no fighting skills

30. NE. Compartmentalized.

[not-your-average-url]

I miss when ads were a single click and then they’re gone. Now every ad has a minimum of three phases where you watch a video, exit the still frame of fake gameplay, and then exit the app download. That doesn’t even touch on the ones that forcibly take you to another app after opening a tab in safari without you ever touching the screen.

I hate advertising. I hate that you can’t do anything without companies jumping down your throat with mostly bullshit ads. I hate that billboards exist. I hate that every company unanimously decided to make their ads longer and longer. I hate that ad blockers try to charge you money and there are in app purchases to remove ads. I hate that my attention has become commodified. I hate that there’s nothing I can do about it.

[socialmaya]

Occasionally forget people genuinely think capitalism is thousands of years old

[sylestial]

One time I was talking about Robin Hood with some coworkers and one guy was like “he was bad because the people he helped learned to expect handouts” and I wanted to be like… okay can you explain how that flawed capitalist propaganda applies to feudalism

[scallioncreamcheesebagel]

reminder that capitalism was literally invented in the 16th century

[tayefeth]

That’s an exaggeration. What was invented in the 16th century was mercantilism. Capitalism really dates for the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the rise of industry and cash crops over artisans and merchants. Vulture capitalism, with the notion that companies have no duties other than generating profit, is even younger.

[antique-scarecrow]

Capitalism is only 200 years old and I have to say, they have not been an impressive 200 years

[downtroddendeity]

I think a lot of this comes from the fact that most people don’t know the formal definition of capitalism. We all know the word, we’ve all seen the jokes, but very few people bother to actually define it unless they’re talking about political theory and philosophy, so it’s easy to end up with the impression that Capitalism = Money Can Be Exchanged For Goods And Services.

Capitalism is the economic system where most of the means of production (i.e. everything people need to have to make the stuff that everyone wants) are owned by private individuals or corporations, who then hire people to provide the labor necessary to produce things, with the intent of selling the output at a profit. It’s the difference between “you’re a carpenter and you make a chair and you sell it” and “you’re Richard Q. Richington who owns a chair factory, and you pay people to sell the chairs you paid other people to make and then all the excess money goes back to you.” There have been Richard Q. Richingtons on and off throughout history, but that being the norm for every single industry is a pretty recent development.

[antiterfbutch]

An alarming amount of people seem to think capitalism = all trade, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

[depsidase]

[partywithponies]

Strange racists and homophobes on the internet seem to have access to an alternate way cooler version of TV than me. "every white character on TV is in an interracial relationship" "every show has a gay couple in it" "main characters keep having to secretly be bisexual and nonbinary" "every show has gratuitous full frontal nudity" like damn promise?? What channel???

[urlocalpyshcopan]

as a black gay person real like where y'all be finding this stuff pass the name

[brainsforbabyjesus]

for real though, those DO NOT WATCH OR YOU'LL CORRUPT YOUR CHILDREN lists put out by conservative christian family groups is where I find all the stellar tv shows. Like, shit I didn't know half of those existed, thanks for finding them for me, gonna go watch 30 hours of gay tv now!

[infamousbrad]

I think I know how this works.

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.

Same as the journalists describing Black Rock City as all naked. Same as the right-wing religious culture warriors describing television as entirely mixed-race and gender non-conforming. Not because it's even vaguely true, we know that, but because they haven't gotten over their discomfort over the last one by the time the next one comes along. The anger, not the stimulus, is the part that's continuous, so their mind lies to them that it's "all" the thing they can't get over.

[kagedtiger]

Similar effect for the presence/proportion of women in things, by the way: https://health.howstuffworks.com/mental-health/human-nature/perception/how-17-equals-496-the-amazing-multiplying-women.htm

[jayalaw]

What’s the solution then? Or if there’s no solution, should we make things even queerer and more diverse?

[digitaldiscipline]

That is the solution.

[ovenroastedtwerkey]

Either they'll get used to it or their shitty shriveled little hearts will give out from the stress. Either way is fine by me.

[mr-deep-downer]

[sailatina3]

[herecomesthementalmeltdown]

[threeninesfine]

The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.

—J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come

[enki2]

[enbaluka-tokyo-drift]

[utopians]

man how the hell is this stupid ass sport legal. why do we funnel HIGH SCHOOLERS into this

[utopians]

jesus christ????

[taragrimface]

what the fuck.

[hypokeimena]

#the worst is when a kid fucking dies #and his parents try to raise awareness that your kid could fucking die #but all they get is other parents telling them their kid died because he was bad at football

[robertreich]

Someday, I sincerely hope, we will hold him accountable for the wreckage he has made of our country and much of the rest of the world.

