I used to enjoy conspiracy theories, because I thought it would be cool if they were true.
Things like cryptids, aliens, etc…
But now all the conspiracy groups are filled with stupid right-wing science deniers.Same. I have always loved it as a fictional genre, and as a fun sort of “what if” form of escapism for life in general. We’ve pretty much taken all the mystery out of the world, so that kind of stuff filled that void for me for a long time. But then it turned into a pipeline to recruit people into right-wing paranoia, and now I can’t really enjoy it anymore.
this is definitely a vibe. no more cooky dale gribble types anymore, only weird race supremacist and shit nowadays.
but i will say that this,
We’ve pretty much taken all the mystery out of the world
is patently untrue. if you’re the kind of person to say there’s no more mystery to the world it’s more likely than not that you would’ve said the same thing hundreds of years ago too.
modern people get very preoccupied with the idea of the sum of all human knowledge. the reality is a lot more patchwork than it seems.
for example, most people would fail a basic physics exam. yet this knowledge is fundamental to the vast majority of discoveries made over the past centuries.
not even to mention how we overestimate the knowledge infrastructure we have in the modern period. information is not nearly as free or accessible as most would like to believe, but this is a separate can of worms.
just because “we” know something doesn’t mean we know something. there is still an absolute abundance of mystery in this world; it is a narrative lie fed to you that “everything has basically already been discovered.”
even in contexts that it seems obvious that the topic has been so well trodden as to be “solved”, like global exploration; it’s a myth “there’s nothing left to discover,” in any context. we haven’t even begun to map the vast majority of this planet. what’s under the seas, under the crust? we don’t know for sure.
exploration, math, physics, engineering, computation, the humanities, etc. don’t let anyone convince you that you were “born too late” to do these things. you live in the most golden age to learn, in fact. it isn’t a tragedy, common knowledge, it’s the most beautiful success of the human race. never before has the average person been so well-endowed to explore and discover.
all it takes is having an engineer’s mindset, to be curious. unfortunately being curious is a lot like being a good person. it sounds great and most people claim it as a personal trait, but the reality is that being curious or being a good person are skills that take actual work and effort to hone. just claiming to be curious or a good person doesn’t cut it, reality demands her actors be method.
I wasn’t being literal about there being nothing left unknown in the whole universe. Just that we’ve (at least in the west) culturally outgrown stuff like ghost stories and other supernatural folklore, and that the X-Files type of conspiracy theory entertainment took its place, and it’s hard to enjoy now because that space has been taken over by a bunch of paranoid lunatics.
We’ll always have “birds aren’t real”
Try being a Warhammer 40k enjoyer. Some people forget that humanity are STILL BAD GUYS in 40k.
As someone who casually enjoys 40K, it has a tendency to attract some of the most rancid people. OSR has this problem too sometimes, but its not nearly as bad as 40k. And the general RC hobby. Part of the reason i don’t fly fpv drones as much as I’d like too, can’t stand the chuds at the airfield I’ve never met a more unhappy group of people, and they don’t even fly anything there either!
Blacksmithing/bladesmithing.
I spent must of my youth fascinated by knives, still am, and this got me into classical metal working. By the time I was 18 I had built a pretty decent working forge in my mom’s backyard.
Shortly after 9/11 I took a week long class in bladesmithing in Arkansas. Outside of Blade Forums and the occasional knife show, I’d never really interacted with other knife people. Not a whole lot going on in my large northern city.
The way those bastards talked openly about anyone that wasn’t white or Christian turned my stomach. I pretty much kept to myself, it hung out with the one chill hippy from Oregon, or the eternally gob-struck British blacksmiths apprentice (You sell GUNS in a GROCERY STORE?!)
I learned a lot on that trip. Nowadays I don’t bring up my knife hobby because I sure as shit don’t want to be mistaken for one of those ignorant cretins.
Surely there are communities of bladesmiths that aren’t total bastards, right?
They mainly make longswords
I haven’t gone to any live events in years. Maybe now there are more millennials and zoomers things are more chill? When I was active it was mostly boomers and I was the young weirdo with earrings that got the side eye every time I opened my mouth.
