ameancow @ ameancow @lemmy.world

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The best example of how the world has changed and changed us is by rewatching The West Wing. A show that if aired today, would probably end up with the production studio burned down.

Hyper-individualism is a much more modern idea that may have its roots in our founding but it was exploited by capitalism during the post-war financial boom last century.

Before we had media showing us "how it should be" families lived together throughout their lives, communities helped each other and American towns pulled together and helped each other in a variety of ways. The whole idea of single-family homes was invented by the housing industry to get people to buy three to four times as many homes. To sell this they started leaning harder into the idea that you're the protagonist, you specifically, you are special just for being American, you are special for wanting your own things (that are advertised to you) and so on.

And before industrialized America and throughout the last several hundred MILLENNIA we were a communal species, it's why we have so much contradictory hard-wiring that influences how we feel about our social standing, about other people's feelings towards us, why there are so many people who latch onto authoritarians and fear strangers. These are ideas that run in direct opposition to "rugged individualism" and they are clear signs we're not living the way we've been designed by literally millions of years of evolution.

Capitalism has pried apart the very fabric of our species and weaponized it.

If you're going to use a movie to deliver populism and morality, it better be a good movie or you're just handing ammunition to the world's worst piles of shit.

We need to all collectively admit to ourselves that Superman is tired and over and from a different world. We can write new stories that will connect with and give hope to a far more apathetic and cynical population.

Edit: lot of people telling me it was a great movie, reflexive negative reactions are from guys who think it's "cringe" to be at all genuine and thoughtful in a media work.

Major congratulations. I despair seeing so many people who ostensibly want the same things and yet live in constant stress for living up to some imagined image of what's "normal" or "proper" for a relationship.

People tend to argue for why they're lonely so impassionately that you start to realize that loneliness and hopelessness is what they actually want on some level because it's more comfortable than the challenges of sharing your actual life with someone, and their brains are just inventing stories for why they can't find a partner who they can be friends with and enjoy things together.

We have entire industries of scammers on social media pushing videos that serve only to feed this insecurity and avoidance and it's making everything so much worse. I'm very glad I'm not part of the modern dating world because I've known what I've wanted since the beginning.

I couldn't possibly spend a moment with a woman who couldn't talk with me about historical disasters.

I held to my values and wanted good things for myself and that's what I got.

All fields can be "finance" depending on how you look at it.

Our dumb, violent, primate species fucking deserves the apocalypse we're crafting in laboratories as we speak.

I would be nice if people broadly opposed bombing ANYONE but even here, a site that appeals largely to self-proclaimed leftists and progressives like this is just oozing with as much bloodlust as you would see from the worst people we condemn.

This bloodlust for the deaths of others is why we have a genocide raging to begin with. Why can't we all be better and be consistent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea_crisis

The Houthis say that any Israel-linked ship is a target,[90][87][88] including US and UK warships, but they have also attacked the ships of many nations with no connection to Israel.[91][92] From October 2023 to March 2024, the Houthis attacked more than 60 vessels in the Red Sea.

edit: the fact that people are snarling at actual, neutral reporting of factual events should be the clue-in that you're all literally doing the exact same thing we despise from the right, letting feelings cloud our judgement about who our real allies are or are not. Use your fucking heads you hysterical children.

I am fully convinced that most of you are reflexively reacting because your favorite political streamer said something good about Houthis at some point and you're not even sure why or what the nuance is.

The part where this goes off the rails in the public discourse is that people are broadly absolutely fucking STUCK in linear, binary thinking, I can list a thousand examples of this in every-day-life and it's a weakness that governments exploit daily. For some reason our species can live comfortably in the cognitive dissonance about things like faith and reason existing alongside each other, but cannot fathom the idea that bad people can fight other bad people and they're both bad. Or that people lie in ways that appeal to your own feelings to try to get public sympathy behind their own agenda.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea_crisis

The Houthis say that any Israel-linked ship is a target,[90][87][88] including US and UK warships, but they have also attacked the ships of many nations with no connection to Israel.[91][92] From October 2023 to March 2024, the Houthis attacked more than 60 vessels in the Red Sea.

They're pirates. If the genocide stopped tomorrow, they would still be fighting for their own political agendas and of course the wealth onboard these giant ships full of goods, including food, aid and other vital supplies destined for countries unrelated to Israel, Yemen or Palestine.

