UnderpantsWeevil
@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
- Comment on Frankie Muniz confirms that the ‘Malcolm in the Middle’ revival starts filming in a “few days” 11 hours ago:
Guess the Ridge Wallet sponsorships have officially dried up.
- Submitted 1 day ago to [deleted] | 0 comments
- Comment on Terrorists 1 day ago:
Except it’s not just some guy vandalizing a car
It’s not just one guy serial killing, drug running, or human trafficking either.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 days ago:
I’m not saying we have state-mandated couples
The need to make this clarification should be grounds for divorce.
- Comment on Anon is waiting for Japan 4 days ago:
After WWII, Japan became the first country in Asia to undergo an industrial revolution
After WW2? Industrialization during the 20s/30s was the whole reason they attempted to conqueror the Oceanic island states and the Chinese/Korean/Indochinese mainland.
They then suffered an economic collapse due to unchecked growth and speculative markets and decided to never again speculate on the future and just stick to tried and true methods.
The Japanese Economy was undone by The Plaza Accord and The Louvre Accord, which western nations used to devalue their currency and undermine Japanese export prices. The downturn, followed by a financialized corporate consolidation and expropriation of revenues through foreign investment, permanently crippled the Japanese economy in the aftermath of the 90s Asian recession.
What sets countries like Japan, Korea, and the Philippines apart from China is the domestic control of their industries. Their markets are dominated by private equity and fixated on steady profit margins rather than long term public investments. Consequently, the capital cities are flooded with cash and industrial development while the rural areas are devoid of commerce. There’s no shortage of speculation, but its rooted in the private equity markets and focused largely on fictitious capital - debt instruments and their derivatives - rather than real capital or technology.
Chinese investment in the periphery and its rising tide of middle class wage earners is what propels them into the 21st century. They’re the ones building out new transit lines, new public housing projects, new universities, and blue sky research. The Xi Government is openly hostile to speculative investment, doesn’t bother to bail out failing financial institutions, and focuses primarily on expansion of utilities, trade corridors, and mixed us developments.
- Comment on Anon touches grass 5 days ago:
Touch grass, work on your mental health, get a hobby, start participating in society in a constructive manner and start showering.
All good advice on its face. But they do call it “Getting Lucky” for a reason. You can be the perfect specimen and still strike out (with people you’re attracted to in kind). Past that, celibacy and the resulting depression/insecurity has an impact on your mental health even if you’re getting all the other boxes checked. “Don’t be a fucking sad sack if you want to get laid!” is easy advice to give and hard advice to live. Doubly so when you’re a moody anxious teenager, already.
And it is this hyper-individualist “fuck you, I’ve got mine” attitude is a big part of what drives people off the deep end. The Mean Girls tier prejudice stretching to naked hostility that single people experience - particularly as they get older - is just the other side to the incel coin.
One of the things that gets to me is how often they mock the advice that actually helps.
There’s a degree of selection bias. The loudest, proud-boy-est incels are inevitably the ones that have made a brand of the identity and are trying to sell PUA bullshit. There are plenty of people who struggle with “good advice” in silence. And plenty more who take it, improve, start meeting people, and stop being incels.
But the Self-Help industrialization of dating is often flooded with the same simple “Why can’t you just be normal?” tips and tricks that seem ignore how many perfectly normal people are still incredibly lonely. Meeting new people can be scary, putting yourself out on an emotional line is emotionally taxing, finding the time and money to date is often a luxury, and plenty of people who initially fall for one another discover - sometimes painfully - that they aren’t compatible.
When you trivialize love, you aren’t being helpful. Your cavalier attitude towards other people’s pain can even be abusive. Is it any surprise that a person who feels mocked and insulted isn’t fun to be around?
- Comment on Anon touches grass 5 days ago:
Being trans in 2025 must feel like being Will Smith in Enemy of the State.
- Comment on Anon touches grass 5 days ago:
It’s rough to be an awkward teenager, struggling to find the kind of mutual affection that you’re biologically programmed to crave. Like, bares mentioning that the OG incel was a woman complaining how much difficulty she had getting laid. And one of her primary complaints was how clumsy, prudish, and superficial her male peers had become.
Then the 4chan crowd decided to Rule 30 her blog and insist this was an exclusively cis-het male problem. Then the right-wing outrage machine keyed in on it and decided this was a problem caused by the villanious cartel of liberal feminists, who were all trying to groom eligible bachelorettes into man-hating lesbians with hairy legs and pink hair. And now we’ve got an entire industry dedicated to telling men “Go to the gym, eat meat, be extremely misogynist, and vote for Donald Trump so you can have your dream of a 10/10 stacked Tradwife hottie in the suburbs with 12 kids”.
“Incel” has gone from a feminist critique of unrealistic expectations of teen dating into a reactionary consumerist fantasy.
- Comment on The gentrified forest near me removed the bins. .. From their café/picnic area 5 days ago:
People that litter are atupid/lazy/poorly educated.
Littering is a function of the laziness of the individual combined with the inconvenience of normal waste disposal. If you live in a neighborhood where trash pick-up is infrequent or unreliable, you’re going to find a lot more littering as a matter of simple convenience compared to one where trash pickups are regular and routine.
