Oh yeah for sure,

Stop consuming content.

A confident, average, but nonetheless well-rounded individual with broad interests?

Seems like the word you’re looking for is ‘normal’.

Unless there’s some other quality you’re not describing like if they’re unable to admit when they’re wrong or they lie or exaggerate their skills, they seem like a pretty nice person to me who just for whatever reason doesn’t specialize in any one thing, which tbf is far more normal for people than otherwise and frankly far more sociable.

You seem a bit jealous of and upset at this person judging by your other comments ITT. What do you have against them, other than them ‘liking to pose as an intellectual’ - which I assume just stands for “they like facts”?

Tick city

Don’t watch shorts

Are you serious? It’s real and lead by the only two sane people left in British politics.

They’re participants in the class war on the side of bourgeoisie by virtue of existing and pushing wages down. We need to fight to give kids a world with hope.

It’s a win by non-Chinese western governments against American tech oligarchy’s desire to be above the law. Which makes it a win for the EU who wants to regulate them and a loss for American oligarchs.

Yes UK politics are fucked. Rest of Europe catching up as well. But I don’t envision a scenario where this clash between various bastards is anything but a win for anyone who isn’t a bastard.

Honestly the show’s quality fell a bit around the Irish season. It wasn’t like, painful, but started to get long in the tooth. I think the decline started around the laser tag episode, but it’s still shocking how long it was really peak for.

This is the best thing for everyone.

If Trump intervenes: Trump is forced to either acknowledge 4chan and potentially even be positive of it

If Trump intervenes: UK is forced to weaken the OSA

If Trump backs down: He looks weak, UK gets EU a win against American corpos

Housing prices are everything. We all die. Now or in 50 years barely makes a difference in the grand scheme of things. But imagine dying and your family can’t even grieve because your dead carcass fell behind on rent and was tossed out in the trash by your slumlord to get in an Indian family of 6 for twice the rent in your tiny attic. That’s life.

I am trans and people have threatened to murder me for my existence before I started passing. In both my country of origin and my current country of residence there’s a concentrated institutional effort to effectively extinct people like me from public existence by various forms of lawfare and propagandistic fearmongering.

Don’t get me wrong, the rightoids will come for me, and after that, they will come for you, too, that’s just conservatism for ya, but when they do come, I’d rather meet them in my owned house, filled with guns and ammo, and maybe a nice pet dog by my side that I’d look after and let escape before shit hits the fan, rather than a rented flat I can’t even hang a poster up in without incurring some fine or fee.

And if they don’t come, a house is an asset, the asset, the only productive one in reach now that businesses aren’t viable anymore thanks to landlord and digital feudal lord wealth extraction - it’s retirement and it’s everything, pensions wont be a thing by when I retire, and trust me being a minority with money is much better than being a minority without.

So are you implying that you’d only have kids if you could ensure they’d be bourgeoisie, exploiting others for their own benefits?

I think the society fixing angle is naive. I sure wasn’t that kid, I don’t know anyone else who is, and now there’s some kids who seem to be doing the opposite.

“Kindness” is weapons grade copium. Think of it instead like your average CFD bet or any other financial investment - first the fundamentals must be sound, then you invest, not the other way around - you wouldn’t invest in a failing business just in case it could turn around, unless you’re private equity and have other private equity firms lining up for your sucker special suite of bang-em-and-bin-em retirement home joints.

I’ve never seen hobbit/lord of rings and I don’t watch or care for fantasy. You don’t keep darkness at bay - you stare right into the void and grab it by the balls, then you invest.

Idk why you’re down voted, I’m 100% with you there

I’ve never had a comment removed or be banned outside of /c/ADHD or something like that which banned me for instructions on how to safely self-medicate based on how I did it amongst the shortage, which is fairly fucked up on their part tbf.

I’m old enough and have seen enough to know that I’ve got it better than a lot of people from the present and past.

I agree. But I also am old enough and have also seen enough to know I have it a lot worse than a lot of people from the present and past. I have known this at 27, at 22, and at 20. These are actually not contradictory statements.

but because they use Lemmy I can assume they are a relatively stable, middle class person

This is a pretty odd assumption. A middle class person to me would be someone who doesn’t struggle to pay rent/bills, and is saving up for a property or is already paying a mortgage without extreme sacrifices. They own property, or in (nowadays) rare circumstances a productive business and at least some of their income thus isn’t generated from wage labour.

This is of course a very conservative definition, but let’s go with that:

An extremely lavish internet connection of half a gigabit down with no caps or limits here in the UK costs about £30 or less a month and a phone or basic PC costs less than £100 even for both, easily.

