It is one thing to recognize the system is problematic. It is another to want to meaningfully change it.
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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Very true, but one is a prerequisite for the other.
It's almost as if rhetoric, debates, exposures, truth-telling and media consumption are just empty liberal rituals that can only serve to soothe oneself, and has absolutely no impact on real material life.
These same people: "why would you change the political and economic system? It's the best we have tho"
For some people, this could be what Paulo Freire called a "limit situation" where people notice the structural limits of their freedom and the contradictions. Could lead to a transformation in consciousness, if it's not just passively accepted and offers opportunities for educators.
'People who think they're free in this world just haven't come to the end of their leash yet.'
Michael Parenti
Quick! Someone think of a burger analogy! We might actually steer them away from fascism this time!
Imagine you make a hamburger, season the meat, toast the bread, cut the tomato, and then your boss comes in, eats half of the burger, and then molests untold amounts of children.
Panama papers were released and all you got was a collective shrug. As long as they can fool themselves by saying "bad country probably worse" 
and any real non limp steps to rectify these things will get you closer to bad country. This sacrifice will include children if school shootings haven't shown people already
I'd argue these things build on each other. Nobody should expect people who have been indoctrinated all their live to completely change their views at the first revelation that things aren't working as they were told. But seeing more and more evidence of the depravity of the oligarchs at the same time as their own standard of living continues to erode is forcing people to start questioning things.
The key part here is the material decline affecting people's lived experience. Back when the economy was more or less functional, people would read about stuff like Panama papers and shrug. It didn't affect them personally, there was nothing they could do about it, and they had their own immediate problems to focus on. Now, people are barely making ends meet, jobs are scarce, the cost of living is going up. And these are things people are now experiencing in their daily lives, and seeing the sheer depravity of the elites who rule over them is starting to push people over the edge.
If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.
"American Exceptionalism" is just this concept applied to the world stage
Lyndon B before it's scrubbed
It is exactly the step of "comforting" themselves in thinking that there are those "evil countries" (not isntreal, mind you, that's a misunderstood blessing, my master told me) where it is infinitely worse. I just told my mom about a documentary about China and how it was quite poor (western docu) and she just went: Don't you know that they kill thousands of people every year? Like sure mom, the evangelical Zionist propaganda piece that wants your money to help settlers and foreign agents is sure telling you the truth (she did not want to tell me the source ).
What in the AI?
Even the computers are angry!
the secret third set of rules that even the worst people alive can't avoid playing by, is the fact that they're made of meat
The only vegan meat! Keep that in mind!
Humans are animals bud
WHAT?!
But they can consent to being eaten, which makes it the most ethical form of meat.
Epstein knew this all too well…
Uh, search the files for the keyword “jerky”
I'm embarrassed that I looked into this previously. It's almost offensive to the actual victims that people are trying to make this a thing. If there's one thing to take away from the files that we have, it's that these people are not good at hiding their crimes, they're just good at getting away with them. We don't need to invent atrocities.
If your go-to jerky guy is someone who works at a place called “cannibal and cooks” I’m going to raise an eyebrow.
“Russia has spooky oligarchs unlike our entrepreneurial billionaire business leaders. Also since you like that K-pop stuff please never look up the word ‘Chaebol’” 
This is written like AI...
Because it is AI. It's everywhere now. I've even got replies on hexbear and lemmygrad written by AI. Outsourcing thinking to the machine is the future I guess...
Everyone was told that they sucked at communicating and that we need to add a computer between the people to better translate as if the computer is somehow perfect at it.
Just yet another pointless middleman
It sucks that every time I see an em dash now I'm like hmmmm
That em dash in particular isn't the chatgpt style. But when someone relies heavily on lists of three, that's a red flag for me.
How do you know?
I'm not the person you responded to but when you read enough LLM output certain things just start to smell funny. It's hard to put my finger on it exactly but I am 100% convinced it is at least partially written by AI. The "No X. No Y. No Z." part jumps out at me, as does the "pretend exposure equals injustice" line, and the not-quite-sensical comparison to a spreadsheet, and the em dash at the end, and the structure of the last sentence...
I think learning to recognize AI output today is very similar to this comic: https://xkcd.com/1015/
You are right, it's not quite sensical, that entire sentence or two around the spreadsheet part especially, and just the choices of words, it's like talking to a scammer on email that speaks english well, but not perfect, and not as a first language, the way they use words you can tell it's not someone from the area.
"dumping files, parading names, laying out rape and pedophilia like it's a damn spreadsheet... then...no arrest, no perp walks...
It is off, no one would use those phrases in that manner, I can't believe I didn't spot it at first read, I have to learn to look for it, and suspect everything. now.
Yeah, it's super uncanny because it looks real at first glance, and then you read it again and again and more things are just a little bit off about it, but it's seemingly so close to something a real person could write.