Martijn Jongens 🇪🇺🇳🇱

I prefer friendly discussions, with facts and stuff. You might be wrong, I might be wrong. Hope to find agreement in discussions. Value EQ over IQ.

[Martijn Jongens 🇪🇺🇳🇱 @wmjongens]

@MastrXYZ No laughs from me, I understand completely. Mine is turning 15 in a week and the idea of her unavoidable end coming closer is just unbearable. Had a lot of cats in my life, but this one is something else.

Hopefully yours will recover and stay a little longer…

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

The human species has essentially been transformed into a giant profit-generating machine for corporations.

Under capitalism, humanity exists to serve the interests of the corporation. We are all livestock; beasts of burden used to carry margin expansion forward from quarterly statement to quarterly statement. Enjoyment of life has no value other than the extent to which it can be used to increase the net worth of the shareholders.

That’s why everyone’s so unhappy. We’re not living with purpose. We’re not working together to build a better world and a better future, we’re just pulling levers to turn gears to make the arrow line go up on the graph in the conference room. It’s a hollow, pointless way for people to live.

It makes our whole culture vapid and soulless.

Music is made to be as profitable as possible, which means giving it the broadest possible appeal using formulaic song structure calculated to cause a chemical response in the largest number of human brains.

Movies are designed to draw the largest possible box office revenue at the lowest possible risk to studios and investors, often by just rehashing a movie that’s already proven successful in the past or by slapping together a story about an IP with pre-existing mass appeal.

Food is made to be fast and addictive rather than nourishing.

Healthy human connection has been commodified as social media intertwines with friendships and dating apps insert themselves into the development of romantic relationships.

Human sexuality is being warped and twisted as internet porn normalizes violence and degradation for the maximum number of clicks.

Attention and engagement have been monetized, creating an information ecosystem dominated by conflict and gossip designed to appeal to our baser instincts.

Advertisement is injected into every possible corner of our waking sensory experience, with any available space where the eye might rest or the ear might listen being flooded with psychological manipulation compelling us to consume. They’ll start running commercials in our dreams the instant they have the technology to do so.

You spend eight hours at the office working to generate corporate profits, then you come home and consume products to profit other corporations. You need your beer and snacks to unwind, your streaming services and social media to distract your mind from the stress of it all, your online clothing purchase to try to feel good about yourself, and your prescription drugs to get to sleep at night. People live their entire lives like this.

And that’s those of us who are lucky enough to be living in the global north. In the global south you get wage slavery and exploitation with far more toil, far less relaxation time, and no cheap products made by impoverished workers on other continents with which to comfort yourself.

All of humanity has been roped into this mess. And for what? To make the numbers in some bank accounts increase. To get some green arrows pointing upward on the stock exchange. To enable a few billionaires to buy islands and elections.

All while destroying the biosphere we all depend on for survival.

This, we are told, is the best possible system we could possibly be living under.

I personally do not believe this is true. I personally believe we can have better. Those who benefit from this current arrangement are going to assure us it’s impossible and do everything they can to stop us from changing it, but we do have the means to reclaim the wealth, dignity and happiness that they have stolen from us.

They built this whole machine on our backs. All we need to do is stand up.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

One reason AI is being pushed so hard is because it's the last "humanity can capitalism its way out of all its problems" narrative that has yet to be fully discredited. The idea is that if we can just create AI gods and let them come up with the effective-yet-profitable innovative technological solutions to our various existential crises that our own fleshy brains have so far failed to produce, then we don't need to dismantle the socioeconomic system we built that is destroying our biosphere and driving us to our doom.

Embedded in this logic is the same baseless assumption that has been plaguing us this entire time: that there are effective-yet-profitable solutions to be found. That we can simply let the free market deliver us desirable products that will both (A) cause us to stop cannibalizing our ecosystem and (B) create billionaires and trillionaires. Capitalism hasn't provided any innovations that have allowed us to consume our way out of our problems thus far, but because we've got these complex new AI technologies now, we can allow ourselves to move this entirely faith-based assumption into the purview of our new gods.

