Sponsors and advertisements in emails. We are in an age now where, advertisers must reach us through the very things we send email with. Because spam simply isn’t enough.
Post-Brexit Britain
Flagrant acts of racism.
Portland pretends to be better than that, but I keep having casual reminders that we’re really white-coded. A black guy walks into the liquor store at 10:00 am and both the women behind the counter have a collective sense of panic when I’m walking up to check out. There was nothing off about him. They just had some immediate sense that he intended harm. The one checking me out said, under her breath, “oh, I thought we were getting robbed”.
It was obvious the dude noticed their reaction, and it made me feel fucking horrible.
Mirror
The public acceptance of gambling. It’s fucking everywhere. Even things that seem relatively innocuous on the surface, like trading cards or blind boxes, are less about the fun of collecting and more about the rush of ripping through multiple packs or boxes to focus on the resell value.
I never imagined a world where we can easily bet on natural disasters and cancer on a whim. Please fire me into the sun.
Holy shit people bet on people getting cancer? That is so depraved
There’s a great irony that MLB banned Pete Rose for life until his death from baseball or getting into the hall of fame. Only for them to openly embrace gambling.
Yeah and also that gambling is normalized on two fronts: For adults we’re normalizing betting on fucking everything like if it’s gonna rain tomorrow,
And for children we’re normalizing gambling in video games. Gambling used to be a niche, almost something you’d be ashamed of. „I lost my money on the ponies“ would be something you’d tell your best friends when talking about your dark past.Over under on your body’s liquification time on approach to the sun?
AI generated music, images, and videos.
Conspiracy theory nuts start to get big bucket things right. Like a giant cabal of child sex traffickers running global political and financial systems, including Hollywood.
I mean, it’s pretty much just that one so far, but damned if that wasn’t an evergreen theory over the last few decades.
This reminds me of a Belgian case that implicated their elites in child sexual abuse in the mid-90s, yet the alleged wider network was never fully investigated. It always surprised me that that case wasn’t referred to when the whole Epstein case blew up in the media given the parallels of the elites being involved.
WARNING: VERY DISTURBING STORY (makes Epstein look like a saint) https://torontosun.com/news/world/crime-hunter-how-high-up-did-killer-belgian-pedo-ring-go
“People are being fooled by a secret pedophile cabal!”, says influencer supporting a secret pedophile cabal.
Is it too obvious to say a Hitler-like figure running a country I thought such things couldn’t happen in?
Okay, less political answer: reality shows that go too far with exploiting people. An early season of Big Brother had long lost siblings find out they were siblings on tv. Such moments shoukd be private. There was a reality show where a guy thought he was called for jury duty but it was all fake. I don’t understand how it’s even legal to film a reality show without telling the guy he’s in a reality show. There was a reality show where a woman has to guess who her biological father is. that’s not something we should be making a game of.
The reality show that freaked me out was Solitary. It ran on Fox from 2006-2010. No healthy society would ever allow something like this to exist as a form of entertainment. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/03/voluntary-confinement/
I didn’t know about that one. That’s disturbing
It’s so disturbing. I actually saw part of an episode of it at the time, and I watched, thinking, “they can’t actually mean that, right?” But it seriously is just footage of these people being tortured, with some vaguely sci-fi looking sets. I have no idea how this got approved, and every so often I’m reminded of it, and I think, “god, was that real?” I’m glad that Mother Jones article exists, because otherwise I think people would never believe it.
On the jury one the guy knew he was being filmed the whole time, they just mislead him to believe that the trial was real and the subject of the reality show and that the rest of the jury weren’t actors when in reality he was the only person in the show who was not aware that the whole show was staged to look real
Thanks for the explanation. I haven’t actually watched the show. I have seen a season of the Joe Schmo show, where the guy knows he’s on a reality show but doesn’t know that the rest of the cast are actors
Driving straight through a stoplight from the right turn lane. There’s this intersection where I live that looks like this:
Most people going straight through that intersection want to take the exit right after to hop on a freeway. Twice now I’ve dealt with people following the red line from the right turn lane, forcing everyone else to merge around them to take the exit.
could be worse, every single part where roads cross here has a light btw. 4-5 lanes at most parts.
Where
that’s in boston, known far and wide as the medford supercollider. a tourist attraction. boston has a bunch of godawful intersections like that
I haven’t driven in too many cities, but Boston takes the cake as absolute worse place have had the misfortune of operating a motor vehicle. I swear u can walk across Boston in cinder block shoes faster than u can drive, and my buddies that work there agree given every single one of them drives to the T station nearest their house and takes the train into the city.
