ameancow @ ameancow @lemmy.world

Posts

0

Comments

1,068

Joined

1 yr. ago

I'll deliver this reply in Choose Your Own Adventure Format:

If you want to make a reference to Donald Trump being at his birthday parade and thus exposed, vulnerable and in the open and presently not looking up, turn to page 89.

If you rather make a reference to how we should leave the Devil be because the Devil himself is more respectable and honorable than any of these monstrous despots who murder out of spite and wrap themselves in scripture, turn to page 322.

There are more and more promising trials of life-extension drugs, procedures and genetic tricks, It seems like we might be only a couple decades away from extending human lifespans* by around 30% from conservative averages.

I wonder how many of us are going to slide under that lowering Indiana-Jones door. And how many people are going to live on after seeing people they care for dying to a disease that we still think of as natural. and will look back at one day the way we look at how we lived before germ theory or antibiotics existed.

in this case, "human" will probably mean wealthy white men, but it will be a start.

The Boys was great. For about 1.5 seasons and then became an expensive, repetitive, gratuitous mess that made no effort to keep changing the formula. I actually convinced myself it was okay enough to get through the whole series then looked back and thought "I can't remember a single significant plot development that led to anything real beyond the first season."

I have a feeling it will be a disappointment. Not because the quality of the movie will have changed, but because all of us have changed.

We sort of do but it will be a nightmare abomination of stitched together dead things.

(I'm talking about AI, not actual frankenstein tech, John probably would have been cool with that way of coming back.)

I genuinely thought he had passed several years ago, I had a real Mandela-Effect moment when I saw this trailer, I thought at first "There's no way this will be funny without Mel leading it." Then he appeared and seemed old but energetic and thought "there is no WAY they used AI to resurrect him, this is horrible!"

It took a few minutes for me to figure out what reality I was in and I still have my doubts about Spaceballs sequel, not because I don't think it will be funny, but because the general population who discusses things and overanalyzes things get the loudest voice and review bomb movies that are supposed to be just fun and not a pointed social statement.

You might be a tad on the young side. These kinds of movies were a product of their time and likely wouldn't hold up for people who grew up in the age of Tiktok, Vine, youtube shorts, etc.

We are a species of cognitive dissonance. I want to know how many of the people reading this story and feeling revolted or horrified were eating meat at the time.

Also not a vegan per-say, but I have reduced my meat intake and try to buy local to avoid giving money to the nightmare hellscapes like Tyson and Perdue the like. That's about the best I can manage in my current lifestyle.

Everyone needs to reconcile and work out this dilemma. It's amazing how many people are dishonest with themselves and others about their reasons for feeling the way they do about eating meat, killing animals, etc. It's okay to say "I love animals but not enough to quit eating meat" and accept it in yourself. It's not a worse moral failing than a hundred other contradictory ideas we all hold in our heads every day. It's okay to say "I find this story distasteful because killing animals should be done behind closed doors to respect others." That's also a fine opinion to have.

I don't get why people have to do backflips to rationalize shit. We are irrational species.

Factory farms and the entire livestock/dairy/meat industry does indeed suck.

Edit: exactly seven of you are pro-factory-farm and I think you probably need Jesus. To come back and slap each of you.

You're like, on the edge of political awareness, but you're kinda stuck on the wallpaper.

Setting aside that I also said she's not the right candidate for the time, I know for a fact that the "woman president will never win" mandate is a manufactured talking point and a lot of otherwise smart people ate that story up because they thought the system was remotely balanced and that democracy wasn't compromised. (as well as latent, bitter, cynical sexism oozing out of the country's pores right now.)

Clinton won the popular vote. It's not the gender of the candidate, it's the energy of the electorate and their ability to sidestep very real corruption in politics by people like Elon Musk controlling AI and search engines, and very real KGB tactics being used on our populace.

Trump's victories have been hacks. They exploited every angle to make it happen. The people who voted him into power are the minority, they don't represent the average voter. Our problem is the "average voter" is staying home, because, and I cannot stress this enough, our society has been compromised, hacked, unfairly influenced. In this current climate we won't see ANYONE the corporate oligarchs don't want to see on the throne. The Democrat party is in on this. There's a reason they're trying to undermine the Dems who don't take the checks like AOC and Zhoran, people who are basically enemies of their own party.

We rebuild this a piece at a time from grassroots, and we need to push the "gender" questions out of public discourse and stop falling for the distraction. Every other nation is electing liberal or left-leaning candidates, men and women alike. This isn't a fair democracy in the USA anymore, we have to get out of this mindset that we "just need our own version of Trump."

We need the popular mandate but we also need a way to get around the artificial bumpers the current oligarchy has set up. If you buy the idea that we need to remove women from the ballot, or we need candidates who are more "moderate" (IE: right leaning) you're falling for the ploy, hook, line and sinker.

