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Cake day: May 10th, 2024

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  • ameancow@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.blahaj.zonerule
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    13 days ago

    Before it was coopted by the right to mean “child predator” or “deadly threat to everything holy” it was just a style of burlesque show, a whole niche cultural thing that never bothered anyone, open to anyone who wanted to take part.

    They had problems with the fact that most performers are males or assigned male at birth, and the whole thing is basically parody of gender norms and style, but embraced rather than hated, and it was just a generally fun time. (Never mind that it’s kinda what stage performance has been like across the globe for hundreds or even thousands of years when it comes to gender-bending performances.)

    Speaking as a CIS straight male, I have been to a couple shows and don’t really get it, it’s not my thing, but everyone is having fun and they’re being welcoming and happy and sharing a thing together, and it’s far more harmless than a million other silly things people do for fun as social groups.




  • I’m not impressed by today’s AI and I also fully understand that the tech is going to completely upend society and will eventually be a part of our picture of utopia, or our picture of actual hell on Earth.

    The people who are screaming it’s wild wonders and benefits are at least as closed-minded as the people who think we’re going to be able to put the toothpaste back in the tube. The actual direction this tech moves is going to be far more like the discovery of radio, in that at the time of it’s discovery and early implementation, the people then had no idea the implications down the road and we’re at the same point. Except the big difference and why this is contentious is that radio was far less dangerous to society broadly.

    Radio was a fundamental force that always existed around us, we learned to use it the way our ancestors used rivers and waters to move goods and people. AI is completely human-made and doesn’t exist without human engineering, so it’s not neutral, it’s a tool shaped by man to do whatever a man wants with it.


  • ameancow@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneRule door
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    23 days ago

    I remember in the early 90’s furries on the early message boards and chatrooms were bemoaning how underground and socially pariah from other groups they were, and how few of them were around. People hated them and called them “skunkfuckers” and they took it very seriously.

    I don’t actually know if anything has changed, but I love that there’s so many of them now that society has to deal with them everywhere.


  • Can you imagine how much better our world would be if people who formed radical opinions about things actually investigated the things they’re terrified of? I’m reminded of a recent story about a community forming a reading group to actually read the books that local conservative community leaders were trying to bad from the schools, and something like 99% of the books were reinstated because the citizens group found nothing offensive about them.

    But a lot of our “internet culture” has formed this “double down forever” mentality in people where we’ve adapted and socialized ourselves to not even READ the things that run against our current stances and opinions, to not even address arguments, to not listen to the person debating us, and so on. These kinds of stories are just going to get more and more rare, particularly as we all start growing up with AI that kisses our asses and praises our every fart.



  • I would wager that a lot more do.

    My mother got drunk one night and sat me on her bed and described in detail when she got raped as a teenager, and the resulting abortion and the details of how that went. I was eleven.

    Of course, being a male I can’t go around talking about the lasting effects of many such incidents that happened to me, and I’m not really expected to even connect those things to any feelings about sexual shame. So instead what it does, and what it does to many men who had any kind of sexual trauma, is we just block out the incidents and internalize the feelings and associations inward and it just wrecks our self-esteem, our standards for ourselves and our perceptions of attractiveness in ourselves.

    A lot of guys process this in different ways, and trauma like this can take many forms. But it’s often expressed as later over-compensation and bravado and an image of being “in control” sexually and performative masculinity and hyper-objectifying notions of sexuality, or for more people I suspect, just an internal, festering self-esteem that doesn’t want them to be happy or feel good about themselves. For every loud, angry incel, I suspect there are thousands of men who have the same background or traumas and they just sit quietly on it forever and it robs them of joy.


  • Yeah, maybe my people just messed me up.

    I’m pretty sure we’re now in a situation where most of our society’s contention is driven by childhood-induced shame over sexuality in some form or another.

    And there’s not shit we can do about it because every time someone tries to make a campaign to encourage better sex-education, or even scarier, sex positivity among children, those people or groups get attacked for being pedos and predators.

    This is going to be a social dividing line that gets sharper as time goes. There will be people who have a shred of intellectual capacity and haven’t been hollowed out be capitalism, who raise their kids to be free from shame and shackles of toxic social norms and let them just live and discover on their own what sexuality means to them.

    And the orcs, who want literal dark-ages levels of shame, hate and fear and of course power-imbalances as deeply rooted foundations to anything and everything related to sex, and they will only want children associated with sex when it involves controlling them or worse.


  • ameancow@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneRulecycling
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    1 month ago

    That’s great, now how?

    Do you think if this message alone spread (it already has) that anyone is going to take it seriously? The top polluters and the ones deciding what our packaging is like are the most wealthy corporations on Earth and they are the ones doing the most climate damage, and the ones who control the narrative and our politics.

    Do you think “ban plastics” will ever be a populist political talking point in these conditions? Do you think it would gain momentum?

