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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: May 10th, 2024

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  • Good for this guy, but there is nothing positive or uplifting about this story.

    The police were not materially harmed in any way to encourage a change in behavior, the officer who was obviously just another giant asshole in a sea of assholes is enjoying a healthy retirement where he can sit and fondly remember how many dogs he’s shot.

    This never should have happened, this doesn’t happen in every country with a police force, we don’t have to put up with this as a cost of “freedom.” We don’t accept “a few bad apples” in hospitals or airlines, so why is one of our most important jobs run effectively with no oversight or independant review?

    I used to think it was entirely corruption, but lately I think it’s darker. I think a lot of people want to be persecuted by an authority. Maybe not having a danger to worry about makes humans idle and angry and that’s why we have so much contention and anti-social behavior.

    Or it might just be boomers running shit and laughing at 1-dimensional social media memes.


  • Seems like every billionaire has all these lofty goals and huge dreams to make the world better… but only if they get statues erected of them personally.

    So yes, we are not a mature enough species to handle power and wealth, we can’t even take care of our planet and all we had to do there was not pump poison into the air and we couldn’t even pull that off. Lets cap wealth at a hundred million bucks, tops, and then forcibly take away their money and build houses and gardens and water purifiers all over the developing world. There are probably fucking genius savant children being born who could solve all our problems, out of 8 billion people the odds only increase, but if the majority of these potential world-changing children die from dysentery and other diseases in vast numbers every day, then we’re losing talent constantly.

    If anyone was running the world like a business, they would need to get called in for a performance review, asap.


  • This is the better answer. People don’t want a bleak, colorless world, they want art that makes them feel good.

    But art isn’t something that makes you feel good necessarily. It can but it also can make you feel other things, it’s a tool for conveying feelings and ideas to someone else, it’s a type of communication. We were supposed to have been taught this as children, that art is communication and we have to be able to hear and see things that make us uncomfortable or we will never, ever succeed in life at the things we want.

    Fascists don’t want people empowered, they want people’s imagination squashed so people don’t imagine an alternative narrative to the propaganda that keeps people propping up their dear leader. All channels of communication will be controlled.

    This is some toddler-level conceptual understanding. When we start banning forms of communication then everyone should stand up and point at someone trying to undo society. This is a real threat to everything we’ve accomplished as a species.










  • Conservatism has only ever been about the most superficial of ideals.

    Many of them would have no issue at all with extending laws about gender to laws about appearance and I’m not even kidding. We have plenty of examples from right-wing governments and social trends of the past absolutely leaning into ideas like phrenology or inherent, essential qualities that go alongside things like hair and eye color.

    You should be concerned for your friend, everyone should be concerned that if allowed to mature, conservatism in the US would throw us right back into a time when people can face legal penalties for what they choose to wear, for how they express themselves, for the shape of their face and a thousand other ways they would want to police the world around them so it continues to look the way they want it to look. And too bad if you don’t look like someone who should live in that world.


  • Absolutely correct, I watched this happen to our tech team before I was also thrown in the chipper.

    And it doesn’t help that a lot of the young people trying to get into coding and tech fields are not what you would call titans of confidence and charisma, these are mostly introverted and thoughtful people who have studied most of their lives under the belief that meritocracy exists, and they can prove themselves in the business world by doing great work and being a good employee.

    Meanwhile glance over at the sales side of the building and there are people there making six figures a year who do next to nothing but party and tell lewd jokes, but are absolutely invulnerable to layoffs and downsizing as long as they can talk to clients and joke about sports with the CEO.

    The disillusionment around the business world is real and unsustainable.


  • Truth.

    Been job hunting in similar fields for a while and as a middle-aged person, I simply cannot get a callback from any of these companies, then when you actually visit them and see some of their workforce, you rarely see anyone over late-20’s, and it’s all these high-energy, eager-to-please, eager-to-work-for-recognitionbucks, fresh-outta-college kids who can be exploited and turned over rapidly.

    I am job hunting because the previous company I managed was bought out, downsized, and all the senior employees making more than entry level wages were cut. This is happening everywhere.

    More and more technology, overseas outsourcing options, and general service/gig systems for filling job openings has left companies treating workers as disposable as toilet paper.

    This is because almost every business is now part of a huge chain of ownership, and the shareholders at the top, groups of very rich old white dudes, just gather together in their hooded cloaks and look at the bars and graphs every month and decide what investments are to be amputated, and which to be kept. Before going back to their private sex islands.


  • I have a gaming group that I regularly spend time with, they are about as diverse as you can possibly imagine. We have back-country gun-toting conservatives playing alongside college campus protesting trans girls, hispanic immigrants, US marines, housewives, people from China and Philippines, midwest American Christians and one extremely loving gay couple who do everything together.

