They work harder and take credit for other people’s work.

It’s all about optics. Ruthless people ruthless control their optics, normal people don’t.

and people bitch and whine that they are 5 bucks, not 50 cents.

lots of prepper fetishist weirdos in this thread who seem to think anyone who thinks electricity, plumbing, and internet is normal are ‘weak’.

because apparently if we were ‘strong’ we would all be hunting animals and coking their carcasses over fires and sleeping outside… and communicating via smoke signal… lol

Yeah, they tend to be heavy drinkers and can’t socialize without alcohol. They just get drunk at home and doom scroll and group chat now.

Stewart errs on the side of intolerant liberal belief. He seems to things certain things should be banned from existence if he/liberals finds them offensive. He is also palpable ignorant about certain issues and biased toward mainstream definitions of things, than taking a more academic and broad view. He doesn’t really acknowledge the problems or contractions in many liberal beliefs, the way someone like Maher makes a point of doing. He is not a social libertarian, and Cohn was definitely more of one.

I do those things… and social media/phone users tell me I’m an asshole for not being addicted to my phone.

It’s socially isolating for a lot of people if they aren’t doing what everyone else is doing and aren’t following social media trends that most people are freaking out about.

I’ve had to socially isolate myself a lot more the last few years because it’s so intensely pervasive. Like I meet people, they ask me what my social media handle is, and they get ANGRY when I say I don’t use it. And even ANGRIER when they ask me what I spend all my time doing and I say I read paper books, watch films from the library, etc. and they tell me that makes me anti social and a pretentious douchebag.

Driving everywhere and not walking makes you obese.

Using AI and never using your brain makes you stupid.

For people who are used to driving everywhere, and people who use AI all the time, they think walking/thinking is an impossible task that’s only done by superhumans.

I mean, I’m not a teacher, but I’ve seen a massive decline in people’s basic cognitive abilities and social skills the past 5 years in particular. I used to be able to get along and have a conversation with a relative stranger for alike an hour or two. Now they check out after 10 minutes and can’t seem to have a stained conversation about anything without rapidly switching topics, or just flying into an ignorance rage/rant about something they clearly know nothing about. I’ve also seen a massive uptick in straight up hostility toward me for reading paper books and using paper and pen…

the thing that is massively increased is people’s confidence that they are correct no matter what and there isn’t anything they don’t know, and if there is, it’s stupid and not worth learning. I’ve seen this attitude in online spaces and in real life conversations. A massive difference to like 10 years ago when that attitude was far less frequent and people were far more curious and open to new information. I used to volunteer a lot, and I quit because it became so awful to deal with ignorant and aggressive people, whereas previously people were far more amendable and grateful.

I miss people being able to rant about things they did know about and able to acknowledge the limits of their knowledge. AI is basically next gen social media in that all it does is bias-confirm people’s ignorance and tell them what geniuses they are and they get addicted to that cognitive junk food and think good food tastes disgusting.

For me it’s just the character limit.

I like reddit because people could write in paragraphs. Twitter never had any appeal to me because it could never be more than slogan-slinging and when i briefly used it it just seemed utterly stupid to be limited to like 10 words.

he’s a comedian. not a politician.

Depends on the university. Some of them are still like that, some of them are totally ideologically captured such that they have encoded being anti-free speech into their conduct codes, and/or they simple would not want to deal with the fallout of bad actors would/could do to their servers.

A lot of university’s slide towards authoritarian centralizing of power post COVID along with internalizing their student bodies. Sadly. They themselves aren’t the bastions of freedom and truth they once were, because those things don’t make the bottom line go up. Many also closed off spaces and programs that were previous open to the public to further isolate themselves from the rest of the world. MIT had libraries and other facilities anyone could use, and now they shut them all off from public access post COVID.

That tracks. You pissed off someone who had a connection with a mod and/or admin. Been there!

I got banned once for dunking on IG travel trends and the mod involved was dumb enough to PM me threatening me.

It’s just pathetic how emotional and over reactive people saying crap on the internet they don’t like. I don’t agree with a lot of stuff but I see no reason to censor people for enjoying musicals or whatever else I hate.

They can be used to launder money though.

That’s why art is so inflated. It’s used as a means to launder, because it’s the value is so arbitrary.

What’s baffling is I meet people my own age, who make like 200K a year who also think this exact same way. They think their life right now is impoverished and they deserve to be a billionaire one day. Half my first dates the past couple of years tell me how ‘difficult’ their life is because they can’t afford first class plane tickets.

It’s mind-blowing to me.

because everyone thinks they are middle-class, and everyone aspires to be rich.

very few people think improving the conditions of the working class is a worthwhile goal… the goal is to get out of the working class and feel superior to them.

i grew up a white working class town. Everyone in my town played the lottery and complained about immigrants. They did very little to actually try and improve their town lives… they thought doing so was ‘gay’. They wanted to send their kids to college, but then complained how college ‘corrupted’ us all and turned us into homos, especially when we moved away and got good jobs and had better lives.

Good policy is boring. Good government is boring. A company with moderate growth targets is boring.

Well-informed, articulate, and smart opinions… are boring.

They aren’t designed to do that.

They are designed to give people what they want. People want division and hate. It fuels their attention.

In the 1980s the people who had the longest listening times to Howard Stern were the people who claimed to hate him. The outraged fueled their attention such that they could not turn away because they wanted to see if he got more outrageous and offensive.

People are like kids in an candy store when it comes to negative content. They cannot get enough. They get addicted to the intense feelings the outrageous content provides.

Before algos things were random and they had to try really hard to go find that stuff. The algos spoonfed it to them and they lapped it up eagerly. Back when IG was just my friends, I saw one angry rant every few weeks, today it’s 20 angry rants and 20 ads, and my friends content about their kid or cat being cute is buried by 50 other posts which I can’t get rid of.

and a large chunk of human beings have no understanding of contextual meaning, so it seems like genius to them.

they don’t. some of the worst schools are the best funded.

it’s about culture. poor kids do great at school if they have parents who value education, or value education themselves. people who don’t value education… do poorly at school.

it’s just that rich kids/parents who don’t value it… get propped up by a community that does. it’s better to be a dumb kid in a rich school district than a smart kid in a poor district.

angry atheists think anyone who follows any religion at all is automatically idiot… meanwhile they usually are religious themselves about something else that is traditionally a religion. like the ‘new atheists’ crap.

religious belief is a basic aspect of being a person, no matter how much people deny it.

because conspiracy theory nonsense and the government is inherently evil, or something.

apparently ‘freedom’ is living in the backwoods your entire life as an undocumented citizen or something.

and medical care and social security are ‘evil’.