scarabic
@scarabic@lemmy.world
- Comment on Has America Reached Its Tipping Point with Ignorance? 3 hours ago:
One thing that’s absolutely exhausting me is the constant overreactions to every stupid turn of phrase that dribbles out of Trump’s mouth. He says to a television audience “please go vote, just this one time” and the left FREAK OUT because he’s ENDING ELECTIONS. He says the White House interpretation of the law will prevail over that of other federal agencies and the left FREAK OUT because he’s MAKING UP THE LAWS NOW. He uses a trite phrase to aggrandize himself and people FREAK OUT because WE’RE A NAZI MONARCHY NOW.
This shit isn’t helping. Trump’s diarrhea of the mouth needs to be heard for what it is: the babblings of a deranged fantasist.
- Comment on How is the Stock Market keeping it's value after *points to everything*? 1 day ago:
The stock market is a speculative vehicle whereby predominantly rich people get richer. Generally pointing at everything should indicate a lot of rich people getting richer, so what’s the issue? It’s only if you take the valuation of the stock market as some kind of core health measurement of the economy that it stops making sense. Because it’s not that.
- Comment on So, is the USA screwed? 1 day ago:
I’m afraid you do not recall correctly. One of the features of American slavery is that it was population self-sustaining. You can see #4 on this UNESCO page. I like the way they put it: American slavery created a people where there was none before.
- Comment on So, is the USA screwed? 2 days ago:
Yep the South was invested in agriculture, to this day a labor-intensive sector, largely due to advantages in climate and geography which were basically fixed. So how again would slavery have spontaneously ended in the South again? It’s a question - please answer it.
- Comment on So, is the USA screwed? 2 days ago:
Agriculture still has not eliminated manual labor, son.
- Comment on Am I a bad friend/rude for not engaging with my friends and giving one-word responses? 2 days ago:
“Good” and “bad” aren’t very useful here.
A friend who does not engage in any way is simply not a friend. They don’t become an enemy or whatever: they just drift away until they are simply a person you know.
To be a friend means to engage. It doesn’t have to be texting, though that is now a dominant communication medium and not some fringe thing anymore that people can just wave away as a modern fad.
You can engage in person. You can engage by talking on the phone. You can engage by playing games together. But to not engage at all… it makes me wonder what you think friendship is.
I am “like 50” and I no longer think of friends as “people who are on my side” or “people who know the real me” because all of that can be true even if you haven’t talked in 5 years. If that’s all you want, for someone on earth to be on your side, theoretically, then you’re good.
But that’s not friendship: you have to engage. If you don’t, you will find that you miss out in growth and change in their lives, and after a very short while, they don’t “know the real you” anymore and you don’t know the real them.
Life is to be lived. It’s a thing you do.
- Comment on So, is the USA screwed? 2 days ago:
How exactly would slavery have died out “naturally” in a union made up entirely of slave states who’d just fought and won a war to defend it? I get your point about letting the south stand in its own so it could fall, but you are too casually sweeping aside the issue of slavery. “Yeah yeah - that would pass naturally - now let me tell you my MAIN point….”
- Comment on So, is the USA screwed? 2 days ago:
Personally I think this resurgence is a highly specific cultural moment that is coming as religion dies off and the white population of America teeters toward minority status. Since the US birth rate began to decline (natural phenomenon that happens to all developed nations) its string immigration has held it up. But that has had an accumulating demographic effect. White people lost their official hegemony a long time ago but now they are facing the prospect of losing their simple majority and it scares the living shit out of them. It’s not just because privilege sees equality as oppression. It’s also because they know that they have treated others incredibly badly, and deserve to be castigated should they lose power.
That’s why this Trump admin is so ugly. It’s the death spasm of a dying culture. That’s why this Trump admin is hollow at the center: it’s backed by a group that has no future and can only harken back to the past.
This too shall pass, but at great cost. The USA is the greatest political prize there has ever been and it won’t be let go of lightly.
- Comment on Some examples of video games with an UI layout ripped off of another game? 4 days ago:
But that could still be where most games copied it from.
- Comment on I feel my life is empty. Is there any way to stop this? 4 days ago:
is there any way to stop this
There’s pretty much every way. Work, eat, shower, sleep is such a minimal place to start that if emptiness is your issue, I feel like you could go in any direction you want and do better.