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My dad! Thanks, dad!! /s
My penis. When I was 600lbs and couldn’t see it I longed for the day I could look. I kept working out and kept losing weight and… kept not seeing it. Finally I got down to 120lbs. I can see it now. I wish I hadn’t.
I’m thinking about going back to massive overeating to hide my greatest shame back underneath what I used to think was my greatest shame, but after these last several years of making myself vomit to lose the weight my throat’s just too sore to eat much.
Reports on the high rates of illiteracy and semiliteracy among American adults.
News reports on measles outbreaks.
Trump’s second term, specifically. The bar is in free fall and apparently rock bottom is not the lowest you can go.
Reminds me of the south park episode of honey boo boo. The bar just keeps sinking… Someone send James Cameron out to do what James Cameron does best, being James Cameron. So he can go pick up the bar at the bottom of the ocean.
The bar is made of depleted uranium and will break right through rock bottom.
Surely, it must eventually pass the center of the earth and start going up
People being ‘anti-science.’
I grew up with Star Trek and old school science fiction stories where the rulers were ‘The Council Of Science’ or some such. There used to be a Presidential Science Advisor in the White House.
The entire 2020 pandemic convinced me as to how many people who did not trust science. It was the biggest dying on the inside moment I have ever had.
Man, 2020 (Covid) was so depressing with all that. Nurses not wearing masks and denying the effectiveness of vaccines was such a kick in the crotch for my morale.
Is your user name based on Hai Karate aftershave?
But seriously, yes. All Trump had to do was say something like ‘I’m a businessman, not a doctor. Let’s all follow my friend, Dr. Fauci’s guidelines and stick together.’
Our leaders aren’t as smart as nine year olds.
Is your user name based on Hai Karate aftershave?
Ha! Nope. It’s just a bunch of gobbledygook. I was in karate as a youngun, and Hideaki was the name I took in Japanese class.
Then allow me to educate you, Daniel-san.
Catchy tune.
Thanks for sharing.
And be careful how you use it.
This has been an interesting thread.
I mean Trump only wants yes men and women.
The problem with science is that consensus changes but often with tremendous lag.
The whole anti-fat movement I grew up in, for instance. It never made sense to me so I’ve always been a fan of fat. I always eat my chicken skins, always eat (at least chew) the fat on my steaks.
People used to worry about cholesterol a lot but then we found out dietary cholesterol doesn’t really matter for most people.
Turns out sugar is a lot worse than fat for you. Which they knew back then but industries being what they are … They use money to influence the research. Now they’re finally removing the refined sugars but now they’re pumping like three, four maybe five artificial sweeteners in there and pretty much all of them are linked to various problems…
That’s great for science, when done honestly, it’s striving to be better and it can change when it needs to. But these days there’s a lot of bad science out there and it can be difficult to discern what is good science from what is total bullshit.
To discern the bad science aka pseudoscience from actual educational science, is to follow the money as to what research is being fixed.
Science was always a practice of trial and error. Always will be. Science may not have all of the answers but it dares to challenge itself at all times to find those answers and is not afraid of being wrong.
There’s no point to follow the money. You follow the science. Both good and bad science are funded by drum roll please money!
Nothing is ever ‘pure.’
The old name for Down’s Syndrome was Mongoloid Idiocy, because mostly European doctors thought the eye folds made people look ‘Asiatic.’
The point is that you have people who are trying to discover an objective truth, and people who think that their Truth is already perfect.
this is why a lot of folks don’t think science is real though, because it doesn’t produce eternal truths that simplistic and easy to understand in simple algebra F = ma. Once you go to mechanics and calculus, you lose them and it’s magic and wizards.
they think the fact you can make Pluto not a planet means science is just shit people make up on a whim. and they aren’t wrong, in principle. it is made up shit, but it’s done by consensus of peer-reviewed experts often over years and decades of work pointing us to a new conclusion.
this pretty much sums up the enshitification to me. sure at its core its wealth disparity but I was a stem major and first they choked off funding and now its just plain ole antiscience. I mean he put out a presidential order about vaccine timelines.
The most of them think being anti-education is a kind of science in itself. They never looked at any of that as based in what was tangible, so shifting the role of who gets to define reality onto youtube gurus and facebook groups wasn’t a huge change
i grew up in an anti science family, seems pretty normal to me.
Want to share come details?
Did your family watch space shots? Could you see Star Wars? 6,000 year old Earth?
they think science was for anti-social losers and weirdos and nerds. and scientists shouldn’t be making public policy, business people should.
the only ‘science’ they were OK with was doctors. because they help people, they don’t work in some weird underground lab giving mice cancer for fun.