This isn't an issue, it's used by some parents with very small children in busy areas like amusement parks or if they have special needs, but hardly anyone actually cares outside of comedy skits. Nobody actually feels shame or anything. It's played up for laughs.

There's like 20% of every Lemmy/Reddit post about things like this from people who are thinking WAY too hard about things.

I'm all in favor of using unconventional methods for health and safety, but really outside of a few special cases like improving blood-flow in reattached limbs or other body parts, I'm not sure why we're trying to put leaches on children, it seems like a bad idea, but I guess if you just keep leaches as pets and don't have another blood source for them, maybe just ask your kids first. Smh.

Ah yes, the Chuck Schumer School of Resistance Fighting.

Capitalists always thinking "I better leave a back door open here in case this turns into an opportunity..."

Older American here, I remember the Before Times, so I can speak to how I've seen things change/crumble. Over the last twenty or so years everything has really accelerated. Social media is the biggest tool that outside and internal forces have used to destabilize democracy.

Democratic rule is terrible for business, people may make choices against your bottom line. On top of that, people like Iran, Russia, many others out there, want to crush America and never gave up their wars against us.

The KGB handbook details how to do what's been done to the US in great detail, how to amplify and boost the most confusing, chaotic rage-bait from both sides of every contentious issue until people basically tune out and just go along with whatever the government says. Makes people not get involved in electoral politics anymore. They did this in other countries that they've absorbed/annexed or have created sympathetic populations within.

If it was just Russia we probably could have countered it and defended better against it, but you combine that with the efforts of many other cells, different nations and contracted organizations doing the same thing, then add dopamine-addicting social-media algorithms and a deeply sabotaged education system, carefully tweaked interest rates and health-care obstacles, so that people are forced to work 6-days a week and are barely able to afford anything and can't spend any time learning or being curious, then a lot of very strategic messaging targeting specific portions of the population with racist, xenophobic ideas, and you have what we have now. A huge population held hostage by the smallest, dumbest, loudest segment.

And it's coming for you next.

(Also, this was all done before AI could specifically target every individual's most personal fears, desires and vulnerabilities, and could produce 100% convincing images and videos. We are all massively, thoroughly fucked.)

If I had a genie I think I would spend one wish on making it so people stopped believing random, vague text on random pictures on the internet.

Seriously, this is partially why we're falling apart in the US, we had too many people who get all their news from social media and cannot tell the difference between journalism and "words that someone put on a photo."

Jesus, like most of these don't even have fake photo credits or web-pages. We lost democracy to not even half-assed memes and distractions, this shit is quarter-assed or less

She was a weak candidate and had very little political capital, it was a wild shot, but she was just a better choice than Biden. The dem party has almost ZERO strong presidential leadership that the general, liberal or progressive population can connect with, and I'm pretty sure it's by design.

AOC might have a chance of rising and gaining prominence but she's still regarded broadly as "too young" to do more than take a senate seat, which would be great either way. Zhoran Mamdani is going to be a titan on the left if he survives the concerted efforts of zionist liberal America to melt his efforts, but if he succeeds he's going to be busy in New York for years to come. David Hogg isn't going to lead the nation, but he IS making worthless old dems literally cry, so there is some marginal hope for a rally by next midterms.

But we also may not have midterms at this point. We're edging closer to martial law and general, fascist, authoritarian dictatorship, and the best we're getting from Dem leadership is "strongly worded letters" from Chuck "Less Than Worthless" Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries likes to reiterate that "Trump has a mandate" and is basically Schumer's little shadow. Cory Booker gained national attention by doing a publicity stunt to literally promote a book. Bernie Sanders is still a voice of power and influence but he's definitely past the window of electability, sadly.

We need better representation and that doesn't spawn from nowhere, we need people on the ground, getting involved in local community, city and county elections so that real people with real passion get national attention. It's not that they don't exist, it's that the left and liberals broadly are sitting on their hands waiting for something to be presented to them.

We have to get out of the "someone will do something" mindset and get out and DO stuff, even if it's just joining the protests right now.

We all generally let them because we don't like confronting people in public spaces because everyone is too insecure about social perception.

The general population can barely hold attention spans on anything that doesn't have at least three inset screens of people reacting and video games playing at the same time.

I am not holding my breath that even the most "inflammatory" ideas are more than WWE theater and fans of the show yelling at the screen. Wake me up when there's an actual, organized resistance that doesn't crumble into leftist infighting and purity testing because someone said the word "retard" and now everyone is at each other's throats. (On discord of course.)

I remember in the early 90's furries on the early message boards and chatrooms were bemoaning how underground and socially pariah from other groups they were, and how few of them were around. People hated them and called them "skunkfuckers" and they took it very seriously.

I don't actually know if anything has changed, but I love that there's so many of them now that society has to deal with them everywhere.