this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
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[–] Doctor_Satan@lemm.ee 11 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

It's not about being dumb. It's about being cruel. Those two just happen to intersect more often than not.

[–] Realitaetsverlust@lemmy.zip 1 points 13 minutes ago

I don't think that's true really. I really think that some people don't think their decisions through to the end, or at least halfway through. Just look at brexit, after the vote passed, people were googling the consequences lmao.

Democracy only works if the people are somewhat educated, but we're getting to the point where this is no longer the truth. That's why american elections are more of a entertainment program than a political event.

[–] InverseParallax@lemmy.world 5 points 1 hour ago

It's about needing someone to suffer more than you so you feel better about yourself.

We stole Jim crow, they can never forgive us for that.

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 hours ago

I honestly cannot.

[–] gmtom@lemmy.world 3 points 5 hours ago (4 children)

I meaaaaan a lot of rich people are losing a lot of money right now.

[–] ameancow@lemmy.world 6 points 1 hour ago

Nah, this is their plan. When the economy stabilizes, they will control more of everything, and it will only cost the labor and likely lives of many, many people.

This isn't the first time I've seen this. People just have very bad memories.

[–] Realitaetsverlust@lemmy.zip 1 points 17 minutes ago

Not really. Many of those people have liquidated a lot of their stock assets when trump took over, and are buying again when it's dipping - I think that this was trumps plan anyways.

Don't think that the people that are at the top of the financial market lose anything. They know exactly what they're doing and how to stay at the top.

[–] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 7 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

Are they?

Are you sure?

Or is it all unrealized losses because they're holding and not selling?

[–] ameancow@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago

Yah this entire drama is just wealth consolidation. Everyone has to pay more for everything, when the economy stabilizes, a smaller number of people control even more of everything.

This is simple, and I've seen it before. It's just sad we have so many people who either have goldfish memories or weren't even born the last time this happened. It's like some kind of nightmare seeing people do the same mistakes over and over and you scream at people that they're being stupid and they can fix ALL OF THIS if they just exercise their power and rights.

Crickets. Tumbleweeds.

[–] nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 hour ago

If that's true they won't make anything on the upswing.

[–] lagoon8622@sh.itjust.works 5 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Temporarily. But the middle class is losing more; they'll buy up all the distressed assets like local businesses and small chains and bleed them dry

[–] Shardikprime@lemmy.world -1 points 2 hours ago (6 children)

I mean how many middle class people own stocks or even know what a stock is

[–] Realitaetsverlust@lemmy.zip 1 points 15 minutes ago

You ever heard of trickle down economics? The thing that doesn't exist?

Well, it does exist, but the other way round. If the top makes a lot of money, nothing trickles down to the bottom. But if the top loses money, a LOT trickles down to the bottom. Companies lose money and will try to make up for the loss, raising prices, which directly affects you.

[–] paranoia@feddit.dk 5 points 1 hour ago

Virtually all of them? You think people don't have pension funds?

[–] ameancow@lemmy.world 1 points 57 minutes ago

Also, this is literally the pro-trump, pro-tariff talking point being passed around, that only the rich are going to suffer.

Don't let people say this. I've been through recessions, have you? Has any of the children reading this shit? I cannot fathom how such dense, dumb talking points are being kept alive.

[–] ameancow@lemmy.world 1 points 59 minutes ago

Even if you don't own anything that has the word "share" on it, your life and economic future are deeply tied to the stock market, this is why when there are market problems, the expenses are passed downstream. Everyone pays when people fuck with the system, and you can't get out of the system, it's built-in as long as we have capitalism.

[–] meliaesc@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

What do you define as upper class?

[–] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 hours ago

It's something I put on my foot, right?

[–] sexy_peach@feddit.org 16 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Many people, especially on the political right are happy enough as long as others ar suffering more than them

[–] Strawberry@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 8 hours ago

The're happy even to suffer more as long as those they hate suffer at all

[–] Moose@moose.best 25 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

  • Orwell, 1984
[–] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca -5 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

In this context, is 1984 the book, or the year?

I didn't read the book. Idk

[–] meliaesc@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago

Oh I see, you're a troll, commenting unintelligible BS all over this post. Gotcha.

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[–] squirrel@lemmy.blahaj.zone 174 points 1 day ago (27 children)

The problem is that it's not a question of intelligence.

Trumpists and their ilk are living in echo chambers of "alternative facts", perpetuated by Fox News, Murdoch newspapers and an nearly endless amount of rightwing influencers (starting with Rogan at the top). They are not looking at what's happening, because they are surrounded in a very comforting bubble of disinfo and propaganda that confirms everything they wanted to hear: The illegals get deported, the queers get finally put in their place, the liberals are frothing with anger, finally men are back in charge who tell women where they belong and America is going to be "great" again any moment now.

