For me the most frequent and glaring Cassandra moment of the last decade or so has been the staggering number of "not political, no political agenda, just teaching self improvement" talking heads like :up-yours-woke-moralists: , Joe "JUST TAKE DMT BRO DONT BE A (slur) BRO" BROgan, and even :my-hero: because of the "he's just a better human that wants to save humanity and make humans an interplanetary species and make us all better humans" :soypoint-1: talking points from his fandom. I'd even include scientism cranks like Sam Harris as well as capital-R "Rationalists" in this category because of their own pretenses of being the "grey tribe" and proclaiming that "politics is the mind killer" :very-intelligent: while finding more and more sophistic reasons to bootlick the rich and perpetuate colonialism.
I remember the origins of almost every right wing grifter coming across that way at first, and how I had to push uphill each and every time to say obvious stuff like ":jordan-eboy-peterson: calling feeemales 'sacred' then stating that they are 'chaos dragons' that need to be subjugated for the sake of civiliation is misogynistic ideology even if your cult leader says it isn't."
I've known some people personally that bought into such "nonpolitical" grifters and when the politics became obvious they were like :surprised-pika: and I was like :i-told-you-dog: and depending on whether they still followed the grifter or not they'd either pretend they never bought in or they'd claim that their specific grifter was forced to "get political" because "everything is so divisive these days and everyone has an agenda and a narrative." :morshupls:
I even remember when "NoFap" on :reddit-logo: was aggressively pushed as a wholesome self improvement fellowship that sought magic powers from secular puritanism and that totally wasn't a political movement no matter how misogynistic and MAGA-associated its power users became and it wasn't a cult either because they said so. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aOHQ-sMCps
Well there was that time where :biden-alert: said that "Nothing will fundamentally change" and I said "nothing will fundamentally change" then all my lib friends said Biden would be the most progressive president ever and then nothing fundamentally changed
Unfortunately they're all still at :brunch: so I haven't actually gotten through to them that nothing has fundamentally changed
Not even :covid-cool: got in the way of :brunch: :corona-and-lime: :corona: :grillman: :corona-whitehouse: :biden-fall:
Kinda like how he campaigned against a real lockdown to contain covid, but I was called an "insane idiot" for saying that Biden would absolutely not do what was necessary to contain covid. I didn't want things to be this way.
most progressive democrat since FDR. Also JFK who made speeches on the need for universal healthcare aparently doesn't exist.EVERY - FUCKING - THING - FUNDAMENTALY - CHANGED !
where do you live , Moria ?
Afghanistan and Iraq. Sure was fun being a teenager online saying these were a bad idea while grown adults believed there was a chance Saddam actually had WMDs :yea:
I totally remember being a little kid at that time, not knowing exactly what was wrong and being like "I don't have anything to compare this to, but this social zeitgeist seems stupid and ham-flavored. Thanks a lot, adults in my life, now I have to spend decades trying to figure out what I mean by that."
But yeah seeing all the "grownups" turn into baying war pigs and cheer on a genocidal bombing campaign at a young age was like a vaccine against ever buying into US War propaganda again.
That and the racism and Islamophobia (:same-picture:) which rapidly overtook the West.
I remember people sharing shit like this and actually believing it :yea: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/la-confidential/
I grew up in the shadow of those horrific decisions, and it’s been the predominate thing that led me to my political views
Which is why it was so shocking to see people fall for that shit again completely with Ukraine. Or even worse, China. I was telling so many people “You would’ve believed Saddam had WMDs” and at least once I got a response of “Yeah, and?”
Like, holy shit have you been paying no attention your entire life? You’re my age and grew up in the US. How have you come to any conclusion about information from the US State Dept that isn’t “They’re almost certainly lying”
People seek out the information they want to hear, not the information which is most correct. We… do not teach critical thinking skills here.
I mean yeah definitely, but this doesn’t really require seeking out any information. This just requires having developed your bullshit detector even the tiniest amount in your whole life living here
I can only imagine the exhaustion that must be involved with any job involving environmental or conservation concerns. :desolate:
“hey you should take this issue seriously because it only gets harder and more expensive to deal with it later.”
imagine being able to take out high interest loans using other people's futures as collateral
I remember when I was the only person in a group that thought trump would win. The people were too angry for a clinton I said. But they didn't listen.
