You must log in or register to comment.
“Is he team Red or team Green?”
*Little did they know that beneath his outer attire lay his blue wizard robes.*
“I mean he’s wearing boots, which is more than either of us have.”LOL
It would be nice if we had elected the boring president yeah.
It would have been nice if 45% of the eligible voting population didn’t already check out last year. It would have been nice if there weren’t countless posts by bots on reddit saying “I really hate all this politics” in a concerted, ongoing effort to make people like OP tune out and not care.
I mean, I get that it’s hard sometimes to always see what’s happening in the world, but you have the option to turn it all off. But expecting to just get the content that appeals to your mood at the moment and lets you avoid responsibility, that’s fucking childish.
When you’re a child you can avoid the world. You’re supposed to be protected from the world. You grow up and BAM now you’re part of shit. No, you don’t get out of it. No, you don’t get to escape whenever you want. Sorry, we didn’t sign up for it either but we know what we have to do so we’re concerned about events and trying to communicate that concern so that evil doesn’t flourish. (Much further.)
It’s really easy to blame non-voters when you have the privilege of civic literacy, do not face voter disenfranchisement, do not live paycheck to paycheck, do not have a job that will fire you for ‘other reasons’ when you take off to vote, do not have an abusive spouse that will watch you fill in your mail in ballot if you vote, do not have to walk an hour away to the voting poll because you can’t drive, do not have a permanent address for a mail in ballot, so on and so forth.
Yes, there are lazy ‘I’m not political’ morons who are willfully ignorant and don’t vote. But let’s not pretend that everything about American infrastructure including car dependency, anti-homelessness laws, understaffed voting polls, centralized media and fake news, aren’t all designed to make voting harder than it should be and disproportionately target minorities.
It’s really easy to blame non-voters when you have the privilege of civic literacy
This is a helluva line I that I’m absolutely stuck on.
I don’t even know how to approach it… civic literacy as a privilege? I feel like that’s an entirely new term invented as a way of avoiding accountability tbh. I get that it’s hard to vote, and I get people who have to work all the time, but I don’t get pushback against the idea that we’re just not making the effort or trying to push through challenges for a better future. Fuck that, I don’t care. Ya’ll gonna learn one way or another what accountability means.
Getting a quality education or having parents who did is a privilege. No baby was born knowing how to vote. The vast majority of non-voters don’t even know how to start, let alone how to take time off to vote or when their mail-in ballot window is. Many might not have the required IDs and need to jump through another hoop to vote.
To non-voters, the voting process can be as daunting as getting your driver’s license the first time, except they’re doing it alone, juggling 3 jobs and raising kids. They simply don’t have the time or mental energy to go through bureaucracy and mentally keeping every deadline and paperwork in their minds.
Civic literacy is a privilege because the fact that you understand the importance of voting and know enough about the process to plan ahead of it means that you grew up in circumstances that allowed you to do so.
Calling people lazy for not voting is like calling people assholes for not buying cage-free eggs. t’s very easy to not give a shit about either when you’re living paycheck to paycheck, and it’s very easy to perceive complaints about this as virtue signalling.
You’re not getting anyone to vote by calling them lazy. Don’t be angry. Be useful and be actionable. If you actually want more people to vote, understand the systemic barriers behind why so many don’t vote, educate others on it, and make a difference.
Me who was denied an education and raised by a cult family in the wilderness for the first 20 years, and had to escape and learn everything and get an education on my own, and still somehow managed to learn the importance of voting for qualified candidates, reading this and taking notes
The election was completely fraudulent. Our country did NOT vote for this. Watching people rip each other apart over “how we voted” is painful because ALL OF IT IS FICTION.
The election was real.
The millions of contentious voices on Facebook, twitter, reddit and so on were not. They used the KGB handbook to play the basic tactic of amplifying the worst contention on both sides of literally every issue, leaving the general, moderate population absolutely checked out and uninterested in involvement.
When you don’t feel connected to your community, what do you do? You ignore it, you don’t work to better it.
While I say this was from the KGB handbook (literally) I don’t think they were the only forces at work, I think it’s just an effective tactic that everyone who wants to control or subvert the richest, most powerful nation on earth (a nation already sabotaged by “fierce individualism”) will readily employ so that democracy no longer stands between them and the prize.