    While we do have a few ground rules, more like courtesy guidelines, like no arguing about politics, it’s not something I’ve ever had to enforce or moderate, and if you were to overhear the group on an average gaming night, you would think they are just the closest and tightest group of people who lift each other up, help each other out, laughing together and telling lewd jokes until they laugh so hard together that they wheeze.

    This group has been the end-product of years of “distillation” in that the people who have issues with other people’s identity or politics or can’t set aside ego to have fun with people and make new friends, they just have naturally fallen by the wayside, so what’s left is a group of people who are bound together by something much stronger than politics or ideology, and that’s intelligence.

    The one common thread that everyone left here has is that they are sharp, they like to talk through issues, they talk about ideas and science and sociology and relationships and enjoy the very simple act of trying to understand other people.

    Curiosity about others will carry you through life far, far further than one might think.


  • One of the older meanings of “spirituality” was the idea of finding the origin of your thoughts and feelings with self-exploration and meditation, it’s about asking “why” of yourself about your experiences until you find some level of more pure truth. It had very little to do with anything mystical or even religious.

    Everything that happens in the world happens in your own mind, spirituality is just the exploration of the mind to better understand the world.

    So yeah, fuck those scumbags and pedos for abusing yet another good thing and perverting the meaning of the term even further.


  • They’re already being grifted, they have already passed the first filter.

    People sometimes wonder why scam emails and phone calls are so obvious, with mis-spellings, bad grammar and poor English. The thing is that they do this on purpose. Running a scam takes time and energy, you want to work marks that you know can be manipulated easily, and if someone can’t determine that an email from “micosaft.pAypal-Customre-Sercicve.com” isn’t legit, they’re VERY likely to buy the story that they have to send money via Western Union to some random address in Kazakhstan to get their share of the king’s inheritance.

    Being in maga is basically that. If you’re wearing a red hat and waving flags and spouting off FOX news lines to anyone who will listen, you’re a mark.


  • The average progressive or even liberal in the US hates hearing this, but the vast, vast majority of Trumpers are actually “okay” people, and you would all get along splendidly in just about any other context.

    The problem is though, they are dumb. Don’t get me wrong or think I’m sticking up for them. I just have some amount of sympathy and pity because I grew up out in the boonies in Southwestern USA, I was raised conservative and only flipped in my 20’s after seeing too much horror and war hurt people I cared about, and by extension, I learned to care for more than just the people I know.

    A lot of people haven’t learned that. We take for granted that empathy is a learned skill, and we expect others to have it on demand and we tend to resent those who don’t exercise it. My take is that we’re expecting people to exercise muscles they’ve never even stretched. These are people locked in communities that they will likely spend their whole lives in, often times decaying outskirts of America, rampant with drugs and alcohol abuse, stuck in low-wage jobs or jobs that demand them to spend every waking moment working. They have no time nor opportunity to learn how to incorporate “care” into their daily misery, much less political knowledge. Then someone like Trump comes along, someone they only hear clips of and hear their “news station” praise while simultaneously explaining that all their problems are because of people who “hate america” and are trying to destroy families with scaaary things like abortion and gender-fluidity. It makes sense if your brain is desperately looking for a story to explain why you’re so unhappy. Which is how all our brains work.

    We all have to remember that the worst people in the world are identical to us. We could have been born in their lives with their ignorance and tunnel vision, and all their feelings of fighting against a stacked-deck and hopelessness against change that will (supposedly) take away their only comforts in life.

    I am getting really uncomfortable with the hate the left is directing at people who are simply dumb as fuck. Yes, they are dangerous, yes they are capable of doing better, and on top of that the only examples we SEE of this segment of America is the most horrific and malicious, the people storming the capitol or screaming at rallys or beating up protestors. They are the worst, but not necessarily the rule.

    I had family members who were going to vote Trump and JUST needed to see the clips of him speaking that don’t make it to Facebook news feeds to change their mind. Approach this from a place of education and compassion and you will all have better results.

    Let’s save our hate for the real evil, the grifters and pundits who are pied pipers for the ignorant. They are smart and know what they are doing and it’s pure evil.


  • I understand if your personal stance is that there should be zero government intervention in what people choose to use or not, but we don’t live in that world and likely never will because of the complexity of society.

    So under THIS society and governing system, what would you say should be done about social media and it’s growing negative influence on people, particularly younger people and children? let’s say you’re THIS government and your people are asking for help with this problem so you need to spend the money they pay you somehow.


  • The idea of a warning is not because anyone thinks you’re going to read it and get scared and stop doing the thing you’re hooked on.

    The idea of a warning label is so your ice-age brain, the brain that loves to make up stories to explain things, has something to connect with when you start having a negative experience on something like social media, or something to help you realize that the thing, whatever it may be, is addictive and the reason you’re having problems is because of that addictive quality. We greatly overestimate our brains and our capacity to properly identify threats and tell ourselves the correct story to escape the threat.