askchapo

I understand most of the how, but I do not understand the why of reactionary/regressive sentimentality among so many self-described "futurologists," not just on :reddit-logo: but people I've met in real life while attending conferences of such enthusiasts, back when I was :LIB: and naive enough to believe that it was going to be a lot of talking about how to make Star Trek come true for everyone, not a trade expo where Department of Defense contractors show off their latest ways to control and murder people and creepy cultists find new billionaire gods to fill the void in themselves.

For all the talk of "singularities" and of unimaginable wonders that would change everything, there was this quaint and grotesque aesthetic sense that such an unknowable future would surely, totally, have all of the inherent capital contradictions of today (rich white men in charge) and nothing would fundamentally change in the culture except the billionaires living forever and the mass destruction of the environment to make more phones would spread into space. :biden-harbinger:

How could the speculative future, supposedly so wildly advanced and strange that life itself would be redefined and all old limitations would disappear, also be so stagnant, so stale, so conservative and so boring to imagine? :grillman:

See also :my-hero: 's tweets showing his futuristic dreams of... multi-lane highways for cars on Mars. :grillman:

I know the so-called "extropians" have been a publicly known thing since the 90s, but they didn't quite take over such conferences until their billionaire masters literally bought the venues in the early 2000s.

My best guess is the prevalent ideology itself was just early 1900s Italian Futurism all along with a new coat of paint that fooled me for years, particularly Italian Futurism's featured hatred and desire to enslave women, contempt for the humanities and the desire to burn down libraries and erase history itself in a grandiose display of arrogance and hubris.

How much of this, written roughly a century ago, sounds like it could have come out of an Epic G*mer rant in a CSGO chatbox?

We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.

https://www.italianfuturism.org/manifestos/foundingmanifesto/

https://smarthistory.org/italian-futurism-an-introduction/

Where I live, even if it's been misogynistically loaded by :reddit-logo: and related communities, "Karens" are very real, both in my neighborhood and where I go to get groceries. They argue, a lot, and are especially confrontational and condescending with employees. They will fight and demand a manager over a difference in cents or a matter of months on an expired coupon, and snap their fingers to get people's attention, lick fingers when handling their money as a performative thing they learned from TV, and it isn't just a women thing. For lack of an agreed-upon term, "Henrys" are roughly the same thing but dress like 55+ year old children, wear flip-flops and cargo shorts and have goatees to go with their thumb heads, and have more direct threats of violence toward employees for the same setbacks.

The other stereotype involves self-described libertarians. I knew dozens, in fact scores, during college, and many never grew out of it. Speaking of growing up, almost every single one of them at some point argued with me, usually unprompted, that age of consent laws are "a social construct" and that "a lot of teenagers, and even children" (their words not mine :desolate: ) "are easily as logical and capable of consent as adults." Lots of them cited how child marriage is common and normal or even that they had ancestors that had child marriages and dared me to say their ancestors were pedophiles (in one case, I did dare say that. Yes, there was a fight). They didn't agree on everything but their desire to violate teenagers was a consistent trait. :epstein:

Some starters:

-the Fediverse

-the subreddit

-the Great Vegan Debacle

-The banning of r/chapotraphouse

More obscure:

-The pronoun struggle session

-How the movie nights got started

-How the comms were created

-outdoor cats

-@black_mold_futures

-@TimeCubeEvangelist

Don't go further

-@Beatnik

-@Enver_Hoxha

-@BASED_BALL

The most glaring example of that for me would be the 90s movie "PCU." It is an incredibly :LIB: piece of enlightened centrist propaganda, portraying black activism, feminism, veganism, even concern about endangered species as absurd and stupid, at least as bad as the cryptofascist white fratboys that are (of course) in league with the university's leader, who has two last names with a hyphen (the horror!) and had a whooping crane as a mascot (which is supposed to be a punchline as it wanders off and presumably dies off camera).

The chuds I knew back in the 90s loved it and there were moments that, if pressed, I would still grudgingly accept were cleverly written even if they are like peanuts sticking out of a steaming pile of ironically-:LIB: anti-:LIB: propaganda manure.

Lower key than that, the Indiana Jones movies are much harder to watch with all of the "all the girls in the professor's class want to bang him and also he is a lowkey child molester and it's just a quirky plot point."

I've talked about the Mass Effect series before and I'll bring it up again: being an extrajudicial special forces agent that acts above the law and working with (and effectively joining) a cryptofascist human supremacist organization ran by a rich techbro psychopath and it's all seen as sensible enough to have no opt-out, well, fuck that. "Humanity fuck yeah" stories are also tiresome to me.

