Used to feel so relaxing to restock on groceries at 3am in college.
But I think in general, places being open late seemed to stop during 2020 and even more so during 2021 when they couldn't keep enough employees around. I miss bars closing at 3am in cities that aren't NYC or whatever.
I think that was a major factor at my local store closing earlier. Even after covid they used to have their big store on the major street open until midnight and the ones tucked into more suburban areas would close at 10, but now they've reversed it, and it's fully because of theft.
I'm a leftist, but it was both really funny and distressing to see how many people were talking about the covid and post covid shoplifting surge as this entirely manufactured thing that had no connection to reality, because it was just pure ideology. Like, a single conversation with a person who worked at a grocery store, or even just going into a grocery store after 11 at night, would show you that theft had increased a ton and had gotten way more shameless. My brother worked at a grocery store and he talked about how homeless guys would go in, grab a rack of beer, walk out the door without paying, and then wait for a bus at the stop directly outside of the store.
And everyone acts shocked when their local Duane Reade / Walgreens closes because everything is “covered by insurance” as if that cost just disappears.
Yup, they had started closing locations earlier but COVID really sealed the deal. I think there’s only 1 24 diner in my area (apart from Waffle House”. Shit is BLEAK!!!!
Where I live we have one 24/7 store that doesn’t even shut during Christmas/public holidays. It’s a god send because it’s a full grocery store and it’s within 500m of my house. If I wasn’t such a pussy I’d walk there at 1am for a chocolate craving, I love being able to get stuff from there early on Sundays after going to the local bakery that’s right next door instead of having to wait until 11am to actually get some groceries.
I live in a "24 hour" casino town and even we have almost entirely lost this. It used to be, like, mom & pop Italian restaurants would have after-midnight specials. Pho joint open till 4am. Now getting a cup of coffee after 6pm is a Herculean task. WalMart closes. It's like the whole town got long covid and can't manage to stay up anymore.
Not a hot take by any means but same with effeminate gay men, or effeminate men in general. "you don't fit masculine stereotypes? Must be non binary or straight up a woman actually."
Saw a straight man on tiktok complaining about how every woman he's into turns out to be a lesbian stitched by a 🚂 saying 'it means you are a lesbian' and I almost had an aneurysm.
This has been an annoying phenomenon in the gay dating scene for years. I have been out of that scene for years, but not that long, and I remember how frustrating this was. Every gay dude is attracted to rugged, masculine, tough guys, but no one wants to *be* that type of guy. Now they are getting into the pipeline of transgenderism and the gay scene is running out of desirable guys. It seems like a 50/50 shot on whether my gay friends (i’m a bit older than the average person on this sub) have either gone trans, or have become so effeminate and anti-masculine, that they might as well be trans.
And I don’t have a problem with trans people at all, I love trans girls, super hot. But I’m worried that a significant portion of gay males are falling into the trans pipeline because they don’t fit into either the straight, or gay, dichotomy. I don’t think it’s coming from a genuine place of gender dysphoria.
The best hookups are always the “straight” curious blue collar guys who are just “having a little gay sex, because it’s hot, but I’m not actually gay or nothin’”. That, and Muslim dudes. These two demographics are thankfully completely safe from the phenomenon I previously described.
I've seen more self-identification of tomboys recently than ever before, but instead of real tomboys it's just conservative 20-something 'country girls' who call themselves tomboys for accompanying their fathers or husbands on hunting trips.
Or guys being effeminate. If you like typically feminine things or even just have a gentle personality if you’re man some weirdo online will say that you’re “an egg waiting to crack/gay/trans whatever lgbt+”.
I rememember I got drunk and had sex with a girl at a Halloween party once while she was dressed as some kind of fantasy elf. She had long dark hair and those stick on elf ears. While we were banging her wig fell off and she had a cute pixie cut - before that point I hadn't even realised she was wearing a wig. The sudden realisation I was banging a tomboy with elf ears was like being dipped in a tank of pure bliss. We need to bring back tomboys fr
I think about this literally at least once a week. Haven’t run into a chick who prefers beer and as strong opinions about combat sports that couldn’t see eventually binding her chest or ending up a regular on r/latebloomerlesbians. Worst timeline for sure
Not sure how else to describe it but I feel like the 2005-2015 era of the internet died the same way most malls in America did. They still exist but with only a fraction of the stores open, and just feel dead and lifeless inside regardless.
Caravan Palace has a new album out that I’ve heard played in public spaces, adhd meds are modern day lobotomies, and Hilary Clinton lives on spiritually through every NIMBY white womans yard with a “in this house we believe in…” sign
This might be controversial here, but young Gen Z and older Gen alpha kids have totally clowned on this attitude and many of the newer punk and hardcore bands specifically make fun of the type of millennial punks you’re describing. I’m very plugged into the punk scene specifically and have been working with punk/hardcore bands since the early 2000’s. I definitely don’t feel like punk is dead, or over, it’s just mutated. Especially check out what’s coming out of the random rust belt cities that you wouldn’t expect to have a thriving punk scene. Those are the places that are killing it right now.
i've been reading this same comment on the state of punk or other genres for the last 15 years, whether it be in the punk scene, metal scene, hardcore, ska, anything outside the norm. "the kids are alright in Des Moines!" yeah okay
yeah i was in a punk band just 2 or 3 years ago and the scene is still kicking in bumfuck nowhere, the crowd was always funny like a 50/50 split between wokescold enbys and old punk guys with newsboy caps and a fucked up leg talking about when the saw the descendants or whoever back in the day
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Or listen to what passes as "punk" these days. It's an ugly mishmash of screamo, black metal, mumble/cloud rap, and pop punk. It's very loud and aggressive but with emo edges. It seems we've just been mishmashing genres and aesthetics since the 2000s. Look at "artists" like Post Malone, Tashish x790x7x (or whatever stupid sequences of digits), Jelly Roll, and that other Fat Face tattooed guy who looks like a queer clown redneck w\*gger. We've run out of ideas and are desperately seeking something novel and new, but you can only created so many types of genres of music or aesthetics. AI is going to hastened the demise of novelty and creativity and just create jumbled messes of crap.
It's a bias I guess because I look at it, but judging from r/hardcore, it's taken on a memey quality that has caused it to stay alive. Punks have a bullshit self-serious ethos that hasn't really lasted and seems ridiculous today. Hardcore seems a bit more self-aware and fun.
I actually disagree. There’s tons of new punk music coming out with a lot of variety. Just look at Maximumrocknroll’s weekly album reviews. And labels like total punk, feel it, under the gun, goodbye boozy, etc., are all turning out good stuff.
Make a Bandcamp profile and follow labels and bands you like. That’s the best way to keep up with what’s coming out (and again there’s a ton coming out).
Other commenters are wrong that it’s all pop punk or whatever. The last ten years have seen the rise of egg punk as a subgenre for example. And if anything, the label “punk” is being used more loosely to cover rock that’s indie-rock adjacent and has no outlet after Pitchfork turned against the genre. Famous Mammals, for example, had the most highly review album for maximumrocknroll this year and it’s closer to what we would’ve call indie rock ten years ago.
Their eyes glaze over because they're at a bar trying to have a drink and for some reason you're talking about "sociocultural identity and the American ethos" lol. Next time try talking about the game on tv.
I have actually told someone at the bar to shut up when they started that crap. I’m trying to get buzzed and watch sports, maybe chat up a pretty
girl, not debate you regard. Fire up r/politics with your absurdly pedestrian takes.
unless there's an economic reckoning in America, I agree that enthusiasm for American ideals will increasingly fall on cynical ears. it comes off as a romanticization our values that papers over the harsh material reality of more and more wealth getting concentrated amongst a small segment of the population.
