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Cake day: May 10th, 2024

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  • ameancow@lemmy.worldtoChaotic Good@sopuli.xyzArmed to deter cops
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    3 days ago

    The reason the police do this is that wage slaves won’t be forced back into the worst, most poorly paid jobs we can find if they’re not facing death by starvation.

    Systemically, yes this is why the police are allowed broadly by society to discourage helping those in need.

    On a more personal, fundamental and visceral level, it’s because the police are a product of people who have held power for a long, long time. And you know what poor and homeless people are to the systems that maintain the status quo? They’re an inconvenient reminder that our system is designed to benefit a few, and that there are people hoarding gold and diamond backscratchers for every day of the week while children starve on the street.

    That’s a pretty downer reminder, isn’t it? Throw in some of our human vices that we all share from top to bottom like substance abuse and you have a complete picture of what any of us could become if we’re not careful.

    See, for the vast majority of comfortable Americans, the homeless they pass every day are not reminders that humans need help, they are a reminder of failure. In a world where success is measured in dollar signs and possessions, someone without either is a scary, harsh reminder that we’re all on a tightrope.

    Brush them aside. Put them somewhere. Get them into some kind of “camp” and shuffle them out of view, lest they spoil this perfect image we have created of the modern world.



  • Do you think people become more conservative with age or is it society becoming more progressive and leaving them behind?

    I am getting up there in years and seeing this play out over and over.

    I think every generation wants to be more progressive than the last, but we tend to carry baggage of fear and insecurity through the generations. Or more specifically, older people tend to gain the political and monetary capital needed to affect policy and shape our societal outlook and attitude. They will always be more conservative than the younger generation who will want more freedoms and personal rights, inherently, and as the ruling class will clash with newer sensibilities, over and over.

    What we’re asking here, is the conservatism reflected in our elders and leadership now broadly more harmful or helpful? Are we out of the touch or is it the kids who are wrong?

    I think it’s a mix but mostly it’s not our real problem. Our real problem is that no matter what our age, we have greatly misunderstood how our own existence works. Most people have been taught that they have brains designed to exercise logic and reason and that brains are the best thing ever if you use them and make them smart.

    No, our brains are not logical tools. We are not a rational species. There was no “age of enlightenment.” It’s all a hoax. Our brains are tools designed to write a story to explain how you feel. And that’s it. It doesn’t even have to make sense. When we all learn how our brains actually work we will collectively make better decisions, have more compassion for each other, and likely sink into even deeper despair as we all start to realize we have no free will.


  • I too am taking advantage of the summer sale and am about 20 hours in and still wildly infatuated with this weird, weird amazing game.

    After a while you start getting a slightly better idea of what’s going on, but that doesn’t make it more “game like” if anything, the more you learn about the game, the more it reveals itself to be a giant tool to explore meta-narratives and there are some moments of conversation regarding this that are absolutely chilling.





  • I have this feeling that the “X months” we have, as well the other periods of special recognition, serves a primary purpose of just setting people off.

    For real, the ONLY people who really have a strong reaction to things like Black History Month are racists. The ONLY people who really care that there’s a “Gay Pride Month” are the frothing homophobes. For everyone else, particularly the people whom those days or months celebrate, it’s just Tuesday. Or some such normal day where nothing changes and they still have to constantly look over their shoulder.

    If all it does is make some backwards, broken asshole lose his mind and rage about how “unfair” it is that nobody is giving them their special day, then it’s a victory. If all these recognition periods do is remind us all that there is a sizable segment of our population who hate you personally then it’s actually doing good on the long-term, because we can use it as a barometer. We can use these days and months to gauge how much more work we have to do squashing nazis and purging hate groups, and how much protection our friends and neighbors still need simply for existing outside the “white CIS straight male American” spectrum.





  • ameancow@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzPenguins ❤️
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    6 days ago

    Not only are you correct, we will never have any real sense of scale of just how correct you are, since we’ve only been exposed to about less than 0.01% of life that’s ever existed on Earth in the last several billion years.

    For all we know there were clans of synapsids that were exclusively homosexual for terms of child-rearing and had complicated social systems with language and structured hierarchy, etc.

    The idea that we can even remotely determine what this world’s natural systems have been like from looking at a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of the total picture is once again peak human hubris and self importance.

    This planet has been a thriving source of life in the universe, maybe the only one like it for far, far longer than any human alive can comprehend. In the last several billion years nothing complained about homosexuality. Humans will be here for a brief blip on the larger picture, and there will be no record nor impact from anyone’s hate or fear of sex acts. Earth will keep spinning through the void, life will keep evolving. Protest signs and hateful messages will dissolve back to the systems that created them.

    All you people screaming and crying about “woke” this and that, and who get confused by terms like LGBTQ+, it doesn’t matter. You will be dust for far, far longer than you will be a human screaming about what’s “natural.”


