Buddy, where have you been the past 20 years? The kids who were boots on the ground are now in their late 30s and 40s, and many of them are staunchly anti-military thanks to their experiences.

The US military runs one of the largest propaganda campaigns in the world, from Hollywood movies and TV commercials to Raytheon funding colleges and recruitment officers walking the halls of high schools. Their entire thing is tricking impressionable young kids into doing the dirty work for the wealthy. When I was in college, the seniors in the game design program were working on a VR boot camp scenario in Second Life that the army wanted to take with them to schools as a recruitment tool.

But no war like the culture war, I guess.

I’m not sure exactly what you mean by why this stuff matters, but the stuff that you’d be generating with AI for a game wouldn’t be a loading screen or something - it would be assets. Character models, weapons, buildings, textures, voices, that’s the kind of stuff that companies want to generate with AI. Right now, you can buy stock assets to use, and that’s where all the garbage asset flips come from, but companies want to replace employees with software that makes their own assets for them for cheap. Replace the people who make games with software that spits out gacha products. But if they aren’t protected under copyright, then any asset flipper can use your main character - taking the model right from your AAA game - and throw it into their 99-cent asset flip scam, and you can’t do anything about it.

I believe Steam has the policy on AI that they do both because of public opinion about the use of AI (and the way it’s being used to steal from creators) and because AI generated games tend to fall into the same category of outright scams that NFT games do, and games containing NFTs are straight up banned from Steam.

Edit: Going back and reading through the article, I see that they were straight up putting in AI generated images into the game as skins and loading screens and stuff. These also fall under the asset flip thing, especially if they’re so obvious that they have six fingers like the zombie Santa. The same goes for their social media promotional material. You can just straight up use CoD’s ads for your own game and they can’t do anything about it.

People are upset by the use of it because of the poor quality, and, as I said, these companies want to replace the people who make games with software that churns out slop to consume. They think of gamers as pigs at a trough and developers as leeches stealing their hard earned profits.

Hostages are taken from their homes or jobs with the express intent to threaten their lives, and exchange them for a political outcome.

While this describes them perfectly.

According to a US judge last year, “boneless chicken wings” does not mean the chicken wings don’t have bones in them.

I’ve always held to the rule of divide your age in half and add 7 as a good judge of the absolute youngest age you should consider dating someone.

At 18, that would mean 16 is the youngest they should consider dating. At 38, it would be 26.

I’m right around the same age as you, and I feel much the same way. I can relate to and was on very good terms with the high school kids I used to work with at my old job all through my late 20s, but I could never imagine myself dating someone who is in college or just graduated. Even at that age, people are still developing so much and lack life experience that it’s hard to relate to them on the same level. I could relate to them in the same way as the kids I worked with, in a “I remember what it was like to be that age” kind of way, but that’s about it.

I thought you were OP, so add their line about democracy being driven from the bottom up to your post and tell me if you can see the “If you people had just voted for the Democrats harder” in there.

Because usually when people talk like that, they’re leading up to blaming the Democrats losing on x group (usually either Millennials or a minority) not voting hard enough.

Also because voting is supposed to be the easiest action you can take, but for so many, even that is a risk to the roof over their head and the food in their bellies. The system has been rigged to the point where even the most basic of rights aren’t guaranteed, and we need to provide that for people if they’re ever going to be able to act.

My point is that for many people in this country, that’s practically an impossible task. You can either choose to vote in your gerrymandered district and get fired for taking a day off from work under right to work laws, or you can put food on the table. You can take the time off of work to get a license you may or may not ever use beyond proof under voter ID laws, again at risk of losing your job.

The people who can and don’t because their rights aren’t up for debate every 4 years are one thing. But many of us are already political by necessity, and it means nothing in the end.

Voting harder isn’t going to fix things.

Fuck that and the fuck the ADL. There is no unity to be had with fascists.

The system was designed from the ground up to make sure only the right kind of people had an actual say in it. The people at the top make damn sure that the people at the bottom have as little freedom to act on their right to vote as possible.