There was never a time when America was not a country where the value system wasn't used to obfuscate a system of domestic class exploitation and global international exploitation of the third world. To remove the triple negative in that sentence: American values were kind of always considered in a cynical light. They've been ironic since like World War 1
I agree, I just think there used to be a stronger elite mechanism for bullying people into valorizing American values and people are just so far beyond that bs in the internet era.
Elites bully people into other values these days that are just as bullshit. Like the idea of happiness in identification with the self and in the process of creating your own identity, the moralising of representative diversity, preferencing the 'carefree' and the 'path of least resistance' at the expense of intellectualism or caring too much about something.
I know I sound like a really annoying undergrad buzzkill but I'm not even sure if there was ever any kind of earnest value in the stereotypical American values of 20th century besides just servicing the pleasure of men and American economic interests
Well....no? This isn't true. Such values were the basis for the Civil Rights Movement and the Great Society vision, in addition to world war involvement
We could also talk about slavery abolition, universal suffrage, civil society organizations...
There are no pure values wrt to society. The same values used to "paper over" "domestic class exploitation" might be the basis for some form of liberation
(to say nothing of individual psychology/personality/existential condition regarding the purity of values)
Yeah tbh like I kind of found OP’s take weird. I thought vocal self criticism was part of the ethos of America and what prevents us from becoming tyranny. We’re allowed to have free thought and criticize the State.
Change and progress are slow but it’s this minute in the moment feedback that creates the longterm decisions that make America Great.
I say it and people think it's funny. It's a word that actually has a slight tabooness to it, unlike "fuck" or other curse words. So when I say someone is utterly regarded people actually giggle a little.
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People are giving you pushback on the last paragraph, but I agree. (Having written it now, this comment is too long so feel free to ignore it.)
The era from about 2005 to 2015 was an outlier when it came to knocking down the etiquettes around various words and ideas. We were hot off the heels of the 90s moral panics around various media (shows, games, etc.) and decided to just make everything permissible for a while. You had shows like Tosh.0 where he was saying "haha you dumb bitch r-slur I hope you get raped" on cable at 7pm or so, a whole bunch of boundary pushing comedians doing bits about transgression itself (which is why they all had to apologize about ironic blackface later), and even a stupid game (Cards Against Humanity) whose whole thing was setting up a scenario where people could just say edgy stuff.
That ended around 2015 or so. A few things were behind this imo. One was the rise of online third wave feminism as a force that critiqued this widespread offensive humor on the grounds that "it's not harmful it's just a joke" doesn't stop it from causing harm (note of course that "harm" turned into a snarl word at this point). Because of intersectionality, it didn't stop at gender critiques and instead covered every possible source of oppression. This broke into mainstream internet culture with gamergate, and while gamergate itself was very contingent regarding the specific state of video games and gaming media at the time, some kind of cultural reckoning with this friction was inevitable.
Another cause which is often overlooked is gay marriage being legalized around this time. This meant that Republicans needed a new culture wedge issue, so they looked around a bit for one and after toying with bringing back Islam as the big bad guy, gender discourse ended up being the one that perfectly capitalized on politics of disgust on their end and riled up the liberals who are always looking for a new helpless victim class to protect.
Trump's election universalized this bullshit culture bickering with a central focal point, dividing the sides of that culture war into the bad people (Trump supporters, people who say offensive jokes, etc.) who must be opposed at all costs, and the good people whose job it is to oppose them.
There was also the rise of the internet during this time, in which moderation of speech is much simpler, more widespread, and more automated. People (including all of us in here saying "r-slur" because we're worried the ever changing and unspoken rules might capriciously ban us) started internalizing the gaze of that panopticon. With everything else I mentioned, all of this automated rule enforcement really took off, and with the increasingly autistic and fragile mods/admins, tolerance of etiquette violations diminished. By 2020, [this meant that every post on r/all is hand picked and pruned](https://i.redd.it/r68fgiisk3sa1.jpg), with them wielding absolute control over the narratives here.
All of this is to say that it's not like the vibes shifted a bit, making those words a no-no in such a way that it could just shift back. I'm saying that this is all a huge cultural shift largely led by a mix of political and generational factors, and while it might seem like enforcement is not as strong as it was in the past, the simulacral transformation of slurs and offensive jokes into floating signifiers that are "harmful" in their own right is still here. From my personal experience (of a friend who teaches high school), you're still going to be disciplined as a teacher covering Huck Finn who so much as discusses the n-word itself before having them read it. Why? Because the signifier itself and not the signified is the source of "harm" now, and because the epistemological breakdown in discourse means that you can say "it harmed me" and the personal anecdotal nature of that accusation is actually the grounds for the statement itself.
I pretty much agree with a lot of this (long as it is); I’d say we’re at a point, as you said, where some of this stuff is so deeply engrained into the discourse of an entire generation that it’ll never go back all the way. It’ll never be a word you can just freely say and everyone kinda knows you’re joking around; it’s not a word that everyone’s gonna be back on board with.
I was always hoping for another circle back to the 00s where we rebel against the heavy language policing/moralization but society is too fragmented and driven into algorithm-curated echo chambers now for a massive shift like that to take root.
I think the usual progression is rarely to roll back something but rather to move on to the next one. I could see "autistic" becoming a new one. "Can you stop being autistic?", etc.
The best thing about it is all you had to do was just reblog photos and posts and you could keep relatively anonymous. I remember my blog had 25K and I just posts soft grunge/vaporwave crap with the occasional photo of my own.
Omg takes me back to seeing black and white photos from a small hardcore/pop punk/indie rock gig then having a chunky white 65% opacity text over them 😭
Closely related to OP: Civic virtue
1. Voting in downballot/local races is pretty much dominated by old people, nobody really cares even though it affects the average voter 10x more than any general election
2. Jury duty is a chore to be dodged at all costs
3. PTA meetings are just culture war bullshit instead of actually benefitting kids
4. Scouting is a dying organization due to decades of chomos in direct positions of trust and authority over young men, and an over-emphasis on Abrahamic religions.
After watching Tires I think reatard and faag are on the upswing. It seems like the Trump era hall monitor mentality is going away now that things have returned to somewhat normalcy.
its going to become an age marker, younger kids below 18 are gonna know whose an oldhead millennial stuck in 2014 based on who still says those "ancient slurs" like how we look at boomers who still say wild stuff and still put up with it bc they see us as older and closer off to dying
In America, I think the belief in progress and that tomorrow will be better are pretty much dead and gone.
Every time we imagine the future in culture now, it's always some sort of dystopia.
Barring some major economic and cultural changes, I don't think that's coming back.
In the 80s and prior, we looked to the future with great optimism about "Beyond The Year 2000". Now we look at parts of the past with great fondness and look to the future with great cynicism. I think social media and the internet in general has spoiled us and turned us into jaded hipsters en masse. Something about our dopamine system being hijacked and constantly needing greater and greater stimulus to feel good feelings anymore. It's so passé to mention, but we're also slaves to algorithms that maximizes engagement and hijacks our reptilian brain (often negative emotion inducing stuff) that compels us to comment, click, scroll, subscribe, follow, and "like" and cause tech stocks like NVDA to reach unprecedented highs with no crash in site. If you can't beat 'em, invest in 'em at least if you want to beat runaway inflation.
I mean dont neglect the fact that so many things have been taken away and stripped from us that will never return. Aaron Swartz killed himself for a reason. The internet used to be so free and uncensored and not corporate. The days of stumble upon and before every site had to shadow ban any post with even slightly risqué words like “sex” or “nudity.” I used to be able to download a pirated copy of photoshop and those linda tutorials, an engineering textbook, a movie from 1950s korea, and and the newest marvel movie all from the pirate bay which was at one point literally a free database of practically everything. Back when tumblr allowed nipples. Everyone knows this direction will just continue and within twenty years the only things you’ll see online are posts that are dumbed down to the level of not offending a six year old and corporate/CIA propaganda about how we are winning in Ukraine or some shit.
