User:Viriditas
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"Imagine if the world was designed to help people rather than exploit them."
According to most calculations, if the world's wealth was evenly distributed, the average person could live a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle. As of 2026, there are approximately 3,400 billionaires worldwide. Should public policy protect the wealth and power of a few thousand people, or improve the living standards and opportunities of the 8.3 billion people who call this planet their home?
"前人栽树, 后人乘凉"
"When the bad guys win, it's always because they are enabled by the weakness and wishful thinking of people in a position to stop them."
"I can't believe what you say because I see what you do."
Conservatives flooded my social media feeds after Dolly Parton's death, telling me how much they loved her. Apparently, they love her so much that they defunded her reading programs in several red states.
"Can we all get along?"
I am a lonely fan of the chamber cinema style, which is either ignored in the literature entirely or used derisively and pejoratively ("stagey"). Exponents of the dramatic form include Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, Sidney Lumet, Rod Serling, Gene Roddenberry, Bryan Singer, Quentin Tarantino, Tommy Lee Jones, Richard Schenkman, Jeffrey St. Jules, and many others. For a related concept, see Kammerspielfilm.
12 Angry Men (1957)[1954] is still the greatest chamber film ever made.
Don't Look Up (2021) still remains one of my favorite comedies of all time, with an underappreciated score by Nicholas Britell.
"Fewer than half of all [US] adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story...[while]...gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: [In 2025], 57 percent of Americans placed a bet."
"Researchers have found evidence that the rise of easy access to gambling has pushed people into greater debt, been linked to violence, and increased strain on financially vulnerable households."
"Studies have shown that reading fiction allows people to connect with characters, building qualities like empathy."
 | This user was gifted a drawing by Anna Frodesiak. |
Rabbit hole of the week: I thought I was the only one, but there are other people who also believe that the sound effects in the film Contact (1997) sound remarkably similar to a washing machine's rinse cycle
"Heartwarming" headline parodies are both endlessly funny and yet unsettling. This mixture of humor and tragedy is a scathing indictment of the mainstream media ecosystem that refuses to indict the orphan-crushing machine manufacturing industry that gave us the dystopia in the first place. This is the kind of enlightened centrism that gives journalism a bad reputation.
People who inspire me: Jacqueline Stroud (made me care deeply about earthworms); Thomas Pynchon (made me laugh); Claude Debussy (made me see music, not just hear it)
"It's going to happen" is an illusion; it HAS happened."
Note: I have solved the missing sock problem. Unfortunately, the solution is different for each person.
"The two party system in the U.S. is not left or right, it's extreme right and center right."
"Most media is not right or left. It's corporate. With corporate priorities and limitations...it's hard to trust most of the 'information' we get" (Kornbluth 2011)
Centrists and moderates preserve an unjust status quo when they prioritize stability and compromise over confronting injustice. They ask us to meet them halfway, yet with every step we take toward them, they take another step back, defenestrating those naive enough to step through the Overton window. This is how liberals and Democrats became Republican-lite, and it's why the party must return to its New Deal aspirations.
I am currently exploring the perceptual cognitive shift of umweltkomplexitätsreduktion.
"Suppose They Gave a War and No One Came". Don't support the dominator culture by willingly consenting to it. The resistance begins when you wake up and your feet touch the floor.
My fave Philip Slater quote: "Our economy is based on spending billions to persuade people that happiness is buying things, and then insisting that the only way to have a viable economy is to make things for people to buy so they'll have jobs and get enough money to buy things."
The legacy media in a nutshell: "HIPPIES CLASH WITH POLICE," The New York Times headline claimed; it ran over a story by a former police commissioner. Only in the last few paragraphs did the reporter suggest that the police had provoked the incident. "What could we write?" he explained to a reporter from The East Village Other. "The hippies did clash with the police. We couldn't say the police attacked them. I did the best I could." (Kornbluth 1968)
Defunding the humanities was the greatest trick the devil the tech industry ever played on the American people. Once you forget the purpose of democracy, the importance of compassion and empathy, you end up with a fascist dystopia. Well played.
Vertical video is the ultimate example of modern brain rot. Social media companies actually convinced people that this is ideal instead of just designing their sites to display horizontal video and designing smartphones to shoot horizontally automatically. People will look back on this in the future and shake their heads.
Culture-bound syndromes are everywhere once you go look for them. They are probably one of the most fascinating aspects of psychological anthropology. Currently, tens of millions of Americans have experienced a form of collective madness, part mass psychogenic illness and part moral panic. The Brainwashing of My Dad (2015) frames this as "brainwashing", but it's really a mind virus. If you're not protected from it, you can get really sick.
Superman was originally created as an antifascist who protected the weak and powerless and fought the corrupt and powerful.
The call is coming from inside the house.
"Your people voted for Trump three times and elected him twice. I'm sorry, but you are not ready to join the United Federation of Planets. Please apply again in 250 years time."
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool."
"Take only memories and leave only footprints."
Leave the place better than you found it, and no sign of yourself.
The oldest question: Is the "self" the thing having the experience, or is the self itself something the mind constructs as part of the experience?
I was never here.