The public expectation of efficient trash pickup also creates social pressure on individual neighbors not to dump illegally.
- Comment on Cathy, do the math. 5 days ago:
Unions are meant to bargain against capital.
Capital is already on the side of police.
Unions are meant to bargain against management, which means they may be conciliatory towards capital so long as they can extract concessions from their immediate lenders/capital-owners. This is one problem we see in trade unionism broadly speaking. The American autoworkers union isn’t revolutionary, in large part because it is predicated on the exploitation of natural resources overseas. The SEIU isn’t revolutionary, in large part because the revenues of the companies of the workers they represent are often international shipping, banking, real estate, tech, and government administrators, whose profits are derived from rent-seeking of the public at-large.
Cops are the ur-example of this phenomenon, as their primary role is to surveil and defend private property on behalf of the wealthier tranches of society. The police unions bargain against the elected representatives of the general public for the betterment of their membership. And because their primary purpose is providing heavily subsidized security services for private interests, they are often - implicitly or explicitly - bribed by those interests to weight their coverage towards wealthier quarters.
That said, capital is not “on the side of the police” from an ideological perspective, because the police are still fundamentally a public service administered by a democratically elected administrative system. To that end, police privatization has been a stated goal of libertarian and hyper-capitalist political interests since police liberalization became mainstream in the last century.
This is not nearly at complicated as your making it.
There’s a lot more history to the modern western police state than you’re giving credit. The dynamics are not as straightforward as you make them sound. And the police, as individuals and as an institution, are kept on a much shorter leash than you might realize. Police unions are not simply extensions of capital interests, because they are organized and administered contrary to capital structures. And neoconservative/neoliberal activists have had their eyes on police union abolition for a long time.
- Comment on The gentrified forest near me removed the bins. .. From their café/picnic area 6 days ago:
Hardly an issue of stupidity. We’ve got shops a short ride away that sell you disposables with the intent of bringing them into the park. And we’ve got a park that’s removed the bins used to cart the waste back out again.
The stupidity is in the policy. Either you have to prevent people from bringing this stuff in (incredibly difficult) or you have to manage the waste that exists by centralizing its collection and export (significantly easier and cheaper).
- Comment on Cathy, do the math. 6 days ago:
police already have all the power
That’s a superficial analysis. Police departments and other military and paramilitary organizations need to extract their revenues through the bureaucracy of the state. Your municipal PD officer isn’t showing up at your house, hat in hand, and taking collections to fund his beat. He needs the comptroller to impose taxes and the financial sector to move the money and the administration to divvy it out to employees based on rank and tenure.
What’s more, the police require the consent of the public at large. Which means a friendly media and religious community, willing to legitimize their functions. The US occupation in Afghanistan failed, while the Taliban that replaced them consolidated control, because one set of police was seen as illegitimate and another seen as representative of the public will.
Their union makes them unstoppable.
Their union forms a foundation of mutual support and affords individual officers confidence in their security through collective action. But cops are notoriously lazy, stupid, and trigger-happy. When media turns on a police department and the administrative state peels away from them, these institutions disintegrate rapidly.
- Comment on Cathy, do the math. 6 days ago:
I mean, did she or didn’t she? You’re heading us off with a Cavuto Mark, here.
- Comment on Cathy, do the math. 6 days ago:
I would argue that the problem with police unions is that they’re too good at what they do. They’ve managed to achieve a degree of militantism that rivals any black panther or international world worker.
A single, heavily armed, deeply insular and dogmatic, horrifyingly MAGA-pilled community of workers would be bad in any sector. But to make matters worse, police have this natural affinity with media that makes them the recipient of tons of free positive publicity.
Would that everyone could claim membership in a union this strong.
- Comment on Cathy, do the math. 6 days ago:
The BLS data has historically been a method by which capitalists measured and managed labor power as a fungible resource. It has historically been a tool of capital to evaluate the influence of policy on labor, not a tool of labor to pressure capital for concessions.
Not to say the information isn’t valuable on its face. But it should be worth recognizing that we are looking at autocannibalization of capital. The people most injured by dismantling the BLS are the people who do the bulk of the hiring, not the people being hired.
- Comment on "You should probably just throw it away" 6 days ago:
“Genius Bar” was always just a means of getting people back into the Apple Store to sell them another product.
- Comment on "You should probably just throw it away" 6 days ago:
I love how in a world where we banned straws
We didn’t. If anything, we are in a world where we banned banning straws, because even this trivial token concession was considered a Violation of Our Fundamental Freedoms. Media personalities screaming and nashing their teeth over straws was a PR stunt by petrochemical companies to backstop any kind of radical anti-plastic reforms.
Anybody who asks me about Windows 10’s EOL date will be introduced to the option of using Linux before i’ll help them select a replacement system.
Cheers to this.
