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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • I agree. Ironically he also went on a bit of a rant about how the traditional media outlets whittle down interviews to the most salacious bits, and that’s part of the reason the American public is slowly losing trust in them.

    While the reason for him saying this is to discredit his previous perception as robotic, he’s also not wrong. All the articles I read “highlighting” the interview hyper focused on a few lines, and in doing so left and incomplete or dishonest impression.


  • So I watched the entire three hour interview.

    Technically speaking, Zuckerberg emphasizes the need for balance. He on multiple times either emphasizes that both men and women should feel comfortable in corporate environments, and explicitly says something like “there has to be a balance” on at least two occasions.

    The issue is that other parts of the interview don’t really match that idea of balance. Zuckerberg and Rogan spent like a third of the entire interview talking about bro culture stuff. I’m not even talking about “bro culture in the context of corporate America”. Rogan spends like a full ten minutes lecturing Zuckerberg on the proper way to bow hunt.

    Overall I think the media is focusing outrage bait while ignoring the serious implications of the interview. Zuckerberg is clearly lobbying the Trump administration to prevent meta and other US tech companies from being subject to EU regulatory security. It has serious implications both as a consumer and in terms of geopolitics.




  • Hate to break it to you but reddit isn’t dead.

    I still go on reddit. In a lot of ways it’s a lot worse than it used to be. It’s way more corporate. Huge portions of the site seem sanitized, often in obvious and eyeroll inducing ways. There’s also a lot less content in general. The content that does exist is lower effort, and way more repetitive.

    However in some ways it’s genuinely better. The discourse is a lot less toxic than it used to be. A lot of genuine cruelty wrapped in virtue signaling that defined the site from 2018 to 2022 is either gone or greatly diminished. It’s also slightly less of an echo chamber.

    I think what happened is that after the mobile apocalypse, a lot of the power users left the platform. While these people contributed a lot to the site, they were also extremely toxic people with an even more warped worldview.

    The mods are a reflection of this. They are more corporate, which leads to a lot of censorship like this. However it also means that scrolling is quite a bit more pleasant.

    Overall I spend more time on Reddit than Lemmy. There’s very little content here once you filter out all the outrage bait.


  • So there are actually levels to antivaxxers. The granola nuts that think putting anything into your body is a sin are actually the extreme minority or antivaxxers these days.

    The average antivaxxer is someone who has extremely little faith in both big pharma and the government as a whole. They usually come from a community that has been screwed over by both. In the US, this translates to older first generation immigrants, the African American community, and low income white people in areas that were hit hard by the opoid crisis.

    A lot of these people are cool with the traditional flu vaccine, because it’s been around forever. The covid vaccines on the other hand were met with skepticism, on account of it being “untested”. In their eyes FDA testing and positive media coverage don’t mean anything, because in their eyes both groups have lied to their faces in the past.

    A lot of the antivaxxer discourse during covid frustrated me. While there were people who were legitimately just idiots, there were a lot of communities who had fears rooted in genuine trauma and frustration. Calling them a bunch of idiotic death cultists and then celebrating on social media when one of them died just resulted in those communities distrusting the system further.



  • America places a lot of value in the concept of the person having the final say over our armed forces being a civilian. There are multiple very good reasons for that.

    Multiple presidents have served in the military prior to becoming president, many of whom have seen combat. The last American president to do so was George HW Bush, who served in the air force and was shot down over the Pacific in WW2.

    As to why that hasn’t happened more recently, it’s because the American people don’t see it as a priority. HW Bush was replaced by Bill Clinton. W Bush won over purple heart recipient John Kerry. Obama won over veteran and POW John McCain. Clinton, Bush, and Trump went even farther and essentially dodged the draft.



  • Exactly. The problem isn’t diversity. The problem is soulless corporations who put out mediocre games, and then try to shoehorn diversity in a fairly surface level and lazy fashion as a distraction.

    It would have been weird if AC1 didn’t star an individual of MENA descent, because the game was set in the middle east. Origins had minority protagonists for similar reasons Connor being Native American in AC3 added a lot of depth when it came to the concept of freedom and how it relates to the American revolution.

