Lmao

I'm gonna be honest, the excitement of Obama being elected was real. I understood at the time that the racial aspect was just symbolic, but the symbolism was nonetheless hopeful and felt real. There was a sense that good things could keep piling up. 2008-2011 was a bloomer period despite the recession to me.

About the 10's social justice movement I feel much more ambivalent about. It was too scoldy and moralistic. I actually like and appreciate representation, but now I'm pretty sure is not a viable path of political change. I appreciated MeToo in concept and as something sorely needed, but I definitely felt the gains could have been more solid and I'm not sure if the social media logic of it turned out well. 2017-2020 of BLM was great stuff but in a difficult period. Getting Trump to back down into hiding in a bunker was a sign of something going right. Biden downturn in activism was depressing. I didn't participate in the Palestine movement after Oct 7th but that was too big of a bite to succeed, doesn't mean it wasn't worth a try.

The one thing that feels weird is how sexual politics opened up a lot until the pandemic when transphobic reaction, kinkphobia and tradwifery really kicked up.

P.S. Also, let this be a remembrance of old Reddit of late aughts. The original iteration before gamergate and other reactionary campaigns, it was a nice if techie biased place online. I remember the hacktivists, the Anonymous, Occupy Wall Street, Aaron Swartz, the left libertarians, leftists and progressive circles being quite active on the site during the great recession. It was not a reactionary dump back then. It offered a good exposure to lots of new movements brewing. The internet becoming an outrage machine and Obama leading into reaction was not foreseeable. It's kind of wild how we used to follow authors en masse online. Now we have influencers and the internet is mostly AI slop and the information is becoming enclosed.

Once upon a time, a blogger or am obscure academic could go (relatively) viral and that was cool. The internet used to be a place you could go for an escape instead of being the mainway for interfacing with the society and becoming upset.

Parking reform, open borders, drug legalization and /r/ShitRedditSays were pretty good political influences for the time period. Later /r/chapotraphouse was great not because it was free of bad actors but because it did have a bunch of great posters I've followed elsewhere and it could laught at itself on occasion.

Oh it was just a joke version of Rick and Morty.

I haven't seen it but what's up with the tendency to make quasi franchises out of animated sitcoms? Like making that show look similar to Rizz and Martin or Futurama to The Simpsons.

Not yet, but its hegemony is definitely weakening. No one else is there to step up either. Russia has had its set backs in Ukraine and Syria. China is suffering from an economic bubble of its own and soon will have a declining population. India will be fucked by climate change sooner rather than later. Europe is mostly a threat to itself and migrants.

Anyways rightoids today are much too clownish to run a hegemony properly. Like Elon thinks developmental aid to neighbors of China from the US is DEI and not hegemonic bribes.

It could be that you'd benefit from something more vigorous or frankly stressful. I had a period where I didn't do much besides very leisurely activities - was injured and had to stay in bed, recovered. Not just physically but also had no external demands. My stress tolerance went down and I was hyper all the time, but I started literally playing fps games and high intensity cardio (the kind of where you go hard for a minute or two and have to take a break) to get adrenaline flowing in my body and get used to it again.

Lmao it's still so good

Posting is a form of everyday resistance that goes beyond the calls for overt resistance - such as the heroic if undercut acts if John Brown - and thus comes with the ability to steadily accumulate the coral reef that will one day breach the bottom of the ship of status quo as it is understood today.

Here's a petition: https://www.change.org/p/bluesky-must-enforce-its-community-guidelines-equally

This is an old piece that slipped through the cracks for me the first time around.

A cool post. Appreciated.

Tbh I think gen z is the biggest demo into it but I could be wrong. The Simpsons is millennial humor to me.

Based.

Please spill some more beans.

It's the one place without blight.

I thought first you were thinking about leaf latter. That should stay lol.

If we had a caste system you'd be one level above me.

I actually think the circle jerk part was fine. One sub for dunking and nothing else? If the targets were bad enough whatever.

The rest of the fempire could have been in better faith and lose the reading lists. (Reading lists for online groups are self flagellation and came out of the liberal feminists shakesville scene, which was basically a blog cult.)

Was dril on srs? TIL gentle sir.

You could have actual substantive discussion on /r/chapo which was good. The combination of being relatively lax and not trying to establish orthodoxy and not giving trolls and bad faith right wingers anything they wanted broadly worked. It avoided fiascos like /r/antiwork and socialist cat girls.

I'm only on niche hobbyist, academic and bdsm subreddits, of which the latter kinda suck - there's a lot of easy moralism there. Small enough groups and you can drift to your favorites over time. The wider culture is either mundane or bad.

Oakreef rings a bell.

I wonder if anyone was involved in the gamergate.

That said, later I moved in Dirtbag Twitter and Reddit circles like /r/chapotraphouse. Didn't care for the podcast at all nor (the occasionally floated idea) that we should relax about slurs and such lest we alienate the working classes. It was definitely a reaction to moralistic libs and Clinton fanatics. It just seemed like a space where people could laugh at themselves. Alas, this too devolved into silliness over time and some Medicare for All Only people turned reactionary. /r/stupidpol and such were terrible. Made two comments there and some lib scold posted me on their blog.

/r/chapotraphouse really was the best leftist subreddit before being banned, the only place where progressives, demsocs, socdems, anarchists, left libertarians and marxists commingled. And once again, not too self serious.

Anyways posting isn't that important for left-wing goals like 2020 taught us. Things seem difficult but at least we can learn what hasn't worked.

This was such a magnificent image.