BestOfLemmy

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Manual curation of great Lemmy discussions and threads

founded 2 years ago
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Rewrite: September 2024

Welcome one and all to BestOfLemmy! The goal of this community is "manual curation". Please post good (or best!!) posts you find around Lemmy, highlighting the discussions, communities, and people that make up the Lemmyverse.

There are two rules: Manual Curation and beginner-to-lemmy focus. Please share content on Lemmy that helps introduce Lemmy to newbies!

Don't make automatic bots or algorithms make your pick here. Although its fair game to use bots / algorithms / search engines to look for content, the ultimate decision to post must be made by you. Aside from that, have fun!

EDIT: Discussion in this Welcome Thread is extremely loose. Its important for any community to have a place for freeform discussion, including meta-criticism and wandering off topic, so that individuals are free to express yourself. I won't be moderating this topic as much as other posts however. Still feel free to report posts that cross the line, but comments here specifically are intended to be more freeform.

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There’s a guy on our dog walking route that put up several Trump flags last year. My wife and I actually wound up having an interaction with him because he was spying on us through his cameras and got mad that we referred to the flags as embarrassing and said that Trumpism was a cult.

By mid-April, he’d pulled down all the flagpoles and didn’t even take the flags off them, just laid the poles with flags wrapped around them in the dirt by his driveway.

In May I actually talked with him. Initially I had no intention of trying to be nice to him - he just had done something sort of shitty a few days before (encouraging his dog to bark at our dogs). I was going to be like “Look, if you wanna call me gay slurs over your ring camera, that’s fine, but don’t encourage your dog to be hostile to mine.”
But somehow he tied his dog to military service, and while I was fully prepared to connect the lack of a veteran license plate to his statement to call him a liar and a Reddit ninja, he fielded the license plate question and said that he’d suffered a TBI that resulted in an appreciable percentage of brain dying, and that made him unable to be rational when he felt any sort of threat or insult. So he didn’t use the military plates, because he’d had negative experiences with motorists while using them.
I don’t know if I believe that - it seems dumb on the part of the other motorists. But I’m not willing to keep pressing for the sake of picking a fight. I’ll throw a barb, but not over-extend myself. It’s just not worth it.
So I listened, and we chatted - for like an hour and a half. My wife left after a few minutes with the dogs. We talked about politics, the world, our community, and how fucked everything is. He supported Trump because of the 2016 (Obama) economy. He believes in women’s rights. He is conservative, anti-immigrant, and believes in stronger policing. I told him I believe in increased social support, so folks like him can get out of the VA benefits trap. I told him I think the way to stronger communities is through stronger schools and increased civic engagement - more pride, less punishment. He even asked if we’d be willing to help train his dog better, because he notices that ours don’t bark at other dogs, and don’t pull on their leads. I told him I’d have to think about it, and ask my wife, since she’s the one who really had the patience to get our dogs where they are.

We parted - not as friends - but certainly not as enemies. Just - neighbors with a better understanding of each other.

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submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by rbos@lemmy.ca to c/bestoflemmy@lemmy.world
 
 

Interesting comment on a post.

Tldr: Zebra Mussels reach a balance that prevents them from being a totally catastrophic invasive.

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Look at what men are missing and how the right is selling it to them.

Men aren't doing so hot right now, emotionally and mentally. They feel like they are not manly, and criticized for trying to be manly or liking manly things. There's a lack of transitions into manhood, and the bar that is seen as a successful man with a good career is pretty much impossible.

If you have a poor paying job, you're not manly. If you have a well paying job but it's blue collar you're not manly because you're a dumb working stiff. If you have a white collar job you're not manly because you're not doing anything tough with your body. Maybe if you're a CEO who owns the company but also does rock climbing and bear fighting are you seen as manly enough, maybe.

Then you have these guys, your Andrew Tates and so on, who act very manly and tell you it's ok to be a man and then spout off some of the most toxic, asinine shit saying that's how you be a man. And young guys fall for it because they aren't shown any alternative.

Then on the left you have people who speak ill of men as a whole, and manliness as a whole. Sometimes the criticisms are correct, but a lot of times it's presented as men overall. If you try to say that it's not every man out there who's a monster, you get blasted with criticism for saying "not all men". They also don't provide anything positive or solutions for feeling manly, with the best they can be offered is to be more like women.

So young men, especially young cishet men, are actively pushed away from leftist spaces, leaving them feeling demonized by those spaces, and actively pandered to by the right which are offering mind poison dressed up as solutions.

So what do we do? There's a few things to fix.

  1. leftist media has to stop demonizing men and start demonizing actions. Instead of saying "men are rapists" start saying "rapists are bad". When people start to say things like "cis people are shit" other people need to call them out of it, because if you're supposed to be the side that accepts people's gender identity, it should be for all gender identities. It can feel cathartic to rail against the majority demographic, especially when people of that demographic have hurt you, but if you feel that it's unfair to rail against a group because of the actions of a few members of it, that should apply to all groups. Things like "what's wrong with the straights" doesn't help build bonds with allies, and it turns young men away from leftist spaces.

  2. there needs to be validation and recognition from the left for problems men have, like suicide, workplace death and heavier prison sentencing. The left needs to show that they are trying to fix these problems, too, instead of telling young men to suck it up and be a man about it because they are the oppressor demographic.

