ameancow

@ameancow@lemmy.world
0 Post – 172 Comments
Joined 1 months ago

The strangest part of this was how conservatives used to be the ones pushing for wearing masks as alternatives to vaccinations, because the mindless fear of needles goes waaay back. See, chances are I'm older than you, so I've seen these cycles repeat themselves over and over. You've only seen it once or twice tops.

What happens is that a politician will dangle a new fear over you, and you will attach to that fear because that's how our brains work. I am talking universally, not specific to one party or ideology, this is how we ALL work, and leftists are equally guilty of grifting their base the same way.

But you HAVE to understand where this came from, why you're fighting with people about this, where this came from.

Never mind that people have been wearing face covering for millenia to reduce spreading disease, we have paintings and etching of lepers and plague victims going back thousands of years wearing something to prevent accidental spreading of saliva or body fluids. This isn't a complicated idea, and a lot of people wear face coverings anyway to prevent illness or for safety around immunocompromised people. This isn't new, this isn't something that was planned or contrived, the ONLY reason you're having arguments with people about face masks of all things is because someone out there knows how to connect your brain to a story to explain how it feels. To make you expend your energy on this, not making our world better or focusing on your elected representatives and what they're signing into law, and I bet it works great. I bet you don't get involved in your local politics. Nobody does, nobody spends as much energy on their actual neighborhoods as they do arguing online about props.

See, like with a lot of other things, a lot of us were unsure and worried about the future, so a lot of people trying to get power used masks as their props to fixate that insecurity on. I am not even going to talk about their effectiveness or not, it's like wearing a hat in the sun, sure it won't save you from sunburns but it's just a thing we do to try our best to protect what we can, it's not a big deal.

Your brain is not a tool of logic and reason, that's an illusion. It's a tool to tell you a story to explain how you feel. And it LOVES when someone provides a story for it. Because your brain wants a story that makes sense, not one that's accurate. There is a difference. A lot of things can make sense and not be true.

It should be a giant, glaring alarm that someone is fucking with your brain when you start feeling contentious about what other people wear on their faces. That HAS to trigger something deep inside that makes you wonder why you're so emotionally connected to this "debate."

You got chains around you and they're going to keep attaching chains until you realize how deeply you're playing in the WWE theater of political rhetoric. Let this one go, just walk away, it's objectively a nonsense campaign designed to distracted you.

The outraged reply you're already pounding out in your head is part of that distraction. You are giving your soul away to others to use as they will. Doesn't that bother you?

6 more...

You mean you don't have to like Kamala? I'm voting Kamala.

Not fond of her, but she'll do better than Trump by leagues and miles and make history while not rocking the boat or affecting any meaningful change. Libs will love her, she'll be a democrat party darling. I bet she gets a second term.

I can easily find 30 cute people that I could cuddle.

The problem is that they don't want me to cuddle them or touch them or be around them.

Oh good, another doctor who thinks her own book, website, blog and youtube channel are an adequate substitute for professional, personalized care and diagnosis.

"It's really hard to get a diagnosis, so why even bother trying? Just like the video and hit the bell for notifications!"

1 more...

This post is literally about how hard it is to get a formal diagnosis. Nobody said they don’t want to do it.

This post is about a doctor who makes money from her personal brand, website, books and speaking tours, telling people that getting a formal diagnosis is so hard that why should you bother. And now that you're emotionally validated, why not visit her blog, store or youtube channel and subscribe?

I genuinely don't know if her material is good or not, I tend to lean towards it being pabulum and watered-down schlock like literally any speaking-tour psychologist without even reading it. But lets not make any mistake about what's being peddled here and why.

I don't really appreciate discouraging people from getting professional care and diagnosis just because you have convinced yourself that your impersonal motivational messages are as good as personalized and in-depth care that a professional can offer.

Yeah that sounds so much like post-hoc justification that I'm seriously surprised that it's being swallowed by anyone.

I mean, great if it DOES help with such a terrible problem, it's just I have seen this thing being talked about before and it's NEVER been discussed in terms of helping trafficking victims. This is the first I've heard of it. Almost every time you see this kind of narrative being discussed it's either 99% of the time a bunch of sweaty incels online whinging about how women aren't really pretty and just want to trap guys or some other dom/sub kink fantasy nonsense to validate their depression and self-loathing, OR about 1% of the time it's an actual empowering discussion talking about unfair hollywood beauty standards.

