She Dies Tomorrow - a Method to Understand People
This works with individuals, groups, and is a crowd pleaser at parties!
In the movie She Dies Tomorrow, we follow an ensemble cast all convinced they have hours to live.
As they wander around town from Sunset to Sunrise, each character immediately notifies a loved one that they know they will die the next day. This is a weird trailer, the movie is an indie mystery with a ton of dialogue and only minor plot thrust.
I don't recommend it, but it's a clever movie that acts as a parable for post-pandemic isolation and teaches a lesson that's hard to put into words.
The end of my friendship - not literally, but the end of us being friends on a meaningful level - took the shape of a phone call in which I felt we were no longer living in the same world. I think I first read in an Al Franken novel that "you're entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts." And I had been sucked into the edges of the Ron Paul Revolution, which led me to me understanding the economy much better since everybody else in those circles was clueless and spread misinformation constantly.
Lately, my friends and family have been getting messages from me that could be interpreted as angry, dire, or ominous. They're not. Or, they’re not intended to be any of those things. When I have a narrative that is dismissed as outrageous or impossible, I wait until I have clear proof of what I'm saying and then I pass those things on to the people who matter most to me. It happens at its own pace, so sometimes it seems like it’s coming out of left field to those on the receiving end.
My friend, who was definitely born with a silver spoon so to speak, went to a prestigious art school for college and began his career with a clean-water non-profit, and IMO only started saying things that made no sense around 2023. It was the pandemic, everybody was messed up, everybody was isolating. And I have an auto immune disorder. The CDC recommended that I get 6 shots as a first round (3 of each brand). There was zero chance I was going to do that after I took the first one and realized what kind of ass kicking I would be in for if I repeated that ritual 6 times. I was neutral territory — I refused to get the recommended shots. But I thought people were acting even dumber than usual.
I wasn't even afraid of the strains that came after Delta and Omicron. There didn’t seem to be anything afraid of. I caught it, I think. And it was worse than I thought it would me. My friend didn't tell me when he had been exposed. He waited weeks assuming I would freak out. I wasn't concerned at all about that. If the pandemic taught me anything, it’s that a life worth living is a life lived among other humans, however awkward that often may be.
The first thing he asked me was if I was tired of the never-ending conversation about racism in America.
In my bubble, in my neighborhood, among my friends and family, I couldn't remember a single conversation in the previous years that had even tangentially mentioned racism. This was WELL post-Floyd, post-BLM, I'm sure those conversations happened, but it wasn't on anybody's mind as far as I knew. I would assert that the socioeconomic causes of systematic racism are the same or worse as they had been prior to 2019, but mostly because of the clash between city dwellers and those who call rural areas home. While there is a ton of conflation, I would argue that it’s less racism than it was before, and more about taking rights away from poor people in urban areas (John Lewis Voting Rights Act which legalized disenfranchising poor people and as a result minorities) who are demonized and neglected by government to win elections by catering to white-nationalist GOP voters and pay back the militia groups who keep fear in the GOP establishment and keep them in line. Any society that frees its most fierce and dangerous enemies - no, not Trump - is a society you are not safe in. Any society that is too afraid to broadcast on the news what really happened on January 6th is a society either incapable of breaking from the status quo, or a society where members of the media are no safer. I should mention here that I stopped all political activity and don’t even talk about politics anymore. I am afraid even as a citizen. I did my part, which was warn people. Now I just want to be allowed to live free and live and let live. And I want my medical bills paid. That’s all.
Criminalizing Homelessness | Grants Pass v. Johnson - Mr. Beat (he’s awesome!)
Also, those communities are disproportionally comprised of ethnic minorities for historical and societal reasons that offer a window into a smaller percentage of descendants of Dixiecrats than ever before.
Then my friend started talking about the transgender issue. This could be boiler plate conversation in his friend groups. I might respond to this issue in a way that most people would find disagreeable. But I have never cared enough to discuss it.
I care about legislation preventing people from receiving doctor recommended healthcare of any variety, but if that’s controversial, it’s just a result of MAGA’s trademark hypocrisy and bad faith takes. I’m not in the know on that one. At first, with the Lia Thomas (?) issue I suggested that trans athletes choose who to compete with, are compelled to provide a diagnosis and list of medications to the athletic board if they play college sports, and that same board would make the ultimate determination if there were complaints filed privately by verified competitors.
It seemed to me that would solve the issue. No, it would solve the issue. It’s literally a perfect solution you could implement in one day. It had never occurred to me that rational people believed parents were just letting their kids experimentally change genders, and I still refuse to believe that. Are parents in red states that incompetent at parenting? I’m just kidding, it’s red state governors who don’t want humans to be allowed to spend time with their kids, they bow to big oil and big tech, not big nan. My grandmother encouraged my brother and I to play some kind of little homemaker game when I was 5 or 6 years old. It did seem weird, but she was a firm believer in the traditional family, even if she was simultaneously a vigorous proponent for women's suffrage and to a lesser extent the feminist movement. The issue seems like red meat for cultural conservatives who are still clinging onto the hope WMDs will be found in the basement of the Baghdad Alamo.
"Women and Men are different" is as agreed upon as any issue that comes to mind.
https://images.app.goo.gl/jouqU7SP9dUmer4Y6
Therefore, the discussion is about a handful of people. 4,000 to be precise. You might be told that 1% of Americans, or 1.5 million Americans, or 5% of kids identify as transgender. There have been 4,000 bottom surgeries done in the United States since 2019.