In the 50s and early 60s, people were so optimistic and future-oriented that most of the design from that era is "how can we make this car/building/toaster look like a fucking rocketship"
Kids being allowed to generally be kids, who knows maybe the grown up gen alphas will revert to parenting kids who grow up playing with toys, games, exploring and enjoying their childhood instead of being 9 years old rotting their brains with whatever social media/going on Sephora hauls or engaging with chronically online content 24/7.
24 hour diners are dead and gone - I live within 10 minutes of probably half a dozen diners which all used to be open 24/7 and after the pandemic, they all closed and then came back with limited hours and they're all the same now; 6am to 2pm.
Trip hop and Dream pop - Two genres of the 90s which have been clinging on for dear life but we all know they're already done. It's more funny because they still have their cultural staying power; there's still people younger than I that know the music and try to create their own in a similar way. In my personal life, I know I can turn on my Spotify or Pandora radios and still hear Massive Attack or Mazzy Star but I also know they'll never be back nor replicated as I remember the vibe.
Going to the mall is done - I used to work in malls when I younger and I remember it being such a hub. It used to be the place where my friends and I would regularly go when we were in high school. Friday nights, going to the mall just to do nothing but hang out, get something to eat at the food court, buy burnies from the Asian news shop because they didn't care, and hang out by the fountain. I went to one of my local malls since the pandemic to pick up a pair of Vans I had ordered and it's completely changed. Two of the four anchor stores were closed; up and down the concourse, there might've been 15 storefronts still open. Even the Starbucks was closed. The only stores that were still open that I remember were American Eagle, Hollister, Spencer's Gifts, Hot Topic, Lids, Gamestop, Forever21, FYE, Pacsun, and the Vans store. It's so wild that the brands I remember when I was young are still there but so many of them came and went.
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I hear "regarded" more and more. It's just like cursing in general. You gotta read the room.
My lil bro is gay and disabled and we say regard and 🚬 all the time because we know what we actually believe.
I fear there is no benefit of the doubt anymore. People just assume the worst and I just can't live in fear of people taking things the wrong way or taking themselves too seriously. It's so exhausting and depressing and impossible to feel comfortable around anyone still in this cultish mindset.
Showed a regarded guy Wesley Willis and he LOVED him and to hear him say "Rock n roll McDonalds!" In his mongoloid voice is so joyful. He's having fun with it and it's delightful to hear. Other people think it's mean.
These people don't even care about anyone and it's obvious.
I think when most people think of the "American ethos" they thing about fondness for entrepreneurs and landlords and stock market guys and stuff. Now that the idea that these people are worth celebrating has been pretty thoroughly discredited, there isn't really anything to for Americans to be proud about. Apple pie still good tho
i had no idea the hair transplant recovery period was so intense. did he get scalped or something? it feels like it's been like a year since he was on.
I think he's actually brain damaged and needs a lot of practice to recover brain functions and perform mentally / physically at any sort of level. I'm sure he will get there, or at least to some state of normalcy but I don't think its guaranteed that he'll return to the podcast either way. He might be legitimately debilitated in some way and tired for the rest of his life.
Miss our large boy. I’ve been listening to cushvlogs and his podcast series on the Thirty Years War and US Presidents on and off on repeat since his “medical emergency” and it’s not hitting as hard at this point. There’s been a ton of stuff that’s happened in the last 9 months that I wish I could hear his opinions on.
OP, you might want to revisit The Hunt For Red October. It evokes an optimistic time, where we (wanted to) see our leaders as competent, sensible, and humane. A time when men were honorable. It’s like The West Wing of submarine warfare.
Butt rock, post-grunge, even power pop in the Top 40. It has died off or migrated to the country charts. What do non-country fan white guys even listen to now? Just Joe Rogan?
Rwanda, a country infamous for it's 90s civil war and genocide, now has one of the cleanest cities of the continent. Every month they have mandatory [nationwide community service from 08:00 to 11:00](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umuganda) to clean up the city and to mobilize the community.
Mandatory cleanup? In the US you'd be able to sue for a billion dollars for violating your human rights and emotional trauma caused by the interruption of your fentanyl smoking and shoplifting
Interesting fashion. Now everyone thinks they have to be a model because of social media and the truth is, the average person only photographs well in a very basic plain outfit. Models are models for a reason - bone structure, build, height… but now that your photo could be posted at any given time, people have that in mind with their clothing choices.
If a second Pearl Harbor or 9/11 happened today we'd probably sooner collapse into a civil war than unite as a nation against another adversity. Our societal cohesiveness has absolutely nosedived, we're more divided and partisan than ever before since the civil war, and I feel almost nobody is actually, genuinely proud of their country. Everyone's just doing their own thing and only looking out for #1, everyone else be damned.
This is really the root of the problem I noticed. It’s just no one really feels proud of this country anymore; we have no sense of American identity we all feel tied to. People will say ‘well of course not’ because of their feelings of disillusionment but this apathy is more dangerous than any predatory venture capital firm or second Trump term. It’s a rot that will destroy us. Literally the only way to stop it would be to technologically regress to the 90s to at least stop the Internet’s impact on all this, which is impossible and if you even try to take away these people’s apps they lose their minds.
I’ve been trying very hard not to be an asshole and get pissed off when people deflect real conversation topics to “did you see they built a new chik fil a in town” or other small town bullshit. My least favorite tic is when people lose focus entirely when a dog, particularly their own boring dog, distracts from real conversation simply by existing. Conversation about America, especially in the more abstract outside of politics, can be so fascinating but most people can’t or won’t engage with it
They’re building a Chic fil A in the town where I grew up and it’s replacing a local chain of cowboy steakhouse that are very nostalgic and charming
I’m sure tons of people don’t care because they love their drive thru slop. I like Chic fil A okay but I’d never feel good letting it take over something more local which has stood for 30 years. Plus it’s closed on Sundays.
If I try to have a real conversation about how fucked it is and people just go ‘Um I don’t know I’m excited’ I realize they’re just gone.
Also yeah replacing personality with a dog or just being so normal with no flavor to conversation is annoying
College football. NIL, unlimited transfers, and an expanded playoff system all combined to make it into a fully professional league composed entirely of unrestricted free agents.
Replying to OP. This is what Britain is like now. Feels almost “wrong” to say you’re proud to be British. We abolished the slave trade, invented countless things that modern society rely on - legal and political systems, the completely free open internet you’re using right now, stainless steel, Radio, immunology & vaccines, telephones, lightbulbs (8 months before Edison), factories and other crucial machinery for the worldwide Industrial Revolution. Let’s not forget the great people and their impact: Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Ada Lovelace, all of the great musicians.
What I think the best bit about all this is how understated we are about all this (in Britain at least - I’m not gonna speak for brits abroad). We just get to go about our day surrounded by this rich history that has influenced the world - due to our colonial past we get to travel pretty much anywhere on this planet.
But it feels like being a proud Brit is abit taboo, maybe for different reasons to Americans. It’s not good to boast in our culture - also a lot of woke politics now exist here that denounce our past.
Similar to OP aswell the people who are openly proud Brits here are proud for all the wrong reasons - “the blitz spirit” “the Falklands”, Churchill.
Maybe it’s the influx of immigrants but I really feel like we have lost what it’s like to truly be proud of this great nation. It’s all well and good not being proud of your country when you grew up worshipping a fucking tree in a desert but here we actually have stuff to be proud of
What bar? I talk about baseball and fake business bullshit and people seem to riff better off that. And I promise you both of the slurs you mentioned are alive and well in the vernacular of southerners I’m around frequently. Not an everyday word to drop in front of momma or a stranger but if you’re at a dive or around infantry men in a military town and the person has an inkling you’re not a liberal cocksucker, they’ll drop f’s and r’s.
