One of my more depressing moments in dealing with the human race was when people were boycotting Blizzard a few years ago for… well, everything. But the sexual harassment and discrimination scandal was the final straw for a lot of people.

I talked about it with my gaming friends on discord at the time, everyone agreed that what the company was doing was terrible, but the more we talked about it, the more they delved into nostalgia and thought about how much fun they had playing WoW when they were younger.

The next day I jump in discord and all five of them had reactivated their subscriptions and were having the time of their life running around WoW without a care in the world. I wanted to throw up.

Our species is fundamentally stuck in a state of cognitive dissonance. We will never have good things.

even the RX9070 is running around $900 USD, I cannot fathom affording even state-of-the-art gaming from years ago at this point. I am still using a GTX1660 and playing games from years ago I never got around to and having a grand time. Most adults I know are in the same boat and either not even considering upgrading their PC or they’re playing their kid’s console games.

Every year we say “Gonna look into upgrading” but every year prices go up and wages stay the same (or disappear entirely as private-equity ravages the business world, digesting every company that isn’t also a private equity predator) and the prices of just living and eating are insane, so at this rate, a lot of us might start reading again.

I would wager that a lot more do.

My mother got drunk one night and sat me on her bed and described in detail when she got raped as a teenager, and the resulting abortion and the details of how that went. I was eleven.

Of course, being a male I can’t go around talking about the lasting effects of many such incidents that happened to me, and I’m not really expected to even connect those things to any feelings about sexual shame. So instead what it does, and what it does to many men who had any kind of sexual trauma, is we just block out the incidents and internalize the feelings and associations inward and it just wrecks our self-esteem, our standards for ourselves and our perceptions of attractiveness in ourselves.

A lot of guys process this in different ways, and trauma like this can take many forms. But it’s often expressed as later over-compensation and bravado and an image of being “in control” sexually and performative masculinity and hyper-objectifying notions of sexuality, or for more people I suspect, just an internal, festering self-esteem that doesn’t want them to be happy or feel good about themselves. For every loud, angry incel, I suspect there are thousands of men who have the same background or traumas and they just sit quietly on it forever and it robs them of joy.

Yeah, maybe my people just messed me up.

I’m pretty sure we’re now in a situation where most of our society’s contention is driven by childhood-induced shame over sexuality in some form or another.

And there’s not shit we can do about it because every time someone tries to make a campaign to encourage better sex-education, or even scarier, sex positivity among children, those people or groups get attacked for being pedos and predators.

This is going to be a social dividing line that gets sharper as time goes. There will be people who have a shred of intellectual capacity and haven’t been hollowed out be capitalism, who raise their kids to be free from shame and shackles of toxic social norms and let them just live and discover on their own what sexuality means to them.

And the orcs, who want literal dark-ages levels of shame, hate and fear and of course power-imbalances as deeply rooted foundations to anything and everything related to sex, and they will only want children associated with sex when it involves controlling them or worse.

TPM cup

I googled this and now I’m enrolled in a yacht race… thanks.

I really feel like the linux thing is far more cultural than practical, and if you don’t actually enjoy fiddling around with settings and software, you’re probably not going to enjoy the community either.

I have no idea what I’m going to do, I can’t afford a new PC nor do I have the desire to buy a new PC just because Microsoft says jump through this new hoop. I’ll probably just do a bypass and ask around the docks for a security key “workaround” from the friendly, local, sailors with eyepatches and peg legs.

We need to store the waste for thousands of years. This is bad.

I feel like you didn’t read my comment and just wanted to talk about thorium. Which is fine, yes I know it generates less waste and creates its own fuel and all that, I am speaking about nuclear waste as we know it right now, from our hundreds of traditional power plants, the things that MOST people associate with dangers of nuclear waste. Which I explained is not even remotely the problem people think it is, because the actual amount is so small and those thousands of years pass in a blink of an eye deep under earth’s crust.

Thorium is good. Traditional nuclear power is also good.

I love how almost none of this discussion is about nuclear power or thorium and just about people wanting to feel morally correct about something and snarling back and forth at each other accusing the other of supporting genocide.

Our species is so cooked. We must be the first species to evolve with our heads up our own asses.

For the amount of actual nuclear waste, it kind of is. Earth is so huge and the amount of waste so small, that you could bury literally ALL of it under a mountain somewhere and chances are high that it would never see daylight again nor would never be found by anyone in the future.

Even despite this, extraordinary measures are taken to make sure nothing escapes the containment until such time that Earth’s crust has completely rolled down into the mantle or the mountain erodes, which by then it wouldn’t be nuclear waste anymore.