But that's just it: it's an assumption based on blind faith. There is no reason to believe we'll ever come up with technologies that are conducive to human and environmental thriving which also generate shareholder profits. Generally profits are generated by producing and consuming more products, which is exactly what has gotten us into this mess in the first place.

What this means is that capitalism has no ability to solve the problems we're coming up against as a species. There is no way to compete and consume our way out of the hole we dug through competition and consuming.

We need new systems. Human behavior cannot continue to be driven by competition and the pursuit of profit. We need to move into collaboration with each other and with our biosphere if we are to survive into the future as a species, and we will be unable to do this if we are excluding all possible solutions that don't generate revenue for the capitalist class.

AI is for many people just a psychological box that allows us to avoid facing this uncomfortable truth, because as Mark Fisher said, “It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” It's easier to imagine billionaire tech companies creating AI gods who will serve us up magical solutions to our urgent existential dilemmas which also facilitate continued economic growth than it is to imagine moving into collaboration-based systems where human behavior isn't driven by the pursuit of profit.

But that's just a sign of how insane our species has become. It's a symptom of our collective madness.

We need to wake up. We need to get real. It's adaptation or extinction time for us as a species, and that fork in the road is approaching very quickly.

[Chris Gloninger, CCM, CBM @ChrisGloninger]

Bjorn does this every anniversary: grab Gore's two most over-aggressive lines, wave them around, and pretend the thesis collapsed.

The thesis was "CO₂ warms the planet and it gets worse from here." Twenty years on, the 11 hottest years ever recorded are the last 11. 2024 was the first calendar year past 1.5°C. Arctic ice, glacier loss, ocean heat: all tracking right where the science said, some of it faster. Even your own side's reviewers admit Gore got the core right.

The "panic vs. innovation" line is the tell. The innovation actually cutting emissions - solar and wind, now the cheapest electricity in human history, undercutting new coal and gas - is the exact thing you spent two decades calling a costly waste. You're doing a victory lap for the win you stood in front of.

And "disaster deaths fell" isn't the flex you think it is. Death rates dropped because we built seawalls and warning systems - adaptation, the expensive kind.

[Martijn Jongens 🇪🇺🇳🇱 @wmjongens]

@AbakpaJob The Korowai were better hosts because they cared about proving non-human meat options to their guests but the same hospitality was not extended by regular meat eaters (to serve human meat options).

[Peter Jansen @BurgerMetNuance]

Er gebeurt iets onder onze ogen. Geen coup, geen tanks, geen noodtoestand. Maar een langzame machtsgreep via schermen, servers, satellieten, AI, drones en geld. Omdat het “innovatie” heet, kijken we te laat op. 1/12

[Martijn Jongens 🇪🇺🇳🇱 @wmjongens]

@LExpeditionary My guess is that he’s followed by people who have a better developed critical thinking skill, who know the difference between antisemitism and justified criticism against a government that commits war crimes.

[Martijn Jongens 🇪🇺🇳🇱 @wmjongens]

@FGroeliker @Boreout De teksten uit het oude testament lijken mij helemaal niet geen probleem. Daar hebben we tegenwoordig juist een scherp oordeel over, zelfs wetgeving tegen; stenigen, offeren, wraakzucht, slavernij… allemaal zaken waarop we beperkingen hebben gelegd. En dat lijkt mij goed.

[Martijn Jongens 🇪🇺🇳🇱 @wmjongens]

@FGroeliker @Boreout Denk je niet dat de volledige vrijheid van het uiten van extreme meningen, op een platform waar deze actief bij elkaar komen, juist escalatie op escalatie veroorzaakt, waardoor emotie steeds meer wint van verstand?

[Martijn Jongens 🇪🇺🇳🇱 @wmjongens]

@Cantrushit I think they truly are the hard men that created soft times.

However, as we currently see happening in climate, wellbeing, pollution, politics, those hard men caused gigantic problems.

The whole capitalist cycle of hard time; hard men; soft time; soft men is bad as a whole.

[Martijn Jongens 🇪🇺🇳🇱 @wmjongens]

@philip_ciwf How the fuck does this still exist??

