Some sources when I googled “straining vein kid in class”
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/trying-to-hold-a-fart-next-to-a-cute-girl-in-class
https://imgflip.com/memetemplate/85497783/Bulging-Forehead-Vein
interview with the actual person https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/kid-blowing-up-meme-interview/
Racism/white nationalism is out on full display in the world. While there are plenty of hateful sacks of shit so stupid that they see people with different skin color and assume they’re bad and dangerous, there are also far, far more who are just going along with the flow and trends and don’t want to be punished by the system, by daddy turnip, by his administration, or by the other people who are also going along with it and jumping onto the bandwagon out of laziness and apathy.
This is how social attitudes are changed rapidly, it’s happened over and over in history. It just takes a handful of people normalizing something that most people would reject for entire empires to be toppled and for stable systems to be torn down.
If we were all broadly more aware of how fragile everything is and how much power we really have as groups, I like to think we would have a different world. I doubt we’ll see it though.
Total misuse/misunderstanding of the meme, FYI. It’s supposed to represent straining/restraining.
The situation is so, so much worse than a relatively easy-to-define divide between “smart people and stupid people.” If it was just a segment of the population who are stupid on some quantifiable level, we could work with that, we could work on outreach and education and compensation by making issues easier to understand and so on.
But it’s not just stupidity, there is a larger, society-wide phenomenon that is plaguing the world right now, which is the systemic suppression of thought.
This is a very unpopular fact when I post it, but it remains true: the last three federal elections we held in the US had the highest voter turnout in American history. It wasn’t a matter of people not caring or staying home, the issue shown in exit polling is that most voters had no idea what the candidates represented and felt basically like it was a coin-flip, and mostly went with their “gut” and said they had concerns about grocery prices that seemed to go up under Biden and Harris didn’t make them feel confident enough that she would do things different from Biden, and that Trump seemed to at least promise things. Many Americans haven’t paid solid attention to politics since.
So the picture is this: people who work 6 days a week, have no time or energy to read forums or browse for facts are just pulled along by facebook posts and ignore politics broadly to stay submerged in a lifestyle that simultaneously overworks us, and provides us with so many comforts that we’re not incentivized to exercise thinking skills or be curious about anything broadly. Work, scroll, work, scroll… how many of you right now are on Lemmy on work-hours looking for things to keep your brain distracted? Imagine that but across hundreds of millions of people on their phones endlessly scrolling through youtube shorts, ads, clickbait headlines, bad science stories, drama and hype around insignificant bullshit and so on.
Even if you’re not leaning one direction or another politically, you’re going to scroll past a thousand memes of both political parties saying absurd things about each other that you don’t feel connected with at all, because at the end of the day, no matter what they read about Epstein or Palestine or tariffs or “HE SAID WHAT” headlines, people are still just trying to not feel anything while they grind through the day so they can order a cab for their burrito later, and only really care about what that burrito is going to cost tomorrow… and I promise, Big Burrito has worked out exactly how high they can raise prices and how slowly they can do it before people start to feel uncomfortable.
It’s not an accident you always have only just enough money to make your ends meet. This is all by design. They made a population of cattle and they milk us daily and keep us drugged and placated.
Seriously, it’s become a meme. “How do we know Charlie Kirk’s shooter wasn’t a real leftist? He would have needed 300 more shell casings to etch in his nuanced and inclusive ideologies with every possible qualifier along with detailed explanations of every position he has and why…” etc, etc.
We need to rub our mangled country in their faces like a bad dog that shit all over the carpet. We need to hit them with their own short, strong, often offensive and stupid rhetoric until they feel shame.
How do you know when they’re ashamed? Easy, they will get mad. Leftists remind me of the children of narcissistic parents, who spend their whole lives thinking they can craft the perfect argument, the perfect rebuttal, the correct sequence of lines and phrases to make their abuser suddenly realize how bad they’ve been and everyone will be happy.
That is NOT how conservative mindsets work, if it did, they wouldn’t be clinging to conservatism. They are reactionaries and only know how to feel things in the moment and the moment keeps changing. That’s why we have to be a lot “stupider” and a lot more consistent, but more importantly, we HAVE to start engaging directly with them more, we have to abandoned these cordoned off spaces and start sharing reality again so they feel social pressure.
They’re like children deep inside, the anger and hate is a defense mechanism, but when they interact with you directly, they actually DO want your approval, they want to feel accepted or validated, and they will twist and rage if they don’t get it. We need to start recognizing these tantrums for what they are.
Okay i’m done. (I’m not.)
If you reading this actually care about progress and results and not just arrows next to your comments and emotional validation, I highly encourage you to contact FOX news and add your voice to the wave of pressure to fire Kilmeade, but don’t fucking stop there, keep spreading the clip of his rhetoric on every social media platform you’re currently addicted to. Recruit others to do the same.
Will it make a difference? Who knows, but whether or not it’s going to cure you of “nothing ever happens” syndrome should never be the point of going out of your way to do something that doesn’t feel rewarding. Get off your asses. MOBILIZE EVEN IF IT’S THIS ONE STUPID THING.
Consider it practice for if the left ever decides it wants to try uniting.
Very well said. I could talk at great length the dangers of misjudging how one’s own brain works.
They don’t believe in democracy. That’s it.
