And it only got worse.
(This was posted before Musk bought Twitter and before the full-on invasion of Ukraine)
The date on this post. It definitely checked out.
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026
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I totally didn’t realize
I used to think we might get our star trek future. Now I think we'll be lucky to have a future at all.
You do realize the Star Trek future arose from the ashes of nuclear holocaust, right?
Iirc, things are looking better today than the ST timeline had. They predicted water riots and a breakdown of society in the 2020s and 2030s, leading to a devestating nuclear exchange in the 2050s. Though while we aren't seeing water riots, it doesn't sound that far off.
Buuuuut, ST also predicted that we'd have already seen Kahn take over and the eugenic wars, and that's something that is worse than anything we've actually seen. I think they overestimated how much we could do after the progress seen in sequencing genomes when the original series was being made. They originally put Kahn in the 1990s/2000s.
So one could argue that we're currently in a better timeline than Star Trek.
Strange New Worlds retconned the Eugenics Wars to be an extension of the second US Civil War, which began in the mid-late 2020s and basically escalated over time into WW3 by the 50s. I agree that we're probably in a better timeline than pre-WW3 Star Trek tho.
Yeah, things are going to get worse before it gets better
But there are things worth fighting for
Rage against the dying of the light
Fight for causes that are worth fighting for, fight tooth and nail against the billionaires and corporations
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I told my mom (78) a yesterday about how I was talking to my son (8) about climate change. She said "But he's only 8!" I said "This will affect his entire life, and already is, because it's so hot he can't have recess outside." Politically, she's no Republican, and she hates Trump, but she still struggles to piece together that we know what's causing climate change and how to stop it.
my grandma gave me a book about climate change when I was your kid's age; this was back in the 80s, the book was written in the 70s.
We've long known the cause of climate change and the effects it will have. I forget which oil company did it, but decades ago the did research discovered it was oil companies and decided to ignore and lie about it.
We have known about climate change since the Industrial Revolution. Since coal was causing it, before oil was the norm.
We are all so hypocritical about it. Here we all are, online, burning energy (electricity that is often produced by fossil fuel burning) and contributing to that warming. We buy online. We use AI. We fly for travel. But it is always someone else being the problem. We complain about the billionaires but we are all still sending money their way, daily, sometimes hourly because we are addicted to all their online platforms: shopping, gaming, music, media, sports. It has become so ingrained that I don't know how we get out of it other than a sudden collapse - most likely be someone like Trump or Putin pushing the button. I can see either one of them doing it in their dying breath just to spite the rest of the world.
A few billionaires cause more climate change in a short time than billions of humans cause in a multiple lifetimes.
You use that stuff, most of use only use what is necessary.
Get your priorities straight, your tongue is getting too close to the boot.
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My parents:
"If you just ignore all the bad things, everything's fine!"
What they've been doing all this time and look how great it has been for them!
That silent generation (and anyone born before the 1940s who was alive then) really repressed all the shit that happened to them so thoroughly that there are like 40 years of people that just don't understand suffering. I was watching some of the ww2 propaganda that the Looney Tunes people made and nothing was clearer than the fact that those people were tired of shit happening and knew their luck was about to turn. They didn't proceed to take the necessary steps of explaining to their kids what actually happened to them and how it came to occur.
Someone born in 1900 would have also experienced oligarchy, economic downturns, environmental disasters at scale, and a pandemic (plus 2 fucking world wars) by their 40s
The existence of Farage and Trump as political figures is largely dependent on the ignorance you refer to. It’s so frustrating that the lessons learned through hardship just simply are forgotten.
It is very similar to (moderate) wealth. The first generation earns it and the second generation spends it, ignorant of the effort it took to create it. (Dad and mom started a business and worked 60 hour weeks for 35 years, the kids don’t want the business, and by the end of their life, the kids have spent their inheritance).
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One time when I was working retail, I had an elderly man tell me about how sad he was that the ocean is warming and the corals and dolphins are dying. Then he took a bottle of peach flavored weed gummies out of his pocket and told me how happy he was that it finally got legalized. That guy was cool. I wish more old people were like him.
