A case can certainly be made for solipsism there too, yes, but I said deism specifically because of the techbro habit of believing that they come up with super original ideas because they can't be bothered to check if someone already thought of that idea before, such as the idea of some creative force (the "simulation's" programmer) creating the entire world as we know it (the "simulation") and then setting it to run itself according to established physical laws (the "simulation's" programming) and otherwise doesn't intervene.

Germany, too. Too many such cases. (CW: grooming, SV against children)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/26/the-german-experiment-that-placed-foster-children-with-pedophiles

They don't "love" children no matter how many pedo-apologists may claim otherwise (as they have throughout history too, up to and including Nonce Island "experts" claiming that orphans were better off being taken in by said predators). They're getting off to hurting someone, and the innocence and vulnerability of their prey is what excites them.

Every day, I become more familiar with how the hippies became neocons. The toxic individualism innate to burgerland culture is a plague that corrodes our empathy.

Whenever some Joe Roganite (or equivalent "JUST DO DRUG BRO DON'T BE A (slur) BRO!") tells me about some mind-altering miraculous cure-all, I remember that Steve Jobs took a lot of psychedelics and spends almost as much time in the K-Hole as he does on Twitter.

Sure, certain substances may help some people with specific things, but the "DRUGS FIX EVERYTHING BROOOOOOO" thing is not only idealistic bullshit but it was also the kind of idealistic bullshit that the hippies were into.

Both of my estranged boomer parents did this, and 23andMe pretty much have my shit without my consent. Super cool!

Mine too, the fucking fascist chuds. All they found out is that they had multiple intertwined justifications for nazis to murder their ancestral relatives and they were still believed Hitler should have won WW2.

May even be some GATTACA style eugenics shit where people are denied jobs because of pre-existing genetic medical condition tendencies. It may be technically illegal even then, but that won't stop corpos from mysteriously not hiring those people.

JUST LIKE IN THE TREATS!

Me neither.

Similarly, "Postal" was such a disgusting pile of misanthropic shit that I never ceased to be baffled that the series is somehow considered a classic among .

I enjoy Civvie 11's Youtube videos but even after seeing pretty much all of the non-Postal ones, I still find his Postal playthroughs unwatchable.

I'm in my 40s.

Guard your heart well and never stop caring about other people and you'll preserve the best of you.

Yeah it does, it also has current-year hits, classics etc., but it also has in-universe advertisements and like, fake talkshow type things. It is very on the nose when it comes to these two things.

I'm glad I have been staying away because a bunch of "haha caring about things is stupid check out this farcical version of a hysterial and triggered person being emotional for your amusement!" Howard Sternesque shit would only make GTA even worse for me.

I feel like the capital G Gamers want to have an M-rated edgy Pokémon, for example,where they can have a waifu or whatever

PalWorld offered the edgy and the deliberately horny "Pal" too.

It feels insulting to younger generations that such potential storytelling is missed because the reality is that such writing would offend the sensibilities of those G Gamers. They don't want to talk about animal liberation or systems of power or the myriad things that could be portrayed in a game like Pokémon. They just want their nostalgia slop without politics and that comes at the expense of children.

That really is too bad because even the first game had some pretty fascinating hints of a wider potential story to tell, including talk of a great war before the game started that involved Pokemon.

but I definitely dislike this trend of taking joy from children to heal one's own childhood wounds.

I have my doubts those wounds are actually healing as much as being further irritated to make particularly fashionable scars. "Fallout Equestria" comes to mind. Fucking garbage, but it's heresy to say so among some people.

It's especially clear if you listen to the in-game radio stations, it's just like South Park.

Isn't that one of the most celebrated features that got expanded upon more and more over time? It used to be just "ironic" music if I remember correctly, like opera.

That's the vibe I got when I tried it, especially when I had some of my chuddier friends-of-friends at social gatherings running people over while letting out empty chuckles for HOURS.

This may piss off a lot of but I'll say it anyway: I've been put off by the GTA series ever since the early 3D one (yes, there was a 2D original game too) that had the chud-chortling mechanic of running over sex workers to get money back. Like "Postal," it was misanthropic edgy shit for its own sake and I haven't bothered to check back in decades later.

Later Saints Row games were at least funny and weird and that helped.

Or smuglords that have to affirm how "cool, calm, and collected"(tm) they would be during frightening and life-threatening scenarios.

Mother Theresa has a run for her money when it comes to worst "good" historical figure there.

Then you throw in the way children are already treated like possessions and it gets that much harder to connect with younger generations.

It doesn't make it right, and I want to support the people around me regardless of age, but times are desperate right now and capitalism incentivizes short- sighted selfishness and self preservation.

has a long front-page general population history of hating children (and/or grooming/creeping on them, that's why the "-philia" in the common clinical term for it is so misleading) and I think a whole lot of that was millennial-age spiteful "fuck you mom I do what I want!" style New Atheists that indulged everything that they weren't allowed to do in their upbringings, then got enough money to have all the toys they wanted that they didn't necessarily have when they were children...

... and then they gatekept those toys and wanted to push actual children out of what were once children-specific things, such as Pokemon. My Little Pony also comes to mind, where the adult edgelord/creep demographics outright bullied a lot of kids out of what was supposed to be a fandom meant for those kids first.

He's such a loud transphobe yet he's spent more money than most people make in their lifetimes on what we could call gender affirmation surgeries and treatments.

One of the most unjust things about capitalism is that the more important and good for society the work is, the less it is likely to pay.

Hedge fund managers are a steep net negative to society and are paid the very most of any salaried position.

That's the part of being a teacher I miss the most: the kids are mostly all right. It's inspiring, even rejuvenating, being around people with new minds open to new ideas, even if they make mistakes and can do terrible things because they don't have the wisdom to know better and are impressionable (fuck "influencers" forever).

If there wasn't so many other fucked up things about being a teacher that are top-down decisions made by ghoulish school boards and the like, I wouldn't have retired so early.

I'm an older millennial too, old enough to have a lot of Gen X around me that became junior Boomers to the point of being nearly indistinguishable recently.

I've seen the same thing you have, @Dirt_Owl@hexbear.net . Older millennials like myself, even if they used to be at least sympathetic to leftist (or as they preferred to put it, "progressive") causes, more often then not, often when they found their first "real job" (as in, less marginalized and derided by wine-clinking liberal petite bourgeoisie), suddenly decided that people that didn't get there yet (or never would) were just "lazy" or some other bullshit excuse, anything to feel justified in disavowing them of their own common roots.

I appreciate all the people here, whether you're 20 or 60, for not becoming the thing that hurt you. We need people with a soul more than ever.

I wish I had a more heroic and saintly reason for why I take the stands I do, but in truth they started as spite. I hated the selfish fascist assholes that raised me before I even know what to call their ideology, but definitive fascists, up to and including admiration of fucking Hitler all the same. That's especially rich because I have a fairly complicated ethnic background that involves people that were chased down and exterminated through both world wars from the very same people that their surviving successors now retroactively feel nostalgia and admiration for.

Shit's fucked.