It's Chinese youth basically giving up on the prospect of the careers they were planning for , sometimes just staying with their parents and giving up on the job search. I think it comes from caving to too much family/societal pressure and instead adopting a "fuck this" attitude. The Chinese term is Bai lan (摆烂)
See also "tang ping" (lying flat, 躺平)
The media environment in China is murky at best so I'm honestly not sure how much of it is a real phenomenon and how much is propaganda of some sort.
Additional possible data point that the current US conservative movement isn't all that motivated by economic issues and is spending most of its time talking about social stuff like "groomers," woke culture, abortion, CRT, etc.
They are losing ground with suburban voters and gaining with non-college educated voters because of these issues. So those factors are probably working against the traditional trend of "make it in your career, move to the suburbs and then start voting with your pocket-book"
(In addition to the whole you're-never-going-to-own-a-house thing others have already pointed out)
In uni I was going through pretty bad depression, had broken off a pretty toxic relationship, getting behind on assignments more and more until it was all feeling overwhelming, I wasn't going out of my apartment much at all and started considering ending it all, but couldn't quite work myself up to do it.
For whatever reason i still showed up to one of my classes on project presentation day even though I had absolutely nothing to present. Professor called on me and I just said, "I can't, nothing prepared" with no eye contact and expected that to be the end of it.
As I was walking out she made really intense eye contact and asked if everything was ok, anything I wanted to talk about? I was caught off-guard so I hesitated, then waited for everyone to leave. I think all I got out was "I've been feeling a little down" or something generic like that. She referred me to campus counseling and I went to a few sessions. It was enough to pull me back from the brink at least.
tl;dr Professor probably saved my life by not letting me be a faceless ghost when that's all I felt like.
"Bro I really wanna eat your dog bro. Bro it's my culture bro just let me take a little bite bro I swear it's the most delicious thing you've ever tasted. Bro just let me eat your dog bro, what are you some kinda racist?"
Even if we grant that plant "pain" is 100% morally equivalent to the pain of other beings (it isn't, and you don't earnestly believe that), we still have to eat them as a matter of biology, since humans aren't producers and must consume nutrients from other life. It's the same reason we can't pass moral judgment on a carnivore like a lion for eating a Zebra.
Ethical consideration has to extend to more than just painless death to be worth a damn. I can't walk into an infant ward and painlessly murder infants in their sleep for a reason.
Thanks. Some people really don't get it so I try to communicate in good faith on this issue but damn does it feel like banging your head into a brick wall sometimes.
As I said, the pronoun conversation isn't really about pronouns. It's about tribalism and scapegoating.
How much time did you spend thinking about pronouns or trans people before gay and lesbian relationships began to be normalized and legalized in The West?
Trans people have a new target on their backs because most people don't know someone who is trans and thus don't understand them. They're a scapegoat for right-wing groups to organize and fight against because they lost the ability to be quite so open with their homophobia.
Trans people are, according to some studies, as high as 4 times as likely to be victims of sexual assault and 3.5 times as likely to commit suicide.
Again, this is serious. Trans lives matter, Period.
The fight over pronouns is just the first step in "othering" trans people. It helps to reinforce the idea that they're strange, not like you, not traditional, not natural.
The next steps are to deny healthcare, access to equal treatment from discrimination, things like that. There are leaders in the USA making statements that transgenderism should be "eradicated."
If you aren't dealing with shit like this in your area, I'm genuinely happy for you and I hope this never comes near you. But for lots of people, it's quite a bit more serious than a first world problem.
I think we'd need a parliamentary system to end up with anything more than 2 parties being relevant. The 2 party system is sort of hard-wired into the way the house and Senate work. Ranked choice could have some cool effects on party primaries, though.
If things played out in just the right way, this could push them away from the Fediverse entirely, I'd think. Seems it would be hard to monetize any traffic coming from the Fediverse end of things, which would make the whole thing more of a headache than it's worth for them.
An instance that was explicitly set up as a read-only backdoor to Threads probably wouldn't stay federated long, but is a cool idea at least.
I feel like the cultural/political responses to both global warming and COVID-19 have shaken my faith in this sort-of Watchmen scenario working out. No matter how universal the threat, seems like some groups will always find an angle to work that cuts against the "greater good."
If he was planning to, helping Ron DeSantis to launch his own campaign would be kind of a weird move