It's fascism and fascism has always been a "cult": The early pioneers of fascism (particularly D'Annunzio and later Mussolini) explicitly said their aim was to create a "secular religion" around the nation, the people and the leader. And you can only be a member of that religion if you accept its "truth" and reject everything that contradicts it.

Very smart people can adhere to a religion for a variety of reasons and the most obvious one is (and always has been) because it promises them power over others.

[–] someacnt@sh.itjust.works 3 points 9 hours ago

Yeah, it is simply unbelievable but I just saw people thinking drumpf will "pull it off" and "solve debt crisis" in investing.com.

[–] ameancow@lemmy.world 41 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (3 children)

The problem is that it’s not a question of intelligence.

Not specifically intelligence, but I can make a very strong case that a lot of the problem comes from language. Or specifically the lack of language abilities in a percentage of the population who have missed important developmental milestones growing up.

Not speaking out my ass on this one, I have been researching the connections between learning language at an early enough age and being able to form complex or non-linear thoughts.

It's been studied in human children who were raised by animals (this has happened more times than people realize) that even when they were taken into human society, given shelter and taught how to be a human, they are never able to learn more than the most basic language skills, using single nouns to indicate wants, but nothing more complex than that. This has led to the understanding that if language isn't learned at an early enough age, we "pave over" parts of the brain that could have been used to learn how to turn complex ideas into abstractions, a way to view alternate perspectives and understand the views of others.

So what about the less extreme cases? What about people who just didn't have adequate education in language skills, or were raised in an environment that squelched talking, reading, asking questions or thinking broadly. (Such as poor communities, religious upbringing, conservative policing of thought and identity, and so on.)

This is creating an entire segment of society that aren't just kinda dim, they are actually incapable of anything other than linear, reactive thought patterns. Memories, associations, feelings... no mental "story" to explain their lives, just whatever they're told they go along with.

You can see great evidence of this trend in the abysmal reading scores that Americans have. Nearly a quarter of our adult population is functionally illiterate and this is just the lowest end of the spectrum, people who can read a few words and understand a text message if the sender is using simple enough language and emojis. People who pretend to discard the instruction manual because they "already know how to do it" but really they just can't form mental narratives from paragraphs of information. This is really, really bad. This is why we have Trump. This is why our market is crashing.

[–] Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world 8 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

You make a lot of important points. I'd like to also add that those same communities actively discourage critical thinking.

We all enter the world without knowing how it works. We spend our early childhood learning the rules of reality, sometimes testing them. Consider an infant in a high chair that repeatedly drops their spoon - will the spoon fall to the ground again? Is this a consistent thing? What if it just hovers in the air this time? Gotta drop it again and find out.

Our brains not only build a set of "rules" about how the world works, but our imaginations help us fill in what we don't know. Like how having scared feelings at night can be interpreted by children as a monster hiding in the corner. They don't know the world with any sort of certainty, but their emotions are strong, so of course the existence of a monster makes sense.

Now imagine that nobody ever told you that monsters aren't real. Imagine, instead, that the adults around you reinforced such fears, by using words like "demons" or "devils" to describe the creature you should be afraid of. These same adults can't answer the "Why?" questions that kids have, except to say "God did it." Natural scientists get blocked from information that can help them accurately understand the world.

But it goes beyond simply maintaining ignorance. When kids are raised to sustain their magical thinking past the point where it is developmentally appropriate, they never acquire the mental scaffolding upon which reasoning is built. The logical way to connect concept A to concept B is obvious to you or me, but doesn't stand out for them. Why? Because magical thinking is a free-for-all. Such kids are actively taught to misunderstand reality. If there are no rules to making things make sense, or if everything is some invisible creature's "mysterious plan," then what you or I would call a "logical conclusion" becomes just one of many, equally-valid possibilities.

[–] ameancow@lemmy.world 8 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

magical thinking is a free-for-all. Such kids are actively taught to misunderstand reality.

Every point you made is correct, this as well. I want to add the nuance here though, that I have considered this but it's not final. That is to say, it's not an impassable wall that a child can't break through on their own. Namely because this is my origin story and I have been asked many times how I got out of it and escaped a cult-like family environment with a compound in the wilderness and everything. I had the very same magical thinking fed to me after being denied an education in any capacity for the first couple decades of my life. But I at least broke the mental spell a lot earlier, and I did it completely on my own by reaching out into the world with curiosity.