I don’t know if I’m paranoid, but it is so much harder for me to find links for things I’ve seen to share with people.

Googling “Zelensky blonde hair blue eyes bbc” did not bring up anything referencing his sick comments. Only when I added “Twitter” did I find tweets that had clipped it.

I’m not able to find anything about Yemen being attacked recently and the most recent news says that Yemen launched a rocket.

Am I conspiracy-brained, are there just not any sources reporting on anything inconvenient to Western hegemony, or are they being buried by the algorithm?

I know there are lots of everyday moments of humans being kind to each other, but do you have any good examples on a wider scale to counter that capitalist realist idea?

I usually try and invoke the fact that humanity for hundreds of thousands of years lived in tribes where they had to co-operate or they would die and that "human nature" is just the product of the system under which you live, but are there any better examples you've found to convince your lib acquaintances?

I feel like one of the major hurdles towards getting somebody to become a leftist is the idea that humanity can, if organized democratically and if properly educated and with the right ideas of solidatory instilled, create a better system than the capitalists or technocrats have created. It's easy to look around and superficially see everybody as bumbling idiots or greedy assholes, particularly if you're socially atomized and apathetic, and so conclude that the working class, if left to it's own devices, would infight and crumble.

Or is this just one of those axiomatic things where if somebody you know believes it, it's very difficult to make them not believe it through historical examples unless they do major soul searching after a personal crisis?

Would our chimpanzee cousins approve these weapons?

Like it's mainly just an excuse for parents to not expose their kids to political stuff they don't like?

So, I made the mistake of picking a performing arts degree, so I spend most of my days pondering how pointless of a degree it is. I did manage to pick a module about performance protest, and while some of it gets a bit bullshitty, there's been other parts like looking at native American performance/protest at the Dakota pipeline and stuff, which have been interesting and useful.

Yesterday there was some group work. It was a bit of a brainstorming exercise but as a group we settled on the idea of spamming the illegal immigrant report line/letterbox with shit so that new reports wont go through. Ok, it's nothing amazing, but it served the purpose of the exercise we were given.

Then this girl speaks up. Previously her contribution to class has been telling everyone about how she culturally enriched herself by going on holiday in places where poor people exist.

On our idea, she says that it might be illegal to do, so we should create a fake website and have people fill that in as a symbolic message.

A FAKE WEBSITE FILLED IN AS A SYMBOLIC MESSAGE

At that moment I realised why the arts seem so useless at changing things. It's jam packed with trust fund kiddies.

that is complete insanity. what could possibly drive someone to have that thought at my young age? To remove all potency from the tiniest little act. Seriously ghoulish.

How is it?

No longer drunk! i went to bed and I’m awake

I notice they will do the "males are evil default", and some of them have conspiracy theory's like artificial wombs are going to replace women.

On the incel side you have conspiracy theory's that think women are trying to "genocide ugly males", and think that women are evil. Both of these groups are copying each other more than they would hate to admit.

Most wacky conspiracy theories manage to survive by being impossible to either prove or disprove, but Sovereign Citizens love filming themselves trying to talk their way out of being arrested or charged and subsequently eating shit. All the conspiracists these days are downloading their beliefs from YouTube and going wherever the algorithm takes them, so anyone looking at information on Sovereign Citizenery is also seeing the videos of people trying to put it into action and failing miserably.

How do people convince themselves that this is real when there are so many videos of people with similarly melted brains proving that this absolutely never works? I'm genuinely curious about what the rationale is. Do they think all the videos of judges telling Sovereign Citizens to shut the fuck up are fake, or that they didn't follow the script closely enough?

I had to read the English translation since I cannot read or speak Mandarin unfortunately. Its a really good and engaging book imo, gets better with every page and supposedly loveecraft level shit goes down by the end.

In the beginning tho there are a few scenes describing the Cultural Revolution and struggle sessions.

Is it true that Einstein's theories of Relativity were frowned upon by red guard university students because they were seen as capitalist propaganda?

And is it true that some university lecturers were beaten to death during the struggle sessions? I mean cool if they deserved it (feudal landlords etc.) but the Relativity part seems a bit like the author making shit up.

Its funny how despite this the author is not even overtly rabidly critical of Marxism or Communism itself, unlike western authors who spend 10 pages to explain why "muh gommunism bad" every time such events get brought up. Liu seems to be critical of just the events which transpired during the cultural revolution.

