yes, i can.

but it’s problematic if I have to do that every day. It’s almost a daily part of my use of lemmy.

I don’t want to have to block stuff as a part of my daily use.

this is actually the reason I don’t use tiktok or instagram. because my user experience was block block block, everytime I used it. And it never stopped shoveling the shit I didn’t want to see into my face. and a lot of it was pornographic clickbait crap.

i liked it back when it was smaller, but around 2020/2021 both platforms decided to shove tits in my face non stop. and i wasn’t on those platforms for tits. I was on there for my hobbies, but it kept pushing porn on me. so i stopped using it entirely. i still use youtube because youtube isn’t constantly shoveling porno shit in my face.

that’s kind of what lemmy feels like. except it’s with furryies, linux, etc. even when I block stuff more of it keeps popping up. i want to see more generalist content related to general interests, not content from people who are fetishists.

i have been on lemmy over two years. my first 1.5 years i hardly ever had to block anything, because shit content i dont’ like wasn’t flooding my feed. when i first got here it was just a lot of general news/science/information and link aggregation about nerdy stuff, which i really liked and why i liked reddit. i know there was furry porn on reddit from it’s inception, but I never had to see any of it unless i went looking for it specifically, like a lot of the fetish stuff on reddit.

they call any new deal type thinking ‘populism’ and lump it in with Trump.

the ‘new deal’ rural areas are getting is shitty Data centers fucking up their landscapes and giving them zero jobs.

most people don’t care about sides. they just care about money.

and rightfully so. your theory or political stance can’t buy you food or a car or other basic necessities.

No, they aren’t.

People genuinely believe this stuff. Just like they believe in astrology. It’s a form of magical thinking, it’s a magical political theory. The core premises being ‘liberation’… which just means being a delusional twat who thinks reality horrible and scary and the ideology helps then deny it.

In other words, it’s the equivalent of a child ignore their parents requests res to do chores in the hope the parent/chores will stop asking.

all of these anarchist flavors are a form of relativism where all that matters is people’s individual feelings.

it’s a form of solipsism when you start asking questions about it.

and when you draw it out, it inevitable leads to consequences that totally contradict it’s tenants. but anarchists… don’t do that… they just feel the feelings, man.

anarchism is great if you never think, but some flavors of it regard thinking as an undue burden foist upon people by a unjust society… hence why you are getting these absurd answer about how gravity is unjust and cruel. I suppose they also regard having to eat/drink/breathe as injustices that ‘society’ forces upon us.

lemmy is basically NSFW because of this, yes. the amount of furry anime porn that reaches the front page is crazy.

i don’t get why it being pushed, but I suppose it’s just the userbase is very active and passionate about that stuff so it rises to the top.

every other day i have to block 2-3 furry communities, usually porno ones.

they aren’t no the front page, but once you go a few clicks deeper, boom goes the furry memes/porn.

i’ve blocked like 50 communities and 90% of them are furry content.

most of this was in the past few months, i never saw it the first 1.5 years i was here.

being introduce to furry porn isn’t expanding my horizon, it’s just annoying and weird, and offputting. it’s a sexual fetish. looking at pictures of feet would be similar, but I don’t get bombarded by foot porn here, just furry porn.

Also the linux fetishism on this site is super weird. I’m an IT professional. I use Linux. I don’t idealize it however. It’s just another OS among many. And most of the Linux content is more about being ANGRY about microsoft and apple than anything else.

25 years ago people were going on the same about how linux will save the world… and fantazing that one day microsoft would crumble. it didn’t. it won’t. in fact the opposite happened.

Linux is fine, but it’s a niche OS for nerds and admins. It’s not for regular home/office users and you aren’t a technology Jesus for using it or discovering it. It’s been around since the 1991.

the fediverse is very low quality unless you’re a furry linux-using anarchist/communist

for those of us who live in a broader reality with more ‘normie’ beliefs and lifestyles, it’s weak. it needs less weirdos who go around projecting their persecution complex everywhere

anything that tastes good and you enjoy

join forces to do what?

bluesky is a twitter clone, it’s not a comment board or link aggregator.

Same. You can’t write more than a 10 words in a sentence before you lose people.