And again I think it starts with language. Because even though I was being fed magic, I have distinct memories of wrestling that magic against logic and things I understood about the world. I couldn't tell what was real or not, and even though I was scared of "questioning faith" I was also able to use logic/language to create reasoning for my inquisitiveness. IE: "God would want me to learn about his creation." "Maybe this science stuff can exist alongside the god stuff" and so on.

The reason I was able to have these mental debates in my head at all was I was an avid reader and my family didn't ban comic books for my siblings, and I used those to teach myself to read. Then I learned that I could buy and horde paperbacks because I was the only one who could really read things without pictures. Most of my family was also functionally illiterate. I however had a deeply visual and story-oriented mental landscape from before puberty.

I just think if there's any antidote to ALL OF THIS gesturing broadly then it has to be language and reading, and not reading screens but things that force your brain to construct from abstraction. That act is what makes that scaffolding you reference. You can't logic your way into new ways of viewing the world if you don't have a sense for logic to begin with. Yes, A to B. A child can see it for themselves if they are given that framework to start building their structured thinking.

[–] zenforyen@feddit.org 6 points 16 hours ago

Not putting enough money into education of the population is a crime against humanity done by the wealthy class. It's a tragedy and it's infuriating and it's well understood, yet nothing ever changes, because education threatens the power of capital, while all that capital needs is cheap labor and stupid cattle consumers to support their "infinite growth".

[–] jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 9 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

On poor reading skills, this was a really interesting read/listen: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ - We've apparently just been teaching kids how to read poorly, and not because of like a sinister agenda. That almost makes it worse, that it started with good intentions.

Also I think about how a lot of the people who are, as you're alluding to, bad at language simply won't show up on a platform like this that's all text. That's probably why visual platforms like youtube and tiktok are hugely popular. There are a lot of people who simply cannot comfortably operate in a text-first medium.

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[–] Sergio@slrpnk.net 46 points 1 day ago (1 children)

comforting

That's the key word. The promises of greatness don't actually have to be delivered. You can be in the midst of a pandemic and/or collapsing economy. As long as you have the comforting myth.

[–] Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 hour ago

Same idea behind conspiracy theories.

Uncertainty is scary. Instead of feeling that fear (and turning to a project like science), any imagination that explains the unknown will work.

[–] disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world 31 points 1 day ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (2 children)

Exactly right. The one saving grace is that most cults are tied to their leader. Once Trump is gone, MAGA will fracture into sub-groups over who to follow.

There’s a creator who goes by the name Knitting Cult Lady, who grew up in the Kingdom of God cult and then became intelligence for the US Army. She has some very enlightening insight on the cult of MAGA. Pretty fascinating stuff actually.

The ~~Branch Davidian~~ Jim Jones kool-aid test was a great analogy for Trump’s fearmongering. The leader would ask people to drink poisoned kool-aid as a final test of faith. They had to experience the horror of facing their own death, only to then be filled with relief upon finding it was only a test. This was repeated over many occasions before the kool-aid was actually laced with poison. Trump keeps talking about taking Greenland by force so when the time comes, we’ll be desensitized to the reality.

[–] ericatty@infosec.pub 8 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Wasn't Jim Jones the koolaid test? The Branch Davidians went up in flames in Waco, TX after the Feds attempted to raid them.

Or did they both do it? It's been a while since I read about David Koresh.

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[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 1 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

Like... In general, or what I, personally, am actually doing right now? 🤔

[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 19 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (2 children)

Oh to be one of the people who appreciate "what Trump is doing for America" even if they can't say what, if anything, that is besides "making us Great again".

[–] CH3DD4R_G0BL1N@sh.itjust.works 4 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

MAGDA - Making a Great Depression Again

[–] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 hours ago

Well, as far as I'm concerned we haven't, as a species, economically, bounced back from the recession of the pandemic and all the shenanigans that came in the aftermath of that. Leading up to the pandemic, we had an app time wage stagnation, where wages were basically unchanging for over a decade.

Then the whole pandemic and inflation pricing leading to record profits for most companies because they kept all the money rather than giving anyone a raise or a discount on their products.

Yadda yadda yadda. I feel like I'm preaching to the choir, we all lived through it, so..... Moving on.

As far as I'm concerned we are in a recession, and have been since the pandemic. So along tariffs and starting a trade war is basically adding kerosene to the economy that was already smouldering in a recession.

At this point, I'd be surprised if there isn't a great depression that happens as a result of this insanity.

I'm not even American and I'm bracing for it to happen.

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[–] Spacehooks@reddthat.com 10 points 21 hours ago

What you mean? Im sure foreign agents are having a great time right now on the cultist actions

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