuses on positive news that often gets overlooked for one reason or another.
Congrats!!
