I saw a guy in a Lamborghini just yesterday at the gas station, I remember how it made me feel like less of a man suddenly, and an overwhelming urge to admire and listen to the man driving and respect his opinions.

Oh wait, no I thought “ugly color” and forgot entirely about it a moment later until this post. I always mix those up.

If this wasn’t 2025 I would have thought this image was satire it’s so overtly toxic and stupid.

Yet here we are.

I always wanted to be a teacher. I have a passion for teaching people new ways of looking at the world. I manage a team and used to open every Monday call with a chat about science news until the higher-ups started cracking down on “unproductive time.”

Then I got to know a few teachers, and the way they have to work one or two other jobs on the side so they can afford to bring their kids art supplies and science books and I just don’t have it in me. Massive respect to the men and women who stick with their teaching careers despite not being paid, respected or honored in any way by Western society.

That’s a great example, but Dune as a story was meant to subvert your ideas of heroism. It’s not a story about a common-man who gets swept away in delusions of grandeur and propaganda, the story is about someone who already know for a fact that they were a chosen savior, and how that destiny has a flip-side and how power corrupts and destroys.

I don’t really expect people to “get” that story, it’s subtle and nuanced. If you want to drive the point home about fascism and social manipulation you need nuance without the subtly.

I saw a lot of conservatives praising Dune like a real movie about real heroes and all that BS, while part of me hopes the next movie(s) really drive home Paul as a villain and I want to see the dim fans cry and scream. But I also know it won’t have an impact beyond that. Nobody is going to learn anything from Dune because it’s college-level philosophy about humanity and causality. Where most people are running at a grade-school recess level.

The only reason the “nazis weren’t monsters” narrative is still alive and well is because we broadly didn’t show them as humans who made stupid, horrible mistakes from the very beginning. We didn’t drive home the point that your ignorance is still deserving of the harshest of consequences. We are too afraid of offending someone or making someone feel bad for being dumb that we have allowed ignorance to have as much value as virtue.

The only reason we have people being led astray by people like Trump and Kanye and his ilk right now is because we are all so scared to show moral complexity and human vulnerabilities that we painted nazis like cartoon bad-guys. Which some were, sure, just like there are cartoon bad guys right now pushing millions of otherwise normal, if not ignorant, people to support horrible ideas.

Why are we so afraid to show that letting yourself be led into horrible ideas can still earn you a hangman’s noose or whatever the modern equivalent is?

Good. They should make them seem as human and sympathetic as possible, show the entire slide of emotional manipulation that made otherwise normal people adopt a narrative and made them believe themselves doing right and good as they did atrocities or stood by while their leaders and peers did atrocities.

And then kill 'em anyway. Because there are consequences for being dumb, and we don’t show that enough.

They should. And then kill 'em anyway.

That is the lesson we all needed to learn and ignored. They were humans, they thought they were good and doing right.

We are all equally vulnerable of falling into human biases and ignorance and doing horrific things if we allow people in power to manipulate our emotions. We need more stories about relatable, understandable humans doing absolutely fucked up shit because they went along with the narratives and then facing consequences for it.

Also, holy shit that moderation history LOL

You’re not getting well-received here, it’s worth thinking about. Part of growing up and affecting change is acknowledging that you’re also not perfect and you have your own biases that are going to prevent you from communicating your stances effectively and cause you to argue from a place of personal animosity than any wider social good.

When you learn how to argue against your own positions from someone else’s perspective, you will learn how to actually get people to listen to you.

If instead of that, you call anyone who has a different position a “sociopath” it just reeks of someone who can’t get out of their own traumas and emotional reactions enough to actually get people to empathize. Which is sad, but it’s not working.

Go work on yourself.

I am going to do just that, by blocking you and letting you not fume about one dude on the internet who thinks you’re kinda dumb.

I also appreciate the restoration of our ozone layer. I remember there was a time (when above a certain latitude at least) my skin would fucking burn in less than 5 minutes under direct sun, it’s a lot better now but it seems weird we all just kind of collectively forgot about that time when we all nearly ended the world to such a degree that we could feel it outside, then we all reversed course and fixed it mostly.

I wonder if we would be more motivated to fix our current issues if they caused skin burns.

GenX here… first time?

Foreign inflammation of existing sexism and gendered issues on social media has made it so men and women are afraid to be in the same room with each other, leaving behind only the absolute morons on both sides to represent gendered relationships broadly. People aren’t even dating anymore, loneliness on both sides is becoming a lethal epidemic, human relationships are falling and people are suffering for it on a huge scale.

Where once people would have compromised and men and women would have formed relationships understanding each other, we’re now so high-strung that any slight is considered “harassment” or “feminist woke ideology” (whatever they call it on the other side) and everyone is starting to hate each other just for being different from themselves.

Welcome to part of that machine, you’re a member of the club destroying us all, just as bad as the orcs on the right who think you’re trying to take something away from them. Screeching in all caps about being harassed by some general “male presence” just paints a stereotype that I really wish advocates would abandon because all it’s doing is making the division worse and creating harder lines that people won’t cross to understand each other.

Can’t tell if the pic is AI or not, but your point stands and applies to a much larger issue with the slop being generated at a death-spiral pace across the internet.

Most of the people trying to replicate “stock photos” on the cheap have no clue what the subject is about or how it should look, so if some South Tanzanian family decide to make a few bucks pumping out content with help of their local internet cafe, they can generate the most professional pictures of people doing all kinds of activities. Pictures which get picked up by someone else somewhere else who is trying to make a guide or informational content, again for a few fast bucks. And this story repeats at all levels of human society at all levels because of capitalism. Every time, something is lost, some detail missed, some cultural context glossed over, and this is how we lose human history.

And eventually, inevitably, one way or another, humans.

I never had a microwave magnetron give out, they last far longer than the plastic housing, plastic handles, hollow frames and thin plastic films over the buttons. I’ve also lost five vacuum cleaners of various brands in the last decade, full on smoke and melted plastic. Only Dyson has lasted more than a decade.

And I also realized that by discussing the durability of branded houseware, I am absolutely too old to be on the internet anymore.

And it all starts from people reading the endless, pointless, contention-filled threads like this, where two sides are arguing bitterly about nonsense, not giving in an inch, and not resolving anything.

What do you mindless drones out there think this is doing to your brain? Has anyone of any gender been helped by reading any of these stupid arguments about sharks and bears?

The answer is no. The younger generation who was raised by these terrible posts and terrible, wastes-of-time arguments and persecution olympics is desperately, chronically ALONE.

So yah, lets all just keep stirring this soup of loneliness as we all train ourselves to stop socializing like humans and view everything through the lense of internet arguments. I’m sure it will start to show positive impact annnnny day now.

What pushes people to grifters is reading endless, pointless internet arguments where neither side is compromising.

This is how we all learned to socialize, in bullshit threads like this, and this is why all you young people are so fucking lonely.

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Stop making it a life-goal to go 1.5 million dollars in debt to own a stucco home in a vast ocean of identical stucco homes and maybe buy some property by a small town and sacrifice the luxury of convenience and being able to get doordash whenever you want and instead have a little garden or something.

If the market decided that living in suburban hell wasn’t profitable anymore, they would stop paving over vast tracts of land to unroll a sea of terracotta roofs as far as you can see like a rolling ocean of crippling debt and HOA fines.

I hope you’re copying and pasting this to every other user who thought your comment was inexplicable or I will know you’re just sore.

Your phrasing didn’t sound ironic at all, review the puzzled replies and rethink your notions of how well tone travels over text messages.