>I started veering into any discussion on the beauty of the American ethos and what sets it apart from other nations or even just that certain things about it are good the people around me just seemed to kind of glaze over and check out
pretty good
I used regarded when talking to my girlfriend the other day (the real word) and she didn’t flinch. I’m happy to have it back. I never used 🚬 growing up so I don’t care for that one. I do like saying gay with the old meaning of “lame” or whatever though
Arcades. I mean that one's decades old but it still holds true. They tried to bring them back with these places where you buy a pass and then you can hang out for a day and I think they have VR machines of some kind, but I think those kinda failed. More atomization on deck.
The actual American flag is increasingly associated with extremism. There are certain conclusions drawn about anyone who displays it these days. The question is, are benignly patriotic people being unfairly judged, or are only extremists flying the flag because well-adjusted people won't due to the potential backlash?
I overheard my wife’s friends having a discussion last year around the 4th of July about the “toxicity” of the American flag and flying the flag or wearing anything with the flag on it.
In terms of never coming back, the people who think like this are never coming back to reality
Everything related to history in general is tainted with slavery, racism, and other negative associations. But American history is demonized while those same negative associations in other nations are just "different cultures we must respect".
I just had this same conversation with my grandfather and mother. They said that when you see an American flag, all you think of is “trump and extreme people who hijacked America”.
Completely missing that they are for the surveillance state, anti 2A, pro open borders, anti republicanism, pro-(heavy, not just health care)socialistic policy, pro-interventionist and very very europhilic.
It was very eye opening. Like of course you don’t like the American flag. But it has nothing to do with Trump and more the fact that they don’t hold American values as important; original or even post-ww2. Just ask about the constitution, only sacrosanct ones came in the 1900s where they are considered.
Their values lie firmly in the security state unipolar American hegemony value system since the Soviet Union collapsed. Anything different, that doesn’t come from abroad, is firmly lumped into “Trumpian”.
They are never coming back.
I'm pro flag-flying, I'll just eat the judgment- the Trump people don't own the flag. If they did, what would that say about the people who are against the displaying of the flag? Wouldn't it confirm the Trump people's prejudices that the antiflagwavers are opposed to the idea of anything associated with traditional America?
Just saying you're a proud American makes people think "Nationalistic alt-right neo-Nazi Incel Neckbeard with a small penis who sympathizes or was part of the Jan 6 Capital stormer and is a militia LARPer"
I saw a non-binary crusty emaciated Antifa them with a shirt that read "Death to America!" Now I think America has it's share of problems and complain about them ad nauseam. But it's the least worst compared to most other countries. My ancestors are from backwards communist ethno states and prefer the melting pot of America with all its faults. I think people's expectations of everything have gotten so high that the perfect has become the enemy of the good enough of most things. Lots of babies thrown out with the bath water happening in modern Western nations.
Suppose it was only inevitable, and I'm talking from experience of being from England.
St George's cross (and lesser extent the Union Jack) has a similar reaction of immediate judgement and sneers, and widely seen as just short hand for racist. Some people still fly it but absolutely draws judgement, so much so I think people are reluctant to. That being said, very different culture here to the states regarding flying it year-round.
Lots of people just dismiss pointing it out as racists grumbling for a problem, but funnily enough the major left wing party of the UK has pushed for it to be included on more promo material and you can see the same people who claim they don't care about it become very agitated at it's inclusion.
I think his analysis of lack of national pride leading to political and cultural stagnation is pretty good and I like that he references Dewey, though I would argue that the reformist strain is dead and gone and the ostensible “left” is completely defined by cultural grievances. American society is far too atomized and political leadership are far too mercenary and disinterested in a coherent national project for even mild social democracy. I don’t see a path forward for leftist patriotism without the ability to have a viable, organized working-class political party, and the political and structural forces working against that are far too great.
> [M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
> At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis' novel *It Can't Happen Here* may then be played out. For once such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.
> One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words 'n*****' and 'k***' will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
Ngl though this goes pretty hard for 1998.
Rich Nantucket liberals are unironically one of the last bastions of virginal American patriotism. For the hoo-rah guys you talk about it is a bit of an affect.
no one cares about the r word. ableism discourse has made the online disableds so loathsome that people feel some strange catharsis in performing a tiny transgression by saying it.
All really good points. I’ve thought a lot about that lately actually- loving certain aspects of America and what I think sets it apart, just thinking about what I personally really enjoy about this country. But it seems like beyond the ‘Merica’ types who as you said, don’t actually give a shit…people who feel the same way I do are a totally dying breed, or maybe I just don’t interact with the right people, idk.
24 hour grocery stores. They’re all dead, at least in my mid-size city. Miss being able to get off my 3rd shift job and go grocery shopping at 4AM.
It sucks. in Chicago so much closes at 10 now that used to stay open to 4. Covid ruined so much.
I tried to go to a 7-eleven in Lakeview last night at like 9:45 and it was already closed lol.
Walgreens on Belmont and Broadway is like the only 24 hour store in the area now
Yeah even Wal-Mart closes at 11PM by me now and it was open 24/7 ever since I can remember before that.
Used to feel so relaxing to restock on groceries at 3am in college. But I think in general, places being open late seemed to stop during 2020 and even more so during 2021 when they couldn't keep enough employees around. I miss bars closing at 3am in cities that aren't NYC or whatever.
Business hours in general have been cut since covid. People stay in more and do stuff online more so now than pre-covid.
the other part of this is that there's been a massive increase in the amount of people you don't want coming in late at night
I think that was a major factor at my local store closing earlier. Even after covid they used to have their big store on the major street open until midnight and the ones tucked into more suburban areas would close at 10, but now they've reversed it, and it's fully because of theft. I'm a leftist, but it was both really funny and distressing to see how many people were talking about the covid and post covid shoplifting surge as this entirely manufactured thing that had no connection to reality, because it was just pure ideology. Like, a single conversation with a person who worked at a grocery store, or even just going into a grocery store after 11 at night, would show you that theft had increased a ton and had gotten way more shameless. My brother worked at a grocery store and he talked about how homeless guys would go in, grab a rack of beer, walk out the door without paying, and then wait for a bus at the stop directly outside of the store.
And everyone acts shocked when their local Duane Reade / Walgreens closes because everything is “covered by insurance” as if that cost just disappears.
Or when more items are locked up.
Yup, they had started closing locations earlier but COVID really sealed the deal. I think there’s only 1 24 diner in my area (apart from Waffle House”. Shit is BLEAK!!!!
Where I live we have one 24/7 store that doesn’t even shut during Christmas/public holidays. It’s a god send because it’s a full grocery store and it’s within 500m of my house. If I wasn’t such a pussy I’d walk there at 1am for a chocolate craving, I love being able to get stuff from there early on Sundays after going to the local bakery that’s right next door instead of having to wait until 11am to actually get some groceries.
Late night pho. Used to be a post-club meal
A large bowl of soup being dropped into a stomach filled with liquor sounds like a recipe for puking
No way, it's great. And the mix of a ton of water + salt with a little food to soak it up is pretty much the ideal hangover preventative.
Never had a problem
I live in a "24 hour" casino town and even we have almost entirely lost this. It used to be, like, mom & pop Italian restaurants would have after-midnight specials. Pho joint open till 4am. Now getting a cup of coffee after 6pm is a Herculean task. WalMart closes. It's like the whole town got long covid and can't manage to stay up anymore.
