While I hate the statues and flags and everything they stand for, how well did that fight help us? Where are we now?

The nation is falling because people can’t figure out where to focus efforts because you all get distracted by emotional appeals and straw tigers and little fiddly bullshit while in the background corporations empowered an army of ravaging orcs who are now in control of the mightiest nation on Earth, laughing at our failed efforts to mobilize towards policy, community and representation, the things that would have prevented this.

I mean, it doesn’t matter now. The whole thing is a footnote in America’s slide into fascism and eventual fall of democracy. But sure, at least we successfully fought a few symbols.

Any amount of time I spend arguing with hysterical leftists about this point just fuels the machine, so I’m not replying nor will I see replies.

This is all so stupid and tragic and you all need to actually do something instead of attacking some rando on Lemmy who thinks we’re not fighting the right fights. I mean, it’s pretty evident we’re not fighting the right fights BECAUSE WE FUCKING LOST EVERYTHING AND ARE STILL BICKERING ON SAFESPACE BUBBLES LIKE THIS.

Also, holy shit that moderation history LOL

You’re not getting well-received here, it’s worth thinking about. Part of growing up and affecting change is acknowledging that you’re also not perfect and you have your own biases that are going to prevent you from communicating your stances effectively and cause you to argue from a place of personal animosity than any wider social good.

When you learn how to argue against your own positions from someone else’s perspective, you will learn how to actually get people to listen to you.

If instead of that, you call anyone who has a different position a “sociopath” it just reeks of someone who can’t get out of their own traumas and emotional reactions enough to actually get people to empathize. Which is sad, but it’s not working.

Go work on yourself.

I am going to do just that, by blocking you and letting you not fume about one dude on the internet who thinks you’re kinda dumb.

You keep replying to me like it’s a campaign. If you like 60 minutes, just watch it.

I am not watching it because they are complicit and I don’t trust them. Nobody should trust media, particularly network media.

If moving to independent media or at least better sources like Ruiters, AP or even Ground or just triangulating multiple sources so you can get a better grasp of the truth before CBS helps create a situation they make money from while pretending to be “news” is considered “Defeatist” then yes, I am defeated and you should be too.

I also appreciate the restoration of our ozone layer. I remember there was a time (when above a certain latitude at least) my skin would fucking burn in less than 5 minutes under direct sun, it’s a lot better now but it seems weird we all just kind of collectively forgot about that time when we all nearly ended the world to such a degree that we could feel it outside, then we all reversed course and fixed it mostly.

I wonder if we would be more motivated to fix our current issues if they caused skin burns.

GenX here… first time?

I would argue it’s what every journalist in America should have been doing 8 FUCKING YEARS AGO, but no, they helped create this monster so they could report on it. They are a human/media centipede crossed with an Ouroboros eating it’s own shit. Support independent media, not partisan sources in either direction, they’re ALL compromised by capital.

Ah, so more compromised media sources creating hype and WWE theater spectacle out of a crisis they helped create.

I am done with the “nightly news segment” Uroboros of creating massive problems then reporting on the massive problems they made.

edit: keep whinging, this is just another “cut to YOUR fighter” segment that makes everything think “whoohoo we’re winning!” and feeds this cycle of thinking someone is in control, that there’s an actual “back and forth.” There is no “back and forth.” There is nobody coming. There is nobody in charge. This is all so much worse than even the best media reporting is letting on.

Foreign inflammation of existing sexism and gendered issues on social media has made it so men and women are afraid to be in the same room with each other, leaving behind only the absolute morons on both sides to represent gendered relationships broadly. People aren’t even dating anymore, loneliness on both sides is becoming a lethal epidemic, human relationships are falling and people are suffering for it on a huge scale.

Where once people would have compromised and men and women would have formed relationships understanding each other, we’re now so high-strung that any slight is considered “harassment” or “feminist woke ideology” (whatever they call it on the other side) and everyone is starting to hate each other just for being different from themselves.

Welcome to part of that machine, you’re a member of the club destroying us all, just as bad as the orcs on the right who think you’re trying to take something away from them. Screeching in all caps about being harassed by some general “male presence” just paints a stereotype that I really wish advocates would abandon because all it’s doing is making the division worse and creating harder lines that people won’t cross to understand each other.

