Thats a good point. Do you think the community organizing in & around Chicago has that sort of potential? Reading how they've reacted to the ICE raids, it seems like a drastic change.
Exactly. The juxtaposition between the NYC mayoral race & the establishment Dems acting on this just days after is pretty moving for popular discourse imo
Been saying this. The next shift that needs to happen as it pertains to consciousness in the US is the realization that the Dems don't disagree with what he's doing, they just think he's taking it too far.
I think what's most harmful in popular discourse currently is the assumption that the Dems are on the people's side. It frames the conversation as Dems failing to react & "save" marginalized populations, not that they also represent the capitalist class & march to the same orders.
I used to love Taylor Swift. She grew in popularity mostly during the 2010s, & in the early to mid 2010s was when I listened to her all the time. She had a general, ambient tone that was pretty & easy to listen to, paired with a nice voice & decent aesthetics. Most people could relate to her, & i was closeted at the time so I could "ironically" listen to her while fulfilling some need for femininity at the time.
Her generalized lyrics make it easy to project people's own insecurities onto them & relate, especially with the deterioration of community in the US & elsewhere. A lot of people in the US coalesce around single artists & join their communities for support & friendship, & Taylor Swift fostered a parasocial relationship like that with her fans.
Taylor Swift is a pretty
prototypical American white woman. She never really breaks the mold of the prototype, so she's generally accepted among all sects of the population.
My problem with her is that as I grew, her lyrics didn't seem to grow at all. She's still writing for that lost teenage girl, even though she's 35. She is less relevant culturally, imo, than she's ever been. She gets more & more criticism with every album release because it's not original (this new one's cover is very much an attempt to be like Sabrina Carpenter). She's lost & hasn't been able to find any sort of new niche.
Agreed, I think bsky has been small enough to be able to play both sides without much criticism so far - on one hand, they can say the platform isn't as toxic as the other (the other being owned by an actual nazi) & then on the other whenever there is legitimate criticism of their own moderation, they say they're just system architects. One user said it's like operating public transit & if a user criticizes, they replied with "well you can just get a car" & I tend to agree.
I think this is really just about the diminishing returns that we're seeing from the reverberations of tech culture believing that they could build a piece of software that would fix the world's problems. It doesn't quite work that way, & the contradiction between the owners of these social networks & their content creators is quite sharp at this point. Once they create a solution that reproduces the same exact problems, they react with apathy & resentment as if they did their part & the users just can't behave.
Ultimately for me it's frustrating because while I learn most from lemmygrad about why the world is the way it is, I do enjoy being able to see the regular people on the internet, especially in the US. Seeing shit like this, even though it's inevitable under a capitalist system, sucks.
"Are you scared?" Considering the fact that you hold the commonly held opinions of the western public I'll just say that we're used to the bullshit youre spewing. Why would we allow you to pollute our space too with your drivel when it can be seen on almost the entire internet, and in fact that same exact question has been asked here many times by similar people to yourself? Seems redundant if you ask me
I haven't checked the actual statistics for a while, but it looks like there was 350 in 2023 - so yes, it is daily life. For the past 10 years in the US it just feels like I see that there was either a public shooting or a school shooting almost every day. It never ends.
As for the day Kirk got shot, the school shooting was not far away in Colorado.
I got a new job y'all! Thanks for the well wishes last week. Comes with a decent raise, better benefits, unionized, more predictable schedule, & less job responsibilities. It's also good for a resume builder to get where I want to go in my career. Very happy.
I start my vacation now - my cousin is gonna do my hair & I'm gonna take a nice long day trip on Wednesday. Then I leave the state to visit my best friend for a few days. Things are looking up!
This is a hypothetical situation that you made up, & in the process, you created a transphobic joke. I don't see how that illustrates anything except for your inability to understand the nature of sexism & its cultural effects.
In addition, you picked only one part of my answer - the answer to a hypothetical situation, to argue against. I find that disingenuous.
I got COVID this last week. The symptoms bad as it was before, but I'm SO fatigued all the time & it really lingers more than other sicknesses. Stay safe out there comrades.
In the meantime I'm binging a show & practicing drawing quite a bit, which has brought me a lot of joy. The first character I ever drew was Luna from Sailor Moon. Now I'm practicing shading & shadows. Now I get why people draw fruit so much when they're first learning.
Thats a good point. Do you think the community organizing in & around Chicago has that sort of potential? Reading how they've reacted to the ICE raids, it seems like a drastic change.