The situation is so, so much worse than a relatively easy-to-define divide between “smart people and stupid people.” If it was just a segment of the population who are stupid on some quantifiable level, we could work with that, we could work on outreach and education and compensation by making issues easier to understand and so on.

But it’s not just stupidity, there is a larger, society-wide phenomenon that is plaguing the world right now, which is the systemic suppression of thought.

This is a very unpopular fact when I post it, but it remains true: the last three federal elections we held in the US had the highest voter turnout in American history. It wasn’t a matter of people not caring or staying home, the issue shown in exit polling is that most voters had no idea what the candidates represented and felt basically like it was a coin-flip, and mostly went with their “gut” and said they had concerns about grocery prices that seemed to go up under Biden and Harris didn’t make them feel confident enough that she would do things different from Biden, and that Trump seemed to at least promise things. Many Americans haven’t paid solid attention to politics since.

So the picture is this: people who work 6 days a week, have no time or energy to read forums or browse for facts are just pulled along by facebook posts and ignore politics broadly to stay submerged in a lifestyle that simultaneously overworks us, and provides us with so many comforts that we’re not incentivized to exercise thinking skills or be curious about anything broadly. Work, scroll, work, scroll… how many of you right now are on Lemmy on work-hours looking for things to keep your brain distracted? Imagine that but across hundreds of millions of people on their phones endlessly scrolling through youtube shorts, ads, clickbait headlines, bad science stories, drama and hype around insignificant bullshit and so on.

Even if you’re not leaning one direction or another politically, you’re going to scroll past a thousand memes of both political parties saying absurd things about each other that you don’t feel connected with at all, because at the end of the day, no matter what they read about Epstein or Palestine or tariffs or “HE SAID WHAT” headlines, people are still just trying to not feel anything while they grind through the day so they can order a cab for their burrito later, and only really care about what that burrito is going to cost tomorrow… and I promise, Big Burrito has worked out exactly how high they can raise prices and how slowly they can do it before people start to feel uncomfortable.

It’s not an accident you always have only just enough money to make your ends meet. This is all by design. They made a population of cattle and they milk us daily and keep us drugged and placated.

The way Reddit does is abusive.

Yes, but counterpoint: it was also petty and satisfying as fuuuuck hammering someone with your last point and then blocking them so that after they write up their long-ass reply outlining why eugenics is the true path to a glorious white future, they end up getting an error message.

Yah, it was very bad for actual discourse, but that ship has sailed. people don’t care about debate and discourse anymore, on almost every social media site people post things as stand-alone displays to viewers for points, never engaging with each other unless there’s a contentious point that can be leveraged for up-arrows and thumbs.

We have to get back to talking to each other in real life and stop pretending having introversion or social anxiety is anything but an obstacle to community and a better world

u ok?

They don’t believe in democracy. That’s it.

I would make the argument here that they don’t know what democracy is, at least not in terms that they can directly make applicable to their lives, their homes, their immediate concerns. To most Americans, not just the right, terms like “democracy” carry a negative connotation now.

This is also by design, we have so many conflicting ideologies screaming at each other through bot-wars and large-scale social manipulation efforts and psy-ops that people have pretty much tuned out, and there are plenty of factions who want that result as well and have worked to amplify the worst ideas and thoughts from every angle of every issue.

The last three election cycles saw the highest voter turnout in American history, so it’s not that people aren’t involved in politics, they just don’t really have any idea what’s going on. Exit polling showed most people were almost ambivalent towards either candidate and didn’t really have a clue who to vote for and just went with their concerns over grocery prices and whatever their facebook feed was showing them.

People don’t believe in democracy because they don’t believe we have a working government because everyone, everywhere is locked into their own feeds, their own perspectives of the world, they are not sharing realities and not talking to each other.

Conservatives are largely dumber than dirt, you can sway most of them to believe in socialism and freedom of identity and ANY other issue you care about if you engage them directly and know how to push their emotional buttons in specific ways. But we don’t do that anymore because we have no shared spaces, no shared perspective, no single source of truth that we can even debate or engage with each other about anymore, so the nation is splintering into a million shards that hate each other.

