And as someone who struggled with depression, I also wanted to offer the counterpoint that when you are experiencing a depressive episode, you aren’t necessarily going to be receptive to people coming around your bedside and giving flowers and support. It’s a mental state that rejects happiness or even comfort, so while I get the idea behind the comic, it’s over-simplified and not really prescribing anything. We don’t treat physical and mental illness the same, nor should we.

We should understand that they’re both equally real conditions that people suffer from, and need help in treating, but we need to stop giving this ammunition to unwell brains that their depression is part of a narrative where people aren’t going to help you or support you.

People broadly are bad at supporting and helping with mental OR physical conditions, as you outlined. Every time I’ve ever been ill, physical or mental, I’ve had to spend all my time reassuring others and taking care of the emotional states of those worried. This is how it usually goes, when we get sick or injured, we are not going to get helped by others, and managing the way others feel on top of being unwell is just part of the course, we don’t get a relief or break. We won’t get satisfaction no matter what happens, we have to just hunker down and get through it without expectation in others.

It actually helps their cause that there is a new study now - according to their disinformation machine this is just another “opinion” and proves their point.

KGB manuals written decades ago in the Cold War outline this tactic for destabilizing nations and getting populations to stop holding their government accountable, it’s the relatively simple process of just amplifying every argument, every side of every social issue, every scandal and every news story from the most extreme framing and to make sure you’re turning even the most reasonable idea into two extreme sides screaming nonsense at each other.

And for average, poorly educated, incurious people, a scientific argument is as nonsensical as a rambling spiel about raw milk and essential oils. If you don’t know how cells and chemistry work on even the most basic level, you have no framework to question if it makes sense putting red meat at the top of a new food pyramid. You just see arguments that you don’t understand both for and against it.

Since most people now get curated, atomized perspectives of the world, they don’t have a baseline to refer to for truth, so this effect has been distilled and enhanced with the internet and algorithms. Many people just read stories with competing, extremist language all day and tune the fuck out. They don’t know who or what to trust anymore, because everyone is shrieking that everyone else is lying, so they default to just whatever their mainstream media reporters tell them and stop feeling involved or connected at all. This is how state-media takes over a nation and cements the rule of the manipulative ruling-class.

how does Jesus getting crucified forgive my sins? Is it some sort of ancient Christian bar bet?

Speaking as someone literally brought up in a cult like environment, it’s just one of the many nonsense word-salad doctrines that people live by when those people were never able to separate their feelings from their world. IE: there is a segment of the population who do not have a distinction between an outside world, separate from their feelings about it.

This is a reflection of how the brain works at a most basic level. It’s not a logic tool for reasoning out problems, not by default at least. It’s default instruction state is to assemble experiences and associations to write a story to explain how you feel, and it doesn’t actually have objective understanding about the world, so those stories do not need to make sense.

When you really, truly internalize and digest this fact, you will understand so much about yourself and others. You can overcome some depressive episodes and know how to make people like you, how to manage addiction and unhealthy behavior and how to avoid being manipulated by others, and so much more. It’s vastly important we understand this about our brains.

You have to actually train your brain to actually analyze and understand the world around you in a way that shows you how you and the world relate to each other. Most people don’t do this work, but brains are good enough at taking advantage of your environment that they can still get through life… but it leaves a lot of room for huge errors in reasoning. In fact, it’s not conscious reasoning at all, it’s story-building followed by total acceptance of this story without question because you think it’s you reasoning, but it’s just how your brain weaves narratives in your mind.

So for the people who never learned this distinction, they just feel a thing, and then either let their brains assemble a story to explain it, or they latch onto someone else’s supplied story. This is how people are manipulated on mass scales.

“Jesus died for your sins” makes no logical sense, but it’s not meant to, it’s meant to make you feel like something is being done about the thing you worry most about, if you’re going to see your loved ones again in heaven. That’s a paralyzing fear for almost every human who’s ever lived. Our awareness of death has opened a huge vulnerability in our reasoning skills and caused us more death and harm than if we didn’t worry about it so much.

Once you have a McGuffin that makes you feel protected from this thing you fear most, you are more likely to reinforce and build further narratives around this idea to protect it. To not protect it, to dismantle it and try to figure it out is literally painful to many people, because it invites in the question… What if you’re wrong?" and even approaching that question makes people who have never processed these emotions absolutely fall apart.

edit: I want to add one thing, that the more you think about the really hard thing, your inevitable end, it becomes easier to accept and make peace with. Especially as you get older and more aware of your own limitations and realize you’re kinda stuck on rails in this life. There is no bigger story or experience you will miss out on.

I already said I agree with the assertions, I just don’t agree with the bleak, hopeless, roll-over-and-expose-belly-for-master resignation. We’ve struggled through worst in the past, and generally if you look at all metrics, our quality of life and freedom has only increased over the last several centuries and most unrest and destabilization are just the pendulum swinging, but that pendulum doesn’t wind down, history shows it gradually moves forward.

We still owe it to the people who will come after us to do all we can, we still can see change in our lifetimes towards better outcomes we can still help push the needle, we can see grand outcomes when we actually try, we can still involve ourselves to the extent of our ability and comfort, and/or we can have individually great experiences and set aside what media shoves in your face all day, learn to diet and just focus on the problems for a certain amount of time every day.

