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“Is he team Red or team Green?”
*Little did they know that beneath his outer attire lay his blue wizard robes.*
“I mean he’s wearing boots, which is more than either of us have.”LOL
It would be nice if we had elected the boring president yeah.
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It’s really easy to blame non-voters when you have the privilege of civic literacy, do not face voter disenfranchisement, do not live paycheck to paycheck, do not have a job that will fire you for ‘other reasons’ when you take off to vote, do not have an abusive spouse that will watch you fill in your mail in ballot if you vote, do not have to walk an hour away to the voting poll because you can’t drive, do not have a permanent address for a mail in ballot, so on and so forth.
Yes, there are lazy ‘I’m not political’ morons who are willfully ignorant and don’t vote. But let’s not pretend that everything about American infrastructure including car dependency, anti-homelessness laws, understaffed voting polls, centralized media and fake news, aren’t all designed to make voting harder than it should be and disproportionately target minorities.
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Getting a quality education or having parents who did is a privilege. No baby was born knowing how to vote. The vast majority of non-voters don’t even know how to start, let alone how to take time off to vote or when their mail-in ballot window is. Many might not have the required IDs and need to jump through another hoop to vote.
To non-voters, the voting process can be as daunting as getting your driver’s license the first time, except they’re doing it alone, juggling 3 jobs and raising kids. They simply don’t have the time or mental energy to go through bureaucracy and mentally keeping every deadline and paperwork in their minds.
Civic literacy is a privilege because the fact that you understand the importance of voting and know enough about the process to plan ahead of it means that you grew up in circumstances that allowed you to do so.
Calling people lazy for not voting is like calling people assholes for not buying cage-free eggs. t’s very easy to not give a shit about either when you’re living paycheck to paycheck, and it’s very easy to perceive complaints about this as virtue signalling.
You’re not getting anyone to vote by calling them lazy. Don’t be angry. Be useful and be actionable. If you actually want more people to vote, understand the systemic barriers behind why so many don’t vote, educate others on it, and make a difference.
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The election was completely fraudulent. Our country did NOT vote for this. Watching people rip each other apart over “how we voted” is painful because ALL OF IT IS FICTION.
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So everything is crystal clear to you? Lmao. The election was falsified, the bots online are fake to give the fake election numbers credence. This isn’t rocket surgery. I feel like maybe you don’t understand what’s happening.
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It seems like you’re directing this at me, and I can say that ultimately before November 5th I would have nodded my head in agreement. For basically the last 20 years I’ve been more or less obsessively following politics. I’ve voted in every election, primaries, midterms, special elections, local elections, and general. I’ve canvassed and donated. I’ve perpetually kept my eye on the news and participated in a invite-only political debate sub-reddit back in my reddit days. I’ve advocated IRL at my own workplace, risking my job security.
But now I’m verging on suicidally disinterested. After this result I want to disconnect so fucking badly. I want to check out and it feels like there is no escape. I don’t even enjoy my “escapes” like video games, movies/TV, books as much as I used to. All of it feels like a grey sludge while a radioactive fire burns the world.
And the problem is, even if things get sorted out, I will never want to care again. Even if the US fixes its major problems I will forever be disgusted with the majority of my fellow citizens and be ambivalent about most of their well being. I am permanently mentally isolated after this election. The rest of my life seems intrinsically and inescapably dimmer.
Will I care anyway? Yes eventually and inevitably, I’ll feel emotionally pulled to care. Its just how my brain works. And I will resent it. I resent it now.
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You were fanatically supportive of genocide, while heaping venom and hatred on the people who oppose it; I don’t think anyone cares what you are ‘disgusted’ by. Your boos mean nothing, we’ve seen what makes you cheer.
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I did.
It would be nice if the boring president actually tried to win.
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“May you live in interesting times” is not a blessing.
Yeah, and it doesn’t matter if the politicians overseeing those times are “boring”
When things are on fire you tend to see a bunch of smoke. Just sayin…
Unless it’s a clean burning propane
Taste the meat not the heat.
You don’t, by chance, happen to sell propane and propane accessories?
