From a narrative standpoint, Spider-Man’s entire thing is thematically tied to the idea that “no good deed goes unpunished.” Peter Parker’s academic, professional, and social life all pay a price to enable his crime fighting. Spider-Man 2 does a good job of portraying that. After he stops the train that was about to crash in his fight with Doc Ock, he gets lifted up, arms outstretched, looking like a crucified Jesus. He suffers for the sake of others. It’s honestly a nice contrast to people like Tony Stark for whom being a billionaire playboy superhero has historically (if not in the Marvel movies) been depicted as coming with a fairly comfortable life. Well, at least ignoring the part of his backstory where he went homeless because of his alcoholism. But that was in the eighties, I think.
I find the movies conceptually interesting because there aren’t many movies in which humans are just explicitly the bad guys, or in terms of the most recent one just a supporting entity that exists on the periphery of the story. Avatar kinda does that, too, but the Avatar movies are also puddle deep genre fiction and the “of the Apes” movies are at least structurally and narratively competent.
Dog, we’re all engineers. And the worst business leaders I’ve ever worked with directly were good engineers before they got promoted into positions of management (or started their own terrible business, as the case might be) in which they had no business being because the skill requirements for engineering are not automatically transferable to managing people. It’s called the Peter Principle, and there’s some real truth to it.
However, getting an MBA isn’t going to change you from one type of person to the other.
Sure, an MBA is sort of useless. Management is largely based around personality. And you can’t really teach personality. It’s the same way for a lot of professions, like teaching, actually. In fact, I’d say the management pool should be drawn from people who were accomplished high school teachers. There’s a lot of crossover there in terms of organization, planning, and dealing with a bunch of people who all hate the work you make them do.
Thompson rightly concludes that the American dream is already dead by the 70s.
Important context for that is that the novel is a famous, and relatively early, meditation on the failures of the 1960s counterculture movement and the intense, if ultimately unfocused vision for a better future for the nation that was central to it.
Donald Trump flirted with the idea of being president for three terms – a clear violation of the US constitution – during a bombastic speech for the National Rifle Association in which he vowed to reverse gun safety measures green-lighted during the Biden administration....
And it’s a great line for the gun lobby. In a lot of ways, the NRA and gun manufacturers would prefer a Biden victory because gun sales spike when Democratic presidents get elected, as gun-nuts are certain every time it happens that this is the time, for real, that they’re “coming for our guns.” In other words, people panic buy rifles because they think a federal ban is coming. But the reality is that Dems will never push through sweeping anti-gun legislation because there are so many pro-2FA democrats out there that doing so would be ludicrously difficult and monumentally unpopular.
This is the main thing that happened, I think. I met some old friends recently I hadn’t seen in a while and it’s wild how differently we engage with the internet. My main source of interaction is on a laptop, and even then a non-trivial amount of my web interaction is purely via the terminal. Of all of my friends, one of them had a PC, and they don’t use it. Their engagement with the internet is purely on mobile devices. I was dumbfounded. Like…how do you do stuff on a phone. I hate phones. They’re so much worse than a good keyboard. But I also hate the current version of the internet and they seem to love it.
And that, I think, is the core difference. It’s not that the phones took over, it’s that the keyboard died for the average user. A keyboard allows a complex degree of engagement that is difficult, if not truly impossible, to match on a device meant for short bursts of canned responses and auto-complete suggestions. It forces individually brief, but ultimately continuous pre-programmed engagement.
And that’s the entirety of the modern internet. It’s why tiktok is so popular. It’s why youtube shoves Shorts down your throat when you visit. It’s why Twitter took off. It’s also why a website like reddit, that was based initially around the kind of engagement I like, is so hard to monetize and why the attempts at dumbing it down and strangling it of anything that isn’t that same kind of superficial engagement (and by God are they trying) is so difficult for the website’s leadership: because all the other places that are more profitable than it are designed to do that from the jump, and they have to superimpose that strategy onto a content aggregator whose main attraction was a robust, nested comment system.
I keep thinking about what was, for me, the Golden Age of the internet. I know it’s different for everyone, but from around, I guess, 2009 to 2017 I was online a lot. And a lot of what the internet was and how it operated and the ideas there, especially on reddit, were so formative to who I am. And I keep feeling like I never appreciated it or really thought about how vibrant and interesting it was while it was like that. It feels like when you’re a kid and you see a wave for the first time, and it’s building and building and it seems like it’ll be building forever, getting bigger and bigger, but then suddenly it collapses under its own weight and is gone as if it were never there, and after the fact you just wish you’d appreciated it for the wonder it was in that moment. Part of it’s just getting older and the general feeling of nostalgia that comes with age, but sometimes that nostalgia is justified.
Anything related to a DND live play I’m going to assume will be immediately toxic by virtue of what I understand about DND’s fanbase. I love Dimension20 and I like Critical Role but I’m going to assume every other fan of the show is an insufferable idiot.