    Or are we looking at it wrong? What if more of us targeted the system that is sustaining climate destruction with an actual populist idea? What if we started wresting control and money away from the companies filling our sea with plastic?

    Do you want to spread a message of lasting change? Start spreading “pro family, pro children” messages like the need for social help as millions become jobless as capital starts digesting itself in its current late-stage. You want to see plastics away? (No we’re never seeing an end to cardboard, that’s unrealistic to push for.) Then start advocating for Universal Basic Income and other measures that put control back in the hands of the people.


  • ameancow@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneRulecycling
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    1 month ago

    The chances of first-worlders putting up with packaging and preserved food habits that are essentially post-collapse “The Last of Us” levels of mild inconvenience: about -100% if such a ratio is possible.

    “Ya’ll telling me I gotta feed mah kids dried beans? How da fuck they gonna eat dried beans? they too crunchy!” will be the viral soundbite from a Kansas parking lot.

    Capital won’t allow change until it can no longer bleed a dime in it’s present state. We’re living under a locust plague and we’ve called it the modern world.


  • ameancow@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneRulecycling
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    1 month ago

    I think I read that no matter who you are and what you’ve done, only about 10% - 15% of all plastic you’ve recycled actually gets recycled. The vast majority ends up on barges being shipped overseas or to landfills.

    This isn’t to say stop recycling, if it compiles plastic into places instead of just distributing across the globe, then maybe later when people get off their ass and realize we’re in trouble, they might make some kind of bacterial-world-ending-zombie-plague type solution for breaking down plastic waste, at least the plasti-zombie-plague will be isolated to particular regions and countries.


  • Whatever notions of privacy we used to have are all going to crumble as the newest AI tools come online for prying open people’s profiles and predicting their behavior, their locations, their personal habits and spending, their health and family and relationship statuses, simply by analyzing a few patterns in your search terms and cookies.

    From that information, these same monsters are going to be able to target you specifically with the kind of manipulative effort that previously would involve teams of people working around the clock to derive methods for influencing a single target. But it will be doing it on mass-scale, putting that same kind of effort into influencing millions and millions simultaneously.

    And we all have vulnerabilities. The more invulnerable you think you are, the more likely you are to be subtly shifted by long-term, 3-dimensional tactics for changing the way you think and feel. Be it the way you think and feel about the latest flavor of PRIME energy drink, to how you think and feel about genocide.

    We have to get off the fucking internet.




  • This lemmy forum is far more about kids crying about authority existing than it is about actual structured critique of the business world and processes. It is absolutely exhausting hiring, and sadly most of the people here will never know that stress, and will hold onto these cartoonish notions that only elite, wealthy, privileged cartoon villains are the ones who make decisions who to hire and how.

    Meanwhile, people like us have to somehow dance around pleasing both bosses and employees and potential employees without making mistakes that everyone seems to be looking for you to make with a hunger.


  • Having been on every side of this issue, I can agree 100% that our current state of employment/job-hunting is abysmal, and this has everything to do with the claws of capitalism just sinking into our very souls every day and clawing out anything and everything that isn’t the constant pursuit of wealth.

    It shouldn’t be this stressful to find a place where you can do something you don’t hate for 8 hours. But our very lives depend on it, healthcare attached to it, our social value hinging on saying you have a job. It’s really bad.


  • You would be astonished how many people interview who have no fucking business trying to work at said establishment.

    You would also be shocked how many people are just giant assholes because they perceive the hiring manager as “authority” instead of just someone else trying to do their job who has to meet hundreds of people and make a decision that their own job is riding on.

    Some people have such a strong aversion to work or having a job or a boss at all that they are rude, hostile or uninterested in the interview process. I’ve had people call in to interviews while at drive-throughs. One called in from in bed, half awake. Another in-person was drunk/high and stumbled out while ranting about “the man” and conspiracy shit.

    Look guys, if you want a job, you have to understand it’s a competition. It’s not even the hardest competition you’ll ever take part in, but if you put in a LITTLE effort, you can get a job and pay for your shit. Everyone just wants to pay for their shit, including the poor schlub trying to hire for their company.



  • ameancow@lemmy.worldtoLinkedinLunatics@sh.itjust.worksDid you even say 'thank you'?
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    2 months ago

    The idea that the person who gets nothing from an interview should be thankful for the opportunity is utterly brain dead.

    The other perspective is that after digging through literally hundreds or thousands of applications, I picked you and we both took a huge chunk out of our day to try to connect. Did you like the interview? Did you have questions after? Did I do a good job explaining the role? There’s so much left unsaid after an interview that it does help to give a hiring manager closure, particularly if they have to interview a dozen other people that day. You’re not dancing for my enjoyment, you’re showing you care more than the 11 other people who shrugged and wandered off after without thinking about it. And the hundreds more in the following week or weeks.

    I’m just more likely to remember people who seem engaged and enthusiastic to work.