I’ll have to poke around and find out.
Weightlifters seem to hove about similar parts make up very kind people who just want others to succeed and people who listen to Joe rogan and Jordan Peterson.
Lmao this is so true. One or the other, no in between.
I read an interesting article about 40K Space Marines last year, the problem with them is that some people just don’t get satire no matter how glaringly obvious it is
Starship Troopers is so badass!
My dad legitimately thinks that’s a great action movie. And to be fair, it is.
But he doesn’t understand the deeper meanings.
More meat for the grinder is totally just a bad ass thing to say! Not at all like an orphan crushing machine, for sure.
“The mobile infantry made me the man I am today” shows off two missing legs and one missing arm
All the teachers are injured and in need of prosthetics and assisting devices, all of them served.
As Rico’s dad said, it should be illegal to use schools as recruiting centers.
And while they all need a prosthetic, none of them have one unless it specifically pertains to something that will benefit their military job.
The front desk guy needs 2 legs and an arm, but only has an arm and is in a wheel chair. The arm helps his job stamping new recruits in. The legs serve no purpose but to make his life better, but unnecessary for the job.
Ricos teacher needs an arm, but while he’s teaching, he doesn’t have one. Once he’s back on active duty, he’s allowed a prosthetic arm because it helps the Federation. He doesn’t require an arm to teach.
If it’s not required for your specific position, you don’t deserve to be made whole. It’s a pretty fucked up society overall, and not nearly enough people understand that the humans aren’t the good guys.
In the book there’s an additional interesting scene with Rico and the recruiter: Rico runs in to the recruiter as he’s leaving the office. The recruiter does actually have prosthetic legs, and he’s walking out the door. Rico asks why he didn’t have them on before. The recruiter explains that his job is actually to scare away recruits. He’s supposed to show potential recruits his missing legs as a consequence of his service. That way those that aren’t really serious about it, those who are doing it because it just seems like a cool idea, don’t go through with signing up. He then explains that the government doesn’t require him to be a living warning sign in his off-time, so he puts on his legs and goes about his life that way.
Yeah, but the film is a glaringly obvious satire of the society it depicts, the book isn’t.
Making the aliens actual bugs in the movie was a mistake and washes the rest of the critiques inside the movie away with it.
I really disagree. The aliens being insects is perfect because it provides a justaposition with the human characters. The idea is that the insects are a swarm of mindless drones. Meanwhile, the humans are…well, also a swarm of mindless drones. Which is sort of the point of the movie. The fascist society they inhabit actively dehumanizes them and robs them of their ability to think for themselves. The visuals of the film reinforce this in the larger fight scenes: the mass of gray bodies that constitute the human forces all blend together into a single swarm, much like that of the insects. And by the end of the movie Rico is completely hollowed out as a character: literally just inhabiting the same role as Rasczak, and even parroting all of his phrases from earlier in the film.
Not only are they not the good guys, the military started a fight where none existed in order to justify its existence.
Buenos Aires was 100% a false flag, there’s 0 chance bugs in any system other than this one could have, in less than ten thousand years, encountered humanity and started lobbing asteroids at them.
Even if they had the knowledge of where humanity is from, and the ability to target asteroids in order to reroute them, they simply don’t have the technology to speed an asteroid enough to be a threat to another planetary system.
The military hauled an asteroid to hit a human population center. 100%.
Was Buenos Aires the first attack?
Wut?! How can someone not understand Starship Troopers is satire? What about all of the propaganda cut ins?!
There really is no limit to how dense some dipshits can be. Hell, there are even fascist Star Trek fans, despite the show beating them over the head with stuff like this all the time!
Unfortunately that’s rather understandable. A largely ‘white’ and mostly male cast of mostly humans running around saving the day and ‘defeating/ enlightening’ backwards ‘alien’ cultures in what are basically military ships.
So if you ignore the messages and the actual stories being told and only look at the superficial stuff (as MAGA Morons are wont to do) it does, sadly, pass the facist vibe check.
