ameancow @ ameancow @lemmy.world

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1 yr. ago

No because we all keep talking about her.

Imagine if we all broadly put a fraction of a fraction of the effort we put into performative boycotts and infighting into actually getting involved in our local communities, organizing, fundraising and getting to know our local representatives.

You know, the things that have allowed capitalism to have unfettered access to our highest offices. The things that get ZERO media coverage and less hype, even broadly made fun of as lame or pathetic. If we cared at all about our local community and who represents us closest, we would have at least slowed down this march of endless growth that has made each of us into a commodity who thinks we're winning when we talk about brands and boycotts.

Part of why we're in this current mess is because too many people thought naively that the average person has room in their lives for ideology or that the average working american gives a shit about culture war when there's not enough time or money in the day to even take a breath, much less live a life.

They don't. The well isn't poisoned, it's dried out. If we put Tesla out of business tomorrow Elon will still be wealthy enough to buy nations and people's teslas will still be sitting in their garages slowly depreciating like every other consumer good.

I much, much, MUCH rather see someone put that time and energy that they would use to sell their car into getting involved in their local community organizing or county elections. Those are the systems that allowed people like Musk and Trump to seize power in America and those are also the ones that get ZERO media hype. Not a coincidence. Same distraction is happening in the "culture war" every day and we're all losing.

Absolutely, but a lot of people don't understand that you can't arrive to that point by not ever "small talking" along the way. Small-talk is how we express to each other how we feel, how we want to be talked to, what we notice around us and so on. It's a critical component to socializing. Conversations between human beings doesn't play out narratively like in media and movies, there's no "point" to conversing with someone you're close to, you're just sharing shit.

When most people say "I hate small talk" it's because they don't socialize broadly and don't really "get" how it works, and how it's often just a way of expressing how you feel at that moment, and when two people are making small-talk, it's less about the information being shared and more about the tone, intimacy and connection, like sharing space and being open with passing thoughts.

People in a healthy relationship will "small talk" for hours about the weather or pizza prices, and then launch into a deep debate about post-modernism and expressionist art, which will dissolve as one or both get distracted by the pizza finally arriving.

When someone says "I hate small talk" it just reveals they have no understanding how human connection actually works and think two people talking has to play out narratively like media, television shows or movies.

Lotta folks on both sides of this conversation who have never been in a long-term relationship.

It's okay because when your friend decides to give you a makeover so you can be "hot" they just need to take your glasses off after they fix your hair. It's fine really. No issues at all. Why did you have them on in the first place?

Interstellar gets worse and worse with age too. I'm sure this is tired ground, but the movie is fucking awful.

It introduces some neat concepts that audiences have never been exposed to, which is why it was popular, but the plot itself was utter dogshit. Particularly when viewed from a scientific lens like Nolan seemed to want from the outset.

Bro, I get you watched Contact at an impressionable age and now every great scifi should have some mix of heady science and human emotional experience, but "the only thing that can escape time and space is the human heart"? REALLY? You have actual scientists and mission commanders and the like having serious discussions in space reciting hallmark greeting card lines to each other with a straight face? This is even before touching on the utter nonsense around the black-hole that couldn't figure out it's own size, boundaries and rules.

I would wager that a lot more do.

My mother got drunk one night and sat me on her bed and described in detail when she got raped as a teenager, and the resulting abortion and the details of how that went. I was eleven.

Of course, being a male I can't go around talking about the lasting effects of many such incidents that happened to me, and I'm not really expected to even connect those things to any feelings about sexual shame. So instead what it does, and what it does to many men who had any kind of sexual trauma, is we just block out the incidents and internalize the feelings and associations inward and it just wrecks our self-esteem, our standards for ourselves and our perceptions of attractiveness in ourselves.

A lot of guys process this in different ways, and trauma like this can take many forms. But it's often expressed as later over-compensation and bravado and an image of being "in control" sexually and performative masculinity and hyper-objectifying notions of sexuality, or for more people I suspect, just an internal, festering self-esteem that doesn't want them to be happy or feel good about themselves. For every loud, angry incel, I suspect there are thousands of men who have the same background or traumas and they just sit quietly on it forever and it robs them of joy.

Yeah, maybe my people just messed me up.

I'm pretty sure we're now in a situation where most of our society's contention is driven by childhood-induced shame over sexuality in some form or another.

And there's not shit we can do about it because every time someone tries to make a campaign to encourage better sex-education, or even scarier, sex positivity among children, those people or groups get attacked for being pedos and predators.

This is going to be a social dividing line that gets sharper as time goes. There will be people who have a shred of intellectual capacity and haven't been hollowed out be capitalism, who raise their kids to be free from shame and shackles of toxic social norms and let them just live and discover on their own what sexuality means to them.

And the orcs, who want literal dark-ages levels of shame, hate and fear and of course power-imbalances as deeply rooted foundations to anything and everything related to sex, and they will only want children associated with sex when it involves controlling them or worse.

