40kmart

[olive. 🍸 @livlaughleave]

remember when they did exactly this and discovered that like less than 5% of people who got welfare were on illegal substances and they realized testing everyone at random was actually costing them??? lmfao!

[Vivian @suchnerve]

learning new things requires the humility to accept that you have more to learn, but we are in a zeitgeist where admitting imperfection is mistakenly perceived as a sign of weakness + stagnation is mistakenly perceived as strength

[Madoc Cairns @MadocCairns]

I am cancelling this man’s prayer out by praying Pope Francis not only recovers but lives until he’s 400 years old and is assumed bodily into heaven like the prophet Enoch

[Madoc Cairns @MadocCairns]

I think the real problem with using the Catholic Church as a “vehicle for conservative political change” is that the contemporary political right is increasingly premised on the rejection of moral principles basic to Christianity

[Jesse Brenneman @Jesse_Brenneman]

It’s very telling that in our technology-obsessed age, tech that could actually seriously improve our lives—like CO2 monitors and upgraded HVAC systems—are ignored by the powers that be. There’s no money to be made in actually improving the world!

[localthunk @LocalThunk]

After an appeal from my publisher, Balatro has been reclassified by PEGI from 18+ to 12+

This is a good step from PEGI - bringing nuance to their ratings criteria that used to be 18+ or nothing. I hope this change will allow developers to create without being unfairly punished

[Stanley Cohen @StanleyCohenLaw]

As the offspring of Russian, Lithuanian and Latvian Jews who, I have been told, is a direct descendent of Moses and Aaron, I would rather lose my life among my cousins in Palestine than live it among the Zionists of Tel Aviv.

[John Harwood @JohnJHarwood]

it's under-appreciated how much conservative figures in politics and media frighten elderly audiences into buying ridiculous products that purport to allow them to survive one apocalypse or another.

scam artists preying on people
who don't know any better

[Hayden @the_transit_guy]

I would absolutely report this as a phishing scam if I got this tbh

[/r/Army @rArmyReddit]

Fix the fucking barracks and address the food and stop this idiotic bullshit on twitter. New fucking accounts just to shitpost?

God damn talk about a waste of time and money.

[40kmart @dearestbogwitch]

@lonelytiefling Excellent arc, no notes

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

The trouble is that there’s no money in the pursuit of the good, and there’s no goodness in the pursuit of money.

If you want to devote your life to doing good, then you will likely need to consign yourself to a life of far less material comfort than if you had not. Teaching. Nursing. Social work. Environmental work. The vocations which are typically sought out by people who feel called to dedicate their lives to helping are also notoriously low-paying for how stressful they can be and how much education is required to get into them. Many important callings like peace activism, environmental activism and community volunteer work don’t pay anything at all.

People who devote themselves to the pursuit of money wind up looking in the exact opposite direction. Think of all the surest ways to get extremely wealthy and you will find exploitation, ecocide and abuse at every turn. Extracting profits from the toil of the working class. Investing in surefire sources of profit like defense contractors and fossil fuels. Offloading the costs of industry onto the ecosystem and the developing world. War profiteering. Scams (both the legal and illegal varieties). Monopolistic practices which crush smaller businesses and lay waste to entire communities. The countless depraved manipulations that go into selling medicine for profit.

The Sackler family amassed a fortune by creating an epidemic of opiate addiction. The Walton family got rich by deliberately destroying the local economies of small towns so that everyone would work and shop at the local Walmart. Elon Musk is a Pentagon contractor who’s helping US intelligence construct a planetary surveillance network. Jeff Bezos got rich with the help of contracts with the CIA and Pentagon, and Amazon’s aggressive campaign to control the underlying infrastructure of the economy is destroying whole industries and creating immense suffering for workers. Larry Ellison’s Oracle is intertwined with the US intelligence cartel and the Israeli genocide machine, as is Peter Theil’s Palantir.

These are just a few examples of how depraved you have to be to amass immense amounts of wealth; beyond that there are all the ugly manipulations people engage in to protect the status quo upon which their wealth is premised. The extremely wealthy buy up narrative control in the form of media, think tanks and Silicon Valley platforms in order to influence public political opinion to their benefit. They influence the government through legalized bribery in the form of campaign contributions and lobbying. Sometimes they even hop right in to the actual government itself like Donald Trump and Elon Musk. All to make sure the unjust systems which allow them to amass wealth while destroying the biosphere and making everyone else poorer, busier, sicker, more exhausted, and more propagandized.

These are the kinds of people who rise to the top in our current system: the absolute worst among us. The more ruthless and underhanded you are willing to be, the easier it is for you to become obscenely wealthy and powerful. Our systems reward and elevate sociopathy, which is why we now find ourselves ruled by sociopaths.

And meanwhile the best among us toil in obscurity, swimming against the current of this sociopathic dystopia their entire lives before dying with nothing to their names but the love that they shared. These should be the people running the world and charting the course for our species, and instead they live and die unknown and unrecognized, because our system does not elevate such beings. Instead it elevates narcissistic plutocrats, vapid celebrity artists, and groveling pundits and politicians.

This is what you get when you have a system in place where mass-scale human behavior is determined by what is profitable instead of by what is right.

Is it working?

[collagen machine broke @chronicallybeee]

it’s just very weird seeing how people have been propagandized to believe the government should exist for any other purpose than to care for the people

[Jake M. Grumbach @JakeMGrumbach]

A contact theory classic: in the places with many immigrants, native born people aren’t mad about immigration. The angry people are those in the places with no immigrants that suddenly get a few immigrants. True pretty much everywhere.

[Outlawriddick @outlawriddick3]

@BlazeBinges

[leaf🍃 @coolfunnygirl65]

frank real shit if you need a kidney hit my line

[Jim LaPorta @JimLaPorta]

If we’re going by World War II standards, should we disband the Space Force and roll back the Air Force into the Army? We also didn’t have a Secretary of Defense in World War II, should we reevaluate?

[hegelian vs predator @reachrachelkahn]

there is exactly one thing grimes could do that would make me forgive her but frankly i don't think she has the conviction

[Richard Hanania @RichardHanania]

DOGE claims to have saved $55 billion.

WSJ is able to find $2.6 billion over a multiyear period.

Only 2% of savings are related to DEI. The rest is stuff like a clinical test for a a drug to help with Alzheimer's.

Now that's some real government efficiency.

[delaniac 🌹🌱 @ChadNotChud]

I will easily take “every device I own and every device the people in my life own can charge off the same cable” over “we might lose out on a millimeter of phone thinness”