Maybe no one ever told you this so I’ll try. There is no objective meaning to life or purpose for it. The meaning is up to you to make. I don’t think any path whatsoever (therapy, volunteering, art, hobbies, dating, travel, whatever) will work unless you take responsibility for the problem. If you are hoping for others to provide the genius answer, or looking for some global perfect answer or “meaning of life” then you aren’t taking on the responsibility yourself.
You have to do that or nothing else can work. This thread might be a start. You did ask. Now you need to put the time into the many fine suggestions here.
Don’t take them in turns and try them “to see if they work.” That’s still the main problem of assuming the answer is outside of you somewhere. Instead, take them in turns and put everything you’ve got into them. If you can do this, any of them will work.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 days ago:
Yeah and even more people have killed themselves over the dysphoria and the world not listening to them or validating their right to make a choice.
Yes there is a complex mass of issues that can be difficult to separate out. But I ultimately think 2 things:
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a trans person’s certainty about their body is more important than my doubts about their mental state
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the complex mass of issues is partly created by a world that doesn’t validate their choices and condition. You can give them as much information as possible but then you have to back off and let them choose. It’s ultimately their body, their risk, their choice. There are examples where it doesn’t work out. Okay, fine, but don’t make everything about those. Most health care interventions carry some risk.
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- Comment on [deleted] 4 days ago:
It’s a start. He’s still thinking that the dysphoria can be addressed on the mental side, not the body side.
Ask him how he would feel if he woke up with big sagging breasts tomorrow. He’d be afraid to go outside. He’d wear bulky clothes if he had to. He’d look in the mirror and not recognize himself. He would start calling his doctor to see what could be done. Get him to visualize this and then tell him That’s EXACTLY what it’s like. Ask him if he woke up with big sagging breasts, if instead of calling his doctor, he might consider going to therapy to make sure he isn’t just experiencing some other mental issues that are preventing him from being happy with his knee-knockers.
- Comment on What keeps Americans from being mad about the state of their country? 1 week ago:
People only revolt when they can no longer do those things. Literal starvation is often the cause of revolution in history. Let’s face it America is not there. Yes life is becoming a crushing grind. Yes we have statistics from policy institutes about food insecurity blah blah. But America is not fucking starving. If a few are, they do not have the strength to overpower the many others who still have something left to lose.
- Comment on What keeps Americans from being mad about the state of their country? 1 week ago:
As someone who has been paying attention and organizing for much longer than that, I will say that a lack of leadership is a legitimate part of the problem. This is just as much a case of the Left selling out to neoliberalism as it is the Right gaining strength. Without unifying leadership, minor groups run the risk of working against each other or more likely wasting their strength pulling in different directions.
- Comment on What keeps Americans from being mad about the state of their country? 1 week ago:
Mets not forget that America’s founding was a rich man’s revolution. It was the wealthy here who banded together to expunge their parent corporation and go independent. There is no tradition of popular revolt in this country, unless you want to count the civil war, wherein the wealthy (again) weaponized the racism of the lower class to protect their business interests. That part sound familiar?
- Comment on "Star Trek is dying." How would you sell it to a younger audience? 1 week ago:
They need to take the “end of money” angle and zoom way in on that. Masks that the actual story, not just some blurry fact in the background. How did that transition come about? What are some human stories of why? Make sure it has enough sci fi action elements to be interesting, but show a society leaving money behind and I guarantee it will spur some conversation amongst the youngs.
- Comment on Why was Hitler so mean and hateful toward one group or another? I find it hard to believe he woke up one day and said you and you suck but these people over here are good. Taking it so far as killing? 2 weeks ago:
When a child first hears an adult express a racist attitude they are confused and don’t know what to think. They may not even understand who is in the group being maligned or even have a concept of groups. And even if they do, they may think “huh? I didn’t realize they were all bad.” But like a lot of things you hear as a kid, it just kind of sinks in.
And that seed has been planted. From there, confirmation bias does the rest. Anytime that growing person sees a member of that other group doing something wrong, they notice it and think “hey that’s what Dad was talking about.” Any such missteps from a member of that group get assigned to the whole group. Of course, people not in that group are judged as individuals. Classic in-group / out-group thinking, which is universal.
