I would be nice if people broadly opposed bombing ANYONE but even here, a site that appeals largely to self-proclaimed leftists and progressives like this is just oozing with as much bloodlust as you would see from the worst people we condemn.
This bloodlust for the deaths of others is why we have a genocide raging to begin with. Why can’t we all be better and be consistent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea_crisis
The Houthis say that any Israel-linked ship is a target,[90][87][88] including US and UK warships, but they have also attacked the ships of many nations with no connection to Israel.[91][92] From October 2023 to March 2024, the Houthis attacked more than 60 vessels in the Red Sea.
The part where this goes off the rails in the public discourse is that people are broadly absolutely fucking STUCK in linear, binary thinking, I can list a thousand examples of this in every-day-life and it’s a weakness that governments exploit daily. For some reason our species can live comfortably in the cognitive dissonance about things like faith and reason existing alongside each other, but cannot fathom the idea that bad people can fight other bad people and they’re both bad. Or that people lie in ways that appeal to your own feelings to try to get public sympathy behind their own agenda.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea_crisis
The Houthis say that any Israel-linked ship is a target,[90][87][88] including US and UK warships, but they have also attacked the ships of many nations with no connection to Israel.[91][92] From October 2023 to March 2024, the Houthis attacked more than 60 vessels in the Red Sea.
They’re pirates. If the genocide stopped tomorrow, they would still be fighting for their own political agendas and of course the wealth onboard these giant ships full of goods, including food, aid and other vital supplies destined for countries unrelated to Israel, Yemen or Palestine.
I guess because I’ve witnessed authoritarian takeovers of other countries this detail didn’t even phase me, we should have expected it. There are a large number of places in the world where you will get turned away or worse for your beliefs if you’re outspoken. Americans’ deluded belief broadly that we had “free speech” was always a crutch people would use to justify their hate but was rarely used for actual social change.
The next layer of destruction of our species’ potential was when we monetized attention spans.
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.
The reality is this:
They are accosting and hassling/turning away people who aren’t white. And I see pushback on this in the weirdest forms, people saying how most immigration officers are hispanic or black also, etc. That does not matter. This is entirely superficial and ordered by higher-ups and designed to drive up hate and racial tension so we don’t unify. If you’re not white, you face significant chances of being hassled at immigration but there are still thousands and thousands of people passing in and out of the country daily, so it’s not THAT high of a chance.
As for transit across the states? Outside of some real backwater sundown towns in the deep south, there is a massive cognitive bias at work in the USA that works in two directions.
I can promise you that you can be brown, asian, hispanic, purple with polka-dots and could most likely bicycle across the entire country and you will be treated with kindness and respect and people will offer to take you into their homes across the country.
The weird disconnect that people are having a hard time digesting is that some of these same people will go online and scream about how immigrants are ruining our country and that we need to start a race war.
We don’t live in a coherent reality in the USA anymore. The media world, including the internet and places like reddit and lemmy and facebook and twitter reflect a weird “mirror universe” where people are following an entirely different set of feelings.
We are in a new world of cognitive dissonance and I fully understand how off-putting that is and I recommend not visiting the country for that reason alone. Don’t give this country tourism money as long as this administration remains in control.
* coughskincolorcough *
I want to go back about 20 years and find every idealist moron online who tried to debate with me that we can’t keep calling people racist and that oppression is a deeper issue than superficial appearances and I want to smack them clean into 2025 so they can see what they permitted.
Nobody cares about objective reality anymore. Once we started letting people live in their own worlds of “feel facts” without consequence, lest someone throw stones at our own escapism cognitive biases, we ceded control of the world to the loudest and most hateful people.
There is no convincing people of anything anymore because they can just close their ears and go somewhere more comfortable. If they face no repercussions and can not only get praise for being hateful but even raise money and become celebrities, what do we really think is going to result from explaining things anymore?
This is such a bigger problem than America. Our “leadership” is threatening the entire world’s health and safety. I am literally begging other countries to take this seriously, this is a spreading problem (and I don’t just mean the avian flu) this algorithmic destabilization of intellectual democracy is powered by international funding and if it doesn’t kill you directly, it will indirectly as something like the bird flu mutates and makes Covid look like the sniffles.
Fight America, but also fight for your own sovereignty and get money out of politics and make your leadership understand it’s a matter of life and death.
When the corporations start dividing your population and guaranteeing their own interests over democracy, look at what happened to us and learn from it. It doesn’t stop here.
You’re right, and what you need to understand is that the reason half of our idiots voted for an idiot is because we allowed corporations to atomize society so people didn’t mix anymore, we don’t have shared perspectives of the world anymore, everyone gets their information about literally everything algorithmically. This atomization of society is what took down the USA and it’s coming for you next if it’s not already happening wherever you are.
Almost every American just wants to stay home and play video games, we didn’t want any of this. We wanted healthcare.
The problem is culturally, they didn’t see a need to fight for it because of apathy.
Thank god we don’t have to worry about that happening he- err… fuck.
I changed my upvote to a little cute “down” arrow when I got to the end of your short but unhinged comment. Way to turn “informative” into “needlessly spiteful for no good reason.” You could have ended the comment with a link to the episode even.
Lemmy is worse than reddit in terms of unhinged and hateful replies to benign, good-faith but ignorant comments. I don’t know how shut-in the users here are but everyone is itching to rip someone’s throat out over imagined slights or the desperate, performative need to look better than someone else who doesn’t know something.
I think a big problem is we aren’t really sure what we’re looking for in social media. We see things that give us satisfying dopamine boosts and want more of it, but also feel the hollowness of it. It’s exactly like eating processed carbs when you’re starving. You end up addicted with cravings for more even as the stuff you’re consuming makes you sick.
I was there for the start of it all, I’ve seen the space evolve over the decades. I was out in the pioneering days championing free discussion and moderating huge communities. I love reading someone debating an idiot more than anyone arguably, I get the same sense of satisfaction seeing groups connect and share great ideas and jokes.
But I also know the pleasure gained from that kind of community is as contextual as it is fleeting. We are not the same people we were when we first read some chain-post replying in stupid memes until it got so absurd we’re laughing so hard we can’t breath and we’re waking up our housemates. We’re just not “that people” anymore. Even the younger people now are living in a different time, we are so desensitized to imagery and text on a screen that it won’t ever have the same impact on us, but it doesn’t stop us from looking everywhere for a hit of the ol’ drug.
They don’t have consistent values at all. We keep interacting with them in terms of pointing out their hypocrisy or inconsistent messages, but they literally do not care about what they said yesterday. They are simple, linear minds who only work in terms of what they’re feeling right now and I think if we did better to treat them that way and remember we’re not winning intellectual arguments with them, we would make actual progress in changing them.
They scream about “free speech” when they feel their words are unpopular and being booed. They care about life and abortions when it’s not their daughter. They cheer on cops who shoot innocent black kids, but would go firebomb the local station if a cop came into their house and shot their dog.
We seriously, absolutely HAVE to digest this so we can collectively start forming new tactics to manipulate them into making better outcomes for all of us.
Because whatever else happens, even if we win back everything tomorrow, we will continue to share a world with them as our neighbors and the people who… who… okay I guess contractors and plumbers? Probably a few truck mechanics too, but point remains, they exist all around us, and if we’re really going to be better than them, we have to be like parents who subtle change the way a toddler feels without yelling at them and making them feel mad or put out.
Our country is riddled with ancient old sacks of shit who serve as sheriffs until they die. It’s a whole thing. Among our many, many problems with police in America.
Our dumb, violent, primate species fucking deserves the apocalypse we’re crafting in laboratories as we speak.