US media loves to go on about the horrible working conditions in China, claiming 11-hour days and all kinds of other sweatshop working conditions because nothing sells like a good tragedy, but nobody talks about the working conditions at home and talking amongst ourselves is often made difficult, either by cultural or business practices. It’s illegal to punish employees for talking about how much they make with each other, but that doesn’t stop businesses from doing it anyway, because people here simply don’t know their rights as a worker and companies love to take advantage of it. So we think we have a clear grasp of how the Chinese live while still believing that people here work 40-hour weeks and somewhere in the cultural zeitgeist is still the belief that people can afford a house with a white picket fence, a dog/cat, and 2.5 kids on one person’s salary.

I think this still weighs more than 28 lbs

Andrew Wimmer was handcuffed and taken to jail on January 22, 2003 because he refused to protest in a ““designated protest zone”” that was out of sight of the President as well as local and national TV news cameras.

A woman, armed with a ““We Love You Bush”” sign showed up at the same corner shortly after Wimmer’s arrest. Wimmer asked the police if they were going to arrest her if she didn’t move and they said, ““no.”” The police also allegedly blocked the national press camera crews and an AP reporter from approaching the protest zone to do reporting.

https://www.aclu.org/documents/dissent-forced-be-out-sight-and-out-mind

If we’re talking specifically about art, historically, there was the patronage system where wealthy people would pay artists that they liked to largely just spend their days painting whatever they liked. It wasn’t something every artist could take advantage of (Van Gogh died a poor pauper because his paintings basically didn’t sell at all until after his death, for example), but it did exist.

Also, genuine question if anybody knows, what about the philosophers of old? Did they get paid as teachers of their school of theory or something?

It’s not like there was ever a time when people simply didn’t work at all, but there is a large portion of the population today who don’t feel like their work is anything other than busywork with no reason to it, and that makes them miserable even doing something that they love. There are people out there who love picking up garbage for a living because they know that they’re doing something that makes a difference.

The original post was in response to the meme’s statement that people hate capitalism but don’t know that they hate capitalism, saying that there are few people on Lemmy who don’t specifically blame the problems of capitalism on capitalism (in short, “fuck capitalism, all my homies hate capitalism”), with the criticism I read being directed at pro-authoritarian regime people, not pro-communism. The fact that people took criticism of those who handwave away the wrongdoings of oligarchies because they espouse to be socialist/communist as an attack on communists says more about them than it does the OP.

A perfect summary of their point and mine that I realized after being reminded that r/theDonald was a thing is that Lemmy is so leftist that our version of r/theDonald would be r/thePutin. Although, with the current state of the Republican party, that might be a more conservative leaning sub than one would expect…

I never said that there were transphobes on other instances - I said that your sea-lioning behavior was alike that of transphobes on other forms of social media and then directly referenced Twitter and Reddit. As is the cherry-picking.

Also, unprompted? This entire thread, including the removed original comment, has been about the political leanings of Lemmy as a whole, and my comment was that we’re so left-wing, that even our extremists are left-wing - a point that you continue to ignore. The only complaining about specific groups I’ve done has been the direct result of demands by you and others to specify who I mean. Should I have referred to them as extremists or maybe radicalists? Because that’s what caused you to demand that I specify who I was talking about in the first place.

Again:

Reread my comments and the quotes about the defederation of Hexbear and have a look in the mirror: You and others here are guilty of the same behavior that caused people to demand the defederation of Hexbear from multiple instances.

I’m not “sealioning,” I asked you what you meant by “racism” from Hexbear, proof or not.

No, you didn’t. The closest you came to talking about racism was when you said:

It’s worth noting that I’ve seen far more people thinking of citizens of North Korea as pitiful subhumans than support for the DPRK in general, and fewer still who support the DPRK extending to the ROK.

Which didn’t disagree with my original post it was responding to and a statement that I agreed with in a now removed post that also pointed out how some users had become so irony poisoned that they had actually started believing their own nonsense. You then started quoting theory at me while claiming that nobody actually believes what they’re saying and cherry-picking my comments and calling them “ableist,” alongside a mod who also straw-manned me, accusing me of being media illiterate and supporting the US’s forever war in the Middle East based on a single statement about the worst of the extremism on the entirety of Lemmy that we have to deal with, which pales in comparison to the right-wingers of the rest of the internet.

