Joined the Mayqueeze.
I get that. It’s just the constellation of stuff here. Polish youths in considerate numbers falling in love with Russian culture is a bit like saying 9/11 firefighters are turning to Islam for guidance. Not that both scenarios would be inherently bad, they’re just not very likely. That’s why I asked for more than hearsay.
Can you back this up with anything but personal observation? There is nary a country in Europe that is under threat of a Russian invasion as much as Poland, now that they’re already in Ukraine. Right wingers all over Europe are very pro-Russian - except in Poland. History looms large in a country whose neighbors split it 3 times. It’s obviously possible that Polish younglings, unburdened with things like history, like the culture. You are well within you rights to separate the culture from its people’s history or what the current government is like. But I have a hard time imagining this as more as a passing fluke at best, or propaganda at worst.
I think there may be a paradox hiding in your question. You cannot believe in free will. You have it or you don’t - I would postulate you need a neutral third-party observer to tell you. For us humans, a Martian might do. Believing is an act of faith. Faith tends to bend will to its dogmas. I would go so far as to say belief is the natural enemy of a free will.
We are distracted animals. All things being equal, the Martian observer will after years of careful study come to the conclusion that humans have free will. But it’s constantly battered by short attention spans, a tendency to go with the herd, presupposituons in our heads that we don’t often or never question, etc. We are a smartphone full of bloatware running on too little RAM. It takes skill to operate. Some are more skillful than others.
You could of course counter that by saying that’s what you believe. It’s paradoxes all the way down.
Most media outlets prefer you come to their website or distribution service. That’s where they get most value out of possible ads. It’s where they collect their own first-person data on their users. As such I don’t find it surprising they bury this license somewhere. I’m surprised they have this policy at all. I don’t think it reflects their lack of pride in their work.
TIL I’m not a true Lemmy user.
You have to consider a few things here. You’re not the only one with social anxiety at that event. Your reaction is not to go in the first place (my MO as well) or to sit quietly hoping it shall pass with haste. Others talk too much. School reunions are such a rich vein for neurosis because you’re guaranteed to be judged by your peers. Peers who knew you very well when you weren’t a more well put together person yet. Few people behave like themselves there. So if the woman says she cheated a million times lol, her neurons may be on the fritz as well because she’s more thinking about how she dunked Sharon’s head in the toilet in freshman year or whatever. And that memory is haunting. And she’s sitting just over there! WHY HASN’T SHE SAID ANYTHING? … So you need to have a salt shaker handy for anything you hear.
Also, some people like attention and will say anything to get it. People like to construct a public persona around their worst character traits, the ones they’re unable to change. It’s like they’re putting a cool leather jacket on, aviator shades too. To distract themselves from their inner monolog, which very well might be telling them what a piece of shit they are.
And cheating is common. In my social group I know of a handful of cases. Drunk and horny, sober and crushing - the motivations are on a scale. In some relationships these secrets never get revealed, in others they’ve made the bond stronger, others have broken up. I would say very few people brag about it but hey, we contain multitudes. Some people end up in an unhealthy game of hurt oneup(wo)manship. Relationships are hard fucking work.
It is also a different picture when you have children with your partner. The willingness to forgive infractions increases for the good of the children.
And while centuries of indoctrination of monogamy and loyalty to your spouse can make this hard to accept: some people make open relationships work. I think it’s more often than not the last stepping stone to disaster but if you can make it work, vaya con dios. I have a hard time with it but I’m trying not to judge.
None of this needs to change how you feel about cheating though.
Scale is the factor here. You could say that small places can benefit from a sort of benevolent authoritarianism. I’m thinking Singapore, Liechtenstein, Monaco. None of them are bigger than a postage stamp and the population will go along with it. The bigger the country, the more injustices authoritarianism accumulates, the harder it is to keep people in line, the more suppressive it becomes.
Ideally, democracy trumps everything. It is the only system that has the built-in power to cancel itself. It needs all the people to be aware and to participate accordingly. It’s not perfect. It’s not always fair either. But I’d rather live in a system that can decide to end itself than in a system that would try to end me if I wanted to be critical about it.
In terms of communism, as dreamt up by Marx and Engels, you can only turn a completely capitalist economy into a communist one. This has never been achieved, shortcuts have been taken. All communist states in existence have either turned authoritarian or to dust. So in my view, there aren’t many communist movements left in the world. They may use the word but either M&E wouldn’t like them or they don’t really have a lot of support behind them. No support, no money. Capitalists have a lot of money. People with a lot of money tend to have the ear of their leaders. If an investor is interested it’ll be real hard to go for an employee-owned model (excluding models with free publicly traded shares). If investors are not interested, the business may be failing and employee ownership is the last hurrah before the end. Capitalism tends to come up on top.
