(April 4, 2025 at 10:12 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Personally, it's an on again off again relationship with multiple waves of disillusionment and nihilism.

Ain't that the truth.

(April 4, 2025 at 10:24 am)Thumpalumpacus Wrote:

(April 4, 2025 at 10:12 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Personally, it's an on again off again relationship with multiple waves of disillusionment and nihilism.

Ain't that the truth.

Disillusionment yes, nihilism no -- at least from my perspective.  Just because we lose doesn't mean we were wrong.  Facts are still facts.

Facts don't matter. They really don't. You can spend 90 hrs a week for years maintaining parks or restoring wetlands, or netting floating garbage, or growing cheaper healthier environmentally conscious food.... and there's a very good chance that you will experience and reexperience that moment where you don't wonder whether or not your effort has value..you know it doesn't. You can see it with your own eyes, or you've been explicitly told as much by your clients.

That's what the liquor is for.

It seems I picked the wrong decade to quit drinking.

The sad part is that it's not that hard to believe this is real.

(April 4, 2025 at 10:28 am)Alan V Wrote:

(April 4, 2025 at 10:24 am)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: Ain't that the truth.

Disillusionment yes, nihilism no -- at least from my perspective.  Just because we lose doesn't mean we were wrong.  Facts are still facts.

My particular brand of disillusionment and nihilism doesn't come from despairing about the facts of our world, it comes specifically from the fact that many millions of people here in America simply do not care about the facts. Do.Not.Care. It's demoralizing to be outvoted by the uninformed.

I don't even protest from my arm chair I just vaguely moan about stuff.
Realistically I think for anything to make a change it has to be against something that's preventing people's food supply, stopping people from seeing their family, basic needs not being met and not just to a few but to a large part of the population.
I get annoyed at loads of stuff on the news, hearing that we're invading another country, we pledge aid to another country, some child molester got a light prison sentence. I admit as long as I have to go to work and go take my kids out I'm pretty busy and don't have the energy or motivation to go protest.
I genuinely wonder sometimes what would make people really stop and protest. I think most people even if they heard that half of their countries money was being spent on war or on the dictators new palace would put up with it as long as they have a job, can eat and go back to their families.

Anyway they have protests for some pretty wild stuff, in the UK people protested because someone got locked up in Dubai. Everyone knows you can't fuck around in Dubai it's not like doing a BLM style protest in central london is going to make a difference to what happens over there.

No.

I just plot to bring about human extinction...

(April 4, 2025 at 3:04 pm)Jackalope Wrote: It seems I picked the wrong decade to quit drinking.

Seems I chose the wrong life to avoid taking drugs.

(April 4, 2025 at 8:32 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote:

(April 4, 2025 at 10:28 am)Alan V Wrote: Disillusionment yes, nihilism no -- at least from my perspective.  Just because we lose doesn't mean we were wrong.  Facts are still facts.

My particular brand of disillusionment and nihilism doesn't come from despairing about the facts of our world, it comes specifically from the fact that many millions of people here in America simply do not care about the facts. Do.Not.Care. It's demoralizing to be outvoted by the uninformed.

Not only facts, but conventional morality. That’s probably got to be another major part of the problem. It’s not just a disregarding of facts that makes phrases like “the sin of empathy” commonplace or that believing that there are major societal issues that need to be addressed is just “woke ideology” that needs to be opposed at all costs. And it alone doesn’t put a fucking wrestling villain in the Oval Office twice.