1 more...

Bro is expressing distaste in a fashion accessory, why you so bitter and taking it so hard? You ok?

20 more...

I've re-read your comment dozens of times trying to understand why this concept is lost on you, that it's FINE to be disappointed with someone's fashion choices, be it someone you know personally, or a generalized view of trends. It's OKAY. It doesn't MEAN anything other than, some people like things and other people do not. I too feel a sense of disappointment when people with otherwise pretty features accessorize it in ways that distract or detract from my preference. AND THAT'S ALSO OKAY.

You know what else? You're ALSO allowed to be disappointed with how some people dress, talk, act or just about ANYTHING else that you like or don't like. This is called being an adult human with values, taste and self-esteem.

Whatever cartoonish picture jumped into your head of some "alpha male" casting judgement on women he wants to sleep with, which I think you're picturing here, that shit is coming from a place of insecurity or pain inside YOU, this is not an objectifying or entitled attitude to express or hold. Disappointment with someone's choices is a normal and healthy thing that men and women feel and express all the time and sure it can become toxic in extreme circumstances, it's nowhere NEAR that to just express not liking a thing.

5 more...

I’m going to immediately distrust the motives.

Additionally, the data is self-reported surveys with questions like "Have you ever been contacted by someone from a company or corporation?" and... yeah? This part shouldn't be surprising to any platform that allows private messages. And "Have you ever seen someone promoting a product?" and most people are going to either shrug or already have a strong opinion, it's not very scientific for actual data on the actual traffic from bots and corporate shills, more how the human users feel about the platform.

I would much rather see an independent investigation from a technical point-of-view, which tracks the comments and timing of user comments to determine how many are actually bots just quietly gaining karma with innocuous comments, or how many are just programmed to go to certain subreddits at certain times to push a narrative.

What does random women he has nothing to do with having piercings have to do with him?

Are you not a native English speaker? Do you understand that people can give opinions and critique of things they don't like without it meaning an expectation that someone is going to DO something for them? You immediately made some random, innocuous comment about someone's aesthetic tastes into an issue about entitlement and I assume implications about sex? Don't you get how fucking weird that is? It betrays something on YOUR mind specifically that nobody here is talking about.

Do you think people shouldn't have fashion preferences? Do you think humans can't or should not have feelings about things? Every comment you make here just makes it weirder.

15 more...

Okay setting aside your clearly toxic and unkind attitude that is betraying what this is really about, some personal issue that is making you seeth, why is the word "disappointment" triggering YOU so hard?

I would be disappointed if my date comes home with me and takes off their shirt and they have a tattoo of Sonic the Hedgehog on their chest. Because I don't want to look at Sonic when we're together, does that make a lick of fucking sense? Do you understand that people have consensual relationships and preferences for their partners?

15 more...

No you went on a rant about if op is "entitled" to those women. That's just a fucking weird take from someone talking about disappointment in a fashion choice that people choose. Don't reframe your weird comment.

17 more...

What is your point? Did a billboard with the word "disappointment" fall on your great uncle and kill him?

7 more...

If I die and find out the universe really works this way, I will renounce all of existence and opt out. I rather an eternity not existing over living in a stupid children's book universe of weird arbitrary rules about who gets to do what and go where through these systems of hierarchy.

I quizzed you why you thought a normal, common expression of aesthetic taste became a sexual entitlement issue to you immediately, it was weird, it remains weird, you are weird, every comment makes you seem weirder about it, and I don't think this is a healthy place for you to be engaging and tripling down on. I'm blocking you for your good as much as mine.

13 more...

And here I am over here, an agnostic absurdist, just laughing at the silly monkeys.

I'm not really sure who likes them other than the people who get them and other people who like those specific piercings for whatever reasons.

It's wild how insanely defensive people get about their piercings and body modifications though, just read through this post or any post like it on reddit.

Like, chill out you freaks. If someone doesn't like your fashion choice, unhinged rants and attacks aren't going to make someone magically start loving metal accessories stuck in your soft parts.

9 more...

I mean, everyone has been crying and whinging for years, decades even, that the USA needs to ramp up semiconductor fabrication in case shit goes south in Taiwan. We are finally getting some domestic production power and we're getting outraged by the traffic delays? America will sink itself because of our people's own addiction to comfort and complaining about any slight to that comfort.

12 more...

