I like my coworkers. They’re cool. I just went to acro yoga with one, and go bouldering with another. We show up, talk shit, and get the job done - sometimes it’s a good time. Sometimes we get our asses kicked. But that builds camradrie, too.

I will say, this is blue collar stuff. When I worked as a software dev, I definitely didn’t care about spending much time with my coworkers.

Moe is when you take your fetish/the type of girl you like, then draw an anime girl about it. But the girl is cute, not sexy, and fully clothed and doing normal, not sexy things. It is very weird. I do not understand this level of sexual repression. It feels like the online porn art equivalent of getting a human shaped pillow to hug while you sleep at night.

I agree with this comment in general, but don’t think Ferrell is a good example. Or really, maybe he is a good example, but the way his movies are shot isn’t a good example.

In Ferrell movies, the gag is that the actor says or does something outrageously dumb, and then the other actors largely go along with it, either pumping up the idea, or being coerced by it, or stomping it down in a hilariously insulting fashion. If there is ever a moment of awkward silence, it lingers for a second before the scene ends. Arrested Development is another example of this being done well. It’s a farce - the actions are so bizarre and outlandish that we can’t possibly imagine ourselves doing it, so we are absolved of sympathy for the cartoonish actor and enjoy seeing them fumble their way through the scene.

But there is a new wave of “cringe comedy” that seems to not understand what a farce is. A character will do something just beyond the limit of what we could imagine ourselves doing, so we can still identify with the character. Then the other characters react in the way people would react in real life - with stern condemnation or cold shouldering. And the scene goes on and on and on. It is terrible.

Right! We’re a bunch of 16 year old white boys who worship Xi!

You can just turn on the NSFW filter for your main feed. Removes pretty much everything except the “moe” communities.

Sidenote: you Moe people are weird af. Please tag your communities as NSFW. I would honestly rather have someone look over my shoulder and see a hardcore gangbang post than see me looking at fully clothed anime girls.

These are all reasonable points to make with literally any example other than McDonalds. Saying everything is worse and ruined by capitalism because no one cares about anything except profit anymore is not the trajectory that McDonalds took.

McDonalds in the 1990s was just as cold hearted, capitalist, and profit-seeking as it is today. Its target demo was children who would cry until they got a happy meal, and their weak-willed parents. Thus, it used bright colors, clowns, and ball pits to entice its demo into bringing their money in. McDonalds didn’t suddenly become more greedy and capitalist. They were already maximally greedy and capitalist. What happened is that the government told them they couldn’t advertise to kids anymore. So McDonalds, being greedy and capitalist, pivoted to appealing to adults. They got rid of the play places and ball pits, which were expensive and labor intensive to maintain and which were constantly covered in children’s saliva, puke, and shit. They toned down the color scheme to be less assaulting on the eyes and more relaxing. They improved the quality of their food, and they replaced benches made of cheap hard plastic for padded seats made with some kind of fabric. In many ways, the McDonalds of today are superior to the McDonalds of 20 years ago - it’s a place you’d be comfortable grabbing a quick lunch with some coworkers without feeling like you suddenly stepped into an overstimulating children’s movie.

I honestly like the new look. It says “We’re McDonalds. We sell cheap hamburgers so you can eat and leave quickly, because you aren’t rich enough to have free time. We know it, you know it, we’re all adults here so we don’t have to pretend. Come grab a cheeseburger and get on with your life.”

New tattoo ideas unlocked

I don’t believe in God, but I believe in Leonard!

The potential pleasure is in speaking about it.

Congratulations. You successfully managed to both not engage with my point in any meaningful way, and also provided a solution I already deflated in the comment you are responding to.

Play places? Cool aesthetics? Fuck you, we need to maximize the resale value of our real estate, shut up, you’ll eat our bullshit anyway.

I really have to push back if you are describing McD’s previous aesthetic as “cool”. That shit hurt my eyes and my soul.

The removal of play places was due to a number of reasons, not least of which were regulations barring how much fast food restaurants could advertise to kids. Without being able to target children as effectively, McD’s changed strategies to appeal to adults more. More comfortable seating rather than hard plastic benches; dim, relaxing lighting rather than bright colors; fewer ball pits full of shit, drool, and vomit. It became more of a neutral place where an adult on lunch break with some coworkers could get a hamburger without feeling like a pedo or expecting to be assaulted by the screams of uncontrolled children.

But seriously - kids these days!

It is the point. It’s the point every time this gets brought up. If the only thing that brought you joy as a child was a multibillion dollar hamburger franchise that made its profits on the back of childhood obesity, then you should be glad it is going downhill.

