i can’t tell if this is edginess or mental illness? i hope she’s doing okay
Oh no I'm sorry to hear that :( And I'm guessing my story here nudged you to reach out, I'm sorry. And that's really shitty. How long ago was it that you last spoke?
South African here. Not really that invested in seeing any South African communities grow here if I'm honest. I don't really feel any particular connection or pride for any sort of heritage. My 'culture' is cartoons and comics and video games and western music subcultures.
I do like that non-Americans are more visible here though. It feels like much more of an international crowd here on Lemmy.
Can't say I've found any particular subreddits that feel like home yet. Once I'm back on the horse watching pro wrestling I'll probably use SquaredCircle a lot again. On Reddit, I'd be most active in subreddits based on whatever I'm currently watching or playing. Which isn't really a thing here yet. Like, one of the last subs I was fairly active in on Reddit was the Sonic the Hedgehog sub. There's a community here but last I checked it was pretty dead. Most of the communities that I would be active in are entertainment based, I guess.
And of course I appreciate a lot of the communities in Blahaj. Although I'm still mostly floating around finding myself in the regard.
Something else that I'm appreciating is the amount of random animal subs that come through my feed that I'm slowly subbing to. From cats and dogs to raccoons and possums and otters and crows and owls. There's a new one I'm coming across almost every day and I love it.
Charlie the Unicorn (YouTube)
Ah yeah, didn't even think of that and I even saw a post come through my feed this morning from there. I tend to associate this kind of stuff more with hippies lol but maybe that's a good place to ask too.
Ah, I was talking about the satanism connection here lol.
I don't think I've really seen any communities around here dealing with anything metaphysical or whatever. Or this kind of spirituality.
You might possibly get a better reception in !witchesvspatriarchy@lemmy.ca but that's really the only community around here where I think people who have information or advice could possibly be lurking.
Ah fuck is Katy Perry actually cool?
Edit: didn't think I'd need to indicate that I was speaking in jest but /s
They allowed a self proclaimed dictator to take power a couple of months after the courts decided that presidents should have dictator powers and the full plans for what they're doing now called project 2025 was doing the rounds.
I truly feel bad for the good and decent people that were born into a country of fucking sociopath illiterate inbred clowns but Donald Trump's 'approval' rating has never even gone below 40%. In fact just last night I saw an article saying that his approval rating has actually rebounded a little bit.
I used to love Americans. There's still a few that I think are pretty cool. But this whole thing has changed my opinion of them in general. In a not at all good way. I think I despair more about the otherwise decent seeming people who claim they voted for the price of eggs or some shit than I do about the stereotypical 'Murica' people that worship Trump like Jesus. My image of the USA was betrayed the most by those people.
Trump: "Hannibal Lecter is a wonderful man! Wind turbines are killing whales in numbers never seen before. I'll beat Obama in this election again." shuffles around to YMCA
This lady and countless other Trump voters: "He just gets me! Shares all of my views, praise Jesus!"
At this point, he wouldn't even need to call it anything or make any excuses. His followers would just suddenly no longer have a problem with pedos.
Happy birthday! Enjoy your you day. And may there be plenty more opportunities to be social and party on your birthday if that's what you want at the time.
First time I've ever read of this interpretation and that's super fucking cool.
Just to add for information's sake, it works the other way around too. As in, you can use Fennec instead of Firefox Android and still sync with standard Firefox on desktop. Or Librewolf or whatever. I think most forks probably use the same sync functionality and servers as vanilla Firefox.
This reminds me of an online thing that I had going with someone that started in my late teens. Even the line about not having empathy was something that I remember, which I never bought. And talking about self harm, suicide, trouble distinguishing dreams from actual events etc. That was a wild ride. I eventually found out, when everything was crashing and burning, that a lot of stories and details of stories were made up too.
Funnily enough, after years of not talking, she's probably one of my 'best' and longest running friends now lol. Someone that I can talk to about anything with (literally the only person I've ever discussed gender identity related shit with). I wasn't born perfect either, and put her through just as much hell, so we've both seen and dealt with each other at our worst and lowest, which makes a good kind of shoulder to cry on if you can make it through the other side of that.
And in her case, it was part edginess and part mental health lol. Bipolar and being a teenager that wanted to fit in with the alternative scene and be dark and morbid and shit. Which I actually get to some extent too. When I was young I used to say that I'd be part of club 27 because I thought that a cool thing to say and imagine for myself. Until someone actually pointed out how fucked up it is to go around talking like that.
Lol holy shit. And a few hours later he's going to deny that he denied the exemption and be like "what are you talking about? I said certain electronics are exempt!"
I'm starting to think that maybe the reason Elon Musk did two blatant nazi salutes in a row was to test what they could do in front of everyone's eyes while denying it, and to see how many people would just go "ok sure, I didn't see what I just saw. Whatever you say, dear leader."