Now you move on from unsupported claims of racism to unsupported claims of transphobia, and I still don’t know what you’re actually talking about.

Show me on the straw-man where I claimed anybody was transphobic instead of saying that you were sea-lioning and cherry-picking my comments to ignore my point that I’ve stated several times now, like the transphobes on other social media platforms do.

In short:

As for the Hexbear defederation, aye, that was the justification the admins over at Hexbear gave when they defederated from Blahaj suddenly and without warning while the admins of Blahaj and Lemm.ee were in talks with their userbases about the large volume of complaints about Hexbear users’ behavior and calls to defederate from Hexbear. The rest of the context is that up until that point, the admins on all sides had been on good terms with each other and had acted on any issues the admins had had - including said incidents which had happened in the past, and that the threads on both Blahaj and Lemm.ee where the admins of both instances were gathering feedback from their respective communities were brigaded by Hexbear users spamming emojis on comments to the point where the admins on both instances had to hide all posts by Hexbear users.

To quote some of the complaints from various users across various instances at the time:

But the downside is that it’s. Just. So. Exhausting. I fully agree that everything they discuss has a political undertone to it in some way. It feels like they just cannot turn off, and I always have to be on my guard when they get involved in any discussion, even if it’s nominally about a completely non-political topic. Even when they’re making high effort posts instead of spamming emojis and pig poop balls, every discussion feels like a minefield, where the slightest misstep gets you punished with a “here’s a response that implies/outright states you’re woefully misinformed at best and a protofascist nazi at worst, here’s a link to an obscure book written by a communist scholar 50 years ago that you should read before even trying to discuss this topic.” Hexbear getting involved in a discussion is the discourse equivalent of a group playing 4-player FFA Smash Bros. with items on and someone rolls up and demands 1v1, no items, tournament ruleset only.

Sound familiar? Because you should reread the entirety of the comment section on this post with that in mind. I think you’ll find a lot of similar behavior in here. That quote of theirs in the middle is an excellent summary of my interaction with the mod up there.

It really feels like the people who grew up on 4chan and later came out as queer, but never learned how toxic that was

Hexbear is what happens when kids (I hope they’re all in their early 20s or teens, because otherwise this gets much sadder) spend years reading on leftist theory but have zero real world experience. They get intense, volatile, argumentative and have no idea how those points reflect on themselves and in reality. This is why they go around prancing those absurd beliefs and fencing anyone who disagrees out, while also dogpiling and swarming communities that don’t agree: They only know what its like to be leftists in theory… Unfortunately for them, their echo chamber is going to go on and be the equivalent of a left wing /pol/.

Enough with the sea-lioning.

Hexbear, whose users have such a reputation for their hostility and aggressive attacks on other instances that instances have defederated them entirely rather than deal with them - the one I’m posting from included - are not “just a group of Anarchists and Marxists hanging out.” They’ve openly called for their mods to “take over” other instances. That’s not “just hanging out” or “irony poisoning” or whatever else you want to paint it as.

I started this out trying to avoid naming them because my point was that apart from a tiny sliver of crazies over there, we’re a far cry from the right-wing cesspool that is the rest of social media, and even the worst here are leftists because that’s how fairly united we are in terms of the political spectrum.

But I’m done. I get enough sea-lioning from transphobes on other platforms, I’m sick of dealing with it here as well. This thread has shown me just what caliber of people .ml is - mods included - and I find it not all that different from Twitter or Reddit. The only difference is that you guys argue Communist theory in a memes thread as a replacement for debunked transphobic studies. So go back to “hanging out” with the Hexbear chuds because I’m not going to spend another ounce of energy entertaining this nonsense anymore.

Hexbear is the Lemmy equivalent of 4chan, and like the QAnons there who started by posting their garbage and racism ironically, if you say something ironically enough times, you either begin to believe it yourself or it becomes indistinguishable from your beliefs.

And that was my whole point, and OP’s as well. That the rest of the internet has to deal with the right-wing MAGA chuds and QAnon crazies, and over here, we have Hexbear because Lemmy is just that left-wing. Even our chuds are leftists. But my patience has run out, and you all can join them in the sin bin. Goodbye and good riddance.