When the goal is “line go up for infinity” the soil itself is a commodity that will be dug up and sold. I really feel like ya’ll still aren’t realizing what’s happening. Almost half the population didn’t get involved, and the ones who did had no media literacy or involvement in politics, as evident by the absolutely bonkers exit polling. We’re at that scene in the Die Hard sequel where the dump trucks are driving the gold out of the city.
So everything is crystal clear to you? Lmao. The election was falsified, the bots online are fake to give the fake election numbers credence. This isn’t rocket surgery. I feel like maybe you don’t understand what’s happening.
I can already tell I won’t enjoy conversing about this with you, it’s okay, have a good one.
It seems like you’re directing this at me, and I can say that ultimately before November 5th I would have nodded my head in agreement. For basically the last 20 years I’ve been more or less obsessively following politics. I’ve voted in every election, primaries, midterms, special elections, local elections, and general. I’ve canvassed and donated. I’ve perpetually kept my eye on the news and participated in a invite-only political debate sub-reddit back in my reddit days. I’ve advocated IRL at my own workplace, risking my job security.
But now I’m verging on suicidally disinterested. After this result I want to disconnect so fucking badly. I want to check out and it feels like there is no escape. I don’t even enjoy my “escapes” like video games, movies/TV, books as much as I used to. All of it feels like a grey sludge while a radioactive fire burns the world.
And the problem is, even if things get sorted out, I will never want to care again. Even if the US fixes its major problems I will forever be disgusted with the majority of my fellow citizens and be ambivalent about most of their well being. I am permanently mentally isolated after this election. The rest of my life seems intrinsically and inescapably dimmer.
Will I care anyway? Yes eventually and inevitably, I’ll feel emotionally pulled to care. Its just how my brain works. And I will resent it. I resent it now.
It seems like you’re directing this at me,
I actually wasn’t but I do appreciate the brutally honest and non-combative reply, this is exactly the window into how the foreign and domestic forces working tirelessly to amplify contention and hate have subverted our very spirit and left us not wanting to care about anything anymore.
This isn’t entirely the fault of the population, but the population can and should at least more informed of this tactic so they don’t doom-scroll the worst clips and gifs, the pandering content, the screaming matches and “debates” and news stories from dubious outlets. We need to do this so we all take better care of our minds, this is part of the whole story… your mind is vulnerable and selfish forces will sell out your mental wellbeing and sovereignty so they can keep making line go up.
If you take care of your mind like your body, if you take care with what you put into it, it will be stronger and healthier and you can make better decisions. This is why they are attacking the very notion of “mental health” by the way. They want a depressed, checked-out population of serfs working the fields and buying the latest iPhone as soon as it lands.
You were fanatically supportive of genocide, while heaping venom and hatred on the people who oppose it; I don’t think anyone cares what you are ‘disgusted’ by. Your boos mean nothing, we’ve seen what makes you cheer.
Removed by mod
deleted by creator
I did.
It would be nice if the boring president actually tried to win.
Americans really do think their politics is just another tv show. I’ll let you in on a secret, the problem with Trump is not that he isn’t “boring”
“May you live in interesting times” is not a blessing.
Yeah, and it doesn’t matter if the politicians overseeing those times are “boring”
When things are on fire you tend to see a bunch of smoke. Just sayin…
Unless it’s a clean burning propane
Taste the meat not the heat.
You don’t, by chance, happen to sell propane and propane accessories?
Or one of those cool decorative indoor ethanol candles
Exactly. It’s like being in a house that’s on fire, laying down for a nap, and complaining when the flames make it too bright to sleep. You can ignore it and move deeper inside the house to nap like you used to, but there’s no fire brigade this time.
deleted by creator
While true, not all Lemmy is american.
deleted by creator
Yeah, that “I don’t care about politics is what brought them there in the first place”, but they will never acknowledge that, instead they will just double down on their aggressive apatheism.