YMMV. There is no universal answer to this question. None of us separate the artist entirely from the work and thus our enjoyment of it. I think of it in video game terms. Every artist has a power bar. They can get hit a couple of times and can still be tolerated when they’re in the yellow. But once we’re in the red zone and the character starts getting translucent or is flashing I’m out. This is all very subjective though.
Marylin Manson went red for me and I scrubbed the songs I liked from my playlists. Michael Jackson also. But I continue to listen to The Smiths/Morrissey in spite of Morrissey’s politics. I still enjoy Pink Floyd although Walters and Gilmore are profoundly unlikable characters and Walter’s politics rub me the wrong way a lot of the time.
In the age of streaming, there isn’t a lot of money going to the artist. You’re not really supporting them financially if you enjoy their music in spite of any a-holery, moral or criminal, they may have committed. If you get something out of it, continue to do so. If it feels yucky then I’m gonna guess one more hit is putting the character in the red. And if you paid for the music/album, the “damage” is already done.
I’m glad I was never a big fan of Kanye’s œuvre so I don’t have to wrestle with this question about him. I think he would have done enough to drain his power bar thrice over and thus it’s game over for me. I wish he had more well meaning people around him who could help him to protect himself from himself.
Bluesky is merely a stepping stone between Xwitter and Mastodon. Facebook can just die with them boomers.
Any other answer than professional therapy runs the risk of making it worse. But I know that it can be a luxury.
Out of sight hopefully leads to out of mind eventually. Actively avoiding these a-holes is one thing, having a good emergency plan when it can’t be avoided is another. I don’t know your life so you have to figure this one out yourself. In my experience, people that have a certain power over you in your mind immediately lose a lot of it if you imagine them naked, tickling the tip of their nose with a feather.
Are you reacting rationally when you’re confronted with them? If you can control yourself enough to imagine the nose tickling, start there and see how it goes. If you can’t get there and therapy is out of the question look for a fresh start somewhere else. Different part of the city, different city, different time zone. We are conditioned to think we mustn’t run from our problems, which isn’t bad advice but isn’t universally true IMO. There are cases where you’re allowed to just move away in the night, secretly flipping the old life off in the process. If after careful consideration going through all the pros and cons you arrive at this conclusion, don’t deny yourself this option for dogmatic reasons.
A therapist, after disagreeing with me, would probably add that you should make sure you don’t repeat past mistakes by creating new dependent relationships that could lead to new abuse. So keep that thought in the back of your head.
Glad to hear it! I thought I heard a sigh of relief so massive it circled the world twice.
What you need is help, not AI. If paying a designer is out of the question, look for the most design savvy person in your family, friends, or in your neighborhood. Maybe you can comp them a meal in exchange for making this look good.
You can use AI image generators to make background images. Just check the licenses if you’re okay to use their stuff in a commercial setting. AI is still largely dog shit at handling real text in images. That’s why I wouldn’t recommend going this route for you here. You have a lot of text.
What do you want to do with your poster? Will this be used as a meme or will it actually go to a printer or be displayed on a high-res screen? If it’s just a meme thing, any image creator AI will do. Most of them have free options.
If this will actually go to a printer, you’ll need high resolution images and would do well to design it in a vector format, SVG for open source software: Inkscape is free to install on computers, vector-ink is a thing for mobile and the web as well. Adobe Illustrator for the corporate expensive route. Big file sizes work better on a good computer so YMMV.
I get why the feelings sucks. You’re in your head and somehow only the worst possible outcomes ruminate. You’ve called the cops, good on you.
You’re not in charge of the world, there ought to be others who are charged with taking care of that girl. Their failure in preventing her from showing up on your porch is not your fault either and she’s their responsibility, not yours. Keep repeating that in your head.
By European standards nothing to write home about. By Asian standards, a Mount Everestrian protrusion.
Lenmy offers me the freedom to get mad at many different people running instances and not just one godforsaken company running roughshod over everything communities had created over years.
I’m not mad at anyone though because I don’t share your views at all. I’m a happy Lemmy user.
And what is Lemmy dot world acting like at night?
Respect it as art and entertainment people like. Personally, could not care less.
Word of mouth and time. Lots of it. All the ones that need you to be your own algorithm will take longer to gain acceptance with the general public. We’ll need a few more Muskerbergian s-storms to motivate people away from the silos as well.
I do not sense this. Your experience is your own. Just keep in mind you’re looking at a sliver of the whole thing at the best of times. You’re too tiny a dataset, especially considering you just made the sensible swap.