When I refer to the internet narrative-scape, I include everything. Facebook, Reddit, turthscoial or whatever the right-wing ones are, all the way back here to Lemmy. These are the places where the people growing up to make tomorrow’s decisions have their attitudes and beliefs shaped and reshaped.

I mean, the ones who grow up at least. That seems to be falling out of style.

The only way out is not to play.

For yourself, yes. If you have realized all of what you said and want a better outcome for yourself, absolutely stop playing, you will have a better life.

But the vast majority of people are not stopping. The vast majority of people are falling deeper down the slippery sides of the pitcher-plant because this is what we are as a species, we are narrative-seekers, that is my point, we cannot escape.

Even if you shut it all off and live your best life, the decisions that some asshole in power makes will still impact you at some point, because he read something someone posted once and it changed the way he looks at the story. We don’t get out. We can buy time, but there is no real escape. I’m sorry.

Sometimes I stop everything I’m doing as a comfortable person with a job and income and food and a home and it hits me that there is a genocide happening in this moment and children being murdered with state-sponsored weapons, and it’s crippling.

I am not a young person, I have seen some shit in my decades. But it still hurts like hell every time I think about the suffering we’re still allowing as a species and that feeling and sensitivity to the knowledge has only gotten worse as I’ve gotten older. Greater awareness leads to greater pain because you start to see the whole picture; what we are as a species, what we can and cannot do, and how much sorrow and misery we put each other through needlessly.

Her current appearance came from no mortal doctor’s hands, it’s pure evil oozing out and taking shape, her final form is going to be some Moai easter-island-looking monolith that villagers will have to sacrifice babies to every year to guarantee safety from the creeping mist that pours from her mouth-cavern every full moon.

He lived by the college campus and died by the college campus.

Right wing grifters have seen great success directly targeting young people, from Ben Shapeepo and Jordan Peterson doing this along side Kirk for years through to people like Steve Bannon targeting WoW players, and the efforts recruiting from 4chan, and this is just what we know about.

They are groomers and indoctrination agents, they are everything we need to fight in society, so let’s not let the current uproar and narrative crafting stop us from protesting and pushing back on these full-grown-ass men with millions of dollars “just hanging out” in our school campuses.

Do people not understand ‘don’t feed the trolls’?

No, and broadly we have to stop expecting better of people. It’s in our instincts to latch onto narratives, either for or against them.

Instead our task as the better people should have always been to create better narratives, and since this generation of social media warriors all learned how to craft narratives from like, freeform erotic isekai K-pop furry fanfiction roleplay in private discord channels, I am not holding my breath that we’re going to take the stage anytime soon.

Google it in conjunction with the killer’s name.

Seems all these theories are being discounted right now, turns out “googling something next to a person’s name” isn’t necessarily the best source for truth. Funny that.

That’s fine if that’s what you were going for, but then it should be written as “Trying not to scream while watching a right-wing man kill another right-wing man at a right-wing event at a right wing college- etc.” Then the bottom text could read “While they blame left-wing extremism.”

The current formatting makes it look like the kid is somehow the one angry at left wing extremists.

It’s not a big deal, but worth pointing out imo.

Some sources when I googled “straining vein kid in class”

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/trying-to-hold-a-fart-next-to-a-cute-girl-in-class

https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/41y5ug/what_is_the_origin_and_story_of_the_image_of_a/

https://imgflip.com/memetemplate/85497783/Bulging-Forehead-Vein

interview with the actual person https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/kid-blowing-up-meme-interview/

Racism/white nationalism is out on full display in the world. While there are plenty of hateful sacks of shit so stupid that they see people with different skin color and assume they’re bad and dangerous, there are also far, far more who are just going along with the flow and trends and don’t want to be punished by the system, by daddy turnip, by his administration, or by the other people who are also going along with it and jumping onto the bandwagon out of laziness and apathy.

This is how social attitudes are changed rapidly, it’s happened over and over in history. It just takes a handful of people normalizing something that most people would reject for entire empires to be toppled and for stable systems to be torn down.

If we were all broadly more aware of how fragile everything is and how much power we really have as groups, I like to think we would have a different world. I doubt we’ll see it though.

Total misuse/misunderstanding of the meme, FYI. It’s supposed to represent straining/restraining.

The way Reddit does is abusive.

Yes, but counterpoint: it was also petty and satisfying as fuuuuck hammering someone with your last point and then blocking them so that after they write up their long-ass reply outlining why eugenics is the true path to a glorious white future, they end up getting an error message.