So the meme is in agreement that defacing Stonehenge as a protest was pointless?

It was as pointless as everything else, that's why they did it, it's screaming into the void to get attention.

There are ways to get attention for a cause without defacing one of the seven wonders of the world

Are there though? I'm old enough to remember this has gone on for decades without anyone doing anything of significance and now we're at the actual edge of global catastrophe and STILL people are like "hmn, those kids should be recycling." Bruh, you and so many people have no idea how many lives are going to be lost in the next century while every milquetoast liberal and conservative in the developed world roll their eyes and get pissed at slight annoyances like... checks notes colored corn starch on rocks you will never visit.

It's like trying to shake someone in a dream to get them to pay attention. And the more you scream and hit them, the more they look ahead like zombies.

They HAVE sprayed BP's factories and lots and machines, they have sabotaged equipment and chained themselves to machines and have caused material harm to companies like BP, but that doesn't get any fucking coverage because media doesn't want to encourage "violent activism" for fear of turning away viewers like YOU who are annoyed by such things.

27 more...

THEN WHAT FUCKING WILL CHANGE ANYTHING

Because this is the only thing that gets people like you to even talk about this.

edit: I want to be clear that I don't care if it's rude or uncivil to talk to people about this like this, I will do it again and again and again and I support efforts to be annoying about it, because at this point it's all we have left to maybe, potentially, get enough people angry enough that someone, somewhere does something. Anything

You're all making your frowny faces and saying "This is counter-productive" and you're simply not getting it.

If through some magical means we were to learn that nuking Manhattan would somehow lower global temperatures, then we would need to do that, just up and vaporize 1.6 million people. It would STILL be the ethically superior action to take if it magically worked. Because in the next century billions of people may die.

If we learned that filling the Grand Canyon with concrete would get companies to stop producing carbon waste and get people to accept inconveniences like electric cars and paper straws without whinging like a wounded toddler, then yes, line up those cement mixers.

When it comes to the trolly problem, you're all not even looking at the right tracks if you're so upset about incivility or annoyances when it comes to climate activism. If anyone is left to do it, one day they will erect statues of these kids throwing soup at paintings and coloring rocks.

16 more...

There's a whole long LIST of things we can try long before settling on "first felon president."

  • First Woman President

  • First Openly Gay President

  • First Asian/Pacific Islander President

  • First Albino President

  • First Teenage President

  • First Werewolf President

  • First Teenage Werewolf President

  • First Robot President

  • First Robot Teenage Werewolf President

  • First Normal President

We could go on and on too.

19 more...

Not clicking, not looking, this isn't even about you, this is bigger than you. Every individual needs to get a lot better about getting their head out of their own ass.

3 more...

Truth.

Been job hunting in similar fields for a while and as a middle-aged person, I simply cannot get a callback from any of these companies, then when you actually visit them and see some of their workforce, you rarely see anyone over late-20's, and it's all these high-energy, eager-to-please, eager-to-work-for-recognitionbucks, fresh-outta-college kids who can be exploited and turned over rapidly.

I am job hunting because the previous company I managed was bought out, downsized, and all the senior employees making more than entry level wages were cut. This is happening everywhere.

More and more technology, overseas outsourcing options, and general service/gig systems for filling job openings has left companies treating workers as disposable as toilet paper.

This is because almost every business is now part of a huge chain of ownership, and the shareholders at the top, groups of very rich old white dudes, just gather together in their hooded cloaks and look at the bars and graphs every month and decide what investments are to be amputated, and which to be kept. Before going back to their private sex islands.

8 more...

The average progressive or even liberal in the US hates hearing this, but the vast, vast majority of Trumpers are actually "okay" people, and you would all get along splendidly in just about any other context.

The problem is though, they are dumb. Don't get me wrong or think I'm sticking up for them. I just have some amount of sympathy and pity because I grew up out in the boonies in Southwestern USA, I was raised conservative and only flipped in my 20's after seeing too much horror and war hurt people I cared about, and by extension, I learned to care for more than just the people I know.