“star trek went woke”
BITCH STAR TREK WAS WOKE FROM DAY ONE GET BENT
I really blame the games industry as a whole for this. They keep making games with Space Marines as the protagonists, where their violence is presented as justified, when a lore-friendly space marine game should be like “No Russian” missions all the time and the resulting failure this causes to their Empire. This constant “whitewashing” of the lore, is what has attracted a ton of people.
I would LOVE to see a WH40k setting where the space marines are lore-accurate murdering an entire multi-billion hive-city for some minor heresy by a few thousand of the people on the 925th-sub-basement, and you’re playing random ganger Scumface Mc Spikearms who’s just trying to survive.
So a WH40K/Spec-Ops: The Line mashup.
The Line was an anti-shooter, in the sense that it felt like a generic third-person shooter while constantly hammering the “you shouldn’t be having fun playing this because war is awful and full of atrocities” messaging. It was actually a fairly decent critique of the shooters that were prevalent when the game was developed. It came out when games like Gears of War, Resident Evil, Mass Effect, and Red Dead Redemption were dominating the third-person shooter market, while the FPS market was dominated by Halo and COD.
Eh, I feel the message of Spec Ops was really sabotaged by the poor in-game systems.
There’s a mission where you have to defend a point, and you get the option to drop white phosphorus. But that mission is really easy, and you can easily play it for hours and hours, killing an infinite number of enemies. It doesn’t progress without pushing the button.
And then it berates you, the player, for pushing the button.
This feels really weird to me. I can see the point in the distance, but it really doesn’t work for me, since you can obviously just murder people till eternity as well.
And the game has several hidden “better ways”, like shooting the rope at the hanging, where it will reward you for doing it better. But it doesn’t have that option elsewhere, like the white phosphorus option.
Honestly, there’s a big disconnect between some of the scenes, and the heavyhanded message.
Contrast it with “no Russian”, which is a map that’s offered with zero commentary, letting you shoot unarmed civilians, but not punishing you at all if you don’t. And no matter what you do, the end result is the same. That’s a system that fits with everything in the game, it doesn’t have to swing a message in your face, and it doesn’t have to break with normal gameplay to insert elements required for the message.
See, I always thought this comparison falls flat, because No Russian and Spec Ops both give you the same amount of choice - either you complete the mission or not - and both give you no alternative way to proceed and no way to prevent it other than close the game. That Spec Ops makes you push buttons for the bad thing to happen rather than allow you to chicken out and be a passive rather than active participant is a point in it’s favour.
I always hear people talk about the white phosphorus part of the game, but the game doesn’t give you a choice there. I much prefer the parts where you are actually given a choice. The one that I remember the best is the civilians, you don’t have to kill them and I just fired a warning shot and they quickly dispersed. Apparently some people will gun them down.
You hear people talk about it, because it’s so bad and jarring and forced. People keep bringing up specops as some great writing inversion of a shooter trope, when it really just doesn’t get what agency is.
If you don’t give a player agency, you can’t then berate them for doing something wrong, because they didn’t actually do a thing. The phosphorous part of the game is a thing you don’t get a say in, but the game blames you as a player.
It’s like me blaming you for reading the word phosphorus, when you had basically no choice in that.
If you don’t give agency, you can only ever blame the character. And the writer made the characters, not the player.
Maybe that’s kind of the point? Both the player and the character chose to be there in the first place and civilian casualties are accepted as an inevitable during war.
Apropos , the Necromunda video game was such a disappointment :(
yeah, agreed. But Rogue Trader was remarkably on brand.
There were a LOT of parts where you basically had to decide the life and death of tens to hundreds of thousands. And often, the ethical thing was NOT the in-game right choice. For example, you could allow refugees aboard, it gets you nothing, but some of them will try to sabotage you. If you kill them all, you even get piety points for killing (some) heretics.
I recall one of the developer replying to a comment that said “If I’m evil, I get cool items, if I’m good, I get nothing, why is that?” and they replied with “If you’re doing it for a rewards, you’re not really being good, are you now?”