By the time the person is grown up enough to think properly, they may have accumulated lots of these moments of confirmation bias. By then it’s likely that they start assigning blame to this group by default. Litter on the ground? Probably one of them. Something got stolen? Probably one of them. And of course if race relations are inflamed in general there may be plenty of active fuel for the fire. A gang of “them” beat up one of “us.” Now it’s basically war.
I am with you as a fellow lazy person who can’t spare the energy. But I can see how easily others slip into it. Hitler of course used it to galvanize people and turn that in-group / out-group energy into a political force.
- Comment on Can I lose a beer belly working out one day a week? 2 weeks ago:
OP’s stated goal is to lose weight and I’m just commenting on that basis. I like cookies too.
In real life I’m hardly a proponent of skipping life’s rich pleasures. But if weight loss is the goal, a little restraint is a hell of a lot more practical than a lot of exercise.
- Comment on Can I lose a beer belly working out one day a week? 2 weeks ago:
That’s perfectly okay as long as the ratio of 20 minutes per cookie is understood.
OP has a goal to lose weight though, not just stand still. And with the busy schedule they described, 40 minutes of exercise is hard to fit in, whereas not eating 2 cookies takes no time, and if anything puts time back in your day.
- Comment on Why is OCR for handwritten content still that bad? 2 weeks ago:
Moi non plus
- Comment on Can I lose a beer belly working out one day a week? 2 weeks ago:
Working out isn’t the primary path to losing weight, though it is of course a big part of staying healthy.
You burn quite a lot of calories in a day just from being alive. The additional calories you’d burn from a brisk 20 minute walk might about to one cookie. It’s far easier to just not eat the cookie.
- Comment on What do you think of anarchism? 2 weeks ago:
You’re making a good faith effort to inquire into some views being expressed here, and getting a bunch of pompous, hand wavy answers (as well as some reading assignments you must complete before speaking again!).
All I will say is that if these morons cannot even explain their definition in anarchy to you, when you’re asking in good faith, what hope do they have to actually carry out this fantasy with all of humanity? Inevitable, indeed…
- Comment on What do you think of anarchism? 2 weeks ago:
It was the way for most of human history. And I’m not saying that in a good way, like “it’s totally normal, we should not be afraid of it.” I think the past was a uniformly awful time that’s slowly been getting better.
Anarchy working well depends on the people involved. Though at this point, we live in such a rules based world that I wonder if anyone would be able to function entirely without.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Even from the point of view of a heartless capitalist, layoffs should be a shame upon the employer.
Layoffs say: “I don’t know how to make money with these people. And I hired them anyway.”
That’s a double shame. First that your business isn’t robust enough to grow even with additional resources. Second, what were you thinking?
- Comment on Why do smokers specifically seem to be disproportionally bad for littering? 2 weeks ago:
Eat shit and farewell.
- Comment on The new Hulu Subscriber agreement just dropped - Don't like ads too bad. 2 weeks ago:
I’m interested to know if Hulu is under pressure from content owners here. The way this is worded makes it sound like ads are a negotiated part of some of their content licensing deals that they cannot avoid. I’m just curious if that’s in part because of the content owners. Maybe those owners don’t want to give content for a flat fee and instead want a % cut of the business, or something?
- Comment on Why do smokers specifically seem to be disproportionally bad for littering? 2 weeks ago:
I’m aware of the problematic policing.
The point being made here is “we feel license to do things we see lots of other people doing, and we hesitate to do things that we don’t see anyone else doing.”
This point can be made without dragging us into the racist policing. If you know a better name for it, by all means suggest one.
- Comment on Does anyone actually know what MAGA all agree they are getting out of all this? 2 weeks ago:
If they like Chuck Berry, they’re gonna love Morgan Freeman.
- Comment on Does anyone actually know what MAGA all agree they are getting out of all this? 2 weeks ago:
I agree. I’ve heard people say that they willingly voted for a criminal rapist huckster and I don’t believe that. They thought he was something different. They are fucking dumb, not evil.
- Comment on Does anyone actually know what MAGA all agree they are getting out of all this? 2 weeks ago:
It’s also racism.