PZK [he/him]

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  • 72 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: January 22nd, 2021

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  • In the decades before 2016, Trump’s hot mic incident would have been lethal to any politician. It doesn’t seem like much in hindsight because he ended up winning, but the Republican party was panicking and scrambling for an alternate candidate.

    In a way, it ended up creating a lot of the political climate in the United States today. Republicans realized doubling down often was a viable strategy and have done it ever since. It also added to Trump’s mystique, that he could buck the established norms to such a degree, that it convinced many chuds that anything was possible if they were a big enough asshole.

    It was probably a major source of my radicalization, because the fact that he won in spite of it lead me to believe that optics were not the only thing going on with politics. It made me pay attention and figure out why this would happen and why it didn’t matter.



  • Reaction videos are an occasional guilty pleasure of mine. But I avoid channels that are explicitly about “reactions” because as UlyssesT said, they end up all being the same soypoint-1 reaction to different things.

    I do genuinely enjoy seeing people be excited and happy. But so much of that “industry” is fake. People either go over the top or provide nothing in addition.


  • I think some niche youtube channels are fun, but it certainly is becoming a bore. If I had to guess, it probably is from everything being localized to a handful of websites and those are in turn optimized by an algorithm for profit instead of something enjoyable. The internet has been turned into what is addictive instead of fun.

    My personal theory is that we are so detached from joy that many find “reaction videos” a source of amusement because we can’t feel excitement ourselves anymore, so people vicariously enjoy something “new” by watching someone else be very excited and happy about it.

    I only really partake in interacting with people I don’t know on Hexbear, and anything else I leave exclusive to people I know in real life.

    Its a fantastic reservoir of knowledge at your fingertips, but a terrible and inhuman way to interact with other humans. Much nuance and body language is not seen, and people essentially develop the same kind of anonymous rage they feel when driving a car except it is in front of a computer screen.



  • Pretty insane advice if have reached a point where you are telling people to skip what is probably the most important and often cheapest meal of the day.

    Beyond this, it also attempts to trap people into buying more fast food to make up for the lost calories from breakfast, which have a higher chance of coming from a homemade source instead of lunch or dinner.








  • A lot of what you are describing here is why leftism is dysfunctional in the west. Since leftism in the west isn’t always a matter of material survival, western leftists use it to hyper-individualize themselves. Essentially they use leftist ideology to try to improve their class/conditions within a capitalist system without attempting to overthrow it. They also attack each other when one person does not see another’s personal problems as “the one true leftist perspective.”

    A key factor is sometimes these criticisms are not coming from someone who is looking for solidarity, but supremacy. This is why people become defensive, because these accusations are not always launched with a cooperative perspective in mind, but a competitive mindset that is a result of western societal framing. Many of the examples cited can also be liberal perspectives quietly excusing capitalism. Basically saying "if it was only ‘x’ group that was removed from power, or put in charge, the current system would work.