A lot of people haven't learned that. We take for granted that empathy is a learned skill, and we expect others to have it on demand and we tend to resent those who don't exercise it. My take is that we're expecting people to exercise muscles they've never even stretched. These are people locked in communities that they will likely spend their whole lives in, often times decaying outskirts of America, rampant with drugs and alcohol abuse, stuck in low-wage jobs or jobs that demand them to spend every waking moment working. They have no time nor opportunity to learn how to incorporate "care" into their daily misery, much less political knowledge. Then someone like Trump comes along, someone they only hear clips of and hear their "news station" praise while simultaneously explaining that all their problems are because of people who "hate america" and are trying to destroy families with scaaary things like abortion and gender-fluidity. It makes sense if your brain is desperately looking for a story to explain why you're so unhappy. Which is how all our brains work.

We all have to remember that the worst people in the world are identical to us. We could have been born in their lives with their ignorance and tunnel vision, and all their feelings of fighting against a stacked-deck and hopelessness against change that will (supposedly) take away their only comforts in life.

I am getting really uncomfortable with the hate the left is directing at people who are simply dumb as fuck. Yes, they are dangerous, yes they are capable of doing better, and on top of that the only examples we SEE of this segment of America is the most horrific and malicious, the people storming the capitol or screaming at rallys or beating up protestors. They are the worst, but not necessarily the rule.

I had family members who were going to vote Trump and JUST needed to see the clips of him speaking that don't make it to Facebook news feeds to change their mind. Approach this from a place of education and compassion and you will all have better results.

Let's save our hate for the real evil, the grifters and pundits who are pied pipers for the ignorant. They are smart and know what they are doing and it's pure evil.

6 more...

That's not entirely true.

Sometimes they just shoot the family dog(s) for barking and go back to work like nothing happened.

There are countless stories of people cradling their dogs as they bleed out from bullet wounds weeping as the cops write up a ticket or something. Just constantly, all the time, and for some reason we don't DO anything about it. Like, as a group, we could end this nightmare tomorrow if we could all cooperate for one goddamn day without horrible shitty people trying to politicize and subvert every community action we try to do to make the world a little better.

1 more...

For those out there who only read headlines, the short of it is that many Satanists are rarely actually worshipers of Satan like a deity, many of them are just proactive atheists who have adopted the most abhorrent religious identity possible to Christians to provide necessary pushback against attempts at making the USA a Christian nation.

The same people who scream relentlessly about supporting the constitution for issues like gun control, seem just fine with abandoning the 1st amendment's Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clauses. So Satanists are forcing Christians to declare their choices out loud. If you're going to say the law should allow religion to be part of government, then you have to be fine with all religions being involved, OR you have to admit that you don't respect the USA's founding principles and documents. You can't have it both ways.

There is not so much Satanism being promoted here as much as a spotlight on hypocrisy and I'm all in for it.

5 more...

TIL I am actually radicalized because I would prefer catgirls.

2 more...

I'm getting tested for autism as an adult next week. If it turns out I am, who do I contact from the Autistic community? Or does a representative contact me? I don't want to mess this up and I have a costume ready and everything.

14 more...

I’m criticizing the delivery, not the message.

I don't care fucking one bit. It's the same shit.

12 more...

When I worked as operations manager in a contracting company we had an installer named Jesus. He was a young guy, illegal immigrant trying to support his family back home.

I was gonna tell a funny anecdote about how he smoked a joint on lunch break and ended up installing a door backwards and trapped an old lady in her house, but then I remembered that my boss would hire illegals like him because he could get away with paying them far below minimum wage and fire them for any passing mood he had, he delighted in punishing struggling people and didn't view them as human. I, the only white guy working with them and I started there counting screws and doing all the same shit work they did, learned a lot of really funny or vulgar spanish, I got to know them all as people and made friends and I wonder even nearly 20 years later what happened to some of them.

Jesus was deported when my boss called a "tip" into immigration services because he thought Jesus was lazy. Jesus was 19, it was not only his first job, it was his first job in a foreign country surrounded by people he doesn't know, living alone, no education or legal protection. He needed help, not cruelty.

So yeah, when people say "Jesus was treated unfairly" I always nod in agreement.

They're already being grifted, they have already passed the first filter.

People sometimes wonder why scam emails and phone calls are so obvious, with mis-spellings, bad grammar and poor English. The thing is that they do this on purpose. Running a scam takes time and energy, you want to work marks that you know can be manipulated easily, and if someone can't determine that an email from "micosaft.pAypal-Customre-Sercicve.com" isn't legit, they're VERY likely to buy the story that they have to send money via Western Union to some random address in Kazakhstan to get their share of the king's inheritance.

