OnlyFans getting more and more specific in it’s diversity, I guess I’m here for it.

Ok

There are over 8 billion people on Earth, and most of them are not living near grocery stories that have protein alternatives and they view meat-eating as culture, as family connection, as celebration and deep roots through community so you’re not going to change them. I would love if our world went vegan and we all became bean-eating human beans, but that day is sadly a long, long way off so I advocate for cultured meat because our species is nowhere close to what we hope it could be.

Realistically, we’re going to be eating every last bug and sea cucumber and coral polyp when we’ve eaten everything else we can before we switch to alternatives.

While the number of actual whalers in the world has declined to just a handful of shitty people, we need to talk about what we’re doing to sharks and octopuses. To say nothing of the newest research and discoveries of how complex fish broadly actually are, with complicated social structures, even languages and the capacity to feel and experience pain.

We need lab-grown proteins and need to put an end to farming sentient creatures in hellish conditions to slaughter and consume them.

Unfortunately, the chances of that becoming normal in the next several centuries is pretty slim. If our solution to the Fermi-Paradox is quarantine, we’re not being let out any time soon.

How are people at work this addicted to AI already? That should be the entire punchline right there, that ANYONE would consider quitting because lack of AI. This is insane.

If you are this dependant on LLM’s you have to stop using them. Like, RIGHT NOW. End your subscription, delete the app, find a good book and start reading.

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The only ragebait is the needless censoring to get people to wonder why it’s being censored so they share it, otherwise the mockery of economic propaganda is pretty based.

That city center? The hyperspace bookshelf dimension from the ending of Interstellar.

That you feel attacked is what I want here. I am not here to make peace with my own side. I am pissed at my own side. I want to antagonize you all by telling you the hard shit you don’t wanna hear.

One of those hard things is you have all broadly gotten to sheltered, too lazy, too self-entitled and abandoned community. Leftists and progressives broadly are rejecting community because it seems like something “midwest white rednecks” have. The same way we let them have the flag and guns. It’s dumb, we have to exercise, we have to get stronger, we have to get angry.

Get mad at me. Hate me. WHATEVER THE FUCK IT TAKES TO SAY “I WILL BE STRONGER” so that when you do talk to your neighbor you don’t feel so fucking drained you have to escape to your dark hidey hole for a whole day.

I just find social interactions to be energy draining

My broken arm

How are these equitable? How is “feeling drained” the same as having a handicap or being physically broken? I don’t actually want an answer, I don’t really care, you’re not going to do my community any good if you feel forced to do something you don’t see the benefit from, but it’s worth remembering that submerging in comfort now usually has a pretty steep cost later. Whether it’s not exercising your body because it hurts, or not exercising your emotional intelligence because it’s uncomfortable or draining.

This epidemic of de-socialization is artificial, and should be pushed back on by everyone who cares about being a strong, healthy adult in a strong community. It’s very basic stuff that got us through ice-ages, mass extinctions, depressions and violent times of the past.

“I don’t know how this helps me!” said the karate student doing pushups. “I came here to learn how to not get hurt, what good does hurting myself this way accomplish?”

I agree with and appreciate your honest, realistic perspective.

And I maintain that we can break through the challenges of fear and propaganda designed to push people indoors and to stop organizing, to stop creating communities. It’s artificial. It goes against millions of years of evolution. People want to be connected and part of a community, but the manufactured fear is stronger right now.

In fact, this is how I’ve turned my share of conservatives towards better ways of “thinking” which is understanding that even the person who hates you and everything you stand for, on some level, really, really wants your acceptance. It doesn’t sound like it makes sense, but that’s just it… our species is loaded with contradictions, it’s why we have a reality-TV president and why we have so many people spinning out about wildly unrealistic issues or false-flag stories stoking people’s fear and anger. Because we’re not rational.

I often tell the story about how at my first job I volunteered to start taking the difficult clients’ calls for my boss, they were so happy to hand that task over they didn’t care if some monkey from the warehouse like myself was handling it.

What I did was listen to the angry client’s calls, I listened to their stories and their feelings and their frustrations, and didn’t try to fix it all, just listened and said I understand. Then they would call back and ask for me. Still angry, but now seeking the only person who will let them have emotions about it, then over time they did business only with me, and apologized for their temper earlier.

