#US Society

[erebusvincent]

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

[allpowerfulspacevalkyrie]

Person 1: Wow, anxiety, depression, suicide rates are all through the roof. Everyone is so lonely and there's such a lack community!

Person 2: Maybe people should talk to each other and make friends out of strangers.

Person 1: That's what everyone does on the internet.

Person 2: No, I mean in person.

Person 1: Are you joking? That's too dangerous! No one can be trusted anymore! Everyone is out to rape and murder and chop your body up and eat you! Trust no one! Stranger danger! The world is evil and no one has good intentions ever!

[horizon-verizon]

Did Genocide Joe Biden defeat fascism by giving weapons and political support to Israel as it ramps up its genocide against Palestine ? Did Genocide Joe defeat fascism by personally writing laws that directly led to the mass incarceration of black people ? Did Genocide Joe defeat fascism by letting 600k+ people in the US die of covid (and those are only the deaths they counted) ? Did Genocide Joe defeat fascism by waiving environmental regulations to build Trump's border wall ? Did Genocide Joe defeat fascism by giving states the go ahead to discriminate against trans people, even going so far as to explicitly allow schools to ban trans kids from sport ? Did Genocide Joe defeat fascism by shrugging his shoulders when millions upon millions of women begged him to do ANYTHING AT ALL about abortion bans in 43 states ? The Democrats do not give a shit about any of us! they are not on our side! voting blue will never "defeat fascism." Fundamentally, the Democrats and the Republicans have the exact same interests, to enrich the USAmerican bourgeoisie. The United States is one big monstrous business, and the President is its CEO. The job of the CEO is to enrich the shareholders, no matter what they may say their goals are.

No notes agreed.

[confusedgoldenflower]

Commissions Open

I haven’t done this for myself, idky. I guess anxiety and shyness. But what spurred me to do this now is the Jasmine Sherman/Tanda Blubear (https://linktr.ee/fat_socialist) campaign NEEDS money to make it through the gatekeeping—I mean to pay the ballot fees because the Green Party couldn’t support actual action.

So I’m bluntly stating my writing requests are OPEN! Hell, I’ll even write you you’re smut. Just donate to this campaign, please.

(I will NOT do SA/pedo/zoo/gender slurs/or other topics that distress me.) If I don’t know the fandom/source, I can work with enough info to write.

[tiredphilosophy]

It’s times like these (exams) that I wonder what all this work was for. Like, on a whole, were the people who advanced society (philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, some politicians & rulers, etc) thinking “ah yes, one day my descendants will be able to sit in fluorescent-lit rooms and fill in bubbles on a piece of paper that will be judged by a machine to determine if they’re intelligent enough to not have to take a class in the special school they’ll go to after 12 years of schooling” or “ah yes, one day my decedents will be staying up late researching things they don’t give a damn about because the government decided it was important. Will they ever be genuinely interested in pursuing the topic after associating it with exhaustion, back pain, lack of control over their own lives, and a lack of self worth? Ha, probably not, isn’t that great?”

And then did pioneers from what are less privileged groups today go, “oh, oh, and my decedents will struggle to get an education instead! They’ll also have dirty water and be starving and their economy will be failing and their government will be corrupt! Wouldn’t that be so fun?”

And did the pioneers from what are privileged groups today go, “That’s genius! And the young people from our countries will learn, like, Calculus, while not being encouraged to help those less fortunate than them. I mean, they’ll do ‘service hours,’ I guess, but that won’t be nearly as rewarded as working to be accepted to a highly respected college, which they’ll also pay to attend, even though we’ll eventually create a resource (the internet) where literally all the knowledge of the human race can be recorded and communicated.”

I was told by people much smarter than me that the school system and much of our culture is meant, first and foremost, to benefit the economy. And personally, I believe it. We’re taught about productivity and how to maximize output, with only a small amount of time being dedicated to exploring what is valuable to us as individuals and to the world as a whole. Or the way that we, as individuals, function best, both alone and in a group. (And when I say in a group, I don’t mean group projects where you just want to get it done and get a decent grade, I mean group projects that you actually care about contributing to.) We’re basically taught how to do a simple job. Get instructions, follow instructions, improve at task. And even then, the skills are only really applicable to jobs that don’t require actual independent thought.

Critical thinking skills? Unheard of. Comprehension skills? What are you even talking about.

We aren’t taught thinking skills; we’re taught patterns. It’s no wonder that most young people seem unoriginal and dependent. Society took the human feature that allows us to improve as a whole and made it so extreme that we don’t grow as individuals. (Or learn to actively consider the actual whole, including those outside our social group and more.)

TLDR: Is measurable academic success, (and later economic success, especially through traditional means) really what we should be shaping children to value and achieve?

[zenosanalytic]

That nearly all of it is ultimately owned by some rich old conservative is a good thing to keep in mind about ALL US Media: Hollywood, Radio, Social Media, and Yes, even the news. All their talk about ~The Liberal Media~ is misdirection.

There's a REASON Republican pols hate PBS and NPR as much as they do, and it's because, as milquetoast as it often is, Public Broadcasting is one of the few institutional voices in the US not entirely reading from the conservative hymnal.

