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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • A friend of mine once described this kind of behaviour as acting like “welfare moms.” While there’s a certain level of sexism there that I am sure she really didn’t mean in the moment, I get the point she was making: parents who sit at home scheming up the next excuse to call social services on that other parent that they pretend to like but also keep an air of superiority about. And that’s all it is. Convincing yourself that you’re better than everyone else not by lifting yourself up, but by tearing others down.

    It’s commen behaviour in narcissists, too. Contrary to popular belief, narcissism is often found in people with low self-esteem. They try to validate themselves by bringing everyone else down below them. It seems like obsession with another person outwardly, but it’s still self-obsession: “this person made me look bad, but they’re so much worse than me. I need to prove it (even to myself).”


  • The cost of food and shelter driving people homeless and hungry is evil. The cost of Nintendo products causing people to play fewer Nintendo games is rude and unfortunate.

    I’m just pissed off at all this misdirected frustration. We should be lobbying governments to manage grocery and real estate megacorps, and instead we’re creating YouTube videos about Nintendo being evil because the price of an individual game went up $20. The gap between unfettered corporate greed of UHC causing suffering on scales previously only seen in wars against Nintendo getting an extra $20 here and there if you want to keep up with their products isn’t even a fucking comparison.


  • And I’m tired of pretending a completely unwelcome and tone deaf price increase is “evil.” I hate paying more for videogames as much as the next gamer, but the cost of living has increased by 50% in basically every metric. Rent, food, power, gas, restaurants, movie theatres, snacks, alcohol… Literally everything I spend money on has gone up between 25-50%. Nintendo is the first asshole in the video game industry cocky enough to up their prices by the same amout, and suddenly, “The Switch 2 is EVIL.” Really?

    Listen, I am not a fan. $10 for a tech demo that should be packaged in is insane. But pull your head back and look at the wider picture instead of coming in here with these terminally online takes. If you can’t distinguish between “evil,” (like health insurance corporations condemning millions to chronic pain and, in extremes, death) and “shit I wish wasn’t so expensive” (like a singular brand of videogames) then maybe it’s worth figuring out where the nearest patch of grass is.







  • It’s intellectually dishonest to say Charlie Kirk was doing anything equivalent.

    I just don’t think this is true. Another poster here pointed to the specific events, and they’re right. The only difference between Hitler or Goebbels and Charlie Kirk is authority, and despite the lack of hard power, some people out there still acted. Soft power is still power, and as a result, rhetoric did become action. I won’t call it dishonest, as this feels like very genuine discussion, but I think it’s a mistake to dismiss soft power like what Charlie Kirk was wielding.

    That said, in the wake of the downvotes you’re receiving, I want to say that I do appreciate the genuine response. You don’t deserve to be digitally booed for having a substantially less bloodthirsty opinion than the average Lemmy user. I really do get where you’re coming from. I just think we’ve unfortunately found a world where the appropriate valves and levers for dealing with people like Charlie Kirk have been fully disassembled, and we’re stuck with the inappropriate fixes.


  • While I agree with you in a general blanket sense, there has to be a limit here. You can’t let someone have a platform where they constantly advocate violence against millions of people to millions of people and then give him a pass because they didn’t commit any visible acts of violence himself.

    Do we say that Hitler is only responsible for the people he himself killed, or do we see him as the murderer of some 6 million Jewish people? Or how about Joeseph Goebbels? He had little to no legislative power, and as far as I’m aware we don’t have any direct records of him killing anyone. Does he get the pass because he was just the messenger?

    I understand your position, and in a general sense I agree with you, but there’s an important intangible threshold that some notable rhetorical violence has passed lately, and we need to treat that as the existential threat that it is. I’d love to deal with such threats via lawful imprisonment and rehabilitation, but the government is currently aiding and abetting these people, because they’re the same people. So, what’s the solution? Minorities live in fear, day to day, until they’re the next people on the list to wind up in prisons, camps and asylums?

    The buck has to stop somewhere, or we just accept the extinction of anyone outside of the right-wing sphere.



  • The order of events as I’ve been seeing online:

    Videos circulating on social media showed an attender at the student event on Wednesday asking Charlie Kirk: “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?”

    In response, Kirk said: “Too many,” as the crowd clapped.

    In a follow-up question, the attender asked: “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?”

    Kirk replied: “Counting or not counting gang violence?”

    His last act on earth was cracking a joke about how only queers and poors are involved in gun violence, at which point he was shot.