It’s more like the wealthy leveraged the poorly educated and mentally deficient segment of society and pit them against everyone else.

It’s not like the left was getting provoked to pass legislation to like, “end redneck culture” or anything (not counting the places they fell for bait like the southern flag and statue distractions) But the the left broadly has been pushing back against capital for decades and making progress, why should we be at all surprised they raised an army in self-defense?

The conservative right is not an even split in this country, there are far less of them than leftists or liberals. They do NOT represent the majority, but again, they leveraged the decency, complacency and naivety of the left to get a foothold into american discourse that will never dislodged because now most people do think the right is some giant monolith. They’re like, less than 20% of the population, and out of that 20% most of them are literally so dim that they would change flags and banners to some new issue tomorrow if led properly. They’re a small band of orcs and we’ve been treating them like a mighty empire of intellectual elves.

Wat

it’s not longer a culture war, but an actual war.

Literally how every war ever started.

Can’t tell if the pic is AI or not, but your point stands and applies to a much larger issue with the slop being generated at a death-spiral pace across the internet.

Most of the people trying to replicate “stock photos” on the cheap have no clue what the subject is about or how it should look, so if some South Tanzanian family decide to make a few bucks pumping out content with help of their local internet cafe, they can generate the most professional pictures of people doing all kinds of activities. Pictures which get picked up by someone else somewhere else who is trying to make a guide or informational content, again for a few fast bucks. And this story repeats at all levels of human society at all levels because of capitalism. Every time, something is lost, some detail missed, some cultural context glossed over, and this is how we lose human history.

And eventually, inevitably, one way or another, humans.

Not only was it wild he coincidentally had the account ready, it’s equally wild that this girl never thought about her father before this random stranger brings it up while she’s trying to work. Really wild stuff, almost makes you wonder.

And the odds of her never having pondered her father except for this one time when she was working: 0%

Our money. He’s throwing our money at his problem.

I guess for his base and supporters, they understand how this works about as well as how they understand tarifs.

When the illegals he promised to kick out of the country are actually the ones reaping the rewards of our tax dollars and getting literal handouts while the administration slashes the budgets of American science institutions and kill funding for PBS, NPR, the education department, etc. etc.

I mean, how big of an organization do they have to create to track and monitor all the self-deportation incentives they’re giving out? This is going to cost billions and billions, or it will be completely gamed by Mexican and Canadian “agencies” designed to let foreigners have a short vacation in the US and get paid after.

Sure, but the catch is they’ll never be able to come into the US legally again.

They are going to create fucking agencies for gaming this system. They don’t need to immigrate permanently if they’re making thousands of US dollars for shuttling people across the border for the express purpose of “self-deporting” once they get here. There are millions and millions of people in Mexico who have no interest in living in the US but sure wouldn’t pass up $1000 USD for a short vacation north of the border.

Same age-ish, and I feel the same.

The hard part is trying to figure out what part of that comes from societal collapse, and how much of that comes from just getting older and seeing more and more of how the world works… or doesn’t work.

Despite all we see and hear, objectively the world is better than it’s ever been. We are at a shocking low level of international conflict, starvation, disease, crime, famine, even teen pregnancy has fallen to the lowest rates we’ve ever seen.

But all of these gains have been made by people forming communities of various kinds, of linking up, sharing ideals and compiling resources. This “downturn” we’re feeling is a localized result of a lot of people turning their backs on community.

We are incredibly communal animals, we need social identities to survive. This has been studied. When community abandons you, or when it feels like they have, people broadly stop caring about things and themselves and become selfish, bitter, cynical and hateful. We’re feeling this all around us, and inside us. And I don’t think it’s a natural phenomenon, there are active groups working to cause this, they want to undo all that progress and bypass war and pillaging and destruction and just rot out the world’s wealthiest countries from the inside out.

I don’t know if these objective, global gains will continue for everyone. But I fully believe that the USA at least is in a nose-dive it won’t pull out of. Things are breaking as we speak, in ways we can’t repair.