They refuse to read anything that’s in a paragraph. each sentence as a bullet points is the best bet and don’t you dare make it a compound sentence.

A lot of my job lately is taking product user guides from the product company and dumbing them down even more for my userbase. Some of most difficult staff are the fresh out of undergrads… they are on par or worse than the 60+ year olds. If I gave them a link to microsoft.com tutorials they would freak out because there are ‘too many words’.

A decade ago 22 year olds we hired had way better comprehension skills and used to interact with me during orientation/training. Now they just stare blank faced at me and look confused like I’m overwhelming them, and they ask me why I can’t just give them a QR code and why they need a password to login to things.

I used to teach. My lazy students told me I was an arrogant prick too. They usually got Cs and would leave me angry reviews about how stupid my course was and how dare I make them try hard because what is the point I was going to give them a bad grad because i didn’t like them personally.

My students who did the readings, showed up to class, wrote good papers, to enjoy my class and usually got As.

Weird how that works. It’s OK if you don’t like to read man, but don’t go around generalizing that your lack of drive and interest in the topic necessitates that it’s a waste of time for everyone else.

I would guess you don’t run marathons either. Are people who run marathons wasting their time too? Or should they just take blood dope?

Amen to that. I thought the first Dark tower was great, but they kept getting… longer and longer and pointlessly so.

I feel the same way about Murakami too. I read his novels and was confused why people liked them so much they were so long and annoying. Then I read his short fiction and was like ‘oh he’s actually good’. He just needs to cut out the filler.

Bingo.

I studied abroad in Canada and Germany… the mentality there was not like that. It was far less hostile to education and learning generally. People in Germany used to compliment me for reading books and think it was good thing. In America, often, it’s considered negative and anti-social to read. It’s insane.

it doesn’t. what i disagree with is your premise that reading books is impossible and too time consuming to be doable by anyone.

It isn’t.

where are those terms from? i am not familiar with the idea of passive vs activity vocabulary, sounds interesting.

the underlying assumption you are missing here, is a political one.

That better reading skills would create a better public voter base would who would vote democratic or more progressively.

That’s a projection based on the current stat, which show that generally, democratic voters are higher educated than republican voters and/or the assumption that a literate public is a good thing.

And TBF the USA founders based a lot of the constitution on the presumption of a educated well-informed public as a foundation for it’s architecture.

So in the liberal sphere, an uneducated, less literate public is a political threat both towards conservatism, and an eroding on the American political project.

And a lot of praise of the USA model in the 18th and 19 centuries was precisely because we were one the first nations to have a public education system and were were such a highly literate nation.

There are also economic concerns here. A more literate/educated public is generally more economically productive.

And a lot of our ‘educational slide’ has been a product of the last 30-40 years.

when you don’t know things, the things you don’t know don’t exist.

it’s cognitively easier to be dumb than it is to be smart.

just like it’s easier to sit on a couch all day watching TV eating processed foods, than it is to run a marathon and cook healthy food.

It’s not a matter of IQ, it’s a matter of money. Marathon runners are 80% college educated, and make 130K per year, and come from families that are college-educated and wealthy.

Marathon runners don’t come from working-class poor rural families.

Can’t read complex policy documents? Perfect. You’ll vote based on slogans and fear. Can’t analyze contradictory news sources? Excellent. You’ll believe whatever authority figure shouts loudest. Can’t understand financial fine print? Outstanding. You’ll sign predatory loans and carry crippling debt forever.

I mean. I worked in public policy for a few years. Most of the policy makers, the politicians, and their staff… can’t do any of that either. Despite the fact most of them have multiple degrees.

But they sure as shit can shout about how stupid it all is and now their gut feelings about taxation are more important than the policy paper a taxation economist writes about it after years of doing research on it. When our highly educated professional politicians can’t pass that standards, I’m not really going to fault the broader public who have a high school diploma at best, for not being able to do so.

There are a lot of brilliant people in our government… but nobody is listening to them. The majority of my highl educated highly literate peers here in Boston… also don’t listen to them. They just ‘know’ that all taxes are bad. mmkay?

So what are you mad about? that you had to read books in English class?

Why were you taking english class if you don’t want to read books?

Are you angry you had to do engineering problems in engineering class too? Sounds like it.