I don’t know if this is a hot take, but I think people need to stop basing their lives off of celebrities/influencers. We equate wealth with some hidden knowledge, when they’re just people. Sometimes really fucking stupid people who happen to have a profitable talent. Next time some tries to sell you something or teach you something, ask yourself if this person is even an authority/knowledgeable on what they’re talking about. I’ve gotten in the habit of mentally going “and you are?” when I get new information. Sometimes you find our that person is a leader in their field. Sometimes it’s just some terminally online teenager.

Hotter Take: I think black people put too much stock in celebrities and what they’ll do for the black community. You don’t get freakishly wealthy being a sweetheart. Jay Z is not going to save us. And our blind loyalty has us supporting subpar performances and people because we “have to support” and it keeps fucking us over. No, I’m not supporting this business just because it’s black owned if the service/quality sucks (especially since black owned goods tend to be more expensive).

@TehBamski Most entertainment is produced in abusive environments, promotes positively evil people to become famous, and twists the legal system through in such a way that it enables surveillance and erodes ownership rights. But barely anyone is willing to boycott it.

America is a lost cause

Parents’ jobs aren’t to protect their kids. It’s to make sure that their kids are sufficiently prepared for the world when the kids grow up.

There seems to be this rising trend of parents being overprotective of their children, even to the point of having parental controls enabled for children even as old as the late teens. My impression has always been that these children are too sheltered for their age.

I grew up in the “age of internet anarchism,” where goatse was just considered a harmless prank to share with your friends and liveleaks was openly shared. Probably not the best way of growing up, to be fair, but I think we’ve swung so hard into the opposite direction that a lot of these children, I feel, are living in their own little bubbles.

To some degree, it honestly makes sense to me why the younger generation nowadays is so willing to post their lives on the internet. When that’s the only thing you can do on the internet, that’s what you’ll do

More and more people are against giving kids internet access. Allow me to go against the grain:

If your child is neurodivergent, or LGBTQ+, or any other form of misfit, then denying them internet access is tantamount to condemning them to social isolation. It wasn’t until I got unrestricted internet access, circa 17 years of age, that I realised that actually, no, I wasn’t a fucking alien, there were hundreds of thousands of people just like me, but I didn’t know because I was stuck in this shitty small town with shitty small town people. So I spent seventeen years thinking there was something fundamentally wrong with me when in reality there was something wrong with the environment around me.

I would have had a much happier early life if I’d gotten internet earlier. Wouldn’t have spent 90% of my teens being suicidal.

Hot sauces should be required by law to list their Scoville range (SHU) on their packaging.

Fediverse is not for everyone and I’d rather not have fediverse go mainstream, and if it does I’d rather have normies use normie instances like lemmy.world and mastodon.social because that way you can filter them out if you don’t like them.

The destruction of the library of Alexandria was a win.

Drinking, driving, smoking, voting, consent, ability to enter contracts including marriage, joining the military:

Raise it all to 25 and be done with it. At 25 you’re an adult, before that your body and brain are still developing.

Here’s one I get a lot of flack for that I don’t bring up much

I think people trying to cook up gun control laws are targeting the wrong guns, in going after semi auto or military rifles, when they should be going after cheap handguns that have been available forever. The majority of gun deaths are suicides, and that’s almost always done with a hand gun, but even if you control for that the majority of homicides with guns are done with hand guns.

Hand guns are usually relatively cheap. They are very easy to conceal. Its very common for people to walk into a bar with a holstered hand gun and make a series of bad decisions. Its too common for people to get in road rage incidents that escalate into something tragic because of a handgun in the glove box. People leave them around their house and treat them as toys that kids end up finding.

AND I would argue that handguns are not in the spirit of the 2nd amendment. They are not fighting weapons. They are for fun, personal protection, or making people feel tough without having to do any real work. They have little range and lesser power. There are are no troops in the world that deploy with handguns as a primary weapon. US military officers get them but that’s more about tradition.

Yes, I’m aware that shooting incidents done with rifles would be more deadly, but the fact there would be much fewer of them at all would be a net benefit in a society that banned or severely restricted hand guns.

The vast majority of people whining about the current political landscape have done absolutely nothing IRL to remedy this (tangibly supporting good candidates, running for office themselves, etc.)

Deep down we all love and facilitate the chaos in the world because we’re bored.

There’s no ethical way to kill someone that’s done nothing to you and doesn’t want to die, and that’s not just for humans.

That Amerikans don’t deserve any special consideration, and in fact, deserve a Century of Humiliation where the odious “please collaborate in our genocide so the cryptofascist oligarchy Democracy™ that anglo-saxon, protestant-descended magnates and a small fraction of uplifted misleaders we All™ enjoy will be saved!” brainworm is concerned.

Yes. My principles do matter to me more than you do at this point if you’re going to look me in the face and tell me I have to support a genocider, all so you (or whatever minority you’re about to only care about long enough to use as a cudgel) can remain comfortable.

If you let your cat outside in the Americas (or anywhere cats haven’t lived for thousands of years) unsupervised I’m going to assume one of the following is true: you don’t care if your cat dies, and/or you don’t care about wildlife. Even if you live in a place with zero predators, why the hell are you trusting a CAT with road safety?

Saying this as someone who grew up with parents that let our cats live (and die, a lot) that way. And as someone who has seen two friends lose cats to coyotes in the past year. And also interrupted an attack on someone’s pet by a coyote. It’s been a bad fucking year here for coyotes.