Go socialize, meet people, create love and safety around yourself with others and see sights in the world while you can.

Yes, shit is going to get bad, maybe worse than anything we’ve seen so far. But the mountain of skulls we live on to have gotten to this next struggle shouldn’t be wasted.

There should be a word, and I’m sure it exists in German or something, for when you agree with someone’s assertions but simultaneously know for a fact they’re just doomer-venting and sound like an edgy teen trying to describe to their mom why they wear black.

It’s fantastic for local economies. It’s HORRIBLE for big capital though.

The average American drives up to 3000 miles a year just commuting back and forth to and from work. That’s tires and gasoline and oil changes and engine work. It’s also new cars every few years so the vehicle stays reliable. It’s a massive chunk of corporate revenue.

And that worker also needs to eat out, usually settling on fast food, that worker also needs work clothes and supplies, and the offices they work in require massive investment in cleaning, upkeep, computer networking, air conditioning, and so on.

Most of this is done through major corporate companies and that money goes overseas or into huge mega-companies which send it all to some central financial institution that doesn’t pay taxes.

Meanwhile, in Work From home environments, you save money and put that money back into your immediate surroundings, which are usually nearby stores. You drive less, and less cars on the road mean less pollution, less wear on the roads and less expenditures from the state. Lower insurance premiums with less driving, and people are generally healthier because they have more time to do things like daily walks before the sun goes down, or cook healthier meals from local markets, leading to healthier people less medical expenses in the long run.

do we literally have to wait for the next administration to do anything with all the evidence being recorded right now?

Honestly, it may even be longer. But the tide will shift.

America has had some dark periods in the past that historians can speak to with more authority, but this might be the biggest one that every single citizen is witness to and involved with, so the stakes are a lot higher, whatever happens here can lead to widescale public instability. It’s not sustainable, so one way or another it will break.

But there are enough clowns desperately clinging to their circus right now that even after the big orange one kicks it, which could happen any moment, it’s going to a shit-show of power-struggling and back-stabbing and maligned plans. It could take a decade to see the US start to stabilize.

(This is best case of course, it’s also possible that this is it, and the US is going to be the Russia of the Americas, a rusting, closed-down, run-down hermit nation run by organized crime, embargoed and sanctioned and only able to sell its own dwindling natural resources, and old weapons stockpile to rogue nations and rebel groups who can afford antique F23’s and ancient M1 tanks.)

No you’re right, it’s a horrible term that was spawned by the very people who wanted to sabotage our better world. The people who introduced the idea that there were “sides” in a “gender war” are particularly likely to be written about in our granddroid’s textbooks as the scourge of our world.

We are wired to be social, to bond with others and mate and raise families and babies and love our little communities. It’s not that hard it’s just that we’ve allowed it to become so toxic and complicated because we also have over-developed internal simulators that constantly run simulations of the worst outcomes, and it makes us nervous about how others view us. Bad people have leveraged this fact to make us all hate each other and ourselves.

I know deeply how infuriating this was to watch, and I’m pretty sure that as bad as it feels now… things will get worse before they get better, and then when they get better a lot of serious shit is going to happen to every masked asshole in that video.

Either the system will rebound and we will have justice, or the system will NOT rebound and we will go get our justice.

I’d hate to die alone bleeding out on my steering wheel because of a fat, stupid, mentally deficient ICE agent who hates women decided I would be a stand-in for his mother that day.

It’s going to start any minute, at least in terms of ads and stunts and attention-seeking social media things. But as we get closer to mid-year we’ll see a lot more chaos and carnival stunts, culminating in November when it will be full on “raw dogging a warp jump with no navigator” level of chaos and bullshit to wade through every day.

I don’t know who’s running, but I know how i’m voting. With a few exceptions, all incumbents must go. Every last rotten piece of ancient, withering meat who hasn’t made any attempt at reform or pushback is out on my ballot, and this should be our goddamn ANTHEM.

We do have a better choice, and that’s more grassroots, state and local involvement. The Democrat party is just a container, we can pour out the contents and refill it with something that hasn’t gone bad.

But in order to do so, we need to destroy what’s holding the contents inside, which is years of state power and representation absolutely tuning the fuck out of anything that isn’t the 4-year WWE spectacle and circus. Imagine if we got involved enough that we could repeat what happened in New York in every major city, every governor seat, every state congressperson or senator.

We would kick the goddamn legs out from under this entire rotten system without having to throw a single molotov cocktail. But this approach requires getting a lot of people with the attention-spans of retriever puppies to learn some boring shit and actually leave the computer and socialize.

It’s time to dismantle the Democrat party.

Forgive me but I do have some difficulty with your English, but if this is the point you are making:

Some could says we want reforms police, and use a different word. We do not. Institution reproduce themselves through the people in it. Even the most social advance organization for “law enforcement” with former cops in it will go wrong.

