curmudgeonly millennial uncle

when i was a kid i decided that killing people was bad therefore war was bad therefore the military was evil. and adults would tell me it's more nuanced than that and i would understand when i grew up. well i'm a grown up now and idk i still think that killing people is bad and war is bad and the military is evil

Normally I would scroll by. But as someone, who used to share much of the same sentiment since youth to adulthood, now living in the actual war zone, through an actual war - with bombs and ground combat, and civilian casualties every day, and a constant, hourly, vicious, relentless threat of death - I gotta say, attitude like that is belying to me a someone who (thankfully, probably) never experienced a war on their own terrain. Because trust me, when glide bombs fall nearby, or missiles rain from the sky - the only gods you do pray to are those guys in the "evil" military, manning the air defense systems.

tldr "your country hasn't been invaded in the past 80 years and it shows"

airpods are literally such a massive downgrade like remember when headphones cost £2 didn’t need charging didn’t randomly disconnect and didn’t get lost all the time. remember when tech kinda worked for kinda cheap

the thing about being bullied for being weird as a kid is that even if you've always embraced being weird your brain is still always looking for the line where it's too much. you can be as proudly and intentionally weird as you want and you can love being weird but your mind is still convinced there's a point where you get too weird and people start treating you like a weird looking bug again. also it feels like you reach that point 500 times a day even if everyone you've spoken to today found you pleasant and likable and even if you're completely alone in your house with nobody looking at you at all.

This. This is me when my bestie (who is also weird but hasn't been bullied for it) asks me why I'm not being as wildly and freely weird as she is.

"Degrees are actually meaningless, expertise means nothing, and anyone should be able to cheat their way to the top" is the exact kind of anti-intellectualism that the right uses to justify attacking higher education and installing lunatics like RFK Jr. into positions of power, but you also hear it on left-leaning sites like tumblr and bluesky combined with smol bean victimhood to justify cheating with ShitGPT and never having to experience the shocking trauma of being expected to do an assignment on your own and turn it in on time instead of scrolling through tiktok 24/7. I'm beyond fed up with it. We're witnessing the consequences of having violently unqualified jackasses in positions of power right now. I don't care about your excuses for why academic dishonesty is heckin' valid.

To clarify, this is about bookshelves in people's homes during socialist/communist rule in Eastern Europe. A lot of homes here in Eastern Europe still have their bookshelves "organized" (or rather, disorganized) in two tiers due to lack of pace. One row (at least) behind, another upfront. So people used that to conceal books that would land them in trouble (dissident books like Offscreen Reports on Bulgaria Georgi Markov, the guy who got murdered with a poisonous umbrella) behind stacks of "safe" books by approved "ideologically correct" writers.

Джентъл ремайндър that those weren't some stray runaway words Lenin said. They were so central to communist polices that the communist governments that they manufactured "folk tales" to put in children's textbooks to teach them that moral.

yes omg I genuinely remember the "който не работи не трябва да яде" that was so shoved down our throats as children even in the early 2000s, after the end of the communist era here

Yep, because the whole school system was never reformed since the soc years

Джентъл ремайндър that those weren't some stray runaway words Lenin said. They were so central to communist polices that the communist governments that they manufactured "folk tales" to put in children's textbooks to teach them that moral.

Джентъл ремайндър that those weren't some stray runaway words Lenin said. They were so central to communist polices that the communist governments that they manufactured "folk tales" to put in children's textbooks to teach them that moral.