I would make the argument here that they don’t know what democracy is, at least not in terms that they can directly make applicable to their lives, their homes, their immediate concerns. To most Americans, not just the right, terms like “democracy” carry a negative connotation now.
This is also by design, we have so many conflicting ideologies screaming at each other through bot-wars and large-scale social manipulation efforts and psy-ops that people have pretty much tuned out, and there are plenty of factions who want that result as well and have worked to amplify the worst ideas and thoughts from every angle of every issue.
The last three election cycles saw the highest voter turnout in American history, so it’s not that people aren’t involved in politics, they just don’t really have any idea what’s going on. Exit polling showed most people were almost ambivalent towards either candidate and didn’t really have a clue who to vote for and just went with their concerns over grocery prices and whatever their facebook feed was showing them.
People don’t believe in democracy because they don’t believe we have a working government because everyone, everywhere is locked into their own feeds, their own perspectives of the world, they are not sharing realities and not talking to each other.
Conservatives are largely dumber than dirt, you can sway most of them to believe in socialism and freedom of identity and ANY other issue you care about if you engage them directly and know how to push their emotional buttons in specific ways. But we don’t do that anymore because we have no shared spaces, no shared perspective, no single source of truth that we can even debate or engage with each other about anymore, so the nation is splintering into a million shards that hate each other.
The most likely explanation is he was a groyper
Is it though? This is all ENTIRELY speculation and smells stinkily like more people trying to “disclaim” him from their “side” and everyone is doing it. It’s the point of this post. Everyone saying everything else ALSO claims to have “most likely explanations” so it’s all entirely speculation and bullshit until I hear verified evidence or an admission, until then you’re all playing internet detective/Q-anoning/thread-linking/conspiracy cosplay.
I said basically the same thing earlier on Lemmy and got called a “both sider” so yeah, we’re fucked, ya’ll are deep in the gravy and need to not just touch grass, you all need to grow grass and dirty your hands in the beautiful topsoil and reconnect with the earth and your own brains.
There are as many different American factions of influence farming as there are foreign, and likely equally in opposition of each other.
Some day the internet is just going to be this entirely dead realm of soulless bots screaming nonsense corporate and political ideology back and forth at each other which nobody will ever see, while humans are too busy trying to grow potatoes in their yards to stay alive.
Very based reply, I wish everyone saw the nuance, danger and difficulty of seeking what your brain tells you it wants or even just thought about it a little more.
They’re absolutely self-reinforcing, and not just “self” reinforcing because there’s also outside reinforcement, in everything from capitalistic endeavors to normalize paying for a cab for your burrito, to online influencers and personalities getting shoved algorithmically in your face who also validate and justify avoidant behavior, reinforcing how you’re a victim of forces outside your control, how being introverted and socially repressed actually makes you “better” than most people and all these other tropes that I get a lot of hate for pointing out in places like Lemmy… from the same people who spend half their day in discord channels with pseudo friends complaining how lonely, unhappy and anxious they are to other people who don’t care about each other and are just there for validation as well.
Shit’s bad out there yo.
Dumb and obtuse question. You would have to be terminal to not see how everyone in the world on every side of every political spectrum is trying to get attention by spewing wild speculation about the shooter, motivations, backgrounds, what online groups he belonged to, his friends, family and so on and on and on endlessly without a shred of actual verified information or evidence.
“I am quite sure that Septic Tank Man’s killer belonged to [GROUP I DON’T LIKE] that way I can sleep peacefully that my own ideology, rhetoric or emotional validation are safe and I don’t have to feel anything concerning or unpleasant!” Said several people on each opposing side of the issue.
Sure, it’s possible, but it’s absurd to pick one group out of everyone online who could also fit that bill and start spreading it online, especially when said group is literally a group of trolls.
People really, really want to blame/credit some group because it’s more material, more content, more “something happening” and it’s dumb because there’s no evidence released, no manifesto, nothing reliable and there is a TIDAL WAVE of bullshit being circulated right now. Best to be quiet and wait and read, even then we’ll never know everything.
He was absolutely left-leaning, likely chronically online leftish and hated his family’s politics.
I grew up in a deeply conservative environment, I was a bible-thumping conservative right up until I was around this person’s age when I started having friends coming back from Iraq in bags and pieces. I never could have remotely imagined doing something so violent and radical, but I also know that when you’re young, surrounded by people who seem disconnected from you, frustrated and you feel outnumbered, you can be influenced real easily to start feeling like you have some kind of power and “destiny” to make changes to the world.
Still seeking confirmation on the Goyper narrative.
I don’t know who started this, but groypers are lazy sacks of pasty bullshit and not a political radicalization group, they’re 4-channers too lazy to have the same level of conviction and principles as actual nazis. Okay so they hated Kirk, so did a lot of people.
I remember some self-described groypers going to that Charlottesville “unite the right” nazi rally and they were literally fat white kids who started crying when actual violence broke out.
I don’t like giving attention whores the attention they desperately want and can’t fathom why so many people are attaching to this stunt.
That’s fine if that’s what you were going for, but then it should be written as “Trying not to scream while watching a right-wing man kill another right-wing man at a right-wing event at a right wing college- etc.” Then the bottom text could read “While they blame left-wing extremism.”
The current formatting makes it look like the kid is somehow the one angry at left wing extremists.
It’s not a big deal, but worth pointing out imo.