You shouldn't pirate the book from z-library because its very unethical and a breach of IP, so you will be sent to hell when you die.

When it came up in 2012 I was still a lib and didn't pay all that much attention to the Kony 2012 stuff besides memes. Lately, however, I've been thinking about it more and the whole event strikes me as very odd. I did some googling and found this:

There is clearly more than Kony at stake here. Central Africa is well known for its rich natural resources – including copper, cobalt, gold, uranium, magnesium and tin. Once ravaged by King Leopold II of Belgium, the 21st-century American Empire now wants in.

At an AFRICOM Conference at Fort McNair on February 18, 2008, Vice Admiral Robert T. Moeller declared the programme’s mission meant maintaining “the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market.”

Not only that. Ugandan President Yower Museveni has for some time courted Iran and President Ahmadinejad “in all fields.” This is the new Scramble for Africa – a sick twist of history in which global powers are returning to old hunting grounds and fiefdoms in preparation for a new proxy war.

If Invisible Children does not turn out to be some Pentagon-CIA front, the charity is still attempting to align social media, activism and youth political disengagement with the United States’ hawkish economic and military interests in Africa.

Was this for sure a CIA op, and does anyone know of any other evidence linking the CIA to this?

Also, does anyone remember how the guy who pushed the campaign went insane and was arrested for masturbating in public? What exactly happened there??

The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) has to be up there. Literally glorifies the stock market and presents a finance bro job as the key to happiness. There's a scene near the start where Will Smith is outside the NYSE looking at all the suits going in and out and narrating how he was inspired by how happy everyone was, and how this inspired him to bootlick his way into some internship, the pursuit of which literally requires him to alienate his friends and family and sleep in subway bathrooms with his five-year-old son. Everyone in the movie is a lazy, unscrupulous asshole, except for the rich people, of course, who are portrayed as generous and open-minded for allowing Will Smith in the door after he kisses their asses the whole movie. All of his struggle with homelessness and poverty etc. is portrayed not as injustice but as the ideal scenario, rewarding the hardest, most dedicated worker with a job. It is literally r/upliftingnews: the movie.

What's going on Americans?

Ive never listened to it. I don’t feel like doing any research. I also don’t feel like listening to a podcast that y’all say sucks. But why y’all hate on it? And why did their fans brigade the site like a year ago? Hit me with the cumtown low-down

Okay so I’m reporting back after listening to some of the bits on YouTube. It’s not that funny. All I heard was immature gay jokes. I think coeliacmccarthy hit the nail on the head with their description. I might’ve laughed at it if I was like, 14. But I didn’t get more than a small chuckle.

Just learned that one of my partner's coworkers has a kid named Atlas

Mine is Garfield X The Garfield Eats guy.

Stumbled on someone decrying TikTok "multiplicity kids" on twitter, but not sure how I feel about this thing and there's no wikipedia article which is usually the limit of my research.

On one hand DID and OSDD are real things, though some people say it's a culture specific disorder.

On the other kids having calling themselves "we", claiming to be piloted by Harry Potter characters, real-life serial killer and Minecraft YouTubers seems to silly to not be just good clean fun.

On the third hand is you told someone thirty years ago about gender spectrum, genderfluidity, xenogenders, bi lesbians, autism spectrum, they'll probably think you're insane. Maybe there is a subclinical version of DID, like Asperger's to autism, so to speak? I dunno...

I'm a little worried tbh, hope they're doing ok

Basically any upbeat song that reminds you to appreciate life in the middle of absorbing and applying theory. Anything from the Internationale to Red Army tunes to modern(ish) artists like Chumbawamba are allowed. Even Lofi.

Personal favorite of mine is Quand Fera-T-Il Jour, Camarade? by Mireille Mathieu. It's bittersweet, hopeful and resolute. Even if I don't speak French, I sometimes mumble to it.

Runner-up would be Solidarity Forever by Pete Seeger.

Dunno where else to put this, but since it's askchapo I guess I gotta ask something: anyone experience anything somewhat similar?

I was running around this building desperately trying to find a specific room because I was late for something, as a giant pigeon dropped blue shit on me while certain family members chased me while yelling about what a horrible person I am.

Woke up at like 3 shaking with chills and had a sleep paralysis episode as well :)

Went back to sleep and still woke up extremely confused and disoriented far earlier than I usually do, the light filtering through the curtains made everything look yellow, and for a few minutes it felt like I had died and this was the afterlife. For the rest of the morning I had this sensation of something being off about... everything. Also had a pounding headache.

Weird shit