I guess because I've witnessed authoritarian takeovers of other countries this detail didn't even phase me, we should have expected it. There are a large number of places in the world where you will get turned away or worse for your beliefs if you're outspoken. Americans' deluded belief broadly that we had "free speech" was always a crutch people would use to justify their hate but was rarely used for actual social change.

The next layer of destruction of our species' potential was when we monetized attention spans.

One of my more depressing moments in dealing with the human race was when people were boycotting Blizzard a few years ago for.. well, everything. But the sexual harassment and discrimination scandal was the final straw for a lot of people.

I talked about it with my gaming friends on discord at the time, everyone agreed that what the company was doing was terrible, but the more we talked about it, the more they delved into nostalgia and thought about how much fun they had playing WoW when they were younger.

The next day I jump in discord and all five of them had reactivated their subscriptions and were having the time of their life running around WoW without a care in the world. I wanted to throw up.

Our species is fundamentally stuck in a state of cognitive dissonance. We will never have good things.

The reality is this:

They are accosting and hassling/turning away people who aren't white. And I see pushback on this in the weirdest forms, people saying how most immigration officers are hispanic or black also, etc. That does not matter. This is entirely superficial and ordered by higher-ups and designed to drive up hate and racial tension so we don't unify. If you're not white, you face significant chances of being hassled at immigration but there are still thousands and thousands of people passing in and out of the country daily, so it's not THAT high of a chance.

As for transit across the states? Outside of some real backwater sundown towns in the deep south, there is a massive cognitive bias at work in the USA that works in two directions.

I can promise you that you can be brown, asian, hispanic, purple with polka-dots and could most likely bicycle across the entire country and you will be treated with kindness and respect and people will offer to take you into their homes across the country.

The weird disconnect that people are having a hard time digesting is that some of these same people will go online and scream about how immigrants are ruining our country and that we need to start a race war.

We don't live in a coherent reality in the USA anymore. The media world, including the internet and places like reddit and lemmy and facebook and twitter reflect a weird "mirror universe" where people are following an entirely different set of feelings.

We are in a new world of cognitive dissonance and I fully understand how off-putting that is and I recommend not visiting the country for that reason alone. Don't give this country tourism money as long as this administration remains in control.

coughskincolorcough *

I want to go back about 20 years and find every idealist moron online who tried to debate with me that we can't keep calling people racist and that oppression is a deeper issue than superficial appearances and I want to smack them clean into 2025 so they can see what they permitted.

Nobody cares about objective reality anymore. Once we started letting people live in their own worlds of "feel facts" without consequence, lest someone throw stones at our own escapism cognitive biases, we ceded control of the world to the loudest and most hateful people.

There is no convincing people of anything anymore because they can just close their ears and go somewhere more comfortable. If they face no repercussions and can not only get praise for being hateful but even raise money and become celebrities, what do we really think is going to result from explaining things anymore?

You likely hold many such superficial judgements, we all do about something or other. I don't think I would frame it as "mental illness" without expecting a lot of pushback from such an inflammatory statement. Normal, healthy people make judgements all day long based on the most superficial of ideas and perceptions, the question is how much you personally care.

If it's strangers on the internet you're just bullshitting with, I can't imagine caring about how some stranger perceives you. But these things can become self-harmful if you're genuinely trying to be heard and understood about something that's important to you. If you've spent any amount of time on social media (including forums like this) I'm sure you've seen this play out over and over, where people end up deeply stressed because they're talking past each other and dismissing each other's actual feelings about things that are important to each other.

This is what I decry, the lack of effort to be heard about important ideas, even if subjectively important, we're all collectively really neglecting effort and embracing anti-intellectual catchphrases (just put the X in the bag, the curtains were just blue, I ain't readin all that, etc.) and making our lack of effort to communicate other people's problem when it goes wrong.

If you think none of this matters, end up in a role of responsibility and have to spend a month interviewing people for a role of great responsibility and sifting through the masses of young people who make zero effort and feel entitled to rewards for it.

It absolutely makes my day that you think this is a fight. Have fun out there.

You don't have to agree with me, the topic is about people generally and their perceptions, if this wasn't something shared by a number of people this wouldn't be a post. You can disagree with me all you want, you will still encounter people who will judge in different ways depending on how you present yourself online. If you don't like it, go change the world.

Sure, and I do, but anime profile pics come with extra baggage and we all know it.