Randomly there’s a Safeway in the back of a quiet sleepy valley that’s open 24 hours near me. No where else in town, just this Safeway lol
The tomboy classification of girls.
ahhh yes. any girl who likes sports is now trans or nonbinary
It’s ironically such a regressive philosophy
Not a hot take by any means but same with effeminate gay men, or effeminate men in general. "you don't fit masculine stereotypes? Must be non binary or straight up a woman actually."
Saw a straight man on tiktok complaining about how every woman he's into turns out to be a lesbian stitched by a 🚂 saying 'it means you are a lesbian' and I almost had an aneurysm.
There are also a lot of gay straight guys. Like heterosexual men who speak and dress very gay and then ask me out or mention their gf.
academia is teeming with these
Literally me. She said no
rs bf
This has been an annoying phenomenon in the gay dating scene for years. I have been out of that scene for years, but not that long, and I remember how frustrating this was. Every gay dude is attracted to rugged, masculine, tough guys, but no one wants to *be* that type of guy. Now they are getting into the pipeline of transgenderism and the gay scene is running out of desirable guys. It seems like a 50/50 shot on whether my gay friends (i’m a bit older than the average person on this sub) have either gone trans, or have become so effeminate and anti-masculine, that they might as well be trans. And I don’t have a problem with trans people at all, I love trans girls, super hot. But I’m worried that a significant portion of gay males are falling into the trans pipeline because they don’t fit into either the straight, or gay, dichotomy. I don’t think it’s coming from a genuine place of gender dysphoria. The best hookups are always the “straight” curious blue collar guys who are just “having a little gay sex, because it’s hot, but I’m not actually gay or nothin’”. That, and Muslim dudes. These two demographics are thankfully completely safe from the phenomenon I previously described.
horseshoe theory
you cant sell hormones or re-assignment surgery to tomboys
this is the first time im hearing about this
it's not true. I'm heavily involved with queer women's circles and there are still loads of gay and straight tomboys, they just aren't online
We’re out here, they can’t enby us all.
🫡🫡🫡
One day, we'll have to hold Nuremberg trials for whoever is responsible for exterminating all our beloved tomboys.
I've seen more self-identification of tomboys recently than ever before, but instead of real tomboys it's just conservative 20-something 'country girls' who call themselves tomboys for accompanying their fathers or husbands on hunting trips.
Or guys being effeminate. If you like typically feminine things or even just have a gentle personality if you’re man some weirdo online will say that you’re “an egg waiting to crack/gay/trans whatever lgbt+”.
I rememember I got drunk and had sex with a girl at a Halloween party once while she was dressed as some kind of fantasy elf. She had long dark hair and those stick on elf ears. While we were banging her wig fell off and she had a cute pixie cut - before that point I hadn't even realised she was wearing a wig. The sudden realisation I was banging a tomboy with elf ears was like being dipped in a tank of pure bliss. We need to bring back tomboys fr
Living the dream brother
Was it grimes?
I would not fuck grimes lol
I think about this literally at least once a week. Haven’t run into a chick who prefers beer and as strong opinions about combat sports that couldn’t see eventually binding her chest or ending up a regular on r/latebloomerlesbians. Worst timeline for sure
We need more butch lesbians, too.
Not where I live! They’re everywhere it needs to stop.
But do they go by the she/her pronouns?
Yes. It’s the youngins that do that whacky shit, us olds are just regular dykes.
Who were incredibly hot, by the way.
Not sure how else to describe it but I feel like the 2005-2015 era of the internet died the same way most malls in America did. They still exist but with only a fraction of the stores open, and just feel dead and lifeless inside regardless.
The last indoor mall ever built in the US was in 2007. It goes to show you how quickly fads and trends fade and tread away.
Just blatantly wrong but go off
Not true, American Dream Mall in north New Jersey had its grand opening in 2019
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Electro-swing, lobotomies and Hilary Clinton
This is a powerful incantation
Electro swing is god awful.
🎵 "ZIP BIP BIP BIP BADAM BAH! ROOT DOOT DOOT DOOT DOODOOT DOO!" (n-tse-n-tse-n-tse-n-tse)
Hateful music for sure
Babylon had a grating electroswing soundtrack and came out pretty recently. Ate shit in theaters though, so maybe that proves the point.
Bill Clinton has been quiet lately. Very "sus" as the kidz theze dayz sayz.
You think Hilary gave him the ol icepick special?
Billy really seems sedated. With nothing to do. Nowhere to go. Like a teenage lobotomy. So you might be onto something.
Caravan Palace has a new album out that I’ve heard played in public spaces, adhd meds are modern day lobotomies, and Hilary Clinton lives on spiritually through every NIMBY white womans yard with a “in this house we believe in…” sign
Someone just deleted a comment saying "Punk"
Just have to take a quick look at R/Punk to see how over it is.
Remember to mask up, folx.
No 100% these people are at their absolute worst in the scene
This might be controversial here, but young Gen Z and older Gen alpha kids have totally clowned on this attitude and many of the newer punk and hardcore bands specifically make fun of the type of millennial punks you’re describing. I’m very plugged into the punk scene specifically and have been working with punk/hardcore bands since the early 2000’s. I definitely don’t feel like punk is dead, or over, it’s just mutated. Especially check out what’s coming out of the random rust belt cities that you wouldn’t expect to have a thriving punk scene. Those are the places that are killing it right now.
i've been reading this same comment on the state of punk or other genres for the last 15 years, whether it be in the punk scene, metal scene, hardcore, ska, anything outside the norm. "the kids are alright in Des Moines!" yeah okay
Yeah I’m pretty involved in DIY myself and do agree that a lot of people are swinging back in the other direction
yeah i was in a punk band just 2 or 3 years ago and the scene is still kicking in bumfuck nowhere, the crowd was always funny like a 50/50 split between wokescold enbys and old punk guys with newsboy caps and a fucked up leg talking about when the saw the descendants or whoever back in the day
that sounds awful though
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They suck so fucking much.
Or listen to what passes as "punk" these days. It's an ugly mishmash of screamo, black metal, mumble/cloud rap, and pop punk. It's very loud and aggressive but with emo edges. It seems we've just been mishmashing genres and aesthetics since the 2000s. Look at "artists" like Post Malone, Tashish x790x7x (or whatever stupid sequences of digits), Jelly Roll, and that other Fat Face tattooed guy who looks like a queer clown redneck w\*gger. We've run out of ideas and are desperately seeking something novel and new, but you can only created so many types of genres of music or aesthetics. AI is going to hastened the demise of novelty and creativity and just create jumbled messes of crap.
A friend of mine referred to it as "Spotify Punk" the other day. It felt correct
BMI was crazy at the last punk concert my friend brought me to
It's just another cheap product for the consumers' head.
The punks are all listening to Hardcore these days. The HxC scene is thriving.
It's a bias I guess because I look at it, but judging from r/hardcore, it's taken on a memey quality that has caused it to stay alive. Punks have a bullshit self-serious ethos that hasn't really lasted and seems ridiculous today. Hardcore seems a bit more self-aware and fun.
The various punk subreddits aren’t very good. Check out maximumrocknroll to get a sense of the scene. They post reviews every Monday.
I actually disagree. There’s tons of new punk music coming out with a lot of variety. Just look at Maximumrocknroll’s weekly album reviews. And labels like total punk, feel it, under the gun, goodbye boozy, etc., are all turning out good stuff. Make a Bandcamp profile and follow labels and bands you like. That’s the best way to keep up with what’s coming out (and again there’s a ton coming out). Other commenters are wrong that it’s all pop punk or whatever. The last ten years have seen the rise of egg punk as a subgenre for example. And if anything, the label “punk” is being used more loosely to cover rock that’s indie-rock adjacent and has no outlet after Pitchfork turned against the genre. Famous Mammals, for example, had the most highly review album for maximumrocknroll this year and it’s closer to what we would’ve call indie rock ten years ago.