We can all do this. It’s not a jedi trick, but it does take a level of emotional intelligence we’re not developing inside on Lemmy and Reddit and Discord. We have to get out more, we have to be the bigger people we think we are. We have to get over our own hangups and fears and insecurities and lead by example. I strongly feel any of us are capable of doing this, even if it’s just once, if we all did it we would change our country.

Me too but it didn’t stop me from actually working on that and viewing it as what it is, not an identity quirk but an obstacle towards progress for myself and my community.

This post is a great example of why we lost America. And what is spreading across the world right now.

Hold a goddamn yard sale and talk to your neighbors people, get to know them, PRETEND you care, at least enough so you can exchange phone numbers and watch each other’s places when you take trips or recognize each others lost dogs.

I promise, it not only gets easier, it becomes a source of pride and comfort knowing the people around you. We have spurned community because it’s more tempting to hide inside and feel miserable and lonely. Losing community was how we lost civics and representation and basic human empathy.

“whaa but my neighbors are all assholes”

I don’t care. You should still know their names.

We have plenty of “nice” cartoons, my point though is that after a certain age, a child should have a solid understanding of some mature concepts like mortality, because if you’re going into your pre-teens and still can’t watch certain scenes in kid’s media, you’re going to have a very hard time with an array of things as life rapidly comes at you.

It was a one-trick pony.

“Get it? It’s 80’s!” can only last about one season before you start to get tired of the decade.

I did like some moments in the later seasons, I wouldn’t say they’re awful but completely forgettable. They just kept trying to tell the same story over and over.

I disagree that this is an actual problem, we have so few sources anymore that show any kind of reality that kids can connect with.

It’s worse than ever. It’s a world of AI slop that is often far more disturbing, youtube kid’s channels that are completely lacking in value or education. Life lessons are avoided like the plague in media and in families now. Parents avoid “hard topics” with their kids at a level that has left an entire generation of adults unable to function under any level of pressure, or unable to do basic things like count change and make eye contact.

Will seeing Bambi’s parents die help with that? Not directly, but there is a type of psychological “grounding” that can come from careful exposure to distressing topics as a child.

Life is horrible, but avoiding it makes the problems worse. Avoiding something distressing because you can’t take negative emotions is a valid choice but it doesn’t make you stronger. Your mental capacity, your emotions and your perceptions are all muscles that wither and die without exercise.

If we taught our children that bad things happen but it’s okay and we can recover, maybe there would be less fear and scared adults who cling to violence as a means to feel in control.

I just don’t like the idea of sanitizing and shaving every hard corner off a world that desperately needs people with mental and emotional strength like never before.

The later seasons weren’t bad necessarily, but you could honestly stop after season 1 and rest confident that you didn’t miss out on anything important to the cultural zeitgeist.

I remember season 1. I don’t remember the other seasons.

How am I underestimating anything? This is a phenomenon that people have been subject to for thousands of years. Alcoholism has been around since the dawn of agriculture and people had far, far shittier lives pre-industry. Objectively. The current iteration of society is the best we’ve ever had. Just because we haven’t found a way to balance our wealth and conveniences with personal emotional satisfaction doesn’t mean you would be happier two hundred years ago. Quite the opposite, and you would probably die a lot earlier and lot more miserable.

edit: I know you hate being told “it could be worse” but it’s TRUE. It shouldn’t make you stop wanting a better life, but it SHOULD make you stop using excuses to not do the best you can with the short life you have. Take a hard look at your needs, vices and self-medication habits and try to ask yourself honestly how much time you spend mentally validating something that feels good but doesn’t actually help you. It should make you uncomfortable to think about.

My dad was the kind of person who would do coke and drink all day and pretended he was he was “doing business” when he was really just calling everyone in his contacts and loudly being obnoxious at them for an hour or two each.

No idea how much money he conned out of people to support his habit but I estimated he probably spent at least a several hundred thousand dollars on cocaine in his life, not counting the hundreds of thousands or more he spent on nightly dinners where he held a captive audience while he ranted and raved like Trump.