“If you’re doing it for a rewards, you’re not really being good, are you now?”
This is moon logic. Yes, that’s how it works in the real world, but you aren’t in the real world. You’re playing a game.
A Warhammer game. Being good is meant to be hard and I never consider evil options any more in games because they are just stupid when there is no reason to do it.
The article discusses this; basically the video games want you to at least slightly like the protagonist you’re playing as, which means they can’t entirely be the monstrous caricatures they were designed to be.
I don’t get it why not though, Spec Ops The Line was not a technical marvel or an outstanding gameplay experience even for its time, but we are still talking about it for its message.
Meanwhile stellaris exists with multiple different options for genocide.
Dude, you can genetically modify a race to live shorter lives, taste good and make them more subservient and weaker. That shit is beyond genocide. From chattel to cattle.
God-Emperor (mostly dead sitting on a cybernetic throne preserving his life, requires like 100 psychics a day to feed on to live) wants to spread his Religious-no-religion religion across the cosmos, and the brutality with which is required is a small price to pay for industry.
And then they choose to like the guy unironically. But if they’re really into Slaneesh then they just get a special brand of weird.
requires like 100 psychics a day
1,000 per day. Every day. For Ten. Thousand. Years.
So you know, just a drop in the bucket, no big deal.
And to be fairrrrrrr… The emperor himself wants no religion at all, and it’s the corrupt and zealous officials that spread the “the emperor is a god” thing, he straight up destroyed a planet because a chapter of marines converted it to Emperorism once. That was before he got stuck on his death throne, obviously.
Anyone who genuinely admires ANY of the factions in 40k just doesn’t understand it.
They all suck. There are no good guys. Honestly I’d say the closest thing to good guys there are would be the tyanids, because they’re just doing what tyanids do. You don’t get mad at cows for being cows. Or wolves for being wolves. They are what they are and they do what they do. It isn’t malicious intent.
It’the A̴l̴l̴ C̶̳̑ọ̷̓͂n̴̼͕͂̄ṡ̴̹̕u̶̘̿m̶̜̿͜ȋ̵̲́͜n̴͈̜̎g̴̰̝̈̇ Ḩ̴̛͖͚̣̯̟̗̮͔͓̝̜͆̓̈́̈́̇̓͒̕Ừ̶̲̓̃̂̉̎͛̀̒̕̚N̵̨̳͈͙̘̭̩̹͈̙͈͙͕̮͋̿̆͐̅̇͆̅̋̈G̵̛̛͇̗̘͓̐̓̆̓̌̓̃̀̂͛́̉͘͘͝Ę̸̙̩͈͕̒̄̋́̍́̔̔̉͝͠R̸̛͇͚̜͍͉̺̋̽̀̎͌̈́͗̀͌̓̊̂͜
Look at this traitor here^^^^
All praise be to Omnissiah. May his leadership and grace guide you to the one true path. Give yourself to him and become one.
Yeah they are really fucked up, but man…what great lore! Best thing about 40k baby
1,000 per day. Every day. For Ten. Thousand. Years. So you know, just a drop in the bucket, no big deal.
3,650,000,000 psykers are sacrificed since the Emperor went on the Golden Throne. That’s just over half the population of Earth.
Writers have issue with scope. 1,000 a day seems shocking until you compare it a 1,000 out of a galaxy of trillions or whatever comes next. It is a literal drop in the bucket.
I think the 1,000 was picked cause it’s high enough of a number for our brains to be like “That’s terrible!”
Honestly I keep forgetting the Imperium supposedly controls over 1 million worlds.
They really do have a problem with scope.
Space marines are bad ass in a fight but there’s only 1000 per chapter if they’re adhering to the codex, but that’s nowhere near enough for an entire galaxy.
I think the problem is that despite everyone being evil, they are all also cool, and there is no real satire in it when there is no point being made.
It’s just a glaring lack of critical thinking brought on by our (sometimes willingly) ignorant masses. Satire is dead in this country because we didn’t have the capacity to comprehend it.