Or one of those cool decorative indoor ethanol candles
Exactly. It’s like being in a house that’s on fire, laying down for a nap, and complaining when the flames make it too bright to sleep. You can ignore it and move deeper inside the house to nap like you used to, but there’s no fire brigade this time.
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While true, not all Lemmy is american.
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Yeah, that “I don’t care about politics is what brought them there in the first place”, but they will never acknowledge that, instead they will just double down on their aggressive apatheism.
Sounds like their problem, not mine. They voted for it, I wouldn’t expect you to care much about British internal politics either.
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It was being en mass before. The only difference is that now it’s effecting (non African) Americans.
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Americans when they realize they’re wrong, but are to much arrogance pieces of shit to admit it.
Can’t just bury your head in the sand and say you don’t care about politics
I can actually and science proves it’s better for mental health.
Not wanting to follow donald ducks disastrous adventures isn’t burying your head in the sand IMO.
You might not be political, but the Nazis are, and they don’t really mind sending non-political people to the camps.
I have a filter on Elon and Trump
It was too much
Same but some don’t tag their posts and I still see some posts slip through maybe I should block the news communities.
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I don’t mind the odd post, sometimes it can be relevant and important topics . But those two words balances it out.
Yea my current blovklist looks like this. And I still see a bunch of stuff for them.
maga, politics, biden, trump, republican, elon musk, musk, elon, conservative, rfk, election, russia, russianLooks like this one slid through. Maybe add “political”
Yea good call I’ll a that one as well.
Me too, it was needed.
You gotta block the bots that post news stories to communities named after the publication.
Really clears up the feed.
Also try to get the more spammy ones blocked by your server, it’s a service for all other users as well
I am leaning harder and harder on ‘political comedy isn’t comedy’ as a rule. ‘It’s just a joke,’ is a far too common smokescreen for people pushing terrible ideas and mocking people spreading bad ideas doesn’t do anything to stop them. It can even help. Politics isn’t supposed to be entertaining. It’s the decisions that affect how we live our lives. We need comedy in politics like we need strippers in surgery.
what I’ve leant into hard is the idea that those “clever comebacks” or “murdered by words” posts and communities do much more harm than good. 80% of the post is the most bigoted and hateful thing you’ve ever read, and 20% is “your mom lol”. sharing hate speech with a lame joke tacked on the bottom is still sharing hate speech, turns out
“murdered by words” posts
I was an OG mod for that sub and hearing you say that makes me so sad.
Here’s some history for you; MBW started out with high quality long-form content. Then one day an Admin hand selected it to feature on the Front Page which caused it to explode in popularity, going from about 5,000 subs to over 30,000 in just 48 hours. The new users started upvoting the old content which caused a 2nd and then a 3rd post to organically hit the FP. The growth accelerated.
Later that week the sole mod had a panic attack over the stress and while melting down they deleted the whole sub. At that point I offered to help and they added me as Mod #2. My first official act was working with the Admins to restore the sub from backup. From there we built a moderation team and all of the crap that goes with it like sub rules, wiki, automod, Discord channels.
As the sub got more popular people started posting ever more short form content which was causing the quality to go down even while the subscriber and traffic numbers continued to climb.
A few of us fought hard for a long time to hold the line on quality content, wanting to keep with the higher quality long form content that made it popular even if it meant lower subscriber and traffic numbers. We tried a lot of things to accomplish that but relevant to your comment one of the things was to create “Clever Comebacks” as a place to push the tsunami of Twitter/Tumblr/Facebook dreck. Sadly it didn’t work, people either posted stuff in both places and / or the mod team wouldn’t remove short form content from MBW because it got too popular before it was noticed and they didn’t want to delete something with tens or even hundreds of thousands of upvotes.
As the mod team continued to expand to deal with the ever higher traffic first one then another Powermod was added. I strongly objected to it but was over ruled by Mod #1. Then the Powermods began to stuff the mod team with their friends and sock puppet accounts. That’s when things really started going downhill. They’d delete things that were almost popular then repost it themselves. They’d refuse to remove Posts or Comments from their friends or sock puppets. They implemented bots without sharing the source code. They kept “accidentally” breaking the mod log. They forced endless re-writes of the sub rules, each one giving them more leeway on what fit the sub and what didn’t.