Seriously, “oh nos! McFatty’s doesn’t look like a kid vomited up a box of crayons anymore!! What is the world coming to???” isn’t a compelling argument to anyone who has realized that there is more to life than shitty cheeseburgers. I don’t care that McDonalds changed its color palette to gray because I do not care about McDonalds, other than hoping their entire business model collapses.

Are things worse now today than they were before? In some ways, yes! Show me an example of that! Show me a beautiful river full of trash now, or a local coffee shop that went under, or literally anything other than McDonalds.

The problem you’ll run into is (1) most leftists/liberals don’t own guns, and (2) most leftists/liberals are relatively affluent and will not be directly effected by Trumps policies. There is not a culture of being armed and organized among them.

The golden rule here is whoever has the gold makes the rules (quite literally).

That’s not an American thing. It’s a human thing.

I have to say, this is just such an in-the-weeds moral stance that it crosses the boundary of reasonableness. Honestly, it’s this sort of thing that drove me away from left wing styles of thinking a while ago.

The impact you make on the world in any of your possible actions with regard to Harry Potter is miniscule. Like, truly, utterly insignificant. Are you going to organize an anti-potter boycott? Participate in a protest? Harass the actors in an online trolling movement? Throw eggs at JK Rawling’s house? Great! Go do all those things! Actively participate in changing the world for the better! These actions might actually lead to real change.

But denying yourself pleasures in the name of moral purity accomplishes nothing. If all you do is sit at home and think to yourself “I wanna watch the new Harry Potter thing, but I can’t, because then I’m a bad person.” (or in this case, "I wanna talk to my friends about the new Harry Potter thing I pirated, but I can’t, because then I’m a bad person) then you are accomplishing literally nothing except making yourself miserable. Again, if you are going to actually do something, then go do it! But if you don’t have the time or energy or interest or social battery to actually do something, then shaming yourself or others into not doing things is actively counterproductive. Go take a road trip without calculating if the pleasure you will derive is worth the carbon footprint! Eat an ice cream cone without feeling bad about the the suffering of the factory farmed cow it came from! Get one of those good-paying jobs in oil and gas or defence and make some goddamned money! You are simply not important enough for any of these actions to have any actual real-world impact. The only thing that happens is that you convince yourself that if you ever enjoy anything, then you are a bad person. You train yourself to constantly be looking for the ways in which life’s simple pleasures are destroying the world, so you can feel bad about them.

Just stop it. Be happy. Do whatever you need to do to chill out and enjoy your life and gain some sense of contentedness and security. And then go out and make the world a better place by actually doing something. Hyper-anxious, shame-ridden, depressed know-it-alls rarely create effective social change because no one wants to hang out with them. No one see them and thinks “yeah, that’s what I want my life to look like.”

In order to lead by example you have to show a path to a better world. Not a cell.

That’s the problem. You’re hanging out with too many “MuH vIoLEnT RevOlUtiOn!!!” types. If you want the system to fail, of course you’re going to see every reason why it would fail.

I’m split. On one hand, thunderstorms in DC in the summer are so obvious and predictable that anyone doing any kind of organizing for an outdoor event would have considered them months in advance and would have contingencies. So “cancelled due to thunderstorms” is obviously a cover for “we’re getting too much pushbacka and don’t want to embarrass ourselves.”

Otoh, not realizing that there is a thunderstorm pretty much every single day in DC in the summer is exactly the level of competence I expect from the Trump admin.

Because trashy people never saw Austin Powers and updated their use of quotation marks to denote sarcasm.

Quotation marks were historically used to add emphasis to text, the way asterisks are used today. Old people who refuse to change and don’t realize their way of writing is actively making fun of themselves still use them this way. These are also the people who watch Fox.

Right. My point is that the Arab states lost to Israel because Israel was backed by the West. Without western support, a tiny Jewish state with almost no natural resources and a small population would be hard-pressed to stand its ground against a coalition of Arab states with a much larger population, oil money, and possible Russian backing. All the Arab states would need to do is keep taking pot shots at Israel while their superior military technology degrades and their stockpiles dwindle. A modern fighter jet relies on thousands of hyper-specific, high precision parts which can only be sources from western manufacturers. One part breaks and your whole plane is grounded. Even if the Arab states are not in great shape themselves, they win a war of attrition handily - especially once the average Israeli sees the inevitable and flees, depriving Israel of its soldiers and intellectual economy.

Otoh, your timeline argument is reasonable, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this wasn’t a coincidence in one way or another.