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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • The only way to start bridging this division is to keep in mind that they’re people too. I’d even argue against calling Trump Voters strictly shitty, hateful people (though truly shitty, hateful people are among them). More often than not, they’re scared, hurt people. They’re people who have been convinced that if they don’t defend themselves and their neighbours, the “other” will come for them.

    Never forget that these people all genuinely believe that what they are doing is right. Attempting to dismiss and demean them is only going to further validate that they are right and you are the enemy. We need them to see the right-wing brain rot that has wormed it’s way into the hopes and fears for what it is, and we’ll never get there through further division and demonization.





  • To be fair, I have heard a lot of vague fear mongering around the project with very little clear statements of exactly what it’s proposing, until this thread. None of this is to suggest it’s not as bad as people were making it out to be - it seems fucking horrific and regressive - but I won’t attack someone for wanting to know the specifics.

    Mind you, I’m Canadian. If I were American, I suspect I’d have read at least parts of the primary text, because that’s what I tend to do.

    EDIT: Okay, I decided to start reading about it right after making this post. It’s fucked. You all are fucked. Welcome to a White Christian Nationalist Ethnostate.


  • My life is almost a total failure. I am in my 20s

    Your life has barely started. It can’t be a failure when it’s barely begun. You spend 18 years with no real control over yourself or your trajectory, then you finally begin to make a few relevant decisions for yourself. Even if you’re 29, you really only start your life when you’re 19-20. That’s 10 years out of 50+, assuming you live to be at least 70. You have only lived a small fraction of your life.

    I won’t pretend to know the unique challenges you’re facing, the difficulities of finding work in your region/with your degree, or the social/economic struggles you’re facing because I am so far divorced from your life that any direct discussion is so meaningless. I would never have the relevant information and context, so I can’t suggest what you should do in a tangible way. What I can say, is this: find what you want to measure your life in, and work towards that. If you value your life through work and wealth, I can understand why you’d feel the way you do, but there far more ways to be prosperous, and things you can focus on.

    A healthy dose of positive nihilism would do you wonders: each and every one of us is so tiny, so insignificant, that the difference between a “successful” and “unsuccessful” life in the terms you’ve defined literally do not matter. You and Elon Musk will both die and decompose, and regardless of either of your impact on the world, this rock we’re riding around the sun will continue to support life for a time, and one day everything humanity has ever conceived will be dust, and our sun will explode, and the universe won’t care if you lived with your parents or owned a mansion. The only things that matter are the things we, individually, give meaning to. If you choose to find meaning and value in creating art then your work has meaning and value. If you choose to find meaning and value in helping others find joy and happiness, then dedicate yourself to your friends, your family and your community, because that has meaning and value. If you want to experience the world through literature and media, then engaging with that material has meaning and value. No one else can define what matters to you in this world, because they’re not you.

    I’m sorry that what you’ve spent time and energy on isn’t panning out for you. I really, truly am. But step back, and think about if those things matter to you because they matter to you, or because everyone else has told you it’s what a successful, prosperous life looks like. Then consider what your version of a good and meaningful is, and chase that. Many people waste 10, 15, 20+ years on things that they ultimately realize don’t bring them joy. In a way, you’re lucky to have found out sometime in your 20s that what you’ve been working on isn’t leading you where you want to be. It took me until 33.


  • Yeah, there’s a lot of cheeky “hurr, thanks for finally catching up!” in response to all these recent articles about Trump being an ignorant, bigoted dictator wannabe, and while none of them are wrong, it’s just not useful commentary. All this self-servinf political-intellectual one-upsmanship only serves to talk down to people who are finally coming around to the reality of the situation, and I’d much rather be glad it’s finally being said than jerk myself off over the fact that I’ve known it for the past 8 years.

    I get that it’s frustrating to have mainstream media only finally admitting to Trump’s anti-democratic position as early ballots are beginning to make things look like he’s losing this race, but it’s just not constructive conversation. Spread the word, get more people exposed to this, rather than lording it over others that it’s old news.






  • My friend, I hate to tell you, but that’s just not true. We are incredibly at the whims of everyone else to even get too and from work or school each day. We only have running water, electricity, food in the fridge, etc., because we all depend on each other.

    Don’t mistake being independant with being self-sufficent. Don’t mistake requiring the support of others for requiring the support of any one, specific person. Every single one of us is dependant on many of us, but none of us should plan on being dependant on any one specific person for our entire life. And that’s okay. This is how society functions, and life is a lot better for it.

    Though I am sorry for whatever happened today to leave you feeling that jaded. Some individuals really just aren’t worth it. It sucks when we think they are, and find out the hard way.


  • I’ve just haven’t had universally good, or even clear majority good, experiences with cats. I don’t “dislike” them, but I don’t choose to like a given cat by default, because I never know what I am getting into. The cuddliest cat can and has suddenly decided it is clawing the shit out of me without warning, and without fail the owner acts like that’s just their cats personality, or just a “cat” thing.

    I’ve never had a dog react in such a way unprovoked. Sure, I’ve met asshole dogs, and they warn me not to go near them immediately. But I’ve never had a dog wander up to me, insist on pets, and then all of a sudden bite me.

    I like animals that try to tell me how they’re feeling, rather than flip with no warning, and I feel the same way about people.

    I can see the logic behind the mistaken correlation between narcissts and cat haters. Cats are known to be independant animals, unlike many other pets that praise you unconditionally just because you provide the food. They don’t feed a stereotypical narcissists desire. But it’s a gross oversimplification of both human-animal relationships and diagnosible narcissism to suggest that there’s any real correlation between the two based on that.



  • Right. As in all cases involving freedom and liberty, my freedom to swing my arms ends where your face begins. This is hurting someone.

    Even if it weren’t such a rediculously politically charged topic, these girls are likely to now have peers who see Ted Cruz’s statement. They’ll have to deal with some of those peers making comments, and mocking them for being “masculine.” We have countless cases of bullying getting out of control and leading to serious psychological and physical harm, and now we have grown-ass men in positions of political power enabling this kind of behaviour to do what? Weaponize gender issues and spread hatred along political lines?

    Fuck Ted Cruz, and fuck anyone who thinks a grown-ass man commenting on the gender of and posting images of young girls should be protected under “freedom of speech”. This is abuse of power and child abuse. You wanna save the children, Republicans? Start with saving them from your leadership.


  • “I’m a gamer myself, and therefore I know what I’m talking about”

    Should we call it a fallacious call to authority, meme on it for being a “how do you do, fellow gamers” moment, or simply mock the guy for whoring himself out in favor of daddy corporate? I could write an essay on the ways this is an absurd statement.

    Gamers hate Denuvo because it doesn’t “simply work”. It limits paying customers from accessing their content, bogs down mid-range machines that are already overtaxxed by poor optimization and, in admittedly uncommon cases, full on breaks some games until patches and fixes roll out. Stop pretending that “gamers” are out here rioting because they’re too cheap and immoral to pay for content. Quit your fuckin’ lying.


  • Excuse my ignorance here, but what is the data that they’re collecting being used for? We see polls every day suggesting that Trump and Kamala are closer in votes than anyone on Lemmy would like, but now I wonder who exactly is being grifted. Is this Trump being lied to and paying for a service he isn’t receiving, or is this data being falsified to make Trump look more popular than he is, lending weight and legitimacy to his claims of widespread voter fraud?

    I’d love, for once, for Trump’s own philosophies to be biting him, but based on the past, I’m worried this is just another tool in the misinformation arsenal.