  3. there needs to be people who counter toxic masculinity, not with telling men to be more like women, but with positive masculinity. If a man is having emotional or mental problems, toxic masculinity says to push that down. Femininity says it's ok to be soft and vulnerable. Positive masculinity would say that a real man is true to himself and his feelings and expresses then freely, even if others might ridicule him for it. There's a subtle difference, and the end result of femininity's and positive masculinity's tactic might be the same, i.e. the man expresses those feelings, but the way that they get there is very different. The former makes the man feel less validated in his identity, while the latter uplifts it. The memes where they say stuff like "I always tell my homies I love them before they go to bed" actually work.

  4. leftist influencers need to make fighting for the rights of minorities seem manly. Badass. Like a hero. Worthy of praise and celebration.

  5. while they won't get the financial and political backing that the toxic male influencers get, there needs to be positive male influencers who talk about masculinity in a positive way, while promoting the ideas above. There needs to be an alternative, who acts manly but in the fun, positive way, that validates young men's feelings of inadequacy, frustration, and isolation, while promoting an egalitarian perspective.

  6. there needs to be a cultural shift in what makes a man. A shift away from dying in battle or becoming a tycoon, and a resurgence of the working class hero. Mass media itself needs to change and promote positive male figures. It can work and be popular, like in Avatar the Last Airbender. We need to show men that they are still men, and still worthy of love, respect and adoration, even if they aren't a super soldier or a wealthy elite. A lot of this is counter to capitalistic goals, so it may have to be subversive, but eventually it needs to be made the norm.

  7. other men need to continue to step up and speak out about injustice towards minorities and against toxic masculinity behaviors in the day to day, and start decrying those behaviors as unmanly. People need to call Andrew Tate and the like unmanly.

  8. ideally, the men's rights movement should be absorbed by the left and the toxic incels kicked out. It should be done in the name of gender equality. Fixing only woman's problems won't solve the patriarchy (which could be changed to a different term so everyone feels like it's less of an us vs them) and feminists should try to help solve men's problems directly rather than indirectly. Young men would see feminism as more appealing if feminists actually focused on men's problems as well, rather than ignoring or worse, demonizing them. Feminism could be rebranded as an egalitarian movement for all sexes and genders, maybe get a name change. If the patriarchy affects everyone, then the focus should be on everyone. Maybe it would have to be a whole new movement entirely.

So it's a larger problem than just getting more leftist male influencers, and some of those problems are systematic. Some can get worked on today. Talking about masculinity in a positive way, promotive equity, stop both their side and your side from bigotry, and, probably the thing that would get young men on board the most:

Actually trying to solve the problems young men are going through.

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I have to say, this is just such an in-the-weeds moral stance that it crosses the boundary of reasonableness. Honestly, it's this sort of thing that drove me away from left wing styles of thinking a while ago.

The impact you make on the world in any of your possible actions with regard to Harry Potter is miniscule. Like, truly, utterly insignificant. Are you going to organize an anti-potter boycott? Participate in a protest? Harass the actors in an online trolling movement? Throw eggs at JK Rawling's house? Great! Go do all those things! Actively participate in changing the world for the better! These actions might actually lead to real change.

But denying yourself pleasures in the name of moral purity accomplishes nothing. If all you do is sit at home and think to yourself "I wanna watch the new Harry Potter thing, but I can't, because then I'm a bad person." (or in this case, "I wanna talk to my friends about the new Harry Potter thing I pirated, but I can't, because then I'm a bad person) then you are accomplishing literally nothing except making yourself miserable. Again, if you are going to actually do something, then go do it! But if you don't have the time or energy or interest or social battery to actually do something, then shaming yourself or others into not doing things is actively counterproductive. Go take a road trip without calculating if the pleasure you will derive is worth the carbon footprint! Eat an ice cream cone without feeling bad about the the suffering of the factory farmed cow it came from! Get one of those good-paying jobs in oil and gas or defence and make some goddamned money! You are simply not important enough for any of these actions to have any actual real-world impact. The only thing that happens is that you convince yourself that if you ever enjoy anything, then you are a bad person. You train yourself to constantly be looking for the ways in which life's simple pleasures are destroying the world, so you can feel bad about them.

Just stop it. Be happy. Do whatever you need to do to chill out and enjoy your life and gain some sense of contentedness and security. And then go out and make the world a better place by actually doing something. Hyper-anxious, shame-ridden, depressed know-it-alls rarely create effective social change because no one wants to hang out with them. No one see them and thinks "yeah, that's what I want my life to look like."

In order to lead by example you have to show a path to a better world. Not a cell.

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@manxu@piefed.social previously worked on a dating app for a large Internet corporation and got some interesting insights as they examined the data from their service

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Ms ArmoredThirteen (@ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.zip) bakes and reviews some cupcakes in this comment thread.

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From https://lemmy.today/u/SirEDCaLot.

I hope I did the Lemmy user tagging correctly.

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https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/40988090

Check the sidebar - this is /c/childfree

I'm guessing you came here from All and didn't seek out this community specifically?

Scrolling through All provides a glimpse into the variety the Fediverse offers. Even when I find a community I don't agree with or care to hear about, I can simply block it. Meanwhile, I'm glad that those who do value those topics have a place to discuss things.

Which is all to say that those who feel strongly about being childfree deserve their space to talk about it, regardless of your feelings toward their opinions. This is their space, and nobody's forcing you to be here.

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