This country of Lemmy?
Is my American-centrism showing? My bad, but the majority of this problem is from here unfortunately.
I think we’ve all got our idiots, yours are just a bit louder!
Yeah, this was on full display when Helldivers 2 launched. So many people just didn’t get the satire, and unironically leaned into the messaging.
For the unaware, Helldivers 2 is basically a Starship Troopers video game.
Starship Troopers the book was flat out propaganda. It’s only the movie that is satire.
The book is an exploration of and presents an argument for militarism. That alone doesn’t make it propaganda. While many of the sentiments, implications, premises in the book carry a clear bias, the book nevertheless invites the reader to engage with and reflect on the ideology rather than aiming to manipulate and indoctrinate the reader.
I’d say the earnest argument presented by Heinlein in ST is flawed and morally objectionable, but not a piece of propaganda.
So the book presents an argument for and has a bias towards militarism, but it’s not propaganda? Are you also going to tell me that Atlas Shrugged invites the reader to explore whether capitalism is good or not? Hard disagree.
I mean… yeah? I don’t agree with it, but I feel like its to detailed and nuanced to be merely propaganda. Propaganda would be shit like the Red Dawn remake or almost any movie involving the US military that tends to be to shallow to be anything but propaganda.
I think it would help if you clarify what “propaganda” means to you, as I have a sense we mean different things.
For me, I understand propaganda as media/content/communication aimed at manipulating people towards a particular point of view. It’s often characterized by reduction, misrepresentation/deception, disingenuous argument, and etc. That is also to say that I make a distinction between manipulation and persuasive argument. So, a piece of content can make an argument, display inherent biases, employ persuasive techniques, without being propaganda. That’s because all forms of expression necessarily hold an ideological position.
It was basically a commercial for the military from what I can remember. There wasn’t subtlety. The military was put on a pedestal. People that hadn’t been in the military didn’t get to vote. The enemy were reduced to inhuman arachnids. It’s propaganda in the same way Top Gun is.
But my point was mainly the movie and book were very different.
I enjoy Powerlifting, Fishing, and Carpentry. I don’t have any friends from those hobbies.
Oh ya… Gym goers are notoriously right wing… It is annoying.
Even in Europe (where I am from), most gym goers are people who would have voted for Trump. I think it might be due to the fact they are generally younger? I don’t know. I do know that it is annoying trying to befriend someone and then you find out they are right wing. God damn.
Might be for the fact that gym heads spend way too much time in the gym listening to Joe Rogan or some other moron’s podcast.
I don’t think gym goers usually listen to podcasts in the gym. They probably do it outside the gym. But again, they could just as well listen to someone like Peter Attia or Mike Israetel. It doesn’t really answer the question: Why is it that gym goers are generally right wing? Maybe they are not and I am just suffering from a selection bias.
You could befriend a fish?
I’ve only interacted with woodworkers online where people are generally helpful and supportive. Are they really nutjobs in real life?
Does programming count as a hobby? I waste my free time on it… There’s this funny stereotype, of a queer programmer with long, quirky socks, and maybe even a fursona. Despite being a small percentage, such types are often overrepresented online. It used to bother me a little.
Nowadays I’m so, so glad when someone I’m talking to is part of that group. It usually means I don’t need to worry about them being weirdly sexist, like women don’t suffer enough in STEM already, or insisting that we need to keep politics out of tech (i.e. they want their politics to rule, unquestioned).
(Need something more tangible? Look no further than uncle bob. I’ve seen his books in classrooms, in the office, and let’s not speak of online mentions. Can you imagine how many know or even read them, yet have no idea how screwed up he is?)
Silly feelings on my part? Perhaps. One less thing to worry about, though.
The old meme was to “hide your power level”. Meaning don’t reveal the extent of your right wing beliefs. That has reversed in the past 10 years.
You don’t even have to question how it used to be. People were out in the open before too. Another popular meme was that women belong in the kitchen. The “make me a sammich” meme was a common joke. Programming was only possible to be learned by white men. Never mind that women pioneered the field in the early days. Also anyone of Asian descent in the field were merely cheaters or just proficient at copying.