Oh absolutely 100% this has had foreign involvement, the KGB handbook (literally) describes how to plant chaotic agents into a democratic nation’s population to boost both sides of every social debate or argument. The digital age made this the easiest tactic in the world and every nation that’s been “annexed” by Russia experienced this sowing of absolute weaponized bullshit and hate.

edit: several tankies follow me around downvoting my every comment and throwing tankie memes at me because they seeth when someone says that Russia did a bad thing. It’s quite charming, they can’t do much else because they’re blocked.

They want us to all tune out. This is all by design so we don’t know what’s real or not anymore, then they can get away with even more and nobody will care.

This is what they’ve been doing for years and years, this is just more of the same.

Trump was also deeply involved in WWF, which also happened to be an entertainment venture which pioneered the idea of wide-scale, public cognitive dissonance for profit.

It was frustrating for some of us when we were kids and we were yelling at our friends that “professional wrestling” wasn’t real and they didn’t believe it, they wanted with all their heart to believe in the storylines and dumb drama, because it was engaging to that part of some people’s brains which desperately needs to follow narratives to make sense of the world. It seemed fucking insane that people would believe that a real sport could have people with swords and black-magic, we were like “What is wrong with this person that they can’t reason through this??”

But we let it go, because it was “harmless.” It was just a silly show, what harm could it be if some people really wanted to believe in it?

But we should have all taken notice of that specific phenomenon because it’s a profound window in the human condition and how far along we really are in evolution. We’re not a rational, reasonable species, we’re animals that formed brains during a million years or so of ice-ages and desperate survival. Our brains are designed to tell stories to explain what we feel, and the brain will readily, greedily latch onto a provided story. The brain is not reasonable or logical, it’s just a story-telling device. And we’re not at all immune to cognitive dissonance no matter how intelligent we are. There are countless people who believe one thing and know another and it doesn’t interfere with their reasoning or life at all.

If we’re not taking control of the stories being consumed, the stories consume us. We might all feel a lot smarter than people who get sucked into WWF or MAGA, but we’re also vulnerable to emotional appeals, fear and hate. I’ve seen plenty of it masked with progressive values, but far more rationalized. We need to be on better guard, we need to understand the nature of our actual enemy. It’s people pulling puppet strings with stories and emotions and it CAN be countered.

Needs more DEEP STATE

Best reply I got here tbh.

Strikes do a lot more damage to companies. I think a lot of people mix the two ideas up.

The last most successful boycotts were mostly ones you never heard of, and at least one you rather not hear of. We managed to get tuna companies to pretend to harm fewer dolphins in 1988. Before that is was things like the 1965 Delano Grape Strike and the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. The most recent boycott that actually got a company to change its marketing and outreach was the Bud Lite/Dylan Mulvaney boycott by the anti-trans right.

If you think you can get enough people as worked up about an issue as the chuds were about a single commercial featuring someone they were scared of, then by all means let’s fire up all the engines and get boycotting. Otherwise, I would encourage people who work at these tech companies to start talking about unions and making change from the inside. But none of that does as much damage to a company as getting politicians installed who are already taking bribes from other companies. Yes this is a dark perspective, you’re welcome to disagree but in my nearly five decades on Earth this is just what I’ve seen over and over.

Boycotts are performative stunts that feel good but don’t have impact on companies and even gets more attention ON those companies.

No really, this is a phenomenon that’s known. When people were protesting Blizzard, I swear to fucking god, people I knew for years who hadn’t played WoW since they were kids suddenly decided to reactivate their accounts because all the talk about blizzard “made them nostalgic” and despite being sympathetic to the people hurt by the company, they simply didn’t have the mental value-system to draw lines between those two things. Their own desires to escape and recapture youth was far, far stronger than the social messaging they honestly just felt was finger-wagging and parental scolding, so they rejected the idea of protesting without conscious thought.

And there are far, FAR more people like this than there are people with steadfast principles and discipline to stick to them. The depressing majority of people are not really thinking, they’re just going with the flow, agreeing with popular sentiment when it’s convenient, doing whatever they want when nobody is looking because capitalism has bled our axioms out.

If we put that much energy into volunteering with groups raising funds for primaries, getting to know our neighbors and forming communities, actually talking to people in our communities, we would abolish this fascist empire in a single election cycle. (Assuming we have elections again.)

edit: I firmly stand by my claim that you can change the world a lot better by being a good, active, social person who organizes your community. If we all kinda, embraced this as a passion and cared about people who aren’t in our discord servers, we wouldn’t need to try to boycott companies who won’t give two shits about you giving them more press.

Welcome to how the world has always worked and always will. There’s gin to help wash the black pill down.

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8-chan was a “less moderated” version of 4-chan where the founders of Q-anon got started, it was a notorious forum for trading child abuse material.

Really good point and in cases like this we should all be a lot more concerned with people who seem obsessive about a given subject. It’s not a coincidence that so many crackpot Q-anon “save the children from the demon vampires” nutcases were actually themselves pedos who were caught, or that Q-anon STARTED on a pedophile message board.