That's great, now how?

Do you think if this message alone spread (it already has) that anyone is going to take it seriously? The top polluters and the ones deciding what our packaging is like are the most wealthy corporations on Earth and they are the ones doing the most climate damage, and the ones who control the narrative and our politics.

Do you think "ban plastics" will ever be a populist political talking point in these conditions? Do you think it would gain momentum?

Or are we looking at it wrong? What if more of us targeted the system that is sustaining climate destruction with an actual populist idea? What if we started wresting control and money away from the companies filling our sea with plastic?

Do you want to spread a message of lasting change? Start spreading "pro family, pro children" messages like the need for social help as millions become jobless as capital starts digesting itself in its current late-stage. You want to see plastics away? (No we're never seeing an end to cardboard, that's unrealistic to push for.) Then start advocating for Universal Basic Income and other measures that put control back in the hands of the people.

The chances of first-worlders putting up with packaging and preserved food habits that are essentially post-collapse "The Last of Us" levels of mild inconvenience: about -100% if such a ratio is possible.

"Ya'll telling me I gotta feed mah kids dried beans? How da fuck they gonna eat dried beans? they too crunchy!" will be the viral soundbite from a Kansas parking lot.

Capital won't allow change until it can no longer bleed a dime in it's present state. We're living under a locust plague and we've called it the modern world.

I think I read that no matter who you are and what you've done, only about 10% - 15% of all plastic you've recycled actually gets recycled. The vast majority ends up on barges being shipped overseas or to landfills.

This isn't to say stop recycling, if it compiles plastic into places instead of just distributing across the globe, then maybe later when people get off their ass and realize we're in trouble, they might make some kind of bacterial-world-ending-zombie-plague type solution for breaking down plastic waste, at least the plasti-zombie-plague will be isolated to particular regions and countries.

Yah that's the one that will do him in and crumble his empire. Surely.

A lot of males or kids raised masculine have that habit broken real fast.

For the majority of the western world, it's still considered cute and more than acceptable for women to have stuffed toys into adulthood, or that it's feminizing in some way. Try that as a guy past a certain age though and you're more likely to flip a coin on social acceptance from friends, family and strangers alike.

It's a funny example how social pressure to conform to arbitrary standards and social norms is generational even if it makes no objective sense.

(For the dense out there, if you're here to reply arguing about the acceptability of having a teddy bear as a man or woman because of your personal story/kink, you're missing the leading subtext.)

I think it's saying you can factor out the zero because it's zero and we're looking for "base sets" which for us 1's? Factoring every number system down to whatever their base set is equivalent to that original 1's relationship with zero?

It seems a little more esoteric than the practical reality that an alien might just count on it's digits which could be any base number, and we should understand that, particularly if it gets so bad on Earth we have to leave soon.

I haven't taken math in a very long time.

It's not that 60% was "okay with fascism."

It's that "60% of people have embraced toxic nihilism." Shaped from years of scrolling, overdosing on dopamine, reading and participating in contentious debates on the internet that never lead to an outcome, reading clickbait headlines that stopped making sense years ago, going home and sitting in front of a monitor instead of going out with friends to hang out and just talk about life, of eating the most addictive foods and getting all manner of drugs over the counter to alter their moods, their feelings, their perceptions.

We have everything to placate us and make us happy and it's killing everyone.

Many years ago I once sat with a local captain (like a constable) of a village in Southeast Asia. We were drinking gin and looking at the stars and he said "You know why gin here is cheap? And sold on every corner? Because as long as everyone makes their number one priority at the end of the day to come home and get drunk, you won't get people coming together and forming groups, of protesting the injustices, of changing the system" he said with a smile as he tossed back another shot.

Since then I've actually pursued this and have found evidence over and over how capital uses numbing agents to keep populations subdued, from the overt tactics well recorded and planned like the use of Opium in China, all the way through more modern places like Russia and vodka. And it works. And we have a lot more numbing agents around us now than just ingestible substances.

In places with fewer numbing agents, people are still having kids, still throwing parties and looking forward to poker every night with their grown siblings, of building a new barn or getting together to open a new store, or instead of spending 12 hours a day getting better at Marvel Rivals, they're playing basketball. Sure it happens here still, but it's in such radical decline that we have a dictator in charge and nobody cares. This is manufactured nihilism and don't mistake it for something else because that's exactly what the numbing agents want you to do.

About 30% of Americans did, and that's the segment least representative of what average people actually want.

This isn't an "America bad" situation as much as an "Oh fuck, capitalism just took down America, who is it coming for next?" situation.

I saw a guy in a Lamborghini just yesterday at the gas station, I remember how it made me feel like less of a man suddenly, and an overwhelming urge to admire and listen to the man driving and respect his opinions.

Oh wait, no I thought "ugly color" and forgot entirely about it a moment later until this post. I always mix those up.

If this wasn't 2025 I would have thought this image was satire it's so overtly toxic and stupid.

Yet here we are.