In a vacuum, without any opposing messaging, guys learning this stuff organically or through simple social maturation might be enough in a leftward-shifting society, but there's an entire developed pipeline to capture young men into right-wing, misogynistic rhetoric, and it's clearly very successful, and it's part of a feedback cycle/ political apparatus used to push society rightwards.
Yeah I'm with you there. As someone that lives in a relatively socially conservative country, I can't think of too many older men I knew growing up that wouldn't have been / probably have been sucked into this culture war shit. Because none of this is new, it's a conservative push to restore gender roles and boomer humour and boys will be boys and greasy old film execs getting away with sexual assault.
I don't think that the answer is necessarily older friends. If it was just a case of needing older male role models to talk to, then this conservative shift would've started with the older millennials already. Because every second person I knew came from a divorced, usually fatherless household.
The difference is that we weren't listening to jackasses whose qualifications are hosting Fear Factor lecture us about gender roles and politics. We didn't even have the kind of 'media' when I was in my early 20s, unless you count greasy TV preachers. So actually what the fuck has happened.
Maybe the answer is to get Guy Fieri doing a leftist podcast because the kids seem to love having reality stars from yesteryear lecture them about politics and social issues. But I dunno, I think the media that we consume in general is part of the issue. Why isn't Sonic the Hedgehog an anti-authoritarian hero anymore? The kids need punk rock, not podcasts. Not whatever the entertainment industry is offering right now if it's being beaten by Joe Rogan and a microphone.
Also just want to say, this author talks like going through a woman hating phase is normal for an 18 year old because of not having money and confidence. Which fuck that, it's not only men that don't have money and confidence or experience when they're young. And that wasn't a 'normal' phase for teenage boys to go through when I was that age.
Which after my long rant (sorry, I'm fairly stoned) brings me to what I'm actually agreeing with in the first place. It's definitely this pipeline, as you said. And lack of a good leftist or progressive pipeline.
Recently did another Plants vs. Zombies run, so I'm gonna throw this one into the mix here.
Before they mention any backwards conservative bigot views, or throw their trash out the window of a moving a car, or treat minimum wage staff like dirt, I'm afraid to say that a big red flag for me personally is being religious.
And it's not just because christians seem to be leading the charge in supporting right wing piece of shit politicians. It's not just because they have looked the other way for decades while priests molest kids but treat drag queens reading books in a public library as the ultimate sin.
It's from a lifetime of these people telling me that all the cartoons I enjoyed and music I listened to was going to send me to hell. It's from believing in the first place that anyone different from you deserves to literally burn for eternity and not seeing a problem with that. It's because of every christian that ever told me that only humans have souls and that other animals are just meat robots to use and abuse. It's because of my reborn christian hostel master that used to go on long lectures about how KISS stands for Kids In Satan's Service. And all of the other super racist, super christian piece of shit teachers in that school. It's because of every christian that I have eaten a meal with that insists on holding hands and saying grace without once asking or checking what my beliefs are, or even giving a shit.
I have a lifelong suspicion and distrust of religious people and nothing that has been happening in the world socio-politically in the last decade has improved that suspicion, in fact it's just made it worse.
So even if you claim to be a 'left wing christian" (like fucking for virginity) or try to tell me that most christians are decent people, all of the evidence says otherwise and tells me that christians are dogmatic and unempathetic and will support dogmatic and unempathetic leaders the first chance they get. And that makes us enemies.
The same goes for all monotheistic religions but a single out christianity here based on my own life experience.
Where are all the free speech warriors? Shouldn't they be blocking freeways with trucks and going on about the 'deep state' and new world order right about now? And what about the king 'free speech absolutionist' and all of his bootlickers? Shouldn't they be defending the values that they apparently care so deeply about right about now? Where's the rioting on twitter?
If you were a fresh faced, bright eyed gen Zer straight out of school that got caught up in and fooled by this bullshit, I could maybe forgive you if you actually used your own brains for once and your own eyes to see these hypocrites, liars and idiots in action and to see what they're really made of and all about.
Anyone older than gen Z can get fucked though because no one older than 25 has an excuse to have not seen these people for what they really are. Anyone that grew up with these clowns calling everything from Ninja Turtles to Pokemon evil and trying to ban rap music and heavy metal should've been able to see from a mile away that they just swapped the word 'evil' for 'woke'. Anyone older than 25 that fell for this must've been a piece of shit to begin with.
For what it's worth, I was also blocked at a time in my saga. And might have even been the blocker once. I don't think it's the healthiest kind of relationship to have with someone lol. Especially with strong feelings involved. All that I can say worked in my situation was time apart and maybe a change in mindset since then too.
But I mean, sometimes people just suck too and are just bullies or bigots. And it's admirable that you're worried about her mental state here when you could probably still do with some healing yourself too. If it's eating you up, I used to find that the best escape from this sort of spiralling out is to lose myself in a complicated RPG.