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Cake day: May 10th, 2024

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  • ameancow@lemmy.worldtoNews@lemmy.worldHulk Hogan dead at 71
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    4 days ago

    It’s just entertainment

    Until the people who profit off making fake things seem real use the same tactics to shape policy and undermine democracy. For that matter, some of the very same people who produced the cognitive dissonance of wrestling went on to produce political campaigns, blurring that line in uneducated viewers’ minds further.

    I’m not saying you can’t enjoy wrestling or whatever media you like, as long as you understand how entertainment works and that it’s not even a reflection of reality, much less an actual narrative. That’s the difference I’m talking about here, if you know that difference, you need not worry, go have fun.


  • ameancow@lemmy.worldtoNews@lemmy.worldHulk Hogan dead at 71
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    4 days ago

    Sorry, I was going to start giving you actual figures about how much money changes hands for our regular traditions and cultural events across the world, but realized if you’re willing to die on this hill you’re a typical internetist where it is critically important that you call out someone’s mildly problematic behavior or history while we lose literally everything we value in society due to rampant fascism resurging and the idolization of actual monsters, and you think that by making a stand on this one slippery-slope that you’re going to do anything but turn people away from the very notion of being anti-royalist.

    Just by engaging with this bullshit it will drive some infinitesimal point up on some algorithm and some Ozzy fan somewhere will read “LIBS CANCEL DEAD ROCK LEGEND FOR NOT BEING WOKE” and all you will have done is make more people angry at the wrong thing at the wrong time.

    And since I know you skimmed that and didn’t read it, let me give you the tl:dr: you’re blocked.



  • ameancow@lemmy.worldtoNews@lemmy.worldHulk Hogan dead at 71
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    4 days ago

    I never understood wrestling. Even as a child I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I didn’t get what was so fucking amazing to my friends about watching people put on a stageplay and pretend to hit each other in a ring while wearing tights. It seemed cheesy, boring and unexciting.

    My friends ate it up, they were screaming at the TV. I tried to tell them it was fake and they got mad. I was boggled how people couldn’t tell it was fake. There was a Hulk Hogan cartoon in the 80’s, I loved cartoons but I was still boggled what was going on with wrestlers being so popular. The cartoon was boring and substandard, even to a child.

    Fast-forward a buncha decades and here we are, a whole world of people shouting at the TV and getting exciting over theatrical bullshit presented in overtly fake ways for people to mindlessly cheer or jeer at their favorite heroes and villains… except now it’s the goddamn federal government.




  • ameancow@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldThe ol' Uno Reverse
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    4 days ago

    Good analysis of the “nothing ever happens” Team Apathy trend.

    It’s not that nothing ever happens, it’s that attention-spans are now a commodity and when you read so many headlines meant to capture that attention span like, “SCIENTISTS HORRIFIED BY STRUCTURES DISCOVERED UNDER MARS” or “EYEBALL PLANET FOUND IN SPACE” (both actual headlines I saw recently) and then it turns out to be just normal stories about science or the like, you start to feel like nothing is real, and if nothing is real then nothing really happens.

    If you turn off your media feed and just seek out news on the things you’re interested in without letting the algorithm drag you around by the ballsack, you will be smarter and appreciate the amazing, terrifying fantastic and fascinating things that happen every day.








  • ameancow@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldIt really does
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    5 days ago

    And the amount of effort and space and knowledge you need to turn your love for gardening into a self-sustaining subsistence is utterly unfeasible for the vast majority of humans right now.

    We tried it. We did it for eons. Then slowly, people started realizing they could trade what they have extra of, for things they needed, and that we could even centralize this trading system and cities were born, and then people were able to work jobs managing the trade of goods instead of just digging in dirt day and night and fewer people starved or froze every winter.

    Our working world is, for the most part, objectively better than how we’ve lived for the last several hundred thousand years. What is making us miserable is our lack of community and connection, because we didn’t do all that stuff I mentioned above alone. We survived by making groups, families, communities and eventually cities and nations.

    We are in the better timeline right now, but all ya’ll kids played Stardew Valley a buncha times and now you think you can go be farmers and be anti-social introverts at the same time.


  • You are absolutely right that we are ignoring community to a disastrous degree, our lack of communal spirit is allowing the worst people to gain the most power because we don’t care about who supports those worst people and only focus on spectacle.

    But we still need broader systems, if we just have small communities, we end up with medieval feudalism the moment one community needs something their neighbor has.

    We can’t get rid of the human need to “get ahead” it’s hardwired in, even in the most equitable system, there will always be someone who says “I want more.” And they will exploit and game the system until they get it. If there aren’t guardrails and laws and systems to enforce those laws, those kinds of people will immediately resort to force and we have, yet again, armed raiders who then become powerful enough after killing and raping enough of their neighboring communities that suddenly everyone sees them as the central power.

    Our problem isn’t that we don’t know how to government, our problem is we’re broadly still too dumb to handle the abstraction required to manage such large systems. We haven’t had that “reckoning” yet that will slap our whole species down a peg and say “You need to value intelligence” and I genuinely don’t know what will do it at this point. We had plagues and wars and genocides and it made people cling to ignorance harder.

    I might be peaking on my cynicism here but I am not sure we can rise above our limitations as a species. It might take several thousand more years of people building civilizations and having them reduced to ashes again and again before natural selection creates a species that can work together for a common good. But I kind of don’t think we’ll even be humans anymore at that point.