They all drank this weird koolaid about how leftist they were (they still do). It’s strange. I think because many guys never left their podunk town. So being exposed to the slightest bit of different things through the internet made them very different from everyone else their christian conservative home town. They supported rather milquetoast things like legalization of pot and carried an affinity for anime. So that meant they were very progressive relative to the god fearing cross burning klan shit happening all around them in real life.
It’s such a shame. I feel like programmers were way more left only a decade or so ago.
I wonder how true that is. Maybe they were considered left in their time, but something we see differently today, then. I really should hit the books on this one.
It’s a bit of a tangent(!), but Parrish gave a talk I think is relevant here. In Programming is Forgetting (transcript, watching optional), she analyzes a book about hackers from the eighties and dissects the ethics of hacker culture—a very loose definition, mind you.
This is all beside the point, because while interesting throughout what I’d really like to point to is the section on the rewiring of the PDP-1. Agree or disagree with any other, that part made me rethink how I saw older generations of programmers. I consider the dignity of all people an important tenet of my leftist values today, and women then were second-class, even in computing. Even when excelling.
So I feel like things have actually improved overall, but it’s difficult to say how much. That really is a shame, it ought to be a lot clearer.
Ah such a sad anecdote. I’m a fan of Hamilton.
It’s wild how on the orange website I can read entirely sensible discussions about tricky Bash semantics or whatever, while people in a parallel thread are seriously arguing the Trump admin’s repressions are dwarfed by… whatever “repressions” they think happened during Covid. And I don’t even click on the threads about disabilities (especially autism) anymore because it’s so predictably sad.
The comment sections are frequently just exhausting. People who read PG blog posts and then make comments pretending to be serious. Lunatics.
I’ve had to stop watching/reading a load of programming stuff because numerous times I’ve found out the creator was just horrifically racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic or transphobic. It got too tiring having to investigate every author (not that it was difficult, they’re usually VERY open about being bigots).
Amateur Radio.
The first video I found on Baofeng Radio guides is on a youtube channel run by some right winger that sounds like a SovCit, who makes “jokes” about people who wear mask and have this “gay humor”.
Like bruh
(I mean, I guess it makes sense. Right-wing “anarchists” are skeptical of “government control” and are the type of people to want to use radios instead of smartphones. Buts its ironic that encryption is illegal… But I assume they probably just ignore the “no encryption” rule anyways since they are a SovCit.)
Not only that, but they’re the ones ignoring getting licensed at all.
It’s not quite the same thing, but Meshtastic tends to be more lefty, or at least not outright sovcit. Don’t need a license and getting started is relatively cheap.
What’s funny is that while Vikings are mostly remembered for their warrior culture, their success as a diaspora came more from their merchant and sailing culture. THEY were the ‘immigrants.’
Merchants in this case translates to slavers, so Nazis can feel right at home in that regard. Your point still stands tough.
Also farming. They spent a LOT of time herding cattle and planting veggies.
We come from the land of the ice and snow
From the midnight sun where the hot springs flow
The hammer of the gods
Will drive our ships to new lands
I am interested in survivalism but it seems like most survivalists are a bunch of god-fearing crazy racist motherfuckers.
maybe the best part of being trans is that your trans friend group can buy a ranch in the mountains and stock up on guns and alpaca and you never get mistaken for a race war wisher
Guns and Alpacas, the two most precious resources in the world! We should combine them a a single element since an Alpaca without a gun is totally useless! /s
Brings a new meaning to ‘pack animal’
The prepper response to covid absolutely broke my heart. I already had an emergency pandemic kit good to go and my whole family in N95 masks from day 1 (in America). We had plenty of canned food and water. I thought, “This is it. We’re ready for this.” And then all the others sided with the fucking virus. 🤮😭
I remember when survivalists were predominately hippie types who feared a right-wing generated apocalypse - like corporatism collapsing the economy, or warmongers starting WW3. The back-to-nature ones learned self-sufficient organic farming, the tech ones bought nitrogen-filled plastic bins of grain, and they all grew weed. Then when rednecks joined the club it became more about homemade ammunition and defending the perimeter.