I proposed a perfect solution to something I don't care about. I’m done talking about it. Instead of getting paid overtime for wasting brain cells obtaining this information and constructing an obvious, perfect solution to the one possible problem that STILL didn't exist in reality, if you consider medical issues to be… medical issues. Then my friend brought up the subject AGAIN. I would guess that he was trying to voice his opinion to a neutral party to see if it would play in more relevant social circles. It probably would, and I was merely mildly annoyed, but I'm the type who just says what everybody is thinking: why the fuck would I want to think about this? And then I remember what I always try to purge from my brain:
Because the MEDIA is causing boys to chop parts of their body off? That's something only a moron would think. Cannibalism didn't go up after the release of Alive. Disney movies have always been the gayest thing ever and the most Florida thing ever. Florida is gawdy, not gay.
Then I learned about the media he was consuming. I did mistake the Matt Walsh he listens to for the other Matt Walsh. Which is understandable in this context, right?
It’s the god damn algorithms. But if he reads this, he should know that I listen to and watch what he watches, because it’s the only way I understand the world he has been brainwashed into seeing through their propaganda. He thinks the same of me, but he also thought I knew what bread tube was and watch Hasan Piker. Gross.
Democrats believe that there were massive ICE raids, which they went out to fight against, protect their noncitizen friends and neighbors, and in many cases won tactical and moral victories.
All you had to do to figure out that was BS was turn the channel to Fox or any other entity owned by Murdoch. The only moral victories were in the almost-universal peaceful nature of this protest. It was a photo shoot. Even the cops were just Proud Boys with Military Outlet bargain bin gear on.
You know what the biggest lie was? That Democrats are violent. Democrats would let you pound them for hours to demonstrate their incredible resilience in the face of terror. Democrats call the police when they see bottle rockets. Democrats insist on letting a fake government agency take our social security information, destroying 30 years worth of mission statements from the reliable conservative voting demographic, because they insist that politics are a game with rules, and if you’re required to show up to a gun fight with a flower, you can simply contest it in court. Or your next of kin can. Or maybe a distant relative who happened to have pretty close 23 and Me Results.
But that's also going to translate to the "March of the Virtue Signal" when we're told there will be no more democratic elections from now on. The party formerly known as the Democrats will take to the streets to do nothing - PROOF they're better people! What an own that will be! And all of the people like my friend who formally predicted libs overtaking the streets and destroying the country will say NOTHING. Because the only thing worse than total annihilation is cognitive dissonance. The realization that they voted to take away their own rights, and it didn’t even require a clever plan.
Alex Jones preached about our freedom being taken away by a new global order that would emerge if the much larger group of good citizens rejected it and fought it. Over the years, that message attracted a lot of people who had the mindset that if they were NOT part of the group destroying the constitution, they would be imprisoned, have their rights taken away, or be killed. And eventually, as we descended into an Idiocracy fueled by built up gas inside of billions of organic echo chambers, this idea of a new global order had been forgotten by everybody except the Alex Jones' of the world, whose job was to warn against it to an audience of people who, unlike Jones, were itching to fight it. I should say - fight "it," because at that point, it was only them trying to overthrow the country and take charge for the sole purpose of making money and becoming more powerful and influential. The only part of the constitution useful to Stuart Rhodes is “we, the people” which is why that’s the only part he tattooed on his arm. And he takes it to mean, “me, the person, and probably my daughter.”
So now when I try to point out that the final test was whether or not we would stop that sole faction still trying to end the greatest experimental democracy in the history of civilization, it's dismissed by people who are too tired to fight, to shouted over to speak, and too busy to think. And those would rather virtue signal than take accountability for refusing to do ANYTHING in the 12 years you could see it coming, inch by inch, day by day. I started writing about it in 2008 and stopped writing about it in 2022. I wasn't warning about a new global order. I was warning about the danger of becoming everything you hate because you can't see that you're fighting windmills. There might have been the shape of a windmill there at a point, but not since the only viable candidates for NWO went bust in Iraq and failed to understand how much healthcare means to both sides of the aisle.
In She Dies Tomorrow, the ending is that every character has contracted a disease which is harmless.
Except for the fact that it makes people incorrectly certain that they have one day left on Earth to live. And so, for the poor souls who are exposed to the airborne mind worm (it's different than what RFK had) that false certainty causes them to needlessly self destruct.
So, if you talk to me failing to understand that I warned people about what was going to happen for 12 years -- or rather, what I talked about being the biggest threat we faced in our lifetime -- you can't understand me. There is no difference between my best friend I spend hundreds of hours talking to about this versus a stranger on the street. You can’t laugh it off or tell me I was right or pretend you’ll start listening.
I told everybody and you fucked up. Not everybody. Some of you were preaching on the corner down the street. We can go have coffee some time. But I just assume the bulk of you were all parading around and keeping up appearances, which is what I’d hope people were doing, while some of us repeatedly and with increasing urgency warned you about a tidal wave that was coming. You didn’t have to stop your lives, you had to look to your left. That’s what fuels my frustration. The idea that looking to the left was so unimaginably hard I can’t genuinely expect anybody would go to that length.
I think about that guy in the Birds who warns everybody that the end times are upon them. If he lived, and the characters all wound up back in that cafe, they'd still ignore him and pretend like he hadn't warned them at all. Admitting that we were missing the plot seems to be the one thing no human being can really do.