Good things will still happen. There is good beer, my cat, hanging with my brother, re-watching Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place, the music of Holland Oats, and you know sunsets and that kind of shit.
All of those things can still be loved and enjoyed as we ceaselessly continue to be hurled through this burning hellscape of inescapable doom and decay careening with no way of stopping until it reaches its catastrophic and explosive end guided by its own blind angry hands.
That show has one of my all-time favorite quotes.
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I think the most important thing would be for people to finally realize what and who is primarily responsible, namely, unbridled, unregulated U.S.-style predatory capitalism, which has been completely out of control since the 1980s and has thus produced this new ruling class of excessively greedy, utterly unscrupulous multi-billionaires who have now become so powerful that they can give free rein to their antisocial behavior without any consequences.
These people are the enemies of humanity, and almost everywhere in the world their ploy is the same: mindless pseudo-nationalism that, with its false enemy stereotypes and wretched reactionary ideology, distracts attention from who the real culprits are. It is always these political factions that rail against foreigners and/or other minorities to hide who the real enemies are—the ones for whom they are actually making policy. The prime example of this is MAGA.
Unfortunately, these far-right extremist movements are by no means popular only among older people. In Germany, for example, the AfD—essentially a carbon copy of MAGA—has had a great deal of success among young people, especially young men. This is, of course, also linked to the fact that they are supported by the same billionaires who control the major U.S. social media platforms, such as Musk, Zuckerberg, Ellison, and their ilk.
It’s a mystery to me how anyone can fail to see that the idiotic hatred they spread serves, first and foremost, to mask the fact that these political movements exclusively pursue policies that benefit the super-rich. Nevertheless, these movements—which are often characterized by fascist and authoritarian tendencies—are, unfortunately, extremely successful. As long as they remain so, I have little hope that anything will change.
You forgot to mention that the wealthy are fucking stupid in modern times. Maybe I’m giving the past too much credit, but it felt like the wealthy from the past at least had this idea that they should be building Great things for the future civilization. Not trying to hoard everything in attempt to live forever through uploading their minds, which is exactly what their goals are.
I’m not so sure whether the super-rich and powerful were really that different in the past. I just think that, at least in the West, they were much more tightly regulated back in the 1980s and even the 90s: It doesn’t seem like a coincidence to me that the rollback of government regulation coincides with the steady growth in the wealth of the richest one percent.
So I think these people have always been degenerate and antisocial; it’s just that they—or rather, those who profit from their wealth—have managed to infiltrate the political system to such an extent that nothing can stand in their way today.
To me, the best example of this development is, again, the U.S.: I find it inconceivable that a government as blatantly criminal as the current one would have been possible even in the 1990s. I mean, it’s very obvious that this is nothing but organized crime. The Epstein case, for example, leaves no doubt in my mind—and this is just one absurd scandal among many that, even twenty years ago, would have forced the government to resign, even in the U.S. Compared to these people, Nixon looks like an innocent schoolboy.
I think this is possible only in a failed state—and the reason for its failure lies quite obviously in the actions of the richest one percent, because they have the greatest stake in it and now even openly advocate this goal, for example, with pseudo-intellectual concepts like "Dark Enlightenment," which forms the "theoretical" basis of their politics —the goal is the abolition of democracy and a return to, or rather a pseudo-modernized interpretation of, the class-based society of the Dark Ages.
So in short: I think there can be no doubt that the billionaires are completely degenerate, but I believe their kind has always existed in this way. Today, however, they have so much power that they believe they can get away with anything—which unfortunately is indeed the case—and that is why they no longer even bother to keep up appearances.
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"I do not wish to seem overdramatic but I can only conclude from the information that is available to me as Secretary-General that the Members of the United Nations have perhaps ten years left in which to subordinate their ancient quarrels and launch a global partnership to curb the arms race, to improve the human environment, to defuse the population explosion, and to supply the required momentum to development efforts. If such a global partnership is not forged within the next decade, then I very much fear that the problems I have mentioned will have reached such staggering proportions that they will be beyond our capacity to control."
U Thant, former secretary-general of the UN, in 1969
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This is the messaging they use to keep you from ever trying to improve the future.
