Charapaso

Yeah, I'm not mad at my Iranian friends because of what their leaders do. I can't blame them for not starting a bloody uprising. It requires coordinated, collective action, and religious leaders and the uber rich work together to keep true change from happening. The same goes for the USA. Propaganda works, and it's keeping the people too divided to easily take serious action.

We need to help make change possible, not only chastise people for being trapped in oppressive systems.

Also a content warning for a couple slurs, but the point from Patton Oswalt a while back is roughly the same: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkKo1_RP_0c

Why are you saying that is if it's contradictory? I know that Russia invaded Ukraine. I can see the horrifying details by watching drone videos. I can know something generally without knowing the details

I assumed the meme is related to high prices decades ago: for example, I remember saving up allowances to buy Star Fox 64, which cost about 70 bucks in the late nineties.

Fascinating, isn't it? Does he think the Democrats just "hate all things fossil" so much that there's some kind of integer overflow and it flips negative, and oil businesses do just fine entirely by accident?

It's truly astounding how well right wing propaganda gets folks to believe things that are so completely at odds with his own lived experience. None of us are immune to propaganda, I know, but that whole statement is just...fascinating

Oh that's her, I was just trying to be insulting haha

Oh I'm totally agreed! It's all capitalist, jingoist garbage, same as it ever was.

Yeah, I was just on a flight and saw a dude across the aisle that was mainlining all the worst people on twitter. Space laser lady, the racist cat, the nazi automaker...this dude was just liking everything and replying frantically. He was flipping through everything and replying so quickly that I felt pity as much a loathing. It was absolutely pathetic. Dude's brain is melted.

That was the NFL being political though, this is them being patriotic...is what my troglodyte relatives will say.

More than I realized. As a kid, my favorite of the original trilogy was ROTJ. It had everything - an opening where the heroes got vengeance on a big slug, there was a dramatic-looking Death Star, speeder bikes, and force lightning.

My father told me (years later), how much some folks hated it for some of the same things. Rehashing the Death Star, Han accidentally killing Boba Fett (this hyped up bounty hunter that in the previous movie was clever and even mouthed off to Vader himself), Ewoks being cuddly teddy bears with janky traps, Leia being yet another Skywalker out of nowhere...basically, a lot of the same goofy shit people railed on George for in the prequels (myself included: since these conversations with my dad came up because I was a teenager complaining about Jar Jar, Yoda ping ponging around, etc.).

Later I saw that plenty of folks complained about ESB being moodier, the "No, I am your father" being a twist out of nowhere and dramatically undermining Obi-Wan's character by his being dishonest. Some of the same "canon-breaking" retcons that we all complain about today.

Granted...I still love ROTJ despite its flaws, and while I never enjoyed the prequels as much as a lot of folks, I find them endearing in an odd kind of way. The Sequel Trilogy less so, but there's a few bright spots.

Basically, I wonder what the reception of the movies would have been if we had the internet then, and especially if we had engagement-based algorithms driving things, which does such a great job of amplifying hate.

To add to this, there's a great section in Man Without a Country by Vonnegut where he talks about his approach to humor, and he mentions the time he was in Dresden during WW2 as a prisoner of war, while it was being bombed.

True enough, there are such things as laughless jokes, what Freud called gallows humor. There are real-life situations so hopeless that no relief is imaginable.

While we were being bombed in Dresden, sitting in a cellar with our arms over our heads in case the ceiling fell, one soldier said as though he were a duchess in a mansion on a cold and rainy night, "I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight." Nobody laughed, but we were still all glad he said it. At least we were still alive! He proved it.

A bigger part of the section here: https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/bookworm/kurt-vonnegut-1/excerpt-from-a-man-without-a-country

No, my entire point is that they are the ones that showed up: hence why we have a more authoritarian president than perhaps ever before. Between the 2020 election and the 2024 election, the raw numbers of votes dropped for the Democrats, not the Republicans. This whole discussion has been about bleeding support from (some) of the Left.

And yes, this is because Harris and the rest of the DNC shit the bed. That they went too hard toward the right is certainly a factor: and again, to be clear,I'm not saying it's a good idea to move right. What I'm trying to get across is that abstaining is often indistinguishable from wanting a more right-leaning candidate, because then that's the candidate that wins.

If it was up to me, see my volcano comment. If we want revolutionary change in the USA, I know which party I'd rather fight in the streets against.