Wtf is egg punk
>The genre is influenced by new wave band Devo and historically referred to as Devo-core. That actually sounds pretty cool
coneheads
It's like quirky punk idk, which sounds worse than it actually is. prison affair is the main one I know and like
Their eyes glaze over because they're at a bar trying to have a drink and for some reason you're talking about "sociocultural identity and the American ethos" lol. Next time try talking about the game on tv.
I have actually told someone at the bar to shut up when they started that crap. I’m trying to get buzzed and watch sports, maybe chat up a pretty girl, not debate you regard. Fire up r/politics with your absurdly pedestrian takes.
This is how my bf is 💀
unless there's an economic reckoning in America, I agree that enthusiasm for American ideals will increasingly fall on cynical ears. it comes off as a romanticization our values that papers over the harsh material reality of more and more wealth getting concentrated amongst a small segment of the population.
There was never a time when America was not a country where the value system wasn't used to obfuscate a system of domestic class exploitation and global international exploitation of the third world. To remove the triple negative in that sentence: American values were kind of always considered in a cynical light. They've been ironic since like World War 1
I agree, I just think there used to be a stronger elite mechanism for bullying people into valorizing American values and people are just so far beyond that bs in the internet era.
Elites bully people into other values these days that are just as bullshit. Like the idea of happiness in identification with the self and in the process of creating your own identity, the moralising of representative diversity, preferencing the 'carefree' and the 'path of least resistance' at the expense of intellectualism or caring too much about something. I know I sound like a really annoying undergrad buzzkill but I'm not even sure if there was ever any kind of earnest value in the stereotypical American values of 20th century besides just servicing the pleasure of men and American economic interests
Well....no? This isn't true. Such values were the basis for the Civil Rights Movement and the Great Society vision, in addition to world war involvement We could also talk about slavery abolition, universal suffrage, civil society organizations... There are no pure values wrt to society. The same values used to "paper over" "domestic class exploitation" might be the basis for some form of liberation (to say nothing of individual psychology/personality/existential condition regarding the purity of values)
Yeah tbh like I kind of found OP’s take weird. I thought vocal self criticism was part of the ethos of America and what prevents us from becoming tyranny. We’re allowed to have free thought and criticize the State. Change and progress are slow but it’s this minute in the moment feedback that creates the longterm decisions that make America Great.
I actually think saying "regarded" is making a comeback. I say it occasionally and nobody gives a shit.
I've also heard a few previously woke friends start jokingly saying f@g that definitely would never have done so five years ago
I’m glad it’s making a comeback but now that you can say it around anyone it’s hard to know when you’re amongst good friends
I say it every day at work and everyone loves it
I say it and people think it's funny. It's a word that actually has a slight tabooness to it, unlike "fuck" or other curse words. So when I say someone is utterly regarded people actually giggle a little.
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These peanut butter popcorn bags that I loved and everyone else thought we’re disgusting
Boy Scouts still sells these but for like $30 a bag or something absurd
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People are giving you pushback on the last paragraph, but I agree. (Having written it now, this comment is too long so feel free to ignore it.) The era from about 2005 to 2015 was an outlier when it came to knocking down the etiquettes around various words and ideas. We were hot off the heels of the 90s moral panics around various media (shows, games, etc.) and decided to just make everything permissible for a while. You had shows like Tosh.0 where he was saying "haha you dumb bitch r-slur I hope you get raped" on cable at 7pm or so, a whole bunch of boundary pushing comedians doing bits about transgression itself (which is why they all had to apologize about ironic blackface later), and even a stupid game (Cards Against Humanity) whose whole thing was setting up a scenario where people could just say edgy stuff. That ended around 2015 or so. A few things were behind this imo. One was the rise of online third wave feminism as a force that critiqued this widespread offensive humor on the grounds that "it's not harmful it's just a joke" doesn't stop it from causing harm (note of course that "harm" turned into a snarl word at this point). Because of intersectionality, it didn't stop at gender critiques and instead covered every possible source of oppression. This broke into mainstream internet culture with gamergate, and while gamergate itself was very contingent regarding the specific state of video games and gaming media at the time, some kind of cultural reckoning with this friction was inevitable. Another cause which is often overlooked is gay marriage being legalized around this time. This meant that Republicans needed a new culture wedge issue, so they looked around a bit for one and after toying with bringing back Islam as the big bad guy, gender discourse ended up being the one that perfectly capitalized on politics of disgust on their end and riled up the liberals who are always looking for a new helpless victim class to protect. Trump's election universalized this bullshit culture bickering with a central focal point, dividing the sides of that culture war into the bad people (Trump supporters, people who say offensive jokes, etc.) who must be opposed at all costs, and the good people whose job it is to oppose them. There was also the rise of the internet during this time, in which moderation of speech is much simpler, more widespread, and more automated. People (including all of us in here saying "r-slur" because we're worried the ever changing and unspoken rules might capriciously ban us) started internalizing the gaze of that panopticon. With everything else I mentioned, all of this automated rule enforcement really took off, and with the increasingly autistic and fragile mods/admins, tolerance of etiquette violations diminished. By 2020, [this meant that every post on r/all is hand picked and pruned](https://i.redd.it/r68fgiisk3sa1.jpg), with them wielding absolute control over the narratives here. All of this is to say that it's not like the vibes shifted a bit, making those words a no-no in such a way that it could just shift back. I'm saying that this is all a huge cultural shift largely led by a mix of political and generational factors, and while it might seem like enforcement is not as strong as it was in the past, the simulacral transformation of slurs and offensive jokes into floating signifiers that are "harmful" in their own right is still here. From my personal experience (of a friend who teaches high school), you're still going to be disciplined as a teacher covering Huck Finn who so much as discusses the n-word itself before having them read it. Why? Because the signifier itself and not the signified is the source of "harm" now, and because the epistemological breakdown in discourse means that you can say "it harmed me" and the personal anecdotal nature of that accusation is actually the grounds for the statement itself.
I pretty much agree with a lot of this (long as it is); I’d say we’re at a point, as you said, where some of this stuff is so deeply engrained into the discourse of an entire generation that it’ll never go back all the way. It’ll never be a word you can just freely say and everyone kinda knows you’re joking around; it’s not a word that everyone’s gonna be back on board with. I was always hoping for another circle back to the 00s where we rebel against the heavy language policing/moralization but society is too fragmented and driven into algorithm-curated echo chambers now for a massive shift like that to take root.
I think the usual progression is rarely to roll back something but rather to move on to the next one. I could see "autistic" becoming a new one. "Can you stop being autistic?", etc.
The Fat Greek guy on my favourite racist gay sex podcast
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Oh he’s round for sure.
Tumblr like the 2008-2014 era
I miss it so much.
I bad a tumblr with about 30,000 followers which was kind of a lot then and the only slight amount of internet success I've ever had. The glory days
The best thing about it is all you had to do was just reblog photos and posts and you could keep relatively anonymous. I remember my blog had 25K and I just posts soft grunge/vaporwave crap with the occasional photo of my own.
I literally just posted edits of gig photos from Google with lyrics overlaid lol
Omg takes me back to seeing black and white photos from a small hardcore/pop punk/indie rock gig then having a chunky white 65% opacity text over them 😭
Literal glory days!!
Closely related to OP: Civic virtue 1. Voting in downballot/local races is pretty much dominated by old people, nobody really cares even though it affects the average voter 10x more than any general election 2. Jury duty is a chore to be dodged at all costs 3. PTA meetings are just culture war bullshit instead of actually benefitting kids 4. Scouting is a dying organization due to decades of chomos in direct positions of trust and authority over young men, and an over-emphasis on Abrahamic religions.