    I feel like I’ve seen the same story a million times. Mediocre IP, lazy forced diversity, culture war commentary, undeserved stellar reviews, underperformance with audiences due to fundamental issues.



  • I feel like a lot of companies that put the most emphasis on making diverse IP make the worst products. I don’t think that the lack of quality is due to diversity. Rather, I think that companies with soulless corporate leadership have a habit of producing mediocre content and attempting to obfuscate said mediocrity by making an otherwise uninspiring game a referendum on the culture war.

    I’m willing to bet that there are developers who can make a game that is more organically diverse and genuinely fun, but that they don’t get an honest shot due to the state of modern gaming.

    Anyway this game is gonna be crap, IGN is gonna give it a 10/10, and Polygon is gonna go on a tirade when it underperforms in the same way every AC game since black flag has underperformed.






  • This is a serious answer so it’s gonna get down voted to hell, but whatever.

    There’s a huge portion of Americans who are suffering. Their personal lives are kind of awful, they live in communities that are impossible to get ahead and the communities are often that way to due the direct actions of the political establishment in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

    Above all else, these communities don’t really feel heard by the liberal establishment. They feel as though their concerns are dismissed by what they see as the powers that be. They feel that their anguish is belittled as a personal failure, and often downright mocked. They also feel as though a lot of entities that fucked them are liberally coded.

    To these people, Trump is the guy who makes those people seethes and tells them to fuck off. That endears them to him and offers extreme loyalty. They often dismiss the allegations against him because at some point every single conservative has been implied to be a disgusting person in popular culture.

    Ironically I think a lot of Trump’s worst actions solidified the support of his base, because of where America has been at since his political ascendency. The US culture war has been raging for a decade now, and both sides have a habit of taking extreme positions while vilifying their opposition. That is naturally going to cause people to get more aggressive, which in turn villifies Trump.

    An example I love to use is vaccine skepticism during covid. There were two huge groups of vaccine skeptics in America: rural whites, and black Americans. Both had suffered greatly at the hands of an aloof medical establishment, and both had their suffering ignored. While the Black community’s wounds run deeper, the rural white community was fresh off the opioid crisis. They had every reason to be skeptical about big pharma lying to them for profit, because that’s literally what happened just a few years prior.

    The liberal response to the black community was understanding and outreach. The medical community made a huge effort to reach out to black community members and popular figures in black culture. There was a direct acknowledgement of the medical establishment’s bigotry in the past. There was not a culture of shame for people who did not choose to get vaccinated. This was also reflected in news articles and social media posts.

    Their response to the rural white community was basically the opposite. The medical establishment’s outreach was extremely limited by comparison. The opioid crisis was written off as a failure by the Sacklers as opposed to any systemic issues that the medical establishment needs to address. Vaccine skeptics were repeatedly and aggressively shamed, with open discussion in regards to simply enforcing vaccination via mandates. Basically every MSM article talked about how the vaccine hesitancy was a character flaw. Social media went even farther. Not only did they call conservative vaccine skeptics things like death cultists, but there were forums dedicated to making fun of antivaxxers dying of covid. People would post private Facebook posts of people they knew by two or three degrees of separation, and then liberals would more or less celebrate their demise. You even had the return of the word “sky fairy” on reddit to describe when these people prayed to God.

    Trump, for his part, encouraged people to get vaccinated. He stated multiple times at his rallies that vaccines could end covid, and that they were making him look bad by not doing so. He was, at his own rallies, booed so loud he had to stop talking. He quickly changed his tune.

    A consistent trend in liberal circles is the belief that they have complete moral and intellectual authority, as well as the belief that this authority gives them the ability to treat people who don’t conform like shit. I’m pretty sure I’m voting for Harris, but there are also times where I felt like I should just say home. It’s completely fucking insufferable, and ironically has a ton in common with evangelical christian politics that dominated the US in the 1980s. So long as that mentality is there, you’ll have people like Trump gaining undeserved support.