OnlyFans getting more and more specific in it’s diversity, I guess I’m here for it.

I love the game’s potential, I will regularly log in just to walk around stations or planets or hang out in my ship and enjoy the aesthetic. I like to fiddle with things and see what’s new. I love the sense of scale and freedom, just knowing at any time you can get up out of your pilot’s seat and open your cargo hatch and yeet yourself out the back just makes me giddy.

All that said, I grow weary of the endless fuckery and delays and just uninstalled for the dozenth time to let the thing cook longer. The graphics, for all their beauty, require more power than my PC can put out so the frame-rates are almost unplayable in many areas. Quests and missions are still a complete dice-roll if they’re going to work or break at any moment. NPC’s in the ground missions are either dumber than rocks or clip through walls and you can never find them. The map/navigation system on your wrist computer is so janky that I dread having to use it, and that’s after several major overhauls.

Server meshing is an amazing technology, but you have to have all your servers working, so there is always at least one area of the solar system that just plain doesn’t work. Stations that don’t answer your landing hail, quest locations that don’t work, lagged out doors and ship systems.

The universe truly feels more vast than any other game, ever, because you feel like a tiny human in a huge expanse. Too bad that’s about it most of the time, there’s no sense of permanence, no bases you can build, no personalization you can do to your own apartment, no storage locker in your own room like every other game ever made, everything including accessing your personal gear has to be done through kiosks in lobbies. The lack of personal items and survival components other than eating and drinking once in a while leave a good 80% of every station or base useless.

Sure you can buy a few cheap ass toys to put in your cockpit, but since most likely your game will crash and you will have to file a claim on your ship, you will hardly want to do this more than once.

Ship interiors feel real, it’s highly convincing. It’s just too bad that they’re mostly useless. Other than moving cargo around a cargo hold, there’s very little else you can do on a ship.

And you know what… I would be okay with all of these shortcomings IF THE GAME HAD GOOD CONTROLS. Seriously, look at a game like SCUM, it’s a survival PvP MMO where the gameplay is so detailed you need to manage your protein levels to build muscle and you have to poop regularly, you can even die of a heart-attack. You can load your magazines with several types of bullets and it will fire them in order. You can adjust how deep of a crouch you’re in and you can craft a vast array of useful items to survive and fight.

And it does it all smoothly. Sure it takes getting used to, but it’s never tedious. You never fall through the floor. You never have to fiddle with a door panel, you don’t have to make sure you point your cursor to just the exact position to open a hatch, you can actually trust the line-of-sight from a hostile mech so you can avoid it.

And that’s a game that’s far, far from perfect but they make a better gameplay experience than Star Citizen which has made exponentially more money from its players.

I will still keep trying it out from time to time, but I really, really hope some new game comes along and takes all the best lessons from SC and makes a more polished game experience that keeps the scale and detail and freedom but gives you things to do.

(No, I know about No Man’s Sky, it’s like a muppet/minecraft version of a space sim and too silly and unrealistic, totally different experience.)

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What if you have it with a cup of coffee? Does that count towards the bean counter?

I don’t think it’s a small thing, I’ve noticed it myself a lot, more than any young generation before today’s young teens are extremely composed and thoughtful broadly, and it does give me hope for the future.

let me debate high schoolers and then call me skilled!

To be fair, I think a lot of gen Alpha right now would absolutely trounce most Gen-Z at interpersonal debate and discussion. Gen-Z got a shitty hand growing up in the most checked-out period of American history. At least a lot of Gen Alpha from what I’ve seen have learned right away they’re basically on their own, adapted fast to things like Covid, political upheaval and unstable economics, and know already even at an early age that they need to figure out how to do everything by themselves and don’t really have as much extreme social anxiety as their older peers.

I’m sure it varies from place to place, but I don’t think this debate model that people like Kirk and Shapiro pioneered, which is going to high-schools and debating kids, will hold up long-term.

I made zero assumptions about you, my comment was objectively very generalized, but if you took it personally, that’s on you and how you choose to take even mildly, distantly opposing views and maybe you should work on that.

We’re at the Thought Police stage it appears.

