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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2024

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  • No numbers for “A celebrity’s position on a politicial issue has positively affected my opinion of him/her”?

    And IMO, considering all the other groups that are trying to sway voters and how close elections tend to be (and how polarized politics are in the US), these numbers aren’t that bad. And the way advertising/propaganda works, they don’t necessarily have to sway people in a way that the people directly notice - it’s often enough to keep repeating a point to keep it in people’s consciousness.



  • rumschlumpel@feddit.orgtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldmorons
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    20 days ago

    “white” is an increbibly malleable category, anyway. At one point, the Irish (who are generally even lighter-skinned than the English due to higher percentage of gingers) were considered non-white. Nowadays, most people would consider Italians and Spaniards white, and there’s quite a few hispanic people who both look white and consider themselves white (due to being descended from European immigrants). There’s a similar dynamic in India, southern Indians are often darker than ‘black’ americans while many north Indians could pass as southern europeans.


  • I wouldn’t be so sure about that. We definitely got a lot of social progress from technology, but it’s plain to see that social media gets massively abused for reactionary propaganda (not entirely unlike radio and print have been abused to further authoritarian ideologies in early 20th century). IME, in recent years people have been getting MORE cold and brutal, more willing to assault random people for being the wrong sexual orientation, they started assaulting EMTs, firefighters and train employees in significant numbers, and people have been outright murdered for telling them that they should wear a mask.

    And every appliance becoming “smart” seems to further the corporate desire for planned obsolescence and making people unable to repair their belongings, along with massively increasing security risks and possibilities for mass surveillance.

    IMO, we’re moving backwards right now, with significant risk of losing the progress of the last 50 years.




  • Cyberpunk authors have been introducing progress-hostile/‘go back to the past’ movements and factions since the 80s, arguably it’s older than cyberpunk-style technology itself (cyberpunk-style technology definitely being a thing that already exists, arguably since the www-internet but nowadays with VR, AI and electronically enhanced prostetics we’re definitely getting into the flashier stuff). And remember that the cyberpunk genre paints the future as bleak, in terms of how the common people live most cyberpunk worlds are clear downgrades compared to the actual 1980s.

    And e.g. the amish rejected the industrial revolution.


  • I suppose we have pumpkins, too. At least this holiday is pretty fun, even if no one actually celebrates it here (there’s little chance it gets adoption here, where I live we even have a hard time getting into carnival, even though that holiday has native tradition).

    Anyway, late August christmas sweets are way better than any Halloween-themed food or drink.