That video of Alex Hirsch reading S&P notes for Gravity Falls conveys a few things to me:

1) the U.S. entertainment industry (especially animation) is run by older conservative types who make up offensive terms and get really mad about them.

2) the people who run Disney would be the first to fall in line with a fascist regime.

3) most of the media we consume is tailor-made and watered-down to appeal to the tastes of older, deeply religious conservative audiences.

4) conservatism, not the left, is and always has been the biggest voice of censorship in American culture.

[liveandbreathemusicals]

Gay people will be like “this is my comfort show!” And then show you the most emotionally devastating, stress-inducing, tragic piece of media you have ever witnessed

[erebusvincent]

The transformation of liberalism, namely its polarization, lies at the heart of social divisions and a retreat of democracy in the United States. Internationally, this shift has led to Washington’s more self-centered approach, weakened efforts on multilateralism and to the resurgence of authoritarianism, putting the liberal international order in jeopardy.

Liberalism is based on the universality of individual dignity and autonomy, which are viewed as equal and respected among all under the principle of tolerance. Especially in Japan, “liberal” may be understood as a term for a center-left stance favoring government intervention. Here, however, liberalism is understood not as a policy position but as an ideology about the human condition.

Liberalism in the U.S. today is the product of overextending the idea of individual autonomy, resulting in selfishness, and, at the same time, a return to traditional morality: A complex and intertwined process that has resulted in polarization.

[rev-ised]

Just as evidence for the "we're in a depression that isn't being covered in mainstream news", I was let go along with ~20 of my coworkers in August of this year. Within the next couple months, my dad, my sister's friend, and my cousin-in-law all also lost their jobs (all different companies) as part of layoffs.

I have applied to well over a hundred jobs in the last four months (not to mention all the job openings I had to skip over as they were impossible for me with my physical and mental disabilities) and have heard back from a grand total of four places. They have all been rejections, even for ones I completely fit the requirements for.

I know my former coworkers, my dad, my sister's friend, and my cousin-in-law have been having similar response rates. Of the lot of us, I've only heard about one person finding another job so far.

The job market is absolute shit right now.

[puddingcatbeans]

to be perfectly honest. i don't care if it is cheesy or cliched or idealistic. i like stories where the core of it is about kindness, the warmth we can offer others and the gentleness we receive in return. maybe the moral of the story IS love triumphs. it better fucking be

[allpowerfulspacevalkyrie]

This morning many US citizens are learning from the cheery morning news, amongst the daily dose of imagery of screaming, crying, broken, bleeding, and dead Palestinians, that despite all the two state solution talk, the US does not recognize Palestine as a independent state to begin with. Thanks to Ireland, Norway, and Spain, who the morning news achors are saying are all US allies. Yes, that's the shocking part. Don't choke on your popcorn now America. There will be more blood soaked and dead people paraded on news tomorrow. Can't miss it.

[horizon-verizon]

White Americans calling Muslim countries barbaric and backwards when child marriage is literally legal in most US states. 300 000 children were married in the United States between 2000 and 2018, the vast majority of whom were underage girls married to older men. Approximately 60 000 occurred at an age or involved a spousal age difference that should have constituted a sex crime. Some were as young as ten.

Great points. People going after trans people and drag queens when they are the same ones trying to get the minimum age requirement lower in many states show clearly their priorities and interest in controlling female bodies of any age.

[captainjonnitkessler]

I think I can trace my intense hatred for the whole "regulations are just corporate bullshit, building codes are just The Man's way of keeping you down, we should return to pre-industrial barter and trade systems" nonsense back to when I first started doing electrical work at one of the largest hospitals in the country.

I have had to learn so much about all the special conditions in the National Electric Code for healthcare systems. All the systems that keep hospitals running, all the redundancies and backups that make sure one disaster or outage won't take out the hospital's life support, all the rules about different spaces within the hospital and the different standards that apply to each of them. And a lot of it is ridiculously over-engineered and overly redundant, but all of it is in the service of saving even one life from being lost to some wacky series of coincidences that could have been prevented with that redundancy.

I've done significantly less work in food production plants and the like, but I know they have similar standards to make sure the plants aren't going to explode or to make sure a careless maintenance tech isn't accidentally dropping screws into jars of baby food or whatever. And research labs have them to make sure some idiot doesn't leave a wrench inside a transformer and wreck a multi-million dollar machine when they try to switch it on.

Living in the self-sufficient commune is all fun and games until someone needs a kidney transplant and suddenly wants a clean, reliable hospital with doctors that are subject to some kind of overseeing body, is my point.

[jakeperalta]

the thing is I already know that men and society at large hate women. I know that young men in particular increasingly skew right and towards misogyny (I've read the articles, although all I really need to do is spend any time on any part of the internet to see the evidence). but then every so often something like this happens where it still somehow surprises me. like my god.. they really hate us this much.

[lastoneout]

the whole guilt-tripping language in posts about important topics paired with how I'm still getting bitches in my notes talking about why it's actually good to tell "bad" people to kill themselves continues to prove to me that a lot of people have absolutely no concept of social justice or activism outside of assuming the worst of and then viciously attacking strangers on the internet