Whenever right-wingers show the slightest interest in anything the left-wingers flee with their tails between their legs.
left tends to be pro-social for solutions, right tends to be pro-violence for solutions, so… yeah…
If you go far enough left or right, you end up in the same spot.
If you insist on putting everything on a one dimensional scale, you come up with stupid, obviously false conclusions.
Hitler was 🤏 this close to a classless, stateless, moneyless society. /s
Dude. This. I grew up camping. I am into bushcraft, survival stuff too, and every interesting survival youtuber seems like a ticking time bomb, if not already openly right wing crazy.
Man, I was really invested in that in like 2016 but in 2018 was the election of Bolsonaro. Some time before, during the election and until now every fucking content creator or community around this hobby became a cesspool of right wing dickheads worshipping this fascist.
As someone from a small town in the pacific northwest, it feels like they always have been. It was just a case of the quiet part not being said out loud or them masking it enough those with lower exposure didn’t see it.
I drive a pickup, grew up hunting and fishing and I’m tall, pretty thick, tattooed all to hell and bearded… the amount of “hell yeah brother” followed by some vial, racist, homo/transphobic shit I have said to me is staggering. The moment of pushback has become a high for me. I’m almost baiting them from a conversation about tree stands and elk piss formulas into some fucked statement about trans athlete’s just too feel something.
That said, it isn’t all of us so I don’t want to gate keep survivalism and general outdoorsiness. Always willing to teach a flytie, how to dig a shit hole and the easiest way to catch water with a tarp.
Same boat here (PNW big bearded dude). I actually got handed a 'White Pride’s card last week. Before I had the full beard nobody ever said racists shit to me unless it was accusatory. Now they think I’m on their side.
Doesn’t help that I’m into survivalism, permaculture, and off-grid living. I’m constantly fighting the algorithm that wants to feed me ultra conservative bullshit.
The algorithm is insane for that crap. I’m in a band with a bunch of other 40 something dudes and the shit they get inntheor feeds is wild. I’m too paranoid to raw dog the Internet or have conventional social media so I miss most of the hateful crap. The screen shots they share in the group chat are wild.
One of the guys owns a roofing business and that’s likely the most toxic feed I’ve seen. Its a miracle he isn’t fully maga-activated.
One thing I get a trill from when I receive these kinds of comments is to act like I do not get what the person means so, as an exemple, they need to go from a veiled reference to “darker people” to an outright racist statement. Then, I keep on acting like I don’t understand what they mean, This is often very funny although sad at the same time but having someone trying to explain their racist/*phobic joke while they realize how much they need to expose themselves is pretty fun to me.
Bushcrafting content has a fine line when it pushes over into doomsday prepper. I can get the ideas of having a bit of food/water stocked up for a normal emergency. But if you are preparing industrial quantities of things to survive for years in a bunker you should seek help.
“prepper” vs “Prepper” with a capital “P”.
The first learns and practices actual useful skills – gardening, food preservation, repairing their own things, etc. The later are dorks buying a ton of unnecessary shit shilled by right-wing influencers cosplaying as “entirely self-sufficient”.
Well if you just get a commercial freeze dryer, generator and alcohol fuel distillation setup you can be completely self sufficient!
Freeze drying on a large scale takes a LOT of time. You need to be ready to treat food prep like a full time job for it to make serious financial sense.
I would think other preservation methods are easier to go with really. Salt, dehydrate, smoke, pickle, fermemt.
Hydroponics as well I guess. My DIY automated grow room with a water pump, grow lights, heater and plant shaker (for pollination) always has people think I’m growing weed but I just want chillies and tomatoes.
Airsoft.
It’s so fun but also run mostly by straight up Nazis.
Isn’t that only because they use it to practice live shooter scenarios?