Under the Dome has always been super interesting to me because Brian K. Vaughn is one of the best comic book writers of all time and a consistent criticism of UTD is how bad the writing is. I know he didn’t write many of the episodes, though, but I also wonder how his episodes rank in comparison with the others.
My favorite was the Chapo Traphouse subreddit because the image in this post describes the hosts and their relationship with their fans. Whenever the subreddit got banned and the hosts heard about it their response was “good, that was the right choice. We fully support the admins here and their banning of that subreddit.” The reddit fans were so salty.
It has a couple of very decent episodes, but as someone who is a big Fallout fan the show seems pretty underwhelming. It’s like they wanted to lean into the grim darkness of the setting, so they decided to eliminate whatever vestiges of civilization there might have been (the Brotherhood of Steel being in a massive downward spiral as an organization and the whole Shady Sands things seemed like a copout for budget and storytellilng purposes). Not saying Fallout isn’t a bleak setting, but it’s definitely got more of an oddball humor to it that is generally pervasive through the setting, instead of the sprinkle of it we got throughout the show. I guess what I’m saying is that with something like this you have to really nail the tone, and they just sorta missed the mark on it.
Engagement and disengagement are effectively separate forms of labor expected of an employee, though, and they’re virtually never formally codified. If I’m a coder and my job is to write code, don’t expect me to be enthused about writing terrible medical billing software. Enthusiasm and engagement are emotional labor, which I’m not compensated for, and which, to some extent, you can’t realistically expect me to demonstrate. I’m not able to “be engaged” beyond performing my tasks and whatever technical or administrative duties I’ve been assigned. Expecting me to contribute in a way orthogonal to that requires my job to be fundamentally different from what it actually is.
Linux is really just the kernel the OS runs on. What people dislike are some of the stupid choices a distribution’s maintainers make. Like, Ubuntu used to be a great entry-level operating system for people who wanted to get into Linux but didn’t want to ditch all the things they understood from Windows or MacOS. It provided a level of comfort and ease of use. Which is great, and something the Linux community needs. But then Canonical started injecting snap package bloatware with everything and it’s just a mess. You have as little control over snap updates as you do Windows updates unless you completely disable the service, which is hardly trivial for a new user.
In Linux you have to do sudo systemctl disable snapd, which produces a warning about snapd.socket. New users sometimes get a little freaked out about disabling stuff in systemd, especially after they find out what systemd is and does and how important it is. They’re afraid of bricking their installation and you have to be like “no, that won’t happen. Yes, I’m sure it won’t happen. No, you don’t need to reboot. Just replace disable with stop in those commands again and it won’t run anymore. Yes, I’m sure it’ll be fine.” So the commands are trivial, but the psychological toll of doing stuff via the command line that you perceive as dangerous, for truly novice Linux users, isn’t to be underestimated.
Yes, and from most of the people I know who believe themselves to be mildly autistic or to have behaviors commonly identified as autism symptoms, if you said to them “everyone’s a little bit gay,” they would almost certainly say “Yes! Exactly!”
psychotic break a couple of years ago after his mom died
Went from “weird” to “sad and tragic” pretty quick. Honestly, it makes me worried about my own mental health in a big way should I face a similar kind of tragedy.
Goddamn do I feel this in my bones. One fucking election 24 years ago seems more and more significant as time goes on. Can you imagine if Bush/Cheney hadn’t been in the White House? Honestly, this is mostly Bill Clinton’s fault. He poisoned the well against any democratic candidate after the Monica Lewinsky affair. Gore would have had a cakewalk in 2000 otherwise.
Eh, Monica Lewinsky was like 22 years old when Bill Clinton was 49 and he started having an affair with her. He was sort of the predator in that relationship. I wouldn’t describe him as a casualty of anything other than his own predilections.
Oh, okay, well I’m not sure to what extent I really agree with that, but then again I’m kinda arguing from the perspective of a domino effect, like the whole “for want of a nail the shoe was lost” sorta deal.
I already mentioned that shoehorning criticism of religion into conversations that were unrelated came across as bitter and myopic. Your point was, essentially, that a lot of people are bitter towards Christianity, which is implied by my own observation. If you have nothing to add beyond restating what was already said by the person to whom you are replying, then I would suggest saving yourself the time in the future and just clicking the up arrow. Or doing literally nothing. Either of those are fine options.
A lot of it probably comes from deeply negative personal experiences, combined with a general propensity for people to apply a categorical belief to particular experiences. People who were treated badly by a particular group of Christians, or people who see and hear about certain Christians advocating for some terrible politician or political goal, are applying a generalized belief to how all Christians act, and potentially to all religion in general. It’s much harder to accept that the world is a deeply complicated and messy place and that religion and religious belief is a much more complex element of human civilization, culture, and personal identity than what many people would care to acknowledge.
religion functions by 1) lying to people about the fundamental nature of reality in order to 2) manipulate them into doing bad things and that central to this is the idea that doing point 1 actively enables or facilitates point 2.
religion constitutes a “static model of reality” to which people are emotionally attached, which is fundamentally dangerous.
religion does not “determine” good or bad.