- Comment on You better say "Thank You"! 1 week ago:
Kinda like blaming a President at war for not saying “thank you” to its “benefactor”
What’s crazy about this line is how frequently Zelenskyy has done the “America A#1, you’re the best!” media tour in the run up to this meeting. How many clammy-handed, rictus grin photo-ops does this guy have to do for you people? How many trips does he need to make to DC to say “Hello from Ukraine, I love you!” to Congress? Dude’s entire career as President has just been going abroad and brown-nosing for NATO support.
This reminds me of the British journalists who will cut an Arab liberal off in the middle of an “I am here to condemn Hamas and ask for release on behalf of the Palestinian people” automated response to grill them on why they haven’t condemned Hamas.
- Comment on You better say "Thank You"! 1 week ago:
I mean, setting aside the “We’re from the Government and We’re Here To Help” liberalism that American conservatives reflexively recoil at, I do find it disorienting to pretend a heavily rural American breadbasket would need agriculturally scarce Europe to send food aid.
This reminds me of the 90s US effort to do welfare politics in West Africa, by dumping millions of tons of excess agriculture into Trans-Atlantic wholesale markets. The flood of “free” food (with tons of political strings attached) shifted the balance of power to the African urban centers, as local agricultural markets collapsed and people flooded to the industrial centers to get food at below the domestic production cost. Political leadership capable of controlling the influx of foodstuffs rapidly consolidated power within major port cities. This gave rise to authoritarian governments, political purges, and ultimately two horrifying Congolese Wars (the second often referred to as The Great War of Africa).
Obviously, more complicated than this. Along with food “aid” we also delivered a surplus of “military aid” to our regional allies (a list that was constantly shifting between US and African administrations, particularly during the fallout of the failure of the Soviet Union). Then there were a host of local tribal conflicts and score-settling that got ramped up to eleven with the sudden glut of foreign wealth.
But maybe I’m drawing lines where none exist. Can you really imagine how the US economy might be upset by a sudden shift in who controls the supply of cheap imports? Can you imagine what our country would look like if it was flush with small arms or if we had a bunch of local land barons with short tempers and delusions of grandeur? Can you conceive of an America that had a bunch of poorly defined interior borders that suddenly become flashpoints of political tension?
I certainly can’t. Bring on the flood of EU eggs!
- Comment on Anon uses Discord 1 week ago:
Whats the draw of discord?
Chat plus streaming as a freemium service that has its hooks in with the networking effect.
Probably the biggest draw of Discord is how many people use Discord. But past that, it fills a bunch of real time social media roles well.
- Comment on Anon uses Discord 1 week ago:
Lost yearly Nitro
You cuck.
- Comment on If we let republicans set the bar, we will be buried in no time. 1 week ago:
Hard to call it treason when you’re just paying fealty to the king.
At some point, Americans do need to recognize that they aren’t the ones in charge and what they’re talking about is rebellion rather than some kind of restoration.
- Comment on Inching closer to the grave every day 1 week ago:
I mean, are they materially worse than Paris Hilton and Kimberly Kardashian? Or the Jersey Shore crowd? I’m not here to judge.
But I didn’t really follow them when I was age-appropriate to care about that shit, anyway. Was too busy reading blogs about the newest feature list of an up-and-coming MMORPG or tearing through the latest edition of my favorite TTRPG, because I was focused on what truly mattered.
At some point, its not an age thing, its just a taste thing. I could probably name more web comix artists than C-list celebrities, and that’s fine.
- Comment on This whole "Sign in to prove you're not a bot" thing is pissing me off 2 weeks ago:
Its a self-perpetuating cycle. Setting aside the normally deplorable state of YouTube comments. Once you hit a critical mass of “Neat!” and “I liked it 💖🇺🇸🎆” and “Prussy en bi0” comments, why the hell would you bother reading much less participating? Then human interactions tank and its Oops! All Bots! in short order.
- Comment on This whole "Sign in to prove you're not a bot" thing is pissing me off 2 weeks ago:
I am less annoyed by YouTube being shit and more annoyed by 3rd party websites clinging to YouTube for their video hosting needs because it is free.
- Comment on Tesla Shares Plunge as Elon Musk’s Political Role Grows More Divisive 2 weeks ago:
Let me know when Tesla’s p/e drops below 20.
- Comment on This queue for the new swasticar 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on This queue for the new swasticar 2 weeks ago:
Properly motivated person with nothing to loose could take them out
Would be extremely ironic of an overheating Cybertruck were to pull up in front of them.
- Comment on This queue for the new swasticar 2 weeks ago:
I mean, sure, absolutely. Not sure he’s going to be able to hear me given the large crowd of police in between us. But I’ll try and get my mayor’s attention.
Why is tax money going to protect this shit?
Cause businesses like Tesla tip their elected reps generously.
- Comment on Owing your home today is nearly impossible, but even if you did the ever increasing property taxes will bury you 2 weeks ago:
Property tax is on the one hand a wealth tax, which sounds like a great idea;
The problem is in how its assessed. A market-based tax will be vulnerable to market manipulation. A tax accessed by the agents of lobbyists and kleptocrats will be administered to the benefit of their patrons.
This isn’t a policy failure quite so much as it is a democratic failure.
Gulf Shrimp
