I don’t think that’s exclusive to Gen Z, I think pretty much every generation is experiencing that. I think that it’s safe to say that Gen Z and Alpha have been negatively impacted by the COVID lockdowns due to when in their lives they occurred, but the corporate enshitification of all aspects of basic living and human interaction affects everybody.

Dating Is Rough for Gen Z, Especially for Men Who Support Trump

Misleading title, fixed it. Gen Z is fine. It’s just the fascists who are having trouble finding people willing to put up with their vileness.

Maybe they would if they were afforded the opportunity to. They’ve shown up in “unprecedented numbers” in almost every recent presidential election, starting with Obama’s first term. But it’s never good enough for anybody else.

Maybe if they had better political education and easier access to voter registration, they’d show up more.

Older people can show up to elections because they have benefits that the younger generations don’t. Things like time off, better wages, and no student debt to worry about. The kinds of jobs that kids work are the same kind to refuse to give you the time off on election day and fire you if you miss work.

I’ve been hearing the same song and dance since I before I was 18. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it reminds me of the conversations about kids not protesting. Millennials got blamed for not being able to afford to protest, and Gen Z grew up nihilistic enough to simply not give a fuck and just eat Tide Pods because we’re all gonna die to climate change anyways.

Yep. See also: sea-lioning, the gish gallop, and a myriad of other tactics used by the far-right.

Also, another of my favorite quotes:

I’m not doing homework for you. I’ve known you for 30 seconds and enjoyed exactly none of them.

Self-curating my social media experience is self-care.

Optimism, realism, and pessimism.

I’m reminded of a quote that goes something like this:

I’ve been thinking about the free exchange of ideas recently and come to the conclusion that it isn’t an open market - it’s a potluck.

Everybody brings something to the table and you’re free to pick and choose the things that you want to try, but you’re not obligated to try everything. Just because Karen put a piece of shit on the table and calls it a sandwich doesn’t mean that you have to take a bite to know that it’s shit. Similarly, we are not obligated to take white supremacists and other extremists’ ideas and seriously debate their value. They’re shit and can and should be treated as such.

The beauty of a self-curated experience is that you’re free to engage with the things that you want and can ignore the things that you don’t want to deal with. The risk of people isolating themselves is simply a part of having the freedom to choose your own experiences, the same as the real world.

Personally, one of the reasons that I’m here is because I have no choice but to deal with right-wing extremism in my daily life, and I don’t want to deal with it online as well. Reading news articles? That’s fine, but I don’t want to see chuds screaming about DEI or woke or whatever in the comments.

There’s a nuance here that you’re missing - self-curating your social media experience is vastly different from the algorithm hellhole that is the modern corporate social media landscape. You can filter out any dissenting opinions or facts, but you can in real life, too. And like in real life, it takes a lot of active effort to get to that point. Whereas the algorithm will do that for you without you even knowing it.

I’d say that self-curated social media is like going off to college or moving to a new city while the algorithm is like living in the town you grew up in. I grew up in a very liberal state, but there were about 3 non-white kids in my entire high school the year I graduated, and it wasn’t until I was introduced to Tumblr in college in the late 2000s that I first heard words like “transgender.” And Tumblr is the most self-curated social media that I’ve ever seen. Back then, you couldn’t even follow hashtags - just people. So your front page was exclusively people that you followed and the posts that they reblogged from people that they followed.

This was my thought as well. Too many years of retail has left me with an instinctual hatred for holidays. Like how Labor Day is a holiday for the rich to “celebrate” the working poor who have to work that day.

True. I even added the “probably” after writing it for that reason, but that’s still giving them too much benefit of the doubt.

I’m sure the IDF soldiers feel very bad about all the women and children that they’ve driven bulldozers over.

And yet, that still doesn’t justify killing civilians randomly.

And Israel has been running a military campaign to exterminate Palestine since the 1950s. It’s hard to claim their hands are clean in any of these conflicts.

I still remember when they were offering Israeli citizenship with the purchase of former Palestinian homes to American Jews in the 2000s.

If he’s bringing politics into the workplace, that’s unprofessional behavior, and he should be reported to HR.

And just because you work together doesn’t mean you have to be friends. Only talk to him when it’s strictly necessary and ignore him otherwise, and he’ll probably eventually get the hint that you don’t like him.

But that’s more of a “assholes being assholes” thing than it is a “the world is dictated by night owls” thing.

I didn’t realize that HAMAS was as large an organization as the Israeli government and armed forces.

We’re also talking about a completely different country from Palestine that had nothing to do with any part of any of these conflicts, and even then, an indiscriminate terrorist attack on Palestinian civilians wouldn’t be justified by HAMAS’s terrorism. That’s like saying that the US bombings on Iraqi civilians are justified by Al Qaeda’s attack on the WTC on 9/11.

This is why I turned to hardcore drugs. Much cheaper.

…Factorio counts as a drug, right?

Don’t forget to somersault 4 times in a row on your way there.

The internet is weird. You’d be surprised at some of the issues that still happen today.

I once had an issue where I couldn’t log into the servers of an MMO, despite my internet being perfectly fine. After much trial and error, I figured out that the reason I couldn’t log in was because while I played on East Coast servers, all login authentification was done through servers at the companies HQ on the West Coast, and there was a local outage of a DNS server or something out in New York somewhere, which meant that I couldn’t reach the login servers. Literally nothing I could do because a line was down several states away and I therefore couldn’t play the game.

Can’t somebody smell nice without having to bring chemistry into the equation?

Not mines, IEDs. It was an indiscriminate terrorist attack on a civilian population using improvised explosive devices.