[hagiomoto]

[bearballing]

i feel like the rest of that tweet should be shown:

[symptomesper]

Nuclear attack on Iran? UN diplomat resigns saying 'giving up my career to leak possible nuke missile strike plan'

‘Possible nuclear use in Iran: UN-linked diplomat Mohamad Safa, the Main Representative of Patriotic Vision (PVA) at the United Nations, has

Yeah, just so we have an actual source and not a picture of a twitter post. Be sure to check sources! This is real though. Spread wide.

[7-galaxys]

News article from March 30, 2026

[pupmon1]

So we're just gonna nod and chatter our teeth at an ad riddled business news site with a known right wing lean who's main source is a fucking tweet?

Okay. Cool.

Yeah. Let's do that.

With a single news source. That doesn't typically cover news like this, nor cover the news it typically covers all that well.

Good plan.

[hagiomoto]

The tweet is from an actual diplomat you fucking twerp

It's not his fault that only Times of India take his tweet seriously. That's what usually happens whenever non-white diplomats make statements on their twitter accounts.

Fuck off

[ubernegro]

Every country says Transatlantic slavery is the gravest crime in humanity…except US, Israel, and Argentina

UN votes to recognise enslavement of Africans as 'gravest crime against humanity'

The landmark resolution calls for an apology and contributions to a reparations fund, without specifying an amount.

Every country in Europe abstained from voting.

And you could say the Holocaust but then you’d be wrong and really need to read your history of the Transatlantic slave trade and the sheer scope of it all.

[depsidase]

[theconcealedweapon]

[knowing-smile]

Vintage EPA photos reveal what US waterways looked like before pollution was regulated

In the years after the US Environmental Protection Agency was founded, the agency dispatched photographers to document pollution and contami

What was food like before the FDA?

Formaldehyde, brick dust, lead, and borax once made grocery shopping a minefield.

Shit used to be wild, and this is just what I could find that had decent sources, I've heard a lot more horror stories.

I'm not excited to live in a word without regulation. 🙃

[bogleech]

"Regulations don't exist because governments enjoy them" is an important statement here. The government has to spend money and labor to enforce regulations. The government has to be begged for years and sometimes threatened by the American people into even creating the regulations. The people with the money want you to believe regulations are "BIG GOVERNMENT INFRINGING ON OUR FREEDOMS" so you'll help them undo the regulations your grandparents had to force that same government to install in the first fucking place. They count on you being ignorant of the past so they can make another round of dirty money by poisoning you all over again.

[lew-basnight]

Whenever I hear "cutting red tape" I think of food inspections and water runoff rules. Whenever I hear someone complain that it's not fair, how they can't compete as a business with all these "unnecessary" regulations, I think of the safety guards on various industrial machines I've worked. "It's not fair that I could be making so much more money if I was allowed to lie cheat steal and harm the public" is not actually a winning take, and yet

[charlesoberonn]

When a politician or pundit talks about deregulation, always demand to know the specific regulations they want to dismantle. 99 out of 100 times they wouldn't be able to tell you. Either because they themselves don't know, or because they know that it'll make them sound like the cruel greedy bastards that they are.

[elierlick]

We should all be talking about KOSA. The bill would mean the end of the open internet in the US, and it was just approved by a House committee for a floor vote. The act is ostensibly designed to regulate the age of social media users. However, it actually deanonymizes the internet and allows the government to sue LGBTQ+ websites.

Unsurprisingly, the Heritage Foundation is one of the main lobbying groups behind this push. They have publicly stated they want to use the law to restrict LGBTQ+ and abortion-related content. Blocking children under 16 from accessing the internet means young people will be isolated within their communities. They cannot discuss LGBTQ+ issues with their online peers. They could not request help to access abortion clinics. Senator Marsha Blackburn, who once personally sent the FBI to my doorstep to harass me, admits the law is intended to shield “minor children from the transgender [sic] in this culture.”

“The through-line couldn’t be clearer: destroying online anonymity is a way for government to be able to identify ¬— and ultimately punish — dissenters,” explains Ari Cohn, lead counsel for tech policy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. The DHS has already subpoenaed hundreds of anonymous accounts tracking and protesting ICE. KOSA would make it even easier for the government to access your data.

Read the full article in The Intercept!

[imkeepinit]

Judith Butler, philosopher: ‘If you sacrifice a minority like trans people, you are operating within a fascist logic’

[cutecipher]

science has always been political. what gets studied. what doesnt. who gets to do the studying. on and on and on.

[cutecipher]

scientists on this post: yuuuup 👍

people who aren't scientists: um actually ☝️

[unalivejournal]

Reddit post: Hey I'm thinking about pursuing this career does anyone have any advice for my path?

Comments: This job is hell my life is hell don't do it. I wake up every morning for work and hold a gun to my head while doing deep breathing exercises. Find a time machine and go back to 1979 if you even want a chance of getting a position. Prepare to move 5000 miles away. You will be paid one penny per hour for the first 15 years and your days will be 12 hours long at minimum. Being dead is better than doing this profession

[berlynn-wohl]