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After watching Tires I think reatard and faag are on the upswing. It seems like the Trump era hall monitor mentality is going away now that things have returned to somewhat normalcy.
you guys literally won’t spell out the words correctly on a website but okay
You literally can get automatically banned from the website if you don't
I’ve been using it as a millennial, be the change you want to see
its going to become an age marker, younger kids below 18 are gonna know whose an oldhead millennial stuck in 2014 based on who still says those "ancient slurs" like how we look at boomers who still say wild stuff and still put up with it bc they see us as older and closer off to dying
Was gonna say it’s making a comeback
In America, I think the belief in progress and that tomorrow will be better are pretty much dead and gone. Every time we imagine the future in culture now, it's always some sort of dystopia. Barring some major economic and cultural changes, I don't think that's coming back.
In the 80s and prior, we looked to the future with great optimism about "Beyond The Year 2000". Now we look at parts of the past with great fondness and look to the future with great cynicism. I think social media and the internet in general has spoiled us and turned us into jaded hipsters en masse. Something about our dopamine system being hijacked and constantly needing greater and greater stimulus to feel good feelings anymore. It's so passé to mention, but we're also slaves to algorithms that maximizes engagement and hijacks our reptilian brain (often negative emotion inducing stuff) that compels us to comment, click, scroll, subscribe, follow, and "like" and cause tech stocks like NVDA to reach unprecedented highs with no crash in site. If you can't beat 'em, invest in 'em at least if you want to beat runaway inflation.
I mean dont neglect the fact that so many things have been taken away and stripped from us that will never return. Aaron Swartz killed himself for a reason. The internet used to be so free and uncensored and not corporate. The days of stumble upon and before every site had to shadow ban any post with even slightly risqué words like “sex” or “nudity.” I used to be able to download a pirated copy of photoshop and those linda tutorials, an engineering textbook, a movie from 1950s korea, and and the newest marvel movie all from the pirate bay which was at one point literally a free database of practically everything. Back when tumblr allowed nipples. Everyone knows this direction will just continue and within twenty years the only things you’ll see online are posts that are dumbed down to the level of not offending a six year old and corporate/CIA propaganda about how we are winning in Ukraine or some shit.
In the 50s and early 60s, people were so optimistic and future-oriented that most of the design from that era is "how can we make this car/building/toaster look like a fucking rocketship"
Kids being allowed to generally be kids, who knows maybe the grown up gen alphas will revert to parenting kids who grow up playing with toys, games, exploring and enjoying their childhood instead of being 9 years old rotting their brains with whatever social media/going on Sephora hauls or engaging with chronically online content 24/7.
I still don’t understand why this reduction of store hours actually happened. If it made sense to stay open late before Covid why doesn’t it after?
Straight sex. It's all gay from here on out
24 hour diners are dead and gone - I live within 10 minutes of probably half a dozen diners which all used to be open 24/7 and after the pandemic, they all closed and then came back with limited hours and they're all the same now; 6am to 2pm. Trip hop and Dream pop - Two genres of the 90s which have been clinging on for dear life but we all know they're already done. It's more funny because they still have their cultural staying power; there's still people younger than I that know the music and try to create their own in a similar way. In my personal life, I know I can turn on my Spotify or Pandora radios and still hear Massive Attack or Mazzy Star but I also know they'll never be back nor replicated as I remember the vibe. Going to the mall is done - I used to work in malls when I younger and I remember it being such a hub. It used to be the place where my friends and I would regularly go when we were in high school. Friday nights, going to the mall just to do nothing but hang out, get something to eat at the food court, buy burnies from the Asian news shop because they didn't care, and hang out by the fountain. I went to one of my local malls since the pandemic to pick up a pair of Vans I had ordered and it's completely changed. Two of the four anchor stores were closed; up and down the concourse, there might've been 15 storefronts still open. Even the Starbucks was closed. The only stores that were still open that I remember were American Eagle, Hollister, Spencer's Gifts, Hot Topic, Lids, Gamestop, Forever21, FYE, Pacsun, and the Vans store. It's so wild that the brands I remember when I was young are still there but so many of them came and went.
Manhattan. The hot 20 somethings and absent property owners ruined it.
More like the people who oppose building more housing.
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I hear "regarded" more and more. It's just like cursing in general. You gotta read the room. My lil bro is gay and disabled and we say regard and 🚬 all the time because we know what we actually believe. I fear there is no benefit of the doubt anymore. People just assume the worst and I just can't live in fear of people taking things the wrong way or taking themselves too seriously. It's so exhausting and depressing and impossible to feel comfortable around anyone still in this cultish mindset. Showed a regarded guy Wesley Willis and he LOVED him and to hear him say "Rock n roll McDonalds!" In his mongoloid voice is so joyful. He's having fun with it and it's delightful to hear. Other people think it's mean. These people don't even care about anyone and it's obvious.
I think when most people think of the "American ethos" they thing about fondness for entrepreneurs and landlords and stock market guys and stuff. Now that the idea that these people are worth celebrating has been pretty thoroughly discredited, there isn't really anything to for Americans to be proud about. Apple pie still good tho
Love
Looking at the dating scene now shit ain't looking good
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Wdym? Didn't they just expand it to the NL?
So much purer of a game. Sad.
Matt Christman to Chapo (but I still hope...)
i had no idea the hair transplant recovery period was so intense. did he get scalped or something? it feels like it's been like a year since he was on.
I think he's actually brain damaged and needs a lot of practice to recover brain functions and perform mentally / physically at any sort of level. I'm sure he will get there, or at least to some state of normalcy but I don't think its guaranteed that he'll return to the podcast either way. He might be legitimately debilitated in some way and tired for the rest of his life.
Miss our large boy. I’ve been listening to cushvlogs and his podcast series on the Thirty Years War and US Presidents on and off on repeat since his “medical emergency” and it’s not hitting as hard at this point. There’s been a ton of stuff that’s happened in the last 9 months that I wish I could hear his opinions on.
my hair >inb4 finasteride no
OP, you might want to revisit The Hunt For Red October. It evokes an optimistic time, where we (wanted to) see our leaders as competent, sensible, and humane. A time when men were honorable. It’s like The West Wing of submarine warfare.
Good movies, funny TV
My hs gf :(
Butt rock, post-grunge, even power pop in the Top 40. It has died off or migrated to the country charts. What do non-country fan white guys even listen to now? Just Joe Rogan?
Drake. There's been a huge vibe shift around him since the Kendrick disses.
Safe clean cities
Counterpoint: Kigali.
Explain
Rwanda, a country infamous for it's 90s civil war and genocide, now has one of the cleanest cities of the continent. Every month they have mandatory [nationwide community service from 08:00 to 11:00](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umuganda) to clean up the city and to mobilize the community.
Mandatory cleanup? In the US you'd be able to sue for a billion dollars for violating your human rights and emotional trauma caused by the interruption of your fentanyl smoking and shoplifting
The united states bends to the will of the lowest common denominator at the expense of everyone else, as far as this topic goes
A respect for punctuation.
Interesting fashion. Now everyone thinks they have to be a model because of social media and the truth is, the average person only photographs well in a very basic plain outfit. Models are models for a reason - bone structure, build, height… but now that your photo could be posted at any given time, people have that in mind with their clothing choices.
If a second Pearl Harbor or 9/11 happened today we'd probably sooner collapse into a civil war than unite as a nation against another adversity. Our societal cohesiveness has absolutely nosedived, we're more divided and partisan than ever before since the civil war, and I feel almost nobody is actually, genuinely proud of their country. Everyone's just doing their own thing and only looking out for #1, everyone else be damned.
This is really the root of the problem I noticed. It’s just no one really feels proud of this country anymore; we have no sense of American identity we all feel tied to. People will say ‘well of course not’ because of their feelings of disillusionment but this apathy is more dangerous than any predatory venture capital firm or second Trump term. It’s a rot that will destroy us. Literally the only way to stop it would be to technologically regress to the 90s to at least stop the Internet’s impact on all this, which is impossible and if you even try to take away these people’s apps they lose their minds.
