Does the human race need a huge catharsis to straighten out its act?

[31st Street Bridge]

Think of it: Only through cataclysm does mankind ever really solve anything.
It took a Revolution to make America free.
It took a Civil War to free enslaved people in the United States.
It took a crippling Great Depression for a real social safety net to develop.
It took 65 million deaths in World War II to stop Hitler and his fascists.

Must we have a blowout World War III now to really set us straight? If that's even possible?
Just asking.

[Jim__]

1. By the end of World War II we had nuclear weapons, relatively small nuclear weapons.

We used some of those small nuclear weapons. We have large nuclear weapons now. If there is a World War III, what are the odds we use some of those large nuclear weapons. Do you think using those weapons will set us straight?

[Justice matters.]

23. If one goes up at supersonic speeds, all the others go up.

And the end of the world will begin some 40 minutes later.

[bucolic_frolic]

2. Yes, and the cure for diabetes is a diet of only doughnuts and candy

It's the inoculation of disease principle applied to nutrition, same as you apply it to politics and nationhood.

[rampartd]

3. and 1 azzwhole to reverse 250 years of progress

the usa, and maybe 90% of us, are quite doomed however or whenever he and his cult are raptured.

[haele]

4. There are still selfish troglodytes.

The sociopathic baby-men (and women) who believe cooperation is a weakness. Unless it primarily benefits them.
Other people are competition to them; if they're not the center of attention, if they can't own the outcome, anything that's going on without their agreement or approval is an attack against them.

Those idiots have always been with us. They are never able to think beyond themselves.

[OldBaldy1701E]

25. Yes, but we used to not listen to them.

Thanks to delusion becoming commonplace, more people seem willing to believe their insanity.

The right really did remove any ability to think in this country, didn't they?

I wonder how they got away with that?

[Volaris]

27. The internet. Used to be, the crazies would have to drive to 'conferences'

in order to all be in one shared space. That meant money for gas, hotel rooms, etc. Now that same exp happens online, for a small monthly fee. Yes, there are upsides; the same internet made possible the acceptance of Obergefell by the SC, but it's inarguable at this point that it's a double-edged sword. The additional mass-monetinization of sharpening ONLY ONE SIDE of the sword, is how we got where we are now.

[SamuelTheThird]

5. This book is really sobering

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691271842/the-great-leveler?srsltid=AfmBOooAl7gNk4wkTDN4XE3N6-KagOfknEea9dXhCCKSUxa9e9m659yB

[BannonsLiver]

8. I heard Taylor Swift is mentioned in Revelations.

[SamuelTheThird]

9. I apologize

I'll know my place as a peasant and not criticize the defenseless billionaire. I'm very contrite

[BannonsLiver]

14. No check that, I heard she's a prize in a Cracker Jack box.

[Emrys]

15. I think most of us would settle for your not spreading RW BS from bot farms on DU

See here, as you still don't seem to realize you were, at best and on the most charitable interpretation, gullible, unlike many of those who responded to your infamous OPs:

Note: Though based on research about recent campaigns targeting Taylor Swift, the findings have wider relevance for potential political influence operations in future, as detailed in the last paragraph quoted below.

Taylor Swift's Last Album Sparked Bizarre Accusations of Nazism. It Was a Coordinated Attack

Data analysis of social media posts painting the singer as a Trump supporter or white supremacist revealed a network of inauthentic accounts

...
Soon, online discussion of the [The Life of a Showgirl] album turned extreme in ways that many found bewildering. There were social media posts accusing Swift of implicitly endorsing the MAGA movement, trad-wife gender norms, and even white supremacy with dogwhistle references. While the far-right have been known to claim the singer as an icon of “Aryan” greatness despite her record of championing Democrats and liberal values — and President Trump himself has blithely and disingenuously shared AI-generated imagery depicting her as a supporter — this was a noticeably divergent trend, an apparent attempt to cancel Swift for those presumed affiliations. The attacks largely focused on specific word choices (her use of the term “savage” on the song “Eldest Daughter” was interpreted as racist) and symbols (a necklace for sale on her website stirred up Nazi comparisons because its lightning bolt charms bore a passing resemblance to the bolt pattern worn by the SS).
...