Thank you
How selfish and cruel people openly are.
Blows my mind how common it is nowadays.
The shit that comes out of stranger’s mouths to me shocks me on a weekly basis now. Years ago it probably shocked me on a once every couple of months basis.
Cruelty is a virtue in this age. Years of teaching people not to care what others think, no wonder they grew up to be casual sociopaths who lash out as an expression of their rugged and brave individuality
Whenever you hear someone talk about how little they care take a second to consider what they’re actually bemoaning in the context of living in a social fabric.
During the pandemic, my aunt bragged on Facebook about not taking any precautions. I congratulated her on being selfish
these people care a lot about what others thing. they just want others to admire them for being rich and powerful and cool.
no idea what you are on about ruggedness. these are incredibly fragile people who lash out at a barista for them not having oat milk.
You’re right. Boldly proclaiming “I don’t care about nothin” is an aesthetic in itself.
I said ruggedness in a patronizing way, it gets lost in written form. The straw man I usually go to when envisioning this person usually reckons they are some kind of cowboy.
I see what you’re saying and I know you didn’t ask for advice, but putting “rugged” and “brave” in quotation marks could have conveyed that patronization.
It’s not that we don’t care! It’s just that people=shit. ;)
Which is generally the justification people use to act shitty :)
Shit isn’t so bad. We all shit. I think the bigger problem is that the world is ran by the shittiest of the shitty people. And apparently most people look up to these shitty people.
“Shit isn’t so bad”
“The problem is all the shit”
Or let me clarify. Problem with shit is when people don’t wipe their ass.
Reminds me of an old George Carlin bit “you ever notice how everyone else’s stuff is shit, while all your shit is stuff?”
Wiping starts at home. Don’t just blame everyone else for their shit when you’ve still got a load in your own pants.
I would love if you could go into more detail about this. I’ve been a hermit for the past twenty years, so I haven’t noticed a decline.
just go outside.
i can’t go to a bar without hearing someone loudly brag about how they fucked somebody over or making other disgusting comments.
just go outside.
You don’t make it sound very enticing.
Yeah, hearing stuff like that makes me kind of glad i don’t get out much
Trump as president? and again?
I wish that were a surprise, but it was all so dreadfully predictable. There’s an author that I used to follow around the 2010 timeframe, who wrote on his blog that when fascism came to America, it’d be in the form of “corn pone Nazis,” not the stylish Hugo Boss-wearing ones. (Sadly, he’s scrubbed those old entries, perhaps because it’s too embarrassing after he went MAGA.)
There were plenty of warning signs earlier than that, too. The only thing we didn’t know then was the exact timing.
Most of his voters aren’t Nazis.
They are people who want change. and the democrats didn’t represent that in either election. they were status quo candidates. trump was the change candidate.
Most of his voters aren’t Nazis. They are people who want change.
I’m pretty sure that’s how the nazis got into power too
they got into power by representing what the people wanted and getting their votes?
wow… what a concept.
You’ve never meant a Evangelical, eh? They’re Nazis.
met tons of them. none of them were nazis.
met a ton of athelist liberals though, who were more than happy to fantasize about mass-murdering religious people. that seems a lot more nazi to me.
What would you call a congregation with a pastor that storms around on stage raging about how homosexuals and similarly other lgbtq+ are going to burn in hell?
And the whole congregation is loving every minute of it?
Right, they’re not stylish or intelligent enough to be Nazis, but it’s a fascist regime all the same.
nobody in his ‘regime’ is smart or organized enough to be facist. they are not idealogical, they are just greedy.
Oh, I wish that were true. While I hope you’re right, the trend is not looking good.
The democrats are genuinely that awful though. They basically tell 2/3 of the USA to go fuck itself, and well, they don’t get their votes.
They used to be a working-class party. Now they are the party of the college-educated, which is only 1/3 of voters.
So Trump one. All he had to do was appeal to those people, because the Democrats refuse to do so. Boom, wins two elections.
The democrats refuse to appeal to republicans? In my experience, trying to appeal to republicans is one of the bigger reasons the democrats lose elections.
Thats common misinfo spread by insane lefties but not its not true at all.
insane lefties are the majority of the posers on fedi. they existing their own fictional universe that everyone else who isn’t them is a nazi/extremist. and it’s just a reflection because they themselves are often the most nazi-like in their desire to use the force of the state to impose their will/values on everyone else.
1/3 of the country is independent. they are the swing voters. you have to appeal to them.
that’s the funny thing about winning elections… you need to get people to vote for you to do that.
the people who voted for Obama, voted for Trump.
the people who voted for Obama, voted for Trump.
You had me until this. Not even close.