Then I will say, just because we are likely to make the same mistakes over and over is not an excuse to stop doing a thing if it helps, and I cannot subscribe to the belief that just because a thing CAN go wrong that it necessarily MUST go wrong. We can manage our world better with better policies and social structures, to abandon something just because it’s been misused is like not using dinner knives anymore because they’re used for stabbings.

Either we abandon modernity or we overhaul our system for maintaining and preserving it. I would respect the anarchist position more if it said that we need to return to a more primitive lifestyle. I would still think it’s dumb, but I would respect it more.

We hate our police, but we would hate the alternative more. Those two facts can exist side-by-side without conflict, it’s called nuance. I want a shining, gleaming future where people leave their doors unlocked, but we don’t get there with police, and we also don’t get there without police. We need new structures for dealing with evil, and we need to do a lot better in admitting and recognizing that evil is real and it WILL take advantage of whatever utopian visions you have. It just will.

I would love to live in such a simple universe. Like, where people are desperately trying to get the prize itself, like it’s some kind of Duck Tales mcguffin that you have to get in a wacky race with a dozen other competitors to acquire physically.

Picturing chemists and researchers climbing over each other to be the last one holding the sacred golden disc.

I had dreams of becoming a physicist because I was inspired early in life to learn about the world and add to human knowledge. I absorbed all I could about the universe and how everything works, I even got as far as placing into advanced classes in a local college, which I was getting 100% scores on… and like with nearly everything else I pursued in life, I had to quit because I had to pay for food and shelter in a crashing economy and lack of opportunities.

I don’t remember a thing that I had learned, I still listen to science documentaries to fall asleep to. I have cycled through the corporate world several times over, lost everything, started over. Nothing gained, I am basically back to start, struggling for even less pay with fewer assets and absolutely no hope of continuing higher education.

I do think about how far I could have taken my ideas I had when I was younger, and what I could have added to our world if I were lucky enough to have been born into a life of generational wealth or been willing to compromise my morals to get ahead.

I used to find these kinds of comics funny until they started getting leveraged by our dumbest segment of the population to continually rage-bait the very worst conversations from both sides, until everyone became so horrified by what they think the opposite sex thinks and feel about each other, that we all just stopped trying to get along and date and make friends.

This lack of community and dead hope for basic things like family and healthy relationships and love and all the struggle and reward that comes from making families is what’s broadly harming our society across the world.

I am probably part of the 0.001% of people who actually had interest in and read exit polling from 2024, because it contains data that makes a lot of people very uncomfortable, particularly on the left who have blamed repeated losses on voter turnout.

The problem is not turnout, the problem in American democracy is the subversion of the broadest swath of people, the tuned-out, overworked, misinformed liberal majority in America.

The last several federal elections have had the highest voter turnout in American history.

What they didn’t have though was people who had any involvement in the issues or understanding how the political system works, and apparently no attention spans at all. Many millions of the people who voted for Trump were people who voted for Obama or supported Bernie Sanders, and that should spark a massive conversation about leftist/democrat messaging, but is largely glossed over. And a massive swath of the voting was literally hinged on the price of eggs at the time, and the well-known effect of voters making their decisions based on current economics and the party currently in power.

A lot of this came from forces foreign and domestic doing everything they can to salt the discourse, poison all the wells and boost all the weirdest, worst nonsense on both sides so that average people who only get their news and information from two hours of facebook or twitter scrolling every week had no idea what was going on.

So yes, “just vote harder” didn’t and won’t work going forward. Our chance at turning this around though is that people right now are a LOT more unhappy with our politics than they were in 2024, everyone in 2024 were far more comfortable and didn’t actually believe the stories about Trump being a fascist dictator, and tuned out his previous administration because attention spans broadly are melted. Right now if elections were held, or canceled, Trump will get wiped out one way or another.

The GOP’s only hope of retaining power is literally a fascist takeover, they know it, they’re just too dumb broadly to pull it off so I have a good feeling midterms are going to be a violent spank in the ass, and Trump will likely not finish his term. This country has actually survived many similar periods. If enough people can get their brains disengaged from the slop then we have a chance.

it will give cover for gerrymandered red-states to reduce their efforts to make voting available and visible to their citizen.

I think you’re absolutely right, as it draws near we will get a steadily increasing narrative how elections are rigged, there’s massive corruption in voting systems (the paper is chinese!) and many other distracting nonsense claims.

But what they have overreached on over and over again is they are broadly very stupid people, and they can’t grasp the scale of this country and the people. I’m sure there will be election shenanigans but I doubt it will be enough to turn the tide. If they try to cancel any elections outright, while people are this tense and ready to riot, there will be widescale violence. Which the administration may want, but no town mayors or state governors want. The states still hold the cards here.

There is a long history of Anarchism, and because of this history, nobody is going to latch onto the idea broadly. Both because it originated in a group of people who literally just wanted to destroy all existing systems with violence and killed a lot of people, and because it’s kinda dumb, and because if you want a more just and comfortable society just go with socialism.

There’s a ven diagram of “libertarians” and “anarchists” and the huge overlap zone is people who have really, really weird issues with authority and think themselves too special to be part of a bigger system, but want all the benefits of living in an ordered society.

Sorry guys, you’re gonna have to learn to deal with your parental issues.