Being in maga is basically that. If you're wearing a red hat and waving flags and spouting off FOX news lines to anyone who will listen, you're a mark.

1 more...

Yeah, people like you, who have all the power to say something supportive of those doing anything, no matter how feeble, and instead employ people's worse emotions against something you find annoying. I stand by it. I don't care who you are or what your ideals are, you made a choice here to push back on people who are trying to save our lives. If you don't like the methodology, fine. Who cares. All you do by ranting about it is give ammunition to those who would still deny there is even a problem, as we all slowly boil to death.

At least the rocks will be clean, right?

I don't think any of this is even real to them. The same way that a majority of the white-nationalist 4-channers are just roleplaying and losing themselves in the storylines, as a species we tend to do that, we just get lost in a narrative because it explains how we feel.

The tankies are doing the same exact thing. They're not impacting policy, they're not marching for anything, they're not taken seriously and it's just another in-club that has its own language and imagery and secret handshakes and a unifying message to rally behind (America bad!) and instead of turning that criticism into actionable plans for changing representation and making anything better, they put on WW2 Russian Tanker helmets and have erotic fantasies about a communist uprising that will never happen.

they do not have either of these compounds

Instead what many of these "shroom" products do is use other kinds of fungus that is known to cause altered states and hallicinations, such as the perfectly legal Amanita Muscaria, which if you're not familiar is that iconic red mushroom with white spots, which you may have also been taught is extremely toxic.

It is, but in low doses it can bring about states of relaxation or sleepiness and the head-shops and shady online dealers sell the stuff promising to get you "high." The trip from a high dose of Amanita Muscaria is akin to torture people have said, so if people are eating whole bags of this shit trying to get high, they're poisoning themselves and having horrible experiences.

1 more...

Absolutely correct, I watched this happen to our tech team before I was also thrown in the chipper.

And it doesn't help that a lot of the young people trying to get into coding and tech fields are not what you would call titans of confidence and charisma, these are mostly introverted and thoughtful people who have studied most of their lives under the belief that meritocracy exists, and they can prove themselves in the business world by doing great work and being a good employee.

Meanwhile glance over at the sales side of the building and there are people there making six figures a year who do next to nothing but party and tell lewd jokes, but are absolutely invulnerable to layoffs and downsizing as long as they can talk to clients and joke about sports with the CEO.

The disillusionment around the business world is real and unsustainable.

2 more...

My last time getting laid off, I had people loyal to me tell me well in advance so I was prepared.

You don't end up the kind of person who has people loyal to them if you do wacky, zany hijinks and make everything about yourself, even when it objectively is about you. Don't make scenes, don't be dramatic, just have some questions ready about severance and what benefits are available to you.

This will pay off a lot when you go to apply for a new job and they want to talk to the people who you worked for.

This was America's first and closest foray into fascist takeover, the same exact way that other democracies have fallen this last century or longer.

Just because it was really dumb this time, and in the end the guilty party was actually found guilty by the law, we are nowhere close to out of danger on this front.

Trump will be dead in a few short years and we're all going to stop talking about him, this is assured, and in that huge, gaping power vacuum with millions of followers ripe for the plucking, they're going to be coerced by some new figure and led to the exact same ideas about burning the country to the ground just so they have a leader who "hurts the right people." And this new leader of the vulnerable masses might not be so dumb or so wildly delusional and may actually succeed at the same exact plan.

Get more involved in your local politics people, state, county, city and community elections are what prop up fascists in the upper reaches. Know who is actually representing you.

I'm beginning to think he doesn't have values of his own and has discovered that he can easily keep dangling simplistic talking points in front of America's most ignorant and most vulnerable segment of simpletons and morons.

3 more...

He's David Fucking Copperfield, nobody at all is surprised, his entire being just oozes creep energy and entitled douchiness.

This concept can be scaled up to a lot of things, like why most of our systems break down. Nature only maintains what is needed to continue the species, everything that happens to you afterwards, with the exception of child-rearing, will be abandoned by nature unless someone gains some trait from living longer that helps the species propagate.

But nature is kind of silly, it doesn't make "choices" so some of the adaptations can be weird. Like how our retina's blood supply formed on the front of the retina so your brain has to always edit out your blood vessels from your vision and you can only see it using special tricks of light and then BAM all the spaghetti appears that's been there all along.

Imagine what else our brain tells us and shows or doesn't show us to make sense of what evolution has turned us into.

6 more...