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I would much rather see a concerted effort to like not do wars, instead of this overtly obvious attempt to stir the pot.

How is my take bad? I didn’t say don’t own what you like, I said people around you become irrational. That’s factual, not a take. You can choose to react any way you want to it.

No faster way to make otherwise normal-seeming people go full-on rabies-mode is to make a public statement about a kind of music you don’t like.

It’s wild how people take that as a personal attack. In every instance, in a public space, if you type out distaste in a music genre someone is going to lose all reason and restraint and come at you swinging fucking viking axes.

I don’t like music in major-key but make an exception for Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater Revival, who specifically talked about how he made the juxtaposition between upbeat music and lyrics about the apocalypse and doom a deliberate choice and made one of the all-time classic songs.

What the fuck are you talking about and who the fuck are you talking to

He’s acting like Light Yagami from Death Note, not Picard.

Oh in this regard, I blame internet counter-culture not being taken seriously enough in the early 2000’s, those times that we thought all these “ironic nazis” were a fad that would wash out like so many times before, this scene is where people found each other and started creating online movements out of the general, passing angst that everyone feels now and then. Depressed teens finding each other did more to kill Picard than any other media.

When Somethingawful purged their low-effort users and those users went and formed 4-chan that led directly to much of our current cultural norms, it seems to many like a footnote in internet history, but that led to the formation of several fetid fandoms and subcultures that went on to get signal-boosts from foreign powers looking for every opportunity to play both sides of our nation’s potential stress-points. And they did this to great effect, this is where we saw jokes and memes turn into political movements.

I don’t know if we could have done anything at the time, maybe if hosts of popular forums and boards and social media were not paid off immediately by Russian bot farms to let them rampage around, maybe if government stepped in early and nipped this interference and passed some kind of legislation against hate-speech on the internet, maybe we could have saved Picard.

As Gen X, I think I’ve seen all these cycles over and over again, media makes ostensible “role models” that people pattern themselves after, then the pattern changes suddenly as it does and leaves a generation stuck without direction as new role models take the stage and make all the previous adopters resentful of society.

It’s part of the “nothing ever happens” generation desperate to have a narrative to follow. If they’re going to feel disengaged and disconnected from how complicated politics has become in an increasingly complicated world… WELL MIGHT AS WELL DUMB THIS SHIT BACK DOWN, OOHRAH WWE WRESTLEMANIA YEAH BROTHA ACTION

I too grew up in an age of movies like Star Wars fighting an overtly fascist empire, of Indiana Jones killing nazis, of countless kid’s shows and cartoons emphasizing values like being accepting and not judging people by appearances, of shows like Star Trek explaining the complexity of human societies and using aliens to relay messages of understanding and empathy with others, of science and educational shows like everything on PBS… I thought FOR SURE that these lessons being seen by everyone would lead to a brighter future of mutual compassion and understanding between people.

Holy shit was I wrong. People didn’t watch ANY of that shit, and if they did, they didn’t think about it, and certainly didn’t take any lessons from it. A vast majority of media-consumers don’t engage with their entertainment I’ve learned, they just experience it and move on without any attempt at making mental effort. Even the lightest mental effort is too much for most people. I’m literally shocked we have the society we do knowing now exactly how ignorant most people are.

There are times when you want a brilliant college student on your team, But you need seasoned professionals to help them through the things they’ve never seen before and never done before.

Honestly, any sweet, white-haired old lady who keeps pictures of her dogs and grandkids on her desk who’s been doing data entry for 15 years could do circles around these clowns.

But she might also have the wisdom and perception to know we’re not supposed to be doing this “work” at all, which is why he recruits naive teenagers and college kids who are still emotionally immature to think that this is going to be their “destiny” or their opportunity to get into the big leagues of business.

I do data analysis for a living, I reach out to tech and complain if I can’t open a file with a million+ lines.