Editor’s picks

What Swift’s defenders didn’t realize, however, was that they were pushing back against a false narrative that had been seeded and amplified by a small network of inauthentic social accounts. Worse, they were helping to disseminate those bad-faith allegations by earnestly engaging with them.

That’s according to new research from GUDEA, a behavioral intelligence startup that tracks how such reputation-damaging claims emerge and go viral on the internet. In a white paper examining more than 24,000 posts and 18,000 accounts across 14 digital platforms between Oct. 4 (the day after The Life of a Showgirl came out) and Oct. 18, shared first with Rolling Stone, the firm concluded that just 3.77 percent of accounts drove 28 percent of the conversation around Swift and the album during that period. This cluster of evidently coordinated accounts pushed the most inflammatory Swift content, including conspiracy theories about her supposed Nazi allusions, callouts for her theoretical MAGA ties, and posts that framed her relationship with fiancé Travis Kelce as inherently conservative or “trad,” with all of this framed as leftist critique.

Once the provocations were injected into the Swift discourse — often they appeared in edgier online forums like 4chan or KiwiFarms before migrating to popular social apps — they were organically sustained by the people challenging them on mainstream platforms. This, in turn, algorithmically reinforced their visibility. “The false narrative that Taylor Swift was using Nazi symbolism did not remain confined to fringe conspiratorial spaces; it successfully pulled typical users into comparisons between Swift and Kanye West,” the researchers wrote. “This demonstrates how a strategically seeded falsehood can convert into widespread authentic discourse, reshaping public perception even when most users do not believe the origin.
...
The more recent, Swift-focused activity of these accounts may indicate the owner(s) dipping a toe in the water before pursuing other ends with this network in the future. After all, while [Blake] Lively has argued that [Justin] Baldoni is trying to sabotage her career with bot-driven commentary, it’s not immediately clear what anyone stands to gain from painting Swift as a closet MAGA voter.

“When we put our doomsday hat on, I think we can see that reality,” Paul says of the test-run scenario. It could be, she speculates, “that there might be other nefarious actors, not U.S.-based, who have reasons to see, ‘If I can move the fan base for Taylor Swift — an icon who is this political figure, in a way — does that mean I can do it in other places?’”

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/taylor-swifts-social-media-campaign-life-of-a-showgirl-1235480646/

[SamuelTheThird]

17. Straw man argument

I typed nothing dealing with any of this-

'The attacks largely focused on specific word choices (her use of the term “savage” on the song “Eldest Daughter” was interpreted as racist) and symbols (a necklace for sale on her website stirred up Nazi comparisons because its lightning bolt charms bore a passing resemblance to the bolt pattern worn by the SS).'

I did accurately note she didnt criticize ICE for using her song, unlike other artists.

I also linked to her friendships with MAGA people and her praising MAGA podcasts

Subsequently I also mentioned her documented high emissions from her vanity private jet use.

So, nothing I said was sourced from right wing bot farms. You are mistaken

[Emrys]

19. Another attempt at dodging from you after your bravura performance yesterday. It'll fare as well.

Read the whole article, which I had to excerpt severely to try to comply with DU's fair use rules.

It covers quite a few bases you did scattergun touch on during your rants. You did source your first screed from Reddit. It's one of the sites used in the campaign analysed. It's certainly not hard to find haters on Reddit, so it's fertile ground for campaigns such as those described.

The point of the article is how these memes spread from the kernel planted by the botnets, often propagated by well-meaning dupes who've had the right buttons pressed. If the cap fits ...

And here, yet again you're regurgitating the same supposed slams - "her friendships with MAGA people", "her documented high emissions from her vanity private jet use" yadayada, all responded to and rebutted multiple times (in the case of the flights, ably refuted by accurately citing what the article you referred to in your support actually said, not what you wished and claimed it said) by those who bothered to reply to you yesterday.