Corporate America has always fired people for expressing political opinions. Ya’ll either haven’t worked in a real job or are very young, this isn’t anything new. Whether or not this decades-old unspoken policy is correct or not is an entirely different conversation, but let’s not pretend that corporate America has ever stood up for freedom of speech or let people express their hot takes at work, that’s fucking absurd.

Just as an FYI out there, the majority of liberal, middle-class America’s attitude about this entire thing is as follows:

“Oh dear, that was so scary, I hope they catch the person who did it, it’s so frightening knowing that can happen!”

Seriously, I have toured companies, I talk to coworkers and associates and managers every day, I am surrounded by America’s white-collar workforce and nobody has ANY political principles. They may once in a while laugh at a conservative meme or joke, but will just as readily laugh at a left-wing meme.

Our country can be broadly divided into two camps, people who know even marginally enough to take a stance and have political affiliation, and people who have ZERO knowledge or interest in what’s going on in our country. The last three federal election cycles saw the highest turnout of voters in American history. But exit polling showed that most people had no real idea who to vote for and just went with whatever their social media was showing them.

This malignant apathy, cynicism or ignorance also fills the segment with political ideology. Most conservatives in America do not have strong principles or thought-out positions. Years back I had a blow-hard conservative-sounding coworker complaining about special accomodations for handicapped workers, IE: special desks “going to waste” right up until they actually made friends with a coworker who had a prosthetic leg and suddenly never another complaint. You’ve probably all read plenty of stories about pro-life activists getting abortions, and so on.

On the left it’s exactly the same. You see plenty of leftists right here on Lemmy who would support fascists and authoritarians if those people wore the right colors and promised to “hurt the right people” without thinking about long-term consequence or larger political pictures.

What’s my point? We need to talk to each other more. We need to work harder to share our realities again, because the majority of people are far more receptive to intelligent, thoughtful examples of having strong, thoughtful values like “We shouldn’t support countries committing genocide” or “We should have social safety nets and healthcare for the amount of taxes we pay” and so on. We CAN infect the population with positive mind-viruses but it takes socializing, it takes effort, it takes caring enough to make yourself uncomfortable.

They’re dungeon dwellers who have no real values or principles other than trolling and being offensive. They’re not any kind of real movement, just an online clubhouse. A lot more people than them called Kirk a fascist, but we have a general public who really want to draw lines and find reasons for things.

Everyone saying this has no idea what a groyper is. But I am numb to caring at this point. Every last American wants to feel like they know something special and unique about every notable event.

edit: STOP 👏 GIVING 👏 POLITICAL 👏 RELEVANCE 👏 TO 👏 MORONS 👏 WHO 👏 WANT 👏 ATTENTION

Exactly.

As well as not putting every Jan 6th insurrectionist in prison.

Absolutely agree, every single person involved in that coup attempt should have been paraded around in orange jumpsuits and shackles and publicly shamed before being locked away for however many years traitors get in prison.

The next slap in America’s dying face was the Supreme Court granting our king, I mean president, full immunity for whatever the fuck he wants to do.

Now that people are starting to realize we don’t have a system anymore, we’re going to see more and more violence as the country continues to decay.

oh I know, I was a mod of a large sub and know the rules, or at least how they used to be. They really didn’t like me, likely because I was antagonizing conservatives a lot harder than I antagonize leftists here.

Had my 12-year-old account banned without recourse or appeal because I quoted someone using a mild slur so they couldn’t edit it after I reported them, I got the ban from that subreddit instead, mod was a blithering child who just laughed and told me to fuck off, the next day reddit admins had perma-banned me and I don’t have the energy to do the whole IP-reset-cookie-clearing dance to make an account that isn’t automatically shadowbanned.

The people I knew there, the communities I modded, all gone. Fuck that site. It’s now like half bots anyway.

He’s dead. I hated him but I can’t cheer.

This is too violent, too awful for the country I grew up in. I am sad not because I give a shit about a dirtbag like Kirk, but that we are now losing Rule of Law and the social contract. We are falling as a nation, and this is just one more domino in that process. They made this world for us but they’re not the only ones who are going to suffer from it.