I remember having acquaintances tell me how I was bad for breathing a Trump presidency into existence. I was like I don't want it, but what I want doesn't matter since he's gonna win. This was back in July of 2016.
"Breathing something into existence" is one of the most lib concepts imaginable, like yeah, I know they don't actually literally believe that, but what they mean is to not talk about bad things that might happen because that's uncomfy. That's at least two types out of Combat Liberalism right there
the difference is breathing something into existence is he-who-shall-not-be-named tier and the lathe is the lathe because it's funny
The level of irony is completely different between the two
I know they don’t actually literally believe that
Some of them are Harry Potter brained enough to think mentioning nazis makes nazis appear so they by extension believe that not talking about nazis keeps them away, as they did with DAE GODWIN'S LAW until Godwin himself told them to STFU. :debord-tired:
they did with DAE GODWIN'S LAW until Godwin himself told them to STFU
I remember that, it was fucking hilarious tbh
They always manage to find a way to blame us for their system failing
Lots of people were fearfully saying that. But Hillary wouldn't listen. The Democrat committees in PA, WI, MI were screaming for help in the weeks leading up to the election. Hillary had to fly in and hold rallies! There was a real chance she could lose these states!
But no, she did nothing. She was going to win without them. She was going to show the working class in these rust belt states that she could win without them, she was going to spike the football in their faces. She was going to win with the Obama coalition: women and minorities, and old white men who got screwed by globalization could go fuck themselves.
CW violence, misogyny, racism
A guy in Atlanta murdered mostly Asian women near a couple of massage parlors, and I correctly assumed he was a sexually repressed Christofascist weeb. This was seen as politicizing a tragedy
and I correctly assumed he was a sexually repressed Christofascist weeb
Just a quiet young man who kept to himself :us-foreign-policy:
I think the most clear thing i remember, as of late, was telling my old coworker not to expect much regarding student debt relief.
Yup. I was written off as being jaded, but I said "nah, look at bidens history and temper your expectations"
Secular Calvinism is fucking everywhere and I hate it so much. :guts-rage:
i predicted that an increasingly large chunk of liberals like Ryan Grim and Ana Kasparian would have transphobe arcs.
at some point i realized a lot of the Obama/post-Obama era liberal view on gay rights always hinged on the idea of acceptance which always leaves the door open for reactionary propaganda to let you think you're "accepting" queer people while spouting whatever anti-trans talking point you find palatable. also it helped knowing the democrats don't give a shit about transphobia when its people like Clinton saying it helped me to that realization.
also it helped knowing the democrats don’t give a shit about transphobia when its people like Clinton saying it helped me to that realization
"Don't ask don't tell" was just homophobia with extra steps and :billdawg: was all for that in the 90s.
One of my sociology professors was doing his tenure paper on the anti-trans lesbian movement (what we would now call terfs, but didn't really have a label at the time) in SF in like 2013, which really opened my eyes to how the liberal idea of 'exclusive identity spaces' was ripe for abuse. It also really indicated to me that we weren't actually as 'enlightened' as we pretended to be.
Ruling class of the UK being too treat brained to take proper precautions for a pandemic. Boris Johnson being PM. TERFS allying with fascists.
The worldwide reaction to :covid-cool: , including eventually in China :china: made me attain levels of Jokerfication that I didn't think were possible. :jokerfication:
Whole fucking planet tried negotiating with a virus.
Modern day Canutes demanding the tide stall.
Modern day Canutes demanding the tide stall.
Canute originally intended for that gesture to show how empty the praise was that he was receiving; he was demonstrating how limited and mortal he was which ran contrary to the asskissing he was getting in court which provoked the gesture, or so that was how that moment was taught to me. :edgeworth-shrug:
I didn't know that. Thanks for explaining it.
I'm not actually that familiar with Canute aside from the pop-cultural interpretation of the tide story.