I think you have a handful of buyers here. Keep pumping if you must, but I think you'll find you're pumping mud.

[SamuelTheThird]

20. What bs

Her private jet CO2 emissions have never been refuted.

And the friendships and podcasts are facts. Go refute them right here specifically if you can.

This celeb worship is really bizarre to me

[Emrys]

22. What BS yourself. Nobody has to "worship" a celeb to be opposed to mendacious hate campaigns.

You know what's weird? Someone who's apparently consumed by hate about someone they''ll almost certainly never meet, who has at most an infinitesimal impact on their life circumstances, and doesn't even know they exist. Reddit, for instance, seems to be a magnet for such people. On DU, we generally try to reserve those sorts of emotions for the real bastards in this world who are seriously hurting others, and there's no shortage of them.

Since you seem not have bothered surveying the ruins of your threads from yesterday, I'll take the liberty of quoting in isolation FascismIsDeath's rebuttal and correction of your caricature of the study on the wealthy and flight ecological impacts you referred to, since you didn't deign to reply to him:

You should've actually read the study (that you didn't even bother linking to)

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-025-02325-x#Sec5

Here is a sentence in the "Discussion" section of the study that essentially summarizes everything I said..

"Wealth-based emissions comprise private consumption and investment in capital formation across production sectors that supply goods and services consumed by society. Recognizing the associated unequal warming contributions can inform policy interventions."

And a few paragraphs later...

"Similarly, the warming attributable to the investments of the wealthy underscores the need to realign financial flows to meet global climate goals32. This is particularly relevant for the wealthiest 1% and 0.1%, whose transboundary contributions to worsening local extremes arise primarily through investments, rather than consumption."

In other words, its EXACTLY what I said, governments bought and paid for by big money interests... they are saying the exact same thing in this study. The wealthy invested in big fossil fuels and big agriculture and big transportation and manufacturing technologies and they also used their wealth to buy off governments from standing in the way of them profiting from those investments which, as the study says "supply goods and services consumed by society", in other words.... all of us, continuing to buy their shit, mostly because we don't have another choice if we want to continue existing in the modern world.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=20896465

No, I can't be arsed going yet another round about the MAGA allegations because they're desperately thin, numerous people responded about those accusations and attempts at guilt by association of yours yesterday and I'd just be repeating what many of them said, and as the article I linked above points out, that sort of well-meaning engagement just ends up promoting the bot bilge anyway.

As someone who proclaimed several times yesterday that this is a discussion forum, you don't seem particularly interested in following up that discussion by actually reading and digesting what people bother to reply to you. One might almost be as well conversing with a bot.

[canetoad]

6. The crisis, when it comes

Will likely be the trigger that wipes out the humans.

Carl Sagan said:
Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

[31st Street Bridge]

24. And democracy is not the default setting

[BannonsLiver]

7. That would only be a temporary solution.

As long as social media consumption is at current levels the species is doomed. We could have an alien invasion and it would be politicized and fully tribal in a matter of hours. Probably even before we could be exterminated.

[GJGCA]

10. Can't supply cat-harsis, but here's...

...cat-horses:

[3catwoman3]

16. I'll take it.

[maxsolomon]

11. Humanity will never "straighten out it's act".

We've been following the same barbaric course for 10,000 years (that we know of).

[GJGCA]

13. Sad but true...

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
--Immanuel Kant

[OC375]

12. Foundation Series

In some ways it’s prophetic, until you realize it’s just retelling human history.

[BH liberal]

18. The doctor's orders in "Dracula: Dead and Loving It"...

would be a good place to start:

"Give them all an enema!"

[Bayard]

21. A WWIII would be the end of humans with all the nukes flying

Unfortunately, we'll drag the rest of the planet down with us. We seem compelled to destroy ourselves.

[Wounded Bear]

26. I believe Einstein was quoted as saying:

"I don't know what weapons WWIII will be fought with, but WWIV will be fought with sticks and stones."

Been reading Dune again lately?

[Ponietz]

28. An AI engineered virus is inevitable now I fear