Sounds like their problem, not mine. They voted for it, I wouldn’t expect you to care much about British internal politics either.
deleted by creator
Removed by mod
Yeah, it’s not easy to ignore when the US goverment starts sending people to concentration camps
You had no problem ignoring it for decades previously.
deleted by creator
Because foreign lives actually are worth just as American ones.
deleted by creator
It was being en mass before. The only difference is that now it’s effecting (non African) Americans.
deleted by creator
Americans when they realize they’re wrong, but are to much arrogance pieces of shit to admit it.
Can’t just bury your head in the sand and say you don’t care about politics
I can actually and science proves it’s better for mental health.
Not wanting to follow donald ducks disastrous adventures isn’t burying your head in the sand IMO.
You might not be political, but the Nazis are, and they don’t really mind sending non-political people to the camps.
I have a filter on Elon and Trump
It was too much
Same but some don’t tag their posts and I still see some posts slip through maybe I should block the news communities.
if it’s that bad, I honestly think you shouldn’t be online.
Not kidding, you need to take better care of yourself if it’s at the point where you’re setting filters and still getting stressed seeing political content, you’re not helping yourself escaping online.
There have to be some other things you can do, places you can go, activities you can occupy yourself with or people you can hang out with.
Because man… this shit happening right now is big, it’s history, it’s going to be really, really hard to escape it online because there are millions and millions of people far more involved and worried and trying to communicate their concerns.
I don’t mind the odd post, sometimes it can be relevant and important topics . But those two words balances it out.
Yea my current blovklist looks like this. And I still see a bunch of stuff for them.
maga, politics, biden, trump, republican, elon musk, musk, elon, conservative, rfk, election, russia, russianLooks like this one slid through. Maybe add “political”
Yea good call I’ll a that one as well.
Me too, it was needed.
You gotta block the bots that post news stories to communities named after the publication.
Really clears up the feed.
Also try to get the more spammy ones blocked by your server, it’s a service for all other users as well
I am leaning harder and harder on ‘political comedy isn’t comedy’ as a rule. ‘It’s just a joke,’ is a far too common smokescreen for people pushing terrible ideas and mocking people spreading bad ideas doesn’t do anything to stop them. It can even help. Politics isn’t supposed to be entertaining. It’s the decisions that affect how we live our lives. We need comedy in politics like we need strippers in surgery.
what I’ve leant into hard is the idea that those “clever comebacks” or “murdered by words” posts and communities do much more harm than good. 80% of the post is the most bigoted and hateful thing you’ve ever read, and 20% is “your mom lol”. sharing hate speech with a lame joke tacked on the bottom is still sharing hate speech, turns out
“murdered by words” posts
I was an OG mod for that sub and hearing you say that makes me so sad.
Here’s some history for you; MBW started out with high quality long-form content. Then one day an Admin hand selected it to feature on the Front Page which caused it to explode in popularity, going from about 5,000 subs to over 30,000 in just 48 hours. The new users started upvoting the old content which caused a 2nd and then a 3rd post to organically hit the FP. The growth accelerated.
Later that week the sole mod had a panic attack over the stress and while melting down they deleted the whole sub. At that point I offered to help and they added me as Mod #2. My first official act was working with the Admins to restore the sub from backup. From there we built a moderation team and all of the crap that goes with it like sub rules, wiki, automod, Discord channels.
As the sub got more popular people started posting ever more short form content which was causing the quality to go down even while the subscriber and traffic numbers continued to climb.
A few of us fought hard for a long time to hold the line on quality content, wanting to keep with the higher quality long form content that made it popular even if it meant lower subscriber and traffic numbers. We tried a lot of things to accomplish that but relevant to your comment one of the things was to create “Clever Comebacks” as a place to push the tsunami of Twitter/Tumblr/Facebook dreck. Sadly it didn’t work, people either posted stuff in both places and / or the mod team wouldn’t remove short form content from MBW because it got too popular before it was noticed and they didn’t want to delete something with tens or even hundreds of thousands of upvotes.
As the mod team continued to expand to deal with the ever higher traffic first one then another Powermod was added. I strongly objected to it but was over ruled by Mod #1. Then the Powermods began to stuff the mod team with their friends and sock puppet accounts. That’s when things really started going downhill. They’d delete things that were almost popular then repost it themselves. They’d refuse to remove Posts or Comments from their friends or sock puppets. They implemented bots without sharing the source code. They kept “accidentally” breaking the mod log. They forced endless re-writes of the sub rules, each one giving them more leeway on what fit the sub and what didn’t.
