• 15 Posts
  • 422 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: April 1st, 2022

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  • I play sport near-daily but I don’t follow professional sports, and I honestly think ideally it should be abolished. It’s exploitative entertainment.

    • Athletes often end up with horrible overwork injuries. I remember an interview where a range of former Olympians were asked “Was it worth it?” and the overwhelming answer was no, they now had life-long injury from training.
    • Sport doesn’t need to be professional to be enjoyable to play and watch at a high-level.
    • Like OP has said, it’s a business. They are parasocial and don’t care to truly involve you. They will platform advertisers who foster addiction, to make money. And I feel disgust every time I see a stadium absolutely covered with ads and uniforms covered in sponsorships. It might as well be a billboard with a patch of grass on it.

    I’m obviously not against either sports or high-level competition, but as a profession? No way.


    While many existing sports develop some useful life skills (physical skills, communication, decision making, strategy, … ) I have an interest in alternative games that emphasise these. Two of my favorites at the moment are Firefigher’s Olympics and Three-Sided Football.







  • Yep. Although…

    Is it safe to use the OK hand signal again?

    Words and symbols cannot be divorced from context. Like @[email protected] hinted at, putting a date of birth in a username is common and there are so many other meanings for these numbers so it would be ridiculous to jump down someone’s throat for simply using them, or using common gestures. Unless that friend in the story was also saying some reactionary things in their comments, I think it’s silly and careless that someone challenged them on their name.

    I been told by some international friends that one of the political flags over in Australia, the Eureka flag, has a similar situation where both trade unions and white nationalists try to claim its legacy, so it’s common to see in both the pro and anti immigration rallies. Context is what makes it either a potential nationalist/racist dogwhistle or a symbol of workers’ rights.




  • To take this a step further, wolf-whistles (neo-Nazi dog-whistles) are often intentionally vague, and spotting them is important in recognizing cryptofascists because they will try and claim plausible deniability, “oh leftists call everyone a nazi” is something open nazis say to downplay themselves to other reactionaries. They know that their beliefs are still unspeakably disgusting to most societies, they tend to disguise it, downplay it and rationalize it.

    [1]

    Sometimes it’s language and phrases itself, you can often see cryptofascists use the same phrases, euphemisms or odd terms as famous fascist speeches or texts, whether as an intentional subtle allusion or just unwittingly echoing what they’ve read. And that’s where they’ll chuck in terms like “Final solution” in memes.

    Other times, it’s more direct coded language and symbols. It’s probably less unknown these days, but some common examples of codes are the sonnenrad ‘Black Sun’ symbol, Nazi-era pseudo-runes (not to be confused with legitimate historical Germanic runes!), the numbers 14 and 88, and more.


  • A few people are saying “streaming services”, I go further and rarely-if-ever buy entertainment media. Music, videos, games, websites.

    Not even pirating most of the time, there’s a whole world of good Creative Commons music, FOSS games and actual creative communities (not just parasocial fan communities) for me to be entertained for lifetimes. It’s just healthier to be outside the world of profit and addiction machines. (It amazes me that people can think ‘influencer’ is not a creepy ominous title)