Look, every generation thinks the world is going to shit and will end in apocalypse during their lifetime. For the boomers, it was Cold War nukes - for us, it's technonazis and climate change. Before that it was WWII and then WWI and so on and so on back through the ages.
And thus far, every generation has been wrong.
Because within in every generation is a core group of people who get sick of expecting good things to happen, and start making them happen.
The real question is what kind of person are you?
14000 people died due to heat related issues this year in my country alone. How many is it gonna be in 20 years? 500,000 every year? We are completely fucked. If you can't see that you must be blind or willfully ignorant.
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The difference for the cold war was it was an imminent, visible threat, that short term decisions could change, where it is beneficial to all parties to prevent it. Climate change is just about the opposite in every possible way.
There was uncertainty of what might happen in the cold war, but this time we have near certainty that there will be extreme consequences due to climate change, the uncertainty is what other negatives might come with it.
It's a little annoying that staying the reality is "doomerism" when I'm still actively fighting against it, and I think it's a bit harmful to compare it to other situations where we weren't so absolutely certain of the extreme consequences we will face. If the building is on fire you don't say it's not to prevent panic, you want people to know how serious it is.
The nuclear threat never went away.
The climate change problem is also unique in human history, as it takes so long to accumulate that it can "boil us slowly" and take so long to get to the sick-of-it phase that we hit tipping points. Some scientifically minded skeptics (like my Dad) dismiss that with "future geoengineering will fix it," but I've read quite a few papers on that, and they are all horrific.
The technonazis are also eliminating the human chain needed to maintain psycological control. That human chain was the foil of every past regime in history.
I agree with your sentiment. Defeatism is harmful, and irrational.
...But we need to look at these problems with clear eyes, too. There are plausible technical reasons this could actually be different.
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Today may be worse than yesterday, but its better than tomorrow! 😌
Ooof that’s bleak but sadly true.
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if it's the end of the world as you know it, then you better start learning new things fast.
It's okay dear, we'll be dead by then anyway. -- This person's parents.
But yes, I agree with the pedants here unfortunately. I know, I need a shower. This is obvious hyperbole.
Having said that, it's also true that a lot of people are in a position where they would not be shocked at all if things continue to decline over time. Today may be a shitty day, but you'll come to realize that it's one of the best days you'll ever have from here on out. A time when you didn't have to worry about which InterZone you got assigned to today or whether you were going to get bazopped in your Volundo today. You can just enjoy the fresh air outside without having to worry if there's more than 80 PPM Solanaceous compounds in it or if you've got enough glonks to go smocking in the boonzoon. Just sitting with a glowing screen in front of your eyes oblivious to it all is a luxury that in time few will be able to accomplish.
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I disagree. Had a great day out today with some friends and ate the largest halloumi burger I have ever seen.
kinda, none of that seems to matter. sure, there is no future. i have spent years of my life detailing these things, talking to people, trying to get any kind of response.
my conclusion is, as far as i could find out, other people seem to be fucking dumb, in the sense of: completely oblivious to the fact that what makes humans humans is being actively dismantled. people are zombies, dead inside, brainwashed individuals.
i don't think it's like all these zombie movies on TV, i think the zombies are not gonna be violent mobsters who are gonna bite you and such and you defend yourself with a gun. the actual zombies are your neighbours, your coworkers, your family. people who are dead inside, just mind-controlled organisms who try to manipulate you to follow the hive mind. in that way they are "eating your brain". they're all around us. that's the actual death of society.
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Don't worry, we oldies are convinced. I mean do worry, but not about this. We share your realization of our doom.
Clearly we are in the timeline that doesn't survive. The wrong leg of the Trousers of Time. The clues are everywhere, large and small. If the climate disasters and worldwide rise of nazism don't convince you, notice: Harambe is dead, the US has never had a female leader, the authors' name is Berenstain, and speach is spelled "speech."
We can only hope that the fact we haven't convincingly met extraterrestrials indicates the doom is contained to our planet. And even once humanity wipes itself out, and takes with it the creatures we know and love, Terra herself will continue, with new species of life arising to meet the new climactic conditions.
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"... And Lenny Bruce is not afraid..."
Good luck out there everyone.
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