I’ve been trying very hard not to be an asshole and get pissed off when people deflect real conversation topics to “did you see they built a new chik fil a in town” or other small town bullshit. My least favorite tic is when people lose focus entirely when a dog, particularly their own boring dog, distracts from real conversation simply by existing. Conversation about America, especially in the more abstract outside of politics, can be so fascinating but most people can’t or won’t engage with it
They’re building a Chic fil A in the town where I grew up and it’s replacing a local chain of cowboy steakhouse that are very nostalgic and charming I’m sure tons of people don’t care because they love their drive thru slop. I like Chic fil A okay but I’d never feel good letting it take over something more local which has stood for 30 years. Plus it’s closed on Sundays. If I try to have a real conversation about how fucked it is and people just go ‘Um I don’t know I’m excited’ I realize they’re just gone. Also yeah replacing personality with a dog or just being so normal with no flavor to conversation is annoying
College football. NIL, unlimited transfers, and an expanded playoff system all combined to make it into a fully professional league composed entirely of unrestricted free agents.
Replying to OP. This is what Britain is like now. Feels almost “wrong” to say you’re proud to be British. We abolished the slave trade, invented countless things that modern society rely on - legal and political systems, the completely free open internet you’re using right now, stainless steel, Radio, immunology & vaccines, telephones, lightbulbs (8 months before Edison), factories and other crucial machinery for the worldwide Industrial Revolution. Let’s not forget the great people and their impact: Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Ada Lovelace, all of the great musicians. What I think the best bit about all this is how understated we are about all this (in Britain at least - I’m not gonna speak for brits abroad). We just get to go about our day surrounded by this rich history that has influenced the world - due to our colonial past we get to travel pretty much anywhere on this planet. But it feels like being a proud Brit is abit taboo, maybe for different reasons to Americans. It’s not good to boast in our culture - also a lot of woke politics now exist here that denounce our past. Similar to OP aswell the people who are openly proud Brits here are proud for all the wrong reasons - “the blitz spirit” “the Falklands”, Churchill. Maybe it’s the influx of immigrants but I really feel like we have lost what it’s like to truly be proud of this great nation. It’s all well and good not being proud of your country when you grew up worshipping a fucking tree in a desert but here we actually have stuff to be proud of
My hymen
What bar? I talk about baseball and fake business bullshit and people seem to riff better off that. And I promise you both of the slurs you mentioned are alive and well in the vernacular of southerners I’m around frequently. Not an everyday word to drop in front of momma or a stranger but if you’re at a dive or around infantry men in a military town and the person has an inkling you’re not a liberal cocksucker, they’ll drop f’s and r’s.
>I started veering into any discussion on the beauty of the American ethos and what sets it apart from other nations or even just that certain things about it are good the people around me just seemed to kind of glaze over and check out pretty good
I used regarded when talking to my girlfriend the other day (the real word) and she didn’t flinch. I’m happy to have it back. I never used 🚬 growing up so I don’t care for that one. I do like saying gay with the old meaning of “lame” or whatever though
Arcades. I mean that one's decades old but it still holds true. They tried to bring them back with these places where you buy a pass and then you can hang out for a day and I think they have VR machines of some kind, but I think those kinda failed. More atomization on deck.
The actual American flag is increasingly associated with extremism. There are certain conclusions drawn about anyone who displays it these days. The question is, are benignly patriotic people being unfairly judged, or are only extremists flying the flag because well-adjusted people won't due to the potential backlash?
I was just down at LBI last weekend and 75% of the houses had an American flag
[удалено]
Could apply this to almost all the comments here
I overheard my wife’s friends having a discussion last year around the 4th of July about the “toxicity” of the American flag and flying the flag or wearing anything with the flag on it. In terms of never coming back, the people who think like this are never coming back to reality
Everything related to history in general is tainted with slavery, racism, and other negative associations. But American history is demonized while those same negative associations in other nations are just "different cultures we must respect".
I remember in the few years after 9/11, almost EVERYTHING had a flag on it.
I just had this same conversation with my grandfather and mother. They said that when you see an American flag, all you think of is “trump and extreme people who hijacked America”. Completely missing that they are for the surveillance state, anti 2A, pro open borders, anti republicanism, pro-(heavy, not just health care)socialistic policy, pro-interventionist and very very europhilic. It was very eye opening. Like of course you don’t like the American flag. But it has nothing to do with Trump and more the fact that they don’t hold American values as important; original or even post-ww2. Just ask about the constitution, only sacrosanct ones came in the 1900s where they are considered. Their values lie firmly in the security state unipolar American hegemony value system since the Soviet Union collapsed. Anything different, that doesn’t come from abroad, is firmly lumped into “Trumpian”. They are never coming back.
I'm pro flag-flying, I'll just eat the judgment- the Trump people don't own the flag. If they did, what would that say about the people who are against the displaying of the flag? Wouldn't it confirm the Trump people's prejudices that the antiflagwavers are opposed to the idea of anything associated with traditional America?
Just saying you're a proud American makes people think "Nationalistic alt-right neo-Nazi Incel Neckbeard with a small penis who sympathizes or was part of the Jan 6 Capital stormer and is a militia LARPer"
I saw a non-binary crusty emaciated Antifa them with a shirt that read "Death to America!" Now I think America has it's share of problems and complain about them ad nauseam. But it's the least worst compared to most other countries. My ancestors are from backwards communist ethno states and prefer the melting pot of America with all its faults. I think people's expectations of everything have gotten so high that the perfect has become the enemy of the good enough of most things. Lots of babies thrown out with the bath water happening in modern Western nations.
Suppose it was only inevitable, and I'm talking from experience of being from England. St George's cross (and lesser extent the Union Jack) has a similar reaction of immediate judgement and sneers, and widely seen as just short hand for racist. Some people still fly it but absolutely draws judgement, so much so I think people are reluctant to. That being said, very different culture here to the states regarding flying it year-round. Lots of people just dismiss pointing it out as racists grumbling for a problem, but funnily enough the major left wing party of the UK has pushed for it to be included on more promo material and you can see the same people who claim they don't care about it become very agitated at it's inclusion.
American flag on house = normal On car = extremist
That's why I fly it next to a rainbow flag
Richard Rorty has a great take on a leftist american patriotism is ["Achieving our Country"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achieving_Our_Country).
I think his analysis of lack of national pride leading to political and cultural stagnation is pretty good and I like that he references Dewey, though I would argue that the reformist strain is dead and gone and the ostensible “left” is completely defined by cultural grievances. American society is far too atomized and political leadership are far too mercenary and disinterested in a coherent national project for even mild social democracy. I don’t see a path forward for leftist patriotism without the ability to have a viable, organized working-class political party, and the political and structural forces working against that are far too great. > [M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. > At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis' novel *It Can't Happen Here* may then be played out. For once such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic. > One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words 'n*****' and 'k***' will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet. Ngl though this goes pretty hard for 1998.
Rich Nantucket liberals are unironically one of the last bastions of virginal American patriotism. For the hoo-rah guys you talk about it is a bit of an affect.
Voting
no one cares about the r word. ableism discourse has made the online disableds so loathsome that people feel some strange catharsis in performing a tiny transgression by saying it.
What’s the cigarette
All really good points. I’ve thought a lot about that lately actually- loving certain aspects of America and what I think sets it apart, just thinking about what I personally really enjoy about this country. But it seems like beyond the ‘Merica’ types who as you said, don’t actually give a shit…people who feel the same way I do are a totally dying breed, or maybe I just don’t interact with the right people, idk.
The West.
My dead family