[Anonymous @YourAnonNews]

Ashley St. Clair: "Stephen Miller is just a loser.... all MAGA are losers... what bonds MAGA together is hate and that they weren't cool in high school. They're all so insecure."
Seriously. Stop voting for these racist losers.

[Martijn Jongens 🇪🇺🇳🇱 @wmjongens]

@Onair58 @PalestineCultu1 Duidelijk. Dan ontvolg ik, met alle respect.

[Martijn Jongens 🇪🇺🇳🇱 @wmjongens]

@Onair58 @PalestineCultu1 Er is geen enkele noodzaak om gefrabriceerde content te gebruiken om een punt te maken. Ik sta aan dezelfde kant als jij als het gaat om de ellende die de Gazanen ondergaan. Misschien is het niet de beste aanpak om mensen die proberen de waarheid helder te houden, sneu te noemen.

[ًً @kelevitch]

Democracy only spread because it was the best system for producing compliant trading partners.
A democracy has elections. Elections require parties. Parties require financing. Financing requires capital. Capital has interests. So by design, every democracy in the world has a built-in mechanism that ensures the people with money have disproportionate access to the people with power.

You don’t need to bribe a dictator and hope he stays in power. In a democracy, you just fund both candidates and own the outcome regardless.
This is why US spent the Cold War toppling democracies that elected the wrong people Mossadegh in Iran, Allende in Chile, Lumumba in Congo and replacing them with dictators who were more “stable.” Stable meaning: predictable to capital.

The genius of it is the aesthetics. Democracy looks like self-determination. It has flags and anthems and moving inauguration speeches. People will die for it. But the operating system underneath is remarkably friendly to concentrated wealth arguably more so than overt authoritarianism, which at least makes the power visible.

The most honest political scientists will tell you: what actually spread after 1989 was markets. Democracy was the packaging.
And the packaging worked so well that the people inside it genuinely believe they’re free which is the final, most elegant feature of the system.
A cage you can’t see is the strongest cage ever built.

[Martijn Jongens 🇪🇺🇳🇱 @wmjongens]

@BuyDand @sibaburck We all grew up in a society that projects meat eating as a normality. No infant can be expected to become a vegetarian, that’s something that happens when your critical thinking develops.

And as that happens, as you become aware of things, you get the choice to change.

[Justin Bonomo 🇵🇸 @JustinBonomo]

I want non-Jews to understand how monumental this shift as.

As Jews we are raised with endless propaganda about how great Israel is. It’s part of our prayers, our family gatherings, our education, our extra curricular activities, even our fraternities.

It’s everywhere, and there’s never another side presented. I practically never even heard the word Palestinian growing up. There was no asterisk next to how great Israel was. No war crimes to atone for. No ethnic cleansing, no open air prison, no list of massacres - just endless propaganda. And free paid trips to Israel from billionaires to try to convince us to move there.

And that’s not to even mention the generic American propaganda we all face daily.

So it’s absolutely staggering, that in the face of that endless, relentless propaganda, 44% of young American Jews favor the establishment of one non-religious state in Israel/occupied Palestine.

Many of us are pissed that we’ve been lied to. We’ve done the research and learned the history about how truly Hitlerian Israel’s history is.

This isn’t something that just happens by accident. You don’t have such large percentages of people mistakenly turning against their families, cultures, and traditions due to misinformation or misunderstandings. This kind of shift can only happen when people are exposed to the absolute worst horrors on the planet that their people have committed.

The human psyche can justify or use cognitive dissonance for almost anything.

But the evils from Israel have gone too far for far too long.

Nobody with a conscience who is educated about what Israel has done for the past hundred years can come to a conclusion other than, “Israel in its current form should simply not exist.”

[Martijn Jongens 🇪🇺🇳🇱 @wmjongens]

@ricky_clay @Natalaney @chiky_handlr Sorry to break it to you, but I’m afraid you are the snowflake…

[Martijn Jongens 🇪🇺🇳🇱 @wmjongens]

@MAGAMAHACindy These people were also very rude towards some people with other viewpoints… sad how those leftists radicalize.