Religious violence is a thing that exists.
You’re queer and religion bothers you.
So, point by point:
many religions make complex assertions about the metaphysical nature of the universe, often including the existence of supernatural phenomena, individuals, locations, etc. I’m not going to try to argue for the existence of any mystical element of any particular faith, but I will challenge the innately reductive analysis of religion you’ve provided. Most religions, particularly the very old ones, incorporate historical, philosophical, artistic, communal, and ethical traditions. You seem to center your understanding of religious faith around the metaphysical or supernatural components and have asserted that these components warp the underlying perception of reality of its participants for the express purpose of making people behave in such a way as to “do awful shit” and act against your “conscience and general interest.” In making a causal assertion of this kind, however, you really need to be able to support that assertion with something that proves a causal link between what you describe as a belief in “blatantly magical bullshit” and a specific pattern of behavior. Why is it the belief in the supernatural and not, for example, hierarchical organizations of power, something that has existed as a component of organized religion for millennia, but also in virtually all political and dominant social institutions for just as long? Perhaps people are more inclined towards mob mentality or to fall behind powerful and charismatic leaders, regardless of the institution from which they’re working. For example, the Soviet Union under Stalin was a brutally repressive society that actively criminalized both organized religion and LGBT persons. The absence of religion did not magically produce a society devoid of people unwilling to brutally oppress their fellow countrymen.
you seem to be working with terms that don’t really carry a lot of significance or meaning for anyone other than yourself. What, exactly, do you think constitutes a “static model of reality?” And what, exactly, is problematic about that? Because in my mind, most people operate with a fairly static understanding of reality. Not to say it’s the same understanding of reality. Ideologies are as complex and different as the people that internalize them, and they inform our personal understanding of the world we inhabit. For most people, altering these beliefs about the world is non-trivial. As a staunch leftist, someone would have a hard time selling me on the merits of laissez-faire capitalism as an effective mechanism of distributing wealth in a society. My understanding of the fundamental nature of economics, human nature, and reality itself precludes this. Am I working from an overly static and inflexible model of reality?
religion is deeply concerned with the nature of good and evil. Admittedly, these are things you might not actually believe in. Perhaps you’re a moral relativist. Perhaps not. If you are, I don’t have much to say to you about this. You believe good and evil are culturally determined moral concepts and nothing else, from a personal perspective, beyond socially conditioned behavior.
religious violence, or “Holy Wars” as you’ve put it, are virtually all fought for the same purpose as any other war: the primitive acquisition of wealth and the expansion of a nation or nations hegemony. If you think what’s going on in Palestine is not driven by Israel’s desire for Palestinian land, then I have a bridge to sell you.
your experiences are both tragic and common. I’ve personally been physically and emotionally abused by members of specific religious organizations, for reasons and in ways I don’t feel comfortable sharing with strangers on the internet, and by people who were sociopaths that used religion as a cudgel to bully and control others. But I’ve also been comforted and treated kindly by other people for whom their religious faith was an important part of their lives - people who were sick and in pain their entire lives, but who found serenity and comfort through their beliefs and shared that with people around them who were also suffering. History is full of people who used religion as an excuse to do terrible things, but history also has a tendency to amplify monsters and forget the decent people whose faith may have driven them to have a more positive impact on the world.
If you want to hate religion because you’re bitter, that’s fine. You can feel about religion any way that you want. But don’t be offended when you bring it up out of nowhere and someone tells you that your comments are irrelevant to the current discussion.
The world doesn’t revolve around your personal bitterness.
Accurate (lemmy.world)
Just so you're clear on what we're about to watch... (lemmy.world)
Red Lobster files for bankruptcy, restaurants will stay open (www.nbcnews.com)
Consumers are so demoralized by inflation and high rates they've given up on saving for the American Dream and are spending money instead, economist says (fortune.com)
Trump floats idea of three-term presidency at NRA convention (www.theguardian.com)
Donald Trump flirted with the idea of being president for three terms – a clear violation of the US constitution – during a bombastic speech for the National Rifle Association in which he vowed to reverse gun safety measures green-lighted during the Biden administration....
Online Content Is Disappearing (www.pewresearch.org)
"LiNuX uSeR iNsTaLlInG A BrOwSeR haha" meanwhile : (lemmy.world)
Terminal > Windows Registry.
Yeah... Never make the mistake of visiting a community for your favorite podcasts (i.ibb.co)
me_irl (lemmy.world)
What kind of institutional gaslighting is this? (i.redd.it)
Ads in the Start Menu (lemmy.world)
deleted_by_author
Man dies after setting himself on fire outside Trump trial courthouse (www.theguardian.com)
Man identified by police as Max Azzarello, from Florida, declared dead after incident outside lower Manhattan courthouse...
MAGA majority on the court is running out the clock (lemmy.world)
Just 2 people. (i.imgur.com)