He was an early Christian convert because his wife talked him into it. The court around him when he was a fresh conqueror of England was so sycophantic that he was told that he had divine command over the realm. So, in a very "trial by fire" way that goes to his pagan roots, he demonstrated to the court that he didn't have such divine command.
there are two versions of the story in one Canute was just an arrogant moron
Like I said I read one particular set of manuscripts in my Medieval Lit courses in college that implied that it was wisdom, not idiocy, but that may have been its own sycophancy on the part of the writer.
personally I prefer the arrogant moron version because it would be pretty stupid as a dark ages king to put yourself in a position where you're in the north sea and say "see I'm just as powerless as you"
Covid was another 9-11 moment for me. Like seriously we have nothing prepared. No one is in charge. It's all projection. I was raised with Hollywood military fiction, and some people just flew a plane into the pentagon. No force field, lasers, or anything.
I remember those charts saying the US was the best-prepared country in the world for a pandemic, lol
The funniest one was when they said the same thing post-covid. As if no pandemic had recently happened that showed we were actually among the worst prepared.
Dom Mazzetti
blast from the past. Yeah it's nice to be a commie, now can articulate my feelings about why things are gross instead of just saying that shit is "problematic" or whatever.
Was there a specific reason he's problematic outside of the content of his videos?
Oh not that I've heard of. I watched a couple BroScienceLife videos back in the day and thought they were funny and ironic and making fun of the Dom Mazzeti character, and then was horrified to see themenjoyed by people who actually wanted to be able to neg women and skip leg day or whatever. I imagine those guys interpreted it as self-deprecating humor instead of satire. I don't know what it actually was since I lost interest.
A deeper cut might be Sam Hyde.
The only value of Sam Hyde/MDE was a lesson that "ironic" assholes are just assholes with a mask.
Someone I used to know tried to get me into Peterson and I also just immediately disliked him. Even with that person there were multiple times in retrospect where I realized on some level that he's pretty awful to be around and not good for my mental health. I didn't listen to my intuition though and am sometimes disgusted at how long I kept in contact with him and tried to make things work.
I really raelly really really regret not having like self confidence in my decisionmaking when I was 18 because I had a bunch of money as a graduation gift and I literally wanted to dump all of it into bitcoin when it was worth fractions of a penny but instead of just doing that I asked everybody I knew "do you think this is a good idea" but everybody told me to buy a guitar instead
now I have a guitar I don't play
if spent the guitar money on bitcoin it would have been so many bitcoins that at peak value I would be like Rockefeller rich, minus whatever sold before that point :yea: \
but hey in this timeline I'm a sexy himbo communist instead of a libertarian coinlord so that's a plus, I tell myself as I barely scrape by
I don't gamble, as a rule, because this narrative is so tempting. In hindsight, having seen how everything played out, I think "Damn, why didn't I buy some bitcoin back when all my friends were talking about it?" A lot of them cashed out a few thousand dollars years ago.
But then I think about all the other schemes and scams that didn't pan out, all the people who lost their life savings and their homes and their kid's college funds and any other asset they had, the people made destitute, and I remind myself that the house always wins in the end.
If you're going to gamble never gamble more than you can afford to lose, and preferably do it with someone else's money.
you can't view the market in retrospect. You made what was a sensible market decision given the information you had at the time
I knew it would end up like this though, or like, I saw which way it was gonna go. It was so obvious. But i literally could not make a decision on anything without the input of others at this point in my life :bawllin-sad:
If I ever get transported back in time to a pre-bitcoin version of myself I've long decided that I'd buy a bunch of Bitcoin, cash out at peak with that handy dandy hindsight (does it become foresight if the thing you saw in hindsight are no longer in the past??) and use the resulting money to fund communist movements globally
i got a very nice flamenco guitar after my teacher said "don't get a flamenco guitar" but then he said it was a very nice guitar for classical stuff too :soviet-huff:
It was grossly profitable for the early arrivals... which is how Ponzi schemes and related grifts work. It's a parasitic way to get everyone hoping there's a greater idiot buying in after them. :rust-darkness:
that is true but also being involved in bitcoin is spiritually corrosive and just makes you insufferable to be around
for what should it profit a man if he gains the world but starts talking about blockchain at social functions
that is true but also being involved in bitcoin is spiritually corrosive and just makes you insufferable to be around
Not wrong there.
I know at least one literal Bitcoin millionaire and one of his main conversation topics is how enraged he is about how he's rich but single, blaming feminism because of fucking course :up-yours-woke-moralists:
Yes, he's also one of those "all relationships are transactions" Rick Sanchez LARPers so of course he sees it as unjust when a poor like me is married and he's single. He's even talked about going to a "less woke" country to find a "younger and unspoiled tradwife." :libertarian-approaching:
I said back in like 2010-2011 Bitcoin would be like a pyramid scheme in which the first ones in would be the ones who profit, although my reasoning was that Bitcoin was designed to be harder to mine as more of it was mined.
