Don’t forget getting yelled at for “camping” because that’s the only way you can possibly play.

I feel like if parents took the internet more seriously from the start and were more actively engaged in what their rotten teenagers were getting up to online we might have had at least a slowdown of the awful decay of society as our worst intrusive thoughts now not only have space to be seen without consequence, we have entire communities supporting each other’s rotten intrusive thoughts.

It’s entirely demographical.

I was unemployed for a while when private equity butchered the company I was manager at, at some point I spent about a week playing as dedicatedly as some of the younglings and I got really good, really fast, but the moment I had to get back to the grind I fell off again.

You simply cannot compete with kids who’s primary concern in life is if their mom will keep paying for their ChatGTP subscription to do their homework for them when you have bills and family and medical procedures and loans and thousands of ropes of responsibility pulling you in different directions. You simply will not compete with people who can play several hours a day when you only get weekend nights, when you’re already exhausted and just want to sleep anyway.

I don’t care about toxic players and I never spend a dime on any live services… my chief issue is that I have to work for a living and online game matchmaking mix me with people (children) who’s primary stressor in life is trying to print out homework that doesn’t look like ChatGTP wrote it.

My family lived in a remote place, we had just barely gotten phone lines, they were terrible and we rarely got higher than 11kbs no matter what I tried.

Somehow I still was able to play online games like Team Fortress, I just had to radically change how I played compared to other players.

I never understood that, I never participated in that weird ASL greeting, even as a naive kid who didn’t even have social experience I felt that was creepy and dangerous to share that kind of thing, and I resented how it basically turned every conversation into “Is it remotely possible we could fuck.”

I’m so glad the internet outgrew that silly trend and became so much more refined, intelligent and respectful.

Our dumb, violent, primate species fucking deserves the apocalypse we’re crafting in laboratories as we speak.

I would be nice if people broadly opposed bombing ANYONE but even here, a site that appeals largely to self-proclaimed leftists and progressives like this is just oozing with as much bloodlust as you would see from the worst people we condemn.

This bloodlust for the deaths of others is why we have a genocide raging to begin with. Why can’t we all be better and be consistent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea_crisis

The Houthis say that any Israel-linked ship is a target,[90][87][88] including US and UK warships, but they have also attacked the ships of many nations with no connection to Israel.[91][92] From October 2023 to March 2024, the Houthis attacked more than 60 vessels in the Red Sea.

edit: the fact that people are snarling at actual, neutral reporting of factual events should be the clue-in that you’re all literally doing the exact same thing we despise from the right, letting feelings cloud our judgement about who our real allies are or are not. Use your fucking heads you hysterical children.

I am fully convinced that most of you are reflexively reacting because your favorite political streamer said something good about Houthis at some point and you’re not even sure why or what the nuance is.

The part where this goes off the rails in the public discourse is that people are broadly absolutely fucking STUCK in linear, binary thinking, I can list a thousand examples of this in every-day-life and it’s a weakness that governments exploit daily. For some reason our species can live comfortably in the cognitive dissonance about things like faith and reason existing alongside each other, but cannot fathom the idea that bad people can fight other bad people and they’re both bad. Or that people lie in ways that appeal to your own feelings to try to get public sympathy behind their own agenda.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea_crisis

The Houthis say that any Israel-linked ship is a target,[90][87][88] including US and UK warships, but they have also attacked the ships of many nations with no connection to Israel.[91][92] From October 2023 to March 2024, the Houthis attacked more than 60 vessels in the Red Sea.

They’re pirates. If the genocide stopped tomorrow, they would still be fighting for their own political agendas and of course the wealth onboard these giant ships full of goods, including food, aid and other vital supplies destined for countries unrelated to Israel, Yemen or Palestine.

Yah, we shouldn’t hold our breath since every media organization are commercial entities and owned by people with agendas towards profit and holding particular narratives. Media is not only complicit in our current state of American decline, they’re largely the instigators.

Network news. Social media. Youtube pundits and streamers. Movies and television. Magazines and print media. Radio and podcasts.

These are all tools to deliver propaganda and the ones with the most money have the most stake in maintaining their profit margins and relationships with other corporations.

Also, we do not have an “opposition party” anymore, if we ever did at all. It’s all WWE spectacle to hook viewers on drama and narratives.

Reading is the metric, but the implications are so much worse.

This isn’t about if someone can read articles and get facts, even literate people don’t do that.