I eventually went hands-off because I couldn’t stop them and couldn’t deal with what MBW had turned into. I finally left the mod team during the API fiasco because they wouldn’t hold the line on the blackout.
So there you have it, a short history of MBW and CC from someone who knows.
On a side note Powermods ruin everything they touch and they’re now showing up on Lemmy.
Counterpoint, comedy is often a coping mechanism for people dealing with difficult things, be it politics or something else. I’ll agree that it’s not how everyone wants to deal with it, though, and I also agree that not everyone does it in a way that’s constructive (but I think that’s in execution, not everyone is funny and a bad joke without proper comedy is certainly just elevating a bad message)
But I think if I didn’t have political comedy, I’m not sure how I could deal with how absolute shit things have been for decades. For me that’s not memes though, it’s stuff like Last Week Tonight or something that actually is done with professional writers and researchers.
I get that humor is useful for making hard topics seem easier but some things should be hard. Would you consider dirty jokes an appropriate substitute for a sex ed class? Would drinking away your nervousness be a good way to prepare for a driving test? Serious matters need to be discussed frankly and honestly.
I used to kind of like Oliver sometimes, but then I saw the pattern and it ruined it for me. Every episode is 'Hello joke>subject>mock subject if funny looking, else mock thing next to subject>let’s get serious, bad thing is happening>it’s really bad>but don’t get outraged enough to go do something about it, here’s someone else taking care of it for you>callback to joke earlier>HBO-brand anti-capitalist recuperation catharsis complete. Go back to work.
Kind of a false equivalence, since you’re not educating yourself on memes exclusively (and if you are, god help you lol). Even in your own reference, you can absolutely make dirty jokes after sex ed, especially if it helps you remember the topics. Good jokes will both reinforce the right narrative, make it more approachable, and help people remember what matters on a topic. Still has to be a good joke though, and humor is subjective so hard to gauge.
I mostly draw the line when it targets a vulnerable person or persons (like, let’s not joke about rape), or makes someone in the room uncomfortable out of respect for that person (like a dirty joke in front of grandma). I suppose one could say any joke about the assholes in charge fall under that first category, but they harm vulnerable people, but they themselves are perfect targets.
Almost no one does one thing to the exclusion of all else, so few, if any, people are getting their knowledge purely from memes, but it doesn’t have to be exclusive to have an effect. Someone who drinks a gallon of soda a day isn’t necessarily getting all of their nutritional intake from soda, and, to borrow the phrase, god help them if so, but it is going to have effects on their life. Treating politics as entertainment also has secondary effects. Just like drinking soda can train your tongue to expect that level of sweetness, which can lead to troubling dietary choices, political humor trains you expect a punchline in a discussion about policy, which can lead to bad political choices.
And notice there how you changed what I said to argue against a point I didn’t make. I talked about jokes as a substitute for sex ed. You talked about jokes after sex ed. There is no mandated political ed class after which to make jokes. The shallow coverage on things like Oliver, tiktok, or other comedy shows is often the deepest, or the only, examination of a political subject people actually ingest, maybe supplemented by a few headlines, a shallow newscast, and an article they didn’t finish. They aren’t making memes about the thing they learned during an in-depth intended-to-inform class. They are making memes based on the memes they laughed at because of the vague half-knowledge they got from the media atmosphere.
Jokes have their place. No one would argue for a life completely lacking in humor, but, just like your example of rape, a subject that is extremely serious because of the long lasting and possibly life-destroying effect it can have on people, politics is too serious to be joked about in the public sphere. Joking about it fails to take serious something that can leave someone alive, but utterly unable to live.
The “funny” parts of the internet like Twitter and Reddit are also owned by millionaires and billionaires, their express purpose being to entertain you and show you ads, not to actually inform you. An especially egregious example is YouTube when a video essayist tries to explain how the Native Americans were killed by colonists, or how most of Latin America was brutalized by capitalist oppression resulting in millions dead, and people have to bleep out their words like they’re on cable TV.