The council tax alone, before things like electricity, water exceeds that. My rent is 11 times that and is extremely cheap compared to living in the city, which I can only do because I WFH - a rarity.

A median downpayment on a house costs £75,000 for a 30 years long mortgage, this is approximately twice the median, pre-tax income for full-time employees in the UK of £37,430.

Housing price rises, and even rent/bill/cost of living rises have also outpaced both wage growth and even in many cases inflation. Purchasing power is on the whole - down.

Focusing on the only things that have gotten enormously cheap very much contrary to the general trend - like access to social media, internet and electronics is like looking at a really nice tree when the forest is on fire.

I agree, but until that’s clear I remain quite skeptical.

The difference (sans 9/11 which isn’t really comparable) is that all of those were actively worked on and ultimately solved.

We banned CFCs and fixed the Ozone layer. We have done nuclear reduction treaties with USSR/US and later Russia/US, even under Putin. We had prevention, medical and otherwise for HIV, and then effective treatment where having HIV is honestly not even that big a deal anymore. We’ve created and improved upon much better seismic measurement methodology and equipment.

People likewise thought the world would end in 2012 but through science and reason we have evolved past such superstitions.

Now let’s compare to now:

What has been done about climate change? In the grand scheme - nothing. Renewables are all well and good, but most of the emissions are offset with carbon credits that mean absolutely nothing. Recycling is literally just a lie 99% of the time.

The risk of nuclear confrontation has actually increased, not decreased, since ~2012, between NK, collapsing USA, collapsing fascist Russia, increased standoffs between India and Pakistan, China’s increasing militancy, increase in war just generally whether it’s Palestine/Israel escalating (yes I’m aware it’s been going on forever) or Ethiopia/Eritrea.

At least in my opinion, the bitter rivalry of the Cold war was actually significantly safer than the geopolitical farce we live, which i’d pinpoint as sometime around when Henry Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize.

We have the US as world police but the best they could do is give the Taliban some of their gear and get a lot of their own and others killed for it when they weren’t busy crashing the world economy and electing fascists with global ambitions for shits and giggles.

Wow what a Belle Époque, Metternich himself would be proud. (/s of course)

We have widespread vaccine mistrust/hesitancy, which puts vulnerable people at risk, not to mention broadly reactionary, outright fascist/nationalist and anti-science, anti-reason and/or anti-intellectual currents among both the elite and powerful strata in society who pretty openly seek to undo the very solutions and improvements we have had over the last 40 odd years and the general population who not only not opposed them, but seem to find these ideas appealing, whether it’s intersectional tolerance or workers’ rights or people’s general freedoms.

On top of all that, we are currently on course for a dictatorship of the rich, and while our conditions in terms of technology and science are nowhere near, our social attitudes seem downright feudal, if not worse when you consider the absurdity of the fact that most of the problems could literally be solved tomorrow (e.g. more empty houses in the UK than homeless people) but simply aren’t for no actual legitimate reason whatsoever, and the world not only seems to not have any corrections lined up for this trajectory, but seems to be actively accelerating towards it.

So many times I’ve tried to ignore the world and tell myself in the grand scheme of things this must just be the darkest moment before the sunset, but it keeps getting darker and darker, and only faster and faster.

And to get ahead of the usual thought terminating cliches of “doomscrolling” and “go outside” in comments in threads like this - My life personally, world notwithstanding, is actually pretty great, I’ve been enormously lucky compared to many I know IRL, I’m happy on the whole, but it doesn’t make the world around me any less hopeless and depressing or change the facts on which I base that opinion.

If anything, the use of those same cliches just proves this point further - because effectively it’s no different than the “if I don’t look, maybe it’ll go away” from that Twilight Zone episode, and all other excuses like “we weren’t meant to process this much information” that people use to kill the curiousity they have about the world within their very soul to protect their fragile selves from the absurdity of the hell we seem to inhabit at the moment, only reinforce further that the observation of the world today as bleak definitely has merit.

And we’re fighting this fight by breeding more wageslaves for the capitalists?

I don’t mean to be as dramatic as this comes off, but I don’t understand this logic. You don’t work extra hard when you want to stick it to the rich, you don’t work at all, i.e. go on strike. People not having kids would make sense as a strike of sorts.

We don’t know what our asbestos and lead paint will be, and so we don’t worry about it. Neither did they, and it wasn’t a problem for them. They’re a problem for us, though.

So how old must one be to not have you pull an ad-hominem instead of addressing the points being made?

Have you maybe considered that it’s precisely the fact that you are older and have seen more of the world actually somewhat functioning that gives you this impression that on the whole things are fine, not to mention material advantages, and it is in fact - your credibility, that should be in question?