The problem is that reading comprehension is directly tied to one’s ability to comprehend, manage and categorize information in one’s brain. When you learn to read, you teach your brain to take complex ideas information and organize them into manageable sets and abstractions using language.

When you don’t have this “enhancement” to your internal dialogue and cognition, you don’t have a rich inner-voice if any at all, and you just go along with whatever you feel and whatever story is provided to you.

Make no mistake, the destruction of our education was deliberate and planned and it’s working exactly as intended. If we try to organize and even get budgets passed to increase our education capacity, our teacher’s pay, our textbooks and schools and so on, we will still be fighting far more wealthy organizations and corporations who want a population that stares transfixed at shows about people buying things.

I guess because I’ve witnessed authoritarian takeovers of other countries this detail didn’t even phase me, we should have expected it. There are a large number of places in the world where you will get turned away or worse for your beliefs if you’re outspoken. Americans’ deluded belief broadly that we had “free speech” was always a crutch people would use to justify their hate but was rarely used for actual social change.

The next layer of destruction of our species’ potential was when we monetized attention spans.

The reality is this:

They are accosting and hassling/turning away people who aren’t white. And I see pushback on this in the weirdest forms, people saying how most immigration officers are hispanic or black also, etc. That does not matter. This is entirely superficial and ordered by higher-ups and designed to drive up hate and racial tension so we don’t unify. If you’re not white, you face significant chances of being hassled at immigration but there are still thousands and thousands of people passing in and out of the country daily, so it’s not THAT high of a chance.

As for transit across the states? Outside of some real backwater sundown towns in the deep south, there is a massive cognitive bias at work in the USA that works in two directions.

I can promise you that you can be brown, asian, hispanic, purple with polka-dots and could most likely bicycle across the entire country and you will be treated with kindness and respect and people will offer to take you into their homes across the country.

The weird disconnect that people are having a hard time digesting is that some of these same people will go online and scream about how immigrants are ruining our country and that we need to start a race war.

We don’t live in a coherent reality in the USA anymore. The media world, including the internet and places like reddit and lemmy and facebook and twitter reflect a weird “mirror universe” where people are following an entirely different set of feelings.

We are in a new world of cognitive dissonance and I fully understand how off-putting that is and I recommend not visiting the country for that reason alone. Don’t give this country tourism money as long as this administration remains in control.

* coughskincolorcough *

I want to go back about 20 years and find every idealist moron online who tried to debate with me that we can’t keep calling people racist and that oppression is a deeper issue than superficial appearances and I want to smack them clean into 2025 so they can see what they permitted.

Nobody cares about objective reality anymore. Once we started letting people live in their own worlds of “feel facts” without consequence, lest someone throw stones at our own escapism cognitive biases, we ceded control of the world to the loudest and most hateful people.

There is no convincing people of anything anymore because they can just close their ears and go somewhere more comfortable. If they face no repercussions and can not only get praise for being hateful but even raise money and become celebrities, what do we really think is going to result from explaining things anymore?

You likely hold many such superficial judgements, we all do about something or other. I don’t think I would frame it as “mental illness” without expecting a lot of pushback from such an inflammatory statement. Normal, healthy people make judgements all day long based on the most superficial of ideas and perceptions, the question is how much you personally care.

If it’s strangers on the internet you’re just bullshitting with, I can’t imagine caring about how some stranger perceives you. But these things can become self-harmful if you’re genuinely trying to be heard and understood about something that’s important to you. If you’ve spent any amount of time on social media (including forums like this) I’m sure you’ve seen this play out over and over, where people end up deeply stressed because they’re talking past each other and dismissing each other’s actual feelings about things that are important to each other.

This is what I decry, the lack of effort to be heard about important ideas, even if subjectively important, we’re all collectively really neglecting effort and embracing anti-intellectual catchphrases (just put the X in the bag, the curtains were just blue, I ain’t readin all that, etc.) and making our lack of effort to communicate other people’s problem when it goes wrong.

If you think none of this matters, end up in a role of responsibility and have to spend a month interviewing people for a role of great responsibility and sifting through the masses of young people who make zero effort and feel entitled to rewards for it.

It absolutely makes my day that you think this is a fight. Have fun out there.

You don’t have to agree with me, the topic is about people generally and their perceptions, if this wasn’t something shared by a number of people this wouldn’t be a post. You can disagree with me all you want, you will still encounter people who will judge in different ways depending on how you present yourself online. If you don’t like it, go change the world.