What criticisms of society and culture do you have that aren’t necessarily political?
My example is how nostalgia and franchise obsessed people and the entertainment industry are. They’ve always existed but there’s been a recent glut of sequels, remakes, reboots, prequels and spin offs that shows no signs of stopping and the success of the MCU has only made it orders of magnitude worse. It’s like we’re stuck in a spoiled idiot child’s birthday party from 1998. Considering the thousands of original scripts that are submitted every year who knows how many quality films and shows didn’t get made because studios passed up perfectly fine scripts or didn’t prioritize funding them in favor of remakes of decades old films and shows that no one asked for and endless sequels for franchises long beaten to death?
One of my gripes is simply that the amount of energy people expend - in proportion to how severe they claim a problem is - is nowhere near the ratio that they ought to be, if they indeed believed what they were saying.
For instance, climate change is claimed to be an enormously urgent problem, yet even many people who claim that it is so, exert little to no effort to addressing it.
Pro-lifers claim that abortion is murder, yet they do nothing but wave a few placards. They sure wouldn’t behave this way if 1 million toddlers or young children were being murdered.
Christians claim that people who die unsaved burn in Hell forever, which would be a trillion times worse than being stuck in the Twin Towers on 9/11, yet the average Christian spends maybe 1 hour in evangelism per year.
Democrats claimed Trump was a fascist whose presidency could doom democracy forever, yet only 67% of Democratic voters showed up to vote in 2020 - only a few percentage points higher than the norm. If they really thought he was Hitler-ish, shouldn’t their voter turnout have been near-100%?
Many Republicans claimed Democrats were stealing the 2020 election, yet the vast majority of them did nothing except share some memes and complain online. Aside from the people who did the Jan-6 insurrection, the energy expended by these Republicans (in proportion to how severe they claimed the problem was) was nowhere what they ought to if they really believed the election was stolen. Note that I’m not condoning the Jan-6 riot, I’m just saying that the vast majority of Republicans who claim the election was stolen don’t truly believe it was, based off of their lackadaisical behavior.
People all the time say “This is a HUGE problem” but exert little to no effort. Which shows that they don’t truly believe it is a huge problem. This is true across the political spectrum.
You’re kind of painting with a broad brush there. You’re assuming that 33% of Democrats who didn’t vote were also the same ones saying Trump would destroy Democracy.
You’d prefer that glorification go to war and warriors?
It is kind of silly the amount of resources and veneration that people devote to spectator sports, but at least it’s a more benign outlet than some of the alternatives.
I think this is probably not true. It’s easier and easier to make and distribute a film, and the number of films made each year keeps increasing (except for the blip due to the pandemic), and the vast majority of them are interesting non-Marvel non-sequel projects.
The Marvel/Sequels are where the money is made, but you could watch 2 new films a day and not see all the ones that come out in a year. Just… don’t watch the derivative movies. There are tons and tons of other movies out there!
This has only gotten worst in my lifetime. The greed is good mentally of the original Wall Street movie was taken too seriously by a whole generation. And people who do have empathy for the less fortunate are labeled as suckers.
I don’t know if this counts as political, but one thing that bugs me is the proliferation of “middlemen”. In the last 20 years or it seems in every aspect of economic life, regardless of what you are trying to achieve, you are more like to be talking to someone working for some third party contracted to get you the product or service you are trying to secure, rather than the person who actually delivers that service (or if you are talking to them, they aren’t working for the company who’s name is on the building/website you are visiting, instead they work for a third-party).
These kind of companies have always been there, but nowadays it seems pretty much universal whether you are trying to find movers, talk to your company HR, or buy fast food, you have to deal with a “middleman” (or multiple layers of middlemen in some cases). I really don’t get why, you’d think Economics 101 would say the number of third parties will go down over time in a capitalist system, but I’ve definitely observed the opposite (not in a “smash the state and establish a workers collective” way, I’m actually genuinely puzzled by why this should be)
This reminds me of a pithy saying that I’ve been working on:
Belief without action is just a comforting lie we tell ourselves.
Though do note that action is relative to what you actually can do and the consequences for you to do it. My point is merely that there are a lot of people who seem to think saying they believe X thing is enough.
I can relate to that. My current job, I am a consultant who was hired through my firm by our client, a fintech company, to project manage a large software installation at some bank.
On the one hand, sure, there are all these different specialties in business, management, and tech and whatnot and companies don’t want to hire all these people permanently. OTOH, I feel like I just see layers upon layers of “consultants” and “vendors” and “integration partners” such that I can’t figure out who, if anyone, actually knows how to “do” anything.