Yes, they have this hard on for shooting anyone they disagree with
I own guns. I love my guns. But I’m not weird about it, I’m all about responsible gun ownership, I don’t have an entire armory, and I ESPECIALLY don’t open carry.
Ammosexuals give the rest of gun enthusiasts a very bad name.
I’m weird about it. But I’ve always been weird about it. I’m diagnosed as on the autism spectrum, and it’s been a particular interest of mine since i was in elementary school. The only reason I don’t have an entire armory is because I’m far, far too poor. As it is, I’ve got, um, 10?, I think? With three more planned, plus an SBR and silencer(s)? And yeah, I’ll talk your ear off about gun rights. And motorcycles (I only have one of those).
OTOH, I also care about LGBTQ+ rights, and I’m working on an instructor certification specifically to train LGBTQ+, racial/ethnic/religious minority, SW, etc. people that aren’t going to feel comfortable in any traditional gun space. If it’s uncomfortable to me when an instructor goes off on a Christian nationalist rant, it’s gotta be 10x worse for people that can’t pass as a cis- het- white person. No one should have to deal with that shit just so they can get basic safety and marksmanship instruction.
Why… why do you not know how many guns you have?
I don’t use a lot of them regularly, or at all. I use my Canik, Rock Island 1911, and AR-15 for competitions every month. If I don’t use it, I don’t think about it very often. Like, my Mosin Nagant? That was a gift from my dad. I’ve shot it exactly once, and realized that 7.62x54mmR from a bolt action, stipper-clip-fed carbine that has a 10#, gritty trigger, and exceptionally poor iron sights is not a fun rifle to shoot. Now it’s hanging on a set of deer antlers that I inherited from my grandfather. The Winchester 1894? It’s over a century old, and while it’s still functional, .38-55 ammunition is somewhat difficult to find.
Just stuff like that. I don’t think about a lot of them very often, so counting them gets difficult.
Once I get my pistol instructor certification, I’ll probably be using my Ruger Mk IV mostly as a gun to let other people learn on. It’s .22LR, so it’s a very forgiving firearm.
At this point, I’m getting guns for a specific purpose. For instance, I want an SBR AR-15 and silencer mostly for doing PCSL. I plan on getting a CZ Shadow II Compact as a carry gun, and also using it for IDPA. I need (well, want) to get a Glock 17P to use as a training aid; it does all of the things that a regular Glock 17 does, but it’s incapable of firing.
Hopefully that makes some kind of sense.
How many pairs of underwear do you have? How many screwdrivers? After you pass 2 of something, it becomes something you don’t keep in mind. I know where all the guns I have that are not in the safe are around my house (no kids), but I have to take mental inventory to get a count of how many I own. Same thing with computers, rc cars, and other hobbies.
I like my guns and I am weird. I do try to not let most folks know about my gun hobby because they’ll make assumptions about me that I don’t have the energy nor patience to dispel.
No fucking shit. As a redneck that hunts and goes fishing, it’s miserable being around pretty much any other dude that is a hunter and finds out that I hunt. No hunting buddies or anything for me. I’ve seen a prayer circle at the gun range before.
Good thing I like solitude, I guess.
Linux and crypto users. Sometimes, people just use monero for it’s technical merits…
technical merits.
Like buying ‘goods’ on the internet ;)
Yes, cryptocurrency as currency. What a concept!
Linux community is exact opposite no? Like conservatives had to make their own distro at some point because “there are too many trans people on github”
Maybe linux users are mostly okay, I don’t interact with many, but my survey of linux youtubers implies a right-libertarian lean.
Oh that’s actually youtube being unique lol. I guess they are owned by google so community is not set there.
A highlight of linux culture is in this app btw, https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/unixsocks
Nah come on.
FOSS is predominantly leftie territory isn’t it?
Conservatives are Microsoft & Apple weenies.
I changed my views over crypto for some part, although I still think rugpulls, NFTs, and scamcoins are also bad.
I dislike crypto and have grave concerns about anyone participating.
I’m telling you, this is gonna be privacy’s big year.