Why are there so many people assuming every lemmy user is from the USA
Sometimes its bad for mental health to continuously see all the bad things that are happening in the richest country in the world
I’m not amoroncan, but unfortunately what happen there have consequences for all of us
It’s terrible for your mental health to be constantly bombarded with “the sky is falling” news.
“the sky is falling” is implying that what’s being talked about isn’t real. The rise in fascism is very real and very global.
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It’s amazing how much still gets through, but at least I’m not scrolling past a dozen “news” stories between every meme or comic post.
My growing list
“If I don’t see it, it can’t hurt me”
I hear about everything I need to without it being every other post on my lemmy feed.
How could you possibly know what you don’t know?
I trust that the sources I follow give me the right information, because they did even before I used these filters.
I’m sure Republicans feel the same way about their sources. Good luck.
Not sure what the issue is. If I’m getting the same info as I would be here if there’s a problem? Why should I have two channels that give the same info?
Some people come here to relax, not be screamed at with outrage bait.
If you’re calling news outrage bait, I don’t know what to tell you. Orange Mussolini is counting on everyone to not keep up so nobody will stop him. I can’t name anything more pathetic than someone who wants ignorant bliss so badly they’ll put a blindfold on.
Yeah, I don’t mind the odd post. But those two help so much
I got ya
I would post more but I got this computer yesterday and have not transferred my old meme folder yet. Ah well
Subscribed !
At some point, pretty much everything becomes political. I like to cycle, walk and enjoy nature. Me not wanting to get killed by a car driver is political, and me thinking we shouldn’t dump toxic crap in the environment is political. The new stop sign at the corner of the street is political. Housing is political. The high price of goods is political.
It’s understandable to want to escape, avoid all this crap and take a break for a while. But memes are also a way to vent and express the frustration about the current political climate.
Unfortunately those two are narcissist shit stains that enjoy having people talking about them every day so they are nearly impossible to avoid for a while.
I like to go touch some grass. Close social media and go take a walk or cycle. Think about how all the fucking money is… eeerh… touch some grass… go camping and hiking, admire the views that are about to get destroyed by capit… eeehm, that makes you feel small. Hear the beautiful sounds of nature accompanied by the dirt bikes illegally riding in the forest. All free of politics! Even when they’ll invade and annex my country, I’ll just be like “can’t we all just stop talking about politics and share memes, please!?”
I might occasionally be accused of being political, but yes. Lemmy is no escape. Many users from any instance will jam their politics into anything and everything, constantly. It’s genuinely weathering.
You want to vibe and chill? HOW DARE YOU! DONT YOU KNOW X IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW!?!?!?!?
WHY ARENT YOU MAD ABOUT X??? ARE YOU A MONSTER??
Starting to think of unsubing from technology, too often it’s about trump and musk. But it’s also one of the largest communities.
Problem when most active communities at least sometimes include US political bullshit is that few are left without it if you just want to block it. We are not all Americans, it isn’t helpful to constantly have US bullshit showing up. Hopefully as lemmy grows the smaller communities will grow and I can have a feed full of kayaking, Linux memes and homebrewing.
I mean we live in a neo nazi fasict state. It was chill during bama years
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Is it really political any more when evil people have used politics to gain control over our lives to wreck our retirement funds, deport and possibly murder our friends, and oh just for fun destroy the entire foundational structure of science and discovery?
Nope. That’s not political. That’s awareness of the environment in which we find ourselves, and an attempt to deal with it.
Hopefully it will be over soon (in part thanks to awareness campaigns) so we can go back to politics where we have some conservatives, some progressives or whatever, and some single-issue parities that can make common cause with the others from time-to-time. Politics would be so wonderful to have now. It’s only been gone for maybe a decade and I miss it so much.
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I’m Swiss.
I don’t buy the greatness thing. I’d like go back to having an America that makes sense sometimes, and which we can reasonably work with.
So when it only brutalised brown people
It’s weird because I agree with you, but for some reason interacting with you makes me angry anyway.
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