I eventually went hands-off because I couldn’t stop them and couldn’t deal with what MBW had turned into. I finally left the mod team during the API fiasco because they wouldn’t hold the line on the blackout.
So there you have it, a short history of MBW and CC from someone who knows.
On a side note Powermods ruin everything they touch and they’re now showing up on Lemmy.
Counterpoint, comedy is often a coping mechanism for people dealing with difficult things, be it politics or something else. I’ll agree that it’s not how everyone wants to deal with it, though, and I also agree that not everyone does it in a way that’s constructive (but I think that’s in execution, not everyone is funny and a bad joke without proper comedy is certainly just elevating a bad message)
But I think if I didn’t have political comedy, I’m not sure how I could deal with how absolute shit things have been for decades. For me that’s not memes though, it’s stuff like Last Week Tonight or something that actually is done with professional writers and researchers.
I get that humor is useful for making hard topics seem easier but some things should be hard. Would you consider dirty jokes an appropriate substitute for a sex ed class? Would drinking away your nervousness be a good way to prepare for a driving test? Serious matters need to be discussed frankly and honestly.
I used to kind of like Oliver sometimes, but then I saw the pattern and it ruined it for me. Every episode is 'Hello joke>subject>mock subject if funny looking, else mock thing next to subject>let’s get serious, bad thing is happening>it’s really bad>but don’t get outraged enough to go do something about it, here’s someone else taking care of it for you>callback to joke earlier>HBO-brand anti-capitalist recuperation catharsis complete. Go back to work.
Kind of a false equivalence, since you’re not educating yourself on memes exclusively (and if you are, god help you lol). Even in your own reference, you can absolutely make dirty jokes after sex ed, especially if it helps you remember the topics. Good jokes will both reinforce the right narrative, make it more approachable, and help people remember what matters on a topic. Still has to be a good joke though, and humor is subjective so hard to gauge.
I mostly draw the line when it targets a vulnerable person or persons (like, let’s not joke about rape), or makes someone in the room uncomfortable out of respect for that person (like a dirty joke in front of grandma). I suppose one could say any joke about the assholes in charge fall under that first category, but they harm vulnerable people, but they themselves are perfect targets.
Almost no one does one thing to the exclusion of all else, so few, if any, people are getting their knowledge purely from memes, but it doesn’t have to be exclusive to have an effect. Someone who drinks a gallon of soda a day isn’t necessarily getting all of their nutritional intake from soda, and, to borrow the phrase, god help them if so, but it is going to have effects on their life. Treating politics as entertainment also has secondary effects. Just like drinking soda can train your tongue to expect that level of sweetness, which can lead to troubling dietary choices, political humor trains you expect a punchline in a discussion about policy, which can lead to bad political choices.
And notice there how you changed what I said to argue against a point I didn’t make. I talked about jokes as a substitute for sex ed. You talked about jokes after sex ed. There is no mandated political ed class after which to make jokes. The shallow coverage on things like Oliver, tiktok, or other comedy shows is often the deepest, or the only, examination of a political subject people actually ingest, maybe supplemented by a few headlines, a shallow newscast, and an article they didn’t finish. They aren’t making memes about the thing they learned during an in-depth intended-to-inform class. They are making memes based on the memes they laughed at because of the vague half-knowledge they got from the media atmosphere.
Jokes have their place. No one would argue for a life completely lacking in humor, but, just like your example of rape, a subject that is extremely serious because of the long lasting and possibly life-destroying effect it can have on people, politics is too serious to be joked about in the public sphere. Joking about it fails to take serious something that can leave someone alive, but utterly unable to live.
The “funny” parts of the internet like Twitter and Reddit are also owned by millionaires and billionaires, their express purpose being to entertain you and show you ads, not to actually inform you. An especially egregious example is YouTube when a video essayist tries to explain how the Native Americans were killed by colonists, or how most of Latin America was brutalized by capitalist oppression resulting in millions dead, and people have to bleep out their words like they’re on cable TV.
Why are there so many people assuming every lemmy user is from the USA
Sometimes its bad for mental health to continuously see all the bad things that are happening in the richest country in the world
I’m not amoroncan, but unfortunately what happen there have consequences for all of us
It’s terrible for your mental health to be constantly bombarded with “the sky is falling” news.