  • I think the user at top of this thread was confused and thought the image from Tumblr was being critical and saying something negative about the actress in question, or they meant to respond to the referenced haters.

    Whatever it is, the comment was too confused for any of to try to make any kind of statement about anything about it.


  • Which person? The one in the tumblr image above is saying she IS sexy and beautiful. The one(s) referenced as saying she couldn’t be a love interest? I haven’t read any of their actual comments here but I tend to agree that if you get on a soap-box to scream to the world how something in media you’re choosing to watch makes you feel, you probably have more complicated feelings about the topic than you’re letting on.


  • The strangest part of this was how conservatives used to be the ones pushing for wearing masks as alternatives to vaccinations, because the mindless fear of needles goes waaay back. See, chances are I’m older than you, so I’ve seen these cycles repeat themselves over and over. You’ve only seen it once or twice tops.

    What happens is that a politician will dangle a new fear over you, and you will attach to that fear because that’s how our brains work. I am talking universally, not specific to one party or ideology, this is how we ALL work, and leftists are equally guilty of grifting their base the same way.

    But you HAVE to understand where this came from, why you’re fighting with people about this, where this came from.

    Never mind that people have been wearing face covering for millenia to reduce spreading disease, we have paintings and etching of lepers and plague victims going back thousands of years wearing something to prevent accidental spreading of saliva or body fluids. This isn’t a complicated idea, and a lot of people wear face coverings anyway to prevent illness or for safety around immunocompromised people. This isn’t new, this isn’t something that was planned or contrived, the ONLY reason you’re having arguments with people about face masks of all things is because someone out there knows how to connect your brain to a story to explain how it feels. To make you expend your energy on this, not making our world better or focusing on your elected representatives and what they’re signing into law, and I bet it works great. I bet you don’t get involved in your local politics. Nobody does, nobody spends as much energy on their actual neighborhoods as they do arguing online about props.

    See, like with a lot of other things, a lot of us were unsure and worried about the future, so a lot of people trying to get power used masks as their props to fixate that insecurity on. I am not even going to talk about their effectiveness or not, it’s like wearing a hat in the sun, sure it won’t save you from sunburns but it’s just a thing we do to try our best to protect what we can, it’s not a big deal.

    Your brain is not a tool of logic and reason, that’s an illusion. It’s a tool to tell you a story to explain how you feel. And it LOVES when someone provides a story for it. Because your brain wants a story that makes sense, not one that’s accurate. There is a difference. A lot of things can make sense and not be true.

    It should be a giant, glaring alarm that someone is fucking with your brain when you start feeling contentious about what other people wear on their faces. That HAS to trigger something deep inside that makes you wonder why you’re so emotionally connected to this “debate.”

    You got chains around you and they’re going to keep attaching chains until you realize how deeply you’re playing in the WWE theater of political rhetoric. Let this one go, just walk away, it’s objectively a nonsense campaign designed to distracted you.

    The outraged reply you’re already pounding out in your head is part of that distraction. You are giving your soul away to others to use as they will. Doesn’t that bother you?


  • The point is they don’t even think this way to begin with. They don’t think in terms of “human connecting with other humans” they are looking at us like a liquid. A set of probabilities and factors and challenges to extract as much money from as possible via literally ANY kind of psychological manipulation they can legally employ… and it’s not like there’s any laws about “not coercing or manipulating customers” so there’s almost no limit to what companies can get away with. We only really notice it when it falls flat like this, but the more successful marketing campaigns are far more subtle and effective, and you will have your free-will compromised without realizing it.

    Source: worked in marketing for a few years, felt the soul being extracted from my body every day I worked there.


  • They’re saying that they feel bad that they didn’t pull off the “cool, hip young attitude” that their test markets, data-points, cited studies and weeks of brainstorming sessions predicted, so now they’re going to shift around leadership in the marketing teams and try to approach their social media presence from a different angle, one that appears respectful of modern social issues but also not afraid to throw out some media-safe zingers from time to time! Additionally, a newer model of AI to help reply to questions will surely connect with the people who are all so amazed by AI technology.

    That sense you get reading this, that overwhelming desire to find something tall to hurl yourself off of… that’s the reason we haven’t done anything about climate change. We are answering the call of the void because we know deep inside there’s no hope.


  • ameancow@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldStay Mad, Tankies
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    8 days ago

    You mean you don’t have to like Kamala? I’m voting Kamala.

    Not fond of her, but she’ll do better than Trump by leagues and miles and make history while not rocking the boat or affecting any meaningful change. Libs will love her, she’ll be a democrat party darling. I bet she gets a second term.



  • ameancow@lemmy.worldtoComic Strips@lemmy.worldZoinks!
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    8 days ago

    But we’re fine with the gun and murder?

    Understand the way in which people commonly use iconic media figures in artistic, subversive ways to parody and highlight social issues. It’s a human thing, humans do it.

    You gotta try to fit in y’know.