Yah, it was very bad for actual discourse, but that ship has sailed. people don’t care about debate and discourse anymore, on almost every social media site people post things as stand-alone displays to viewers for points, never engaging with each other unless there’s a contentious point that can be leveraged for up-arrows and thumbs.

We have to get back to talking to each other in real life and stop pretending having introversion or social anxiety is anything but an obstacle to community and a better world

u ok?

Seriously, it’s become a meme. “How do we know Charlie Kirk’s shooter wasn’t a real leftist? He would have needed 300 more shell casings to etch in his nuanced and inclusive ideologies with every possible qualifier along with detailed explanations of every position he has and why…” etc, etc.

We need to rub our mangled country in their faces like a bad dog that shit all over the carpet. We need to hit them with their own short, strong, often offensive and stupid rhetoric until they feel shame.

How do you know when they’re ashamed? Easy, they will get mad. Leftists remind me of the children of narcissistic parents, who spend their whole lives thinking they can craft the perfect argument, the perfect rebuttal, the correct sequence of lines and phrases to make their abuser suddenly realize how bad they’ve been and everyone will be happy.

That is NOT how conservative mindsets work, if it did, they wouldn’t be clinging to conservatism. They are reactionaries and only know how to feel things in the moment and the moment keeps changing. That’s why we have to be a lot “stupider” and a lot more consistent, but more importantly, we HAVE to start engaging directly with them more, we have to abandoned these cordoned off spaces and start sharing reality again so they feel social pressure.

They’re like children deep inside, the anger and hate is a defense mechanism, but when they interact with you directly, they actually DO want your approval, they want to feel accepted or validated, and they will twist and rage if they don’t get it. We need to start recognizing these tantrums for what they are.

Okay i’m done. (I’m not.)

If you reading this actually care about progress and results and not just arrows next to your comments and emotional validation, I highly encourage you to contact FOX news and add your voice to the wave of pressure to fire Kilmeade, but don’t fucking stop there, keep spreading the clip of his rhetoric on every social media platform you’re currently addicted to. Recruit others to do the same.

Will it make a difference? Who knows, but whether or not it’s going to cure you of “nothing ever happens” syndrome should never be the point of going out of your way to do something that doesn’t feel rewarding. Get off your asses. MOBILIZE EVEN IF IT’S THIS ONE STUPID THING.

Consider it practice for if the left ever decides it wants to try uniting.

edit: Also, please frame it in ways that make FOX look bad to its own viewership, stop posting your own identity politics expecting the dumbest people in the world to care, start stabbing them in the kidney with lines like “FOX HOST WANTS TO EUTHANIZE US VETERANS IN THE STREET IS THIS THE AMERICA YOU GREW UP IN??” seriously, learn some clickbait hype and stop taking the high road you pansies.

Edit 2: Weowee wow, sure would suck for advertisers on FOX news if people started tagging them with clips of Kilmeade advocating for murdering innocent people. Sure would suck if there were publically accessible lists of FOX news advertisers and sponsors.

No, that’s misinterpretation to a degree I can only assume is deliberate.

I am talking about specifically the various theories and speculation woven by everyone. I cannot FATHOM where you would get the idea that I’m saying this kind of violence is “perpetrated by both sides” so I can only assume you’re trolling or looking to fight another leftist over some imagined slight, you know, that thing that has kept us from uniting for decades or even centuries.

Very well said. I could talk at great length the dangers of misjudging how one’s own brain works.

The most likely explanation is he was a groyper

Is it though? This is all ENTIRELY speculation and smells stinkily like more people trying to “disclaim” him from their “side” and everyone is doing it. It’s the point of this post. Everyone saying everything else ALSO claims to have “most likely explanations” so it’s all entirely speculation and bullshit until I hear verified evidence or an admission, until then you’re all playing internet detective/Q-anoning/thread-linking/conspiracy cosplay.

I said basically the same thing earlier on Lemmy and got called a “both sider” so yeah, we’re fucked, ya’ll are deep in the gravy and need to not just touch grass, you all need to grow grass and dirty your hands in the beautiful topsoil and reconnect with the earth and your own brains.

There are as many different American factions of influence farming as there are foreign, and likely equally in opposition of each other.

Some day the internet is just going to be this entirely dead realm of soulless bots screaming nonsense corporate and political ideology back and forth at each other which nobody will ever see, while humans are too busy trying to grow potatoes in their yards to stay alive.