That is/was true but the guys who mined 10000 Bitcoin are now so fabulously wealthy that they've receded from public life entirely. The yappy ones are later adopters.
That's about when I first learned of them. They were 10c/coin. I often wonder where I'd be today had I bought 10
I saw someone elsewhere make the argument that very few people managed to hold on to their bitcoins from the earliest days. All of the earliest exchanges (like Magic the Gathering Online Exchange) all either collapsed or turned out to be scams, so you'd basically need to be prescient enough to keep them on a hard drive for years and hope you don't lose it. Not many people would've even given bitcoins that much effort, since they weren't worth much.
Most also probably sold them when they were worth like $100 each.
I knew about it way back when too, but fuck having that on my brain for any amount of time. I never would have believed it got as big as it is today, and probably would have sold them for at like $7-800 at the 2014 peak and been done. I probably would have bought in at like $80-100, so it wouldn't have even been that much money.
If I somehow still had them when they were in the $30-60k range, I would be tortured by the fucking price graphs day in and day out, I really don't need that.
I have friends who made a few thousand dollars on it, but they all mined their own coins really early on bc they're tech nerds and thought it was a neat idea, then sold when it seemed like it was as high as it would get (it was not). But they all recognize that they got lucky compared to the countless people who bought in and lost, or worse went all in and got wiped out.
Yeah, knowing what I was like during this period, I'd probably have used it all to buy drugs on silkroad.
The formatting you've done with long paragraphs and frequent emojis makes this borderline unreadable to me and oh god am I getting old.
That's understandable.
For me the most frequent and glaring Cassandra moment of the last decade or so has been the staggering number of “not political, no political agenda, just teaching self improvement” talking heads like (Jordan Peterson), Joe “JUST TAKE DMT BRO DONT BE A (slur) BRO” BROgan, and even (Rocket Jesus) because of the "he’s just a better human that wants to save humanity and make humans an interplanetary species and make us all better humans" talking points from his fandom. I’d even include scientism cranks like Sam Harris as well as capital-R “Rationalists” in this category because of their own pretenses of being the “grey tribe” and proclaiming that “politics is the mind killer” while finding more and more sophistic reasons to bootlick the rich and perpetuate colonialism.
I remember the origins of almost every right wing grifter coming across that way at first, and how I had to push uphill each and every time to say obvious stuff like “(Jordan Peterson) calling feeemales ‘sacred’ then stating that they are ‘chaos dragons’ that need to be subjugated for the sake of civiliation is misogynistic ideology even if your cult leader says it isn’t.”
I’ve known some people personally that bought into such “nonpolitical” grifters and when the politics became obvious they were like (surprised) and I was like (I told you, dog) and depending on whether they still followed the grifter or not they’d either pretend they never bought in or they’d claim that their specific grifter was forced to “get political” because “everything is so divisive these days and everyone has an agenda and a narrative.” I even remember when “NoFap” on was aggressively pushed as a wholesome self improvement fellowship that sought magic powers from secular puritanism and that totally wasn’t a political movement no matter how misogynistic and MAGA-associated its power users became and it wasn’t a cult either because they said so. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aOHQ-sMCps
I told that dumbass inert matter abiogenesis was a bad idea. Didn't listen. Now all the atoms are in pain.
That covid mask mandates should have never been lifted.
My provincial government enforced, then lifted, then enforced again, then lifted mask mandates FIVE TIMES until they (and everybody else) just gave up, and here we are.
I was 50/50 on whether Hilary would win but I recognized it was a serious risk and that she was the worst candidate for the job.
I took Covid really, really seriously right from the start bc epidemiologists have been talking about the inevitability of global pandemics in the age of international air travel for decades and I was mentally ready for something like this to happen.
I used to say the US was never more than five years from genocide, and now here we are.
I've been right about global warming for a long time.
I was right about Biden continuing to be the exact same person he's always been.
I was wrong about Obummer though. Fucker tricked me the first time, but at least I figured it out by the second.