“the sky is falling” is implying that what’s being talked about isn’t real. The rise in fascism is very real and very global.
Removed by mod
It’s amazing how much still gets through, but at least I’m not scrolling past a dozen “news” stories between every meme or comic post.
My growing list
“If I don’t see it, it can’t hurt me”
I hear about everything I need to without it being every other post on my lemmy feed.
How could you possibly know what you don’t know?
I trust that the sources I follow give me the right information, because they did even before I used these filters.
I’m sure Republicans feel the same way about their sources. Good luck.
Not sure what the issue is. If I’m getting the same info as I would be here if there’s a problem? Why should I have two channels that give the same info?
Some people come here to relax, not be screamed at with outrage bait.
If you’re calling news outrage bait, I don’t know what to tell you. Orange Mussolini is counting on everyone to not keep up so nobody will stop him. I can’t name anything more pathetic than someone who wants ignorant bliss so badly they’ll put a blindfold on.
Yeah, I don’t mind the odd post. But those two help so much
I got ya
I would post more but I got this computer yesterday and have not transferred my old meme folder yet. Ah well
Subscribed !
Is it really political any more when evil people have used politics to gain control over our lives to wreck our retirement funds, deport and possibly murder our friends, and oh just for fun destroy the entire foundational structure of science and discovery?
Nope. That’s not political. That’s awareness of the environment in which we find ourselves, and an attempt to deal with it.
Hopefully it will be over soon (in part thanks to awareness campaigns) so we can go back to politics where we have some conservatives, some progressives or whatever, and some single-issue parities that can make common cause with the others from time-to-time. Politics would be so wonderful to have now. It’s only been gone for maybe a decade and I miss it so much.
Is it really political any more when evil people have used politics to gain control over our lives to wreck our retirement funds, deport and possibly murder our friends, and oh just for fun destroy the entire foundational structure of science and discovery?
All that shit was absolutely happening before Trump too, spare us the “we must retvrn to when America was great” reactionary nonsense
I’m Swiss.
I don’t buy the greatness thing. I’d like go back to having an America that makes sense sometimes, and which we can reasonably work with.
So when it only brutalised brown people
It’s weird because I agree with you, but for some reason interacting with you makes me angry anyway.
What bugs me about it is that it’s usually not even news, just outrage bait.
Well yeah, you’re on a social media site, not a news site. What do you expect? Everyone here to have a journalism degree or something?
That’s what most news is
At some point, pretty much everything becomes political. I like to cycle, walk and enjoy nature. Me not wanting to get killed by a car driver is political, and me thinking we shouldn’t dump toxic crap in the environment is political. The new stop sign at the corner of the street is political. Housing is political. The high price of goods is political.
It’s understandable to want to escape, avoid all this crap and take a break for a while. But memes are also a way to vent and express the frustration about the current political climate.
Unfortunately those two are narcissist shit stains that enjoy having people talking about them every day so they are nearly impossible to avoid for a while.
I like to go touch some grass. Close social media and go take a walk or cycle. Think about how all the fucking money is… eeerh… touch some grass… go camping and hiking, admire the views that are about to get destroyed by capit… eeehm, that makes you feel small. Hear the beautiful sounds of nature accompanied by the dirt bikes illegally riding in the forest. All free of politics! Even when they’ll invade and annex my country, I’ll just be like “can’t we all just stop talking about politics and share memes, please!?”
deleted by creator
I guess we’re doing “abortion is murder” now
deleted by creator
(P.S. After the birth happens, parents should never, ever, say “I wish you were never born”. Your window of decision was during pregnancy, you don’t get to say those words to hurt the kids after they were born. Either get an abortion, or live with the fact you chose to give birth to your child(ren), choose wisely.)
Why? You’ve already stated that unborn children deserve moral consideration as if they’re people, and that killing them is ok is it’s “psychological self defense”. You trying to set some arbitrary limit on when that’s allowed seems entirely like you just trying to have a double standard where you don’t have to take on the mantle of being anti-abortion but still want to be able to use it as a cudgel against China.
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Least deranged anti-communist
