The misspellings between the meme and OP’s title is making my head hurt.

I here they do do

Do the Star Wars aliens count?

I can’t think of any “anthro” characters in Star Wars other than Ewoks and Wookies, which I’m sure there is some niche forum or subreddit out there dedicated to fawning over Chewie’s long, shaggy hair, but not quite what I mean.

Marvel had a few characters but none of them have been introduced in the MCU as “attractive” in any capacity. (They did my girl Wolfsbane wrong.)

Yep, that was just one example. As adults we can objectively understand how some of that stuff portrays things that aren’t good in reality, and the idea of a wealthy… duck, diving around in a money bin hits a little different when you have a lifetime of struggling already, but by taking it so seriously and trying to tell people to stop cherishing their childhood memories you are pushing people away from progressivism.

But I feel more like this most days.

That’s just it, there isn’t one.

The right has a few different branches of the same kind of base: groups with actual political capital, the most basic, orcish kind, but it works and progressives broadly have not found a way to unify with any kind of alternative group identity.

Seriously, I am not sure what the left/progressives really think is going to happen here doing the same things over and over, expecting different results. They are still tone-policing, lecturing, and purity-testing as a fucking culture, meanwhile the right is forming war-bands of people who embrace the American flag, carry weapons and will march in lock-step with their leaders.

Groups like that are the power that has formed nations and held up empires. Why is it so hard to imagine having the same kind of force and political capital but without the hate and xenophobia and anti-science rhetoric?

Meanwhile I will spend hours arguing with people on Lemmy trying to convince other people who loved Duck Tales that the show is problematic. Everyone has their own little branch-off faction where they argue with other progressives about the pettiest, performative lines-in-the-sand to virtue signal how incredibly progressive they are while letting the country erode to dust.

The only other alternative just barely left of center is fucking liberals and I don’t even want to start on them.

Wrong way to look at it.

Democrats and republicans share the same donors. They may individually have different goals in mind, but their donors appeal to both sides to preserve a guaranteed outcome and to preserve the image of choice and opposition.

Really though what we have is anyone who wants to make a fast dime and has the gift of gab throwing themselves into the ring to try to get some of that sweet, sweet donor bribery.

Many state and local seats in government run unopposed or have puppet candidates installed and funded by Republican donors, people who have no real capability to do politics and just rely on having a lot of money for posters, but would wither if debated about actual issues.

We just saw in New York you don’t need any of that shit, you just need be social and reassuring and have a message that you stick to and don’t let yourself get distracted.

My god so many candidates get distracted and ruin their own potential careers.

I wonder how long before we get a mainstream anthro character that’s seen as a sex symbol. (Cartoons don’t count, I mean designed from the ground up to be mass-market appealing.)

Welfare generally means something to keep you alive.

2k is one month mortgage or rent. It’s a bribe to make people think he’s doing something, even if he does it, we will never see another dime and his policies and attacks on our institutions will have resulted in financial catastrophe for the US and worldwide death tolls in the millions with the cutting of aid programs and vaccine/medical research and mandates.

There is no amount of our own money he could give to anyone which will make up for the long-term harm he’s done to the world.

Probably not, but the thing we should be angry about is that she’s getting comforts while being responsible for the ruination of so many lives.

This bestiality talk is just going to make the story disappear because nobody is going to pick it up.

Lot of latinos have really conservative values passed down by families and insular communities. Trump acted like he was “pro man” and his admin empowered people’s worst insecurities about their masculinity. He saw the Tate-taint in our society and pried at it like a scab.

It’s very true that if you appeal to someone about the thing they are most insecure about or hung up on, they will look right past the knife you are digging into their back even as they vote for you. He was able to get a shocking amount of votes from people of color this way. That should be our biggest wake-up call, that we’re this vulnerable to being conned broadly, that it just takes someone petting any segment of the population for those people to fucking roll over and forget their entire brains exist, making up stories and validations for why they won’t have their faces eaten by the Face Eating Leopard Party.

I have thought about this reply for about 9 hours and still cannot connect it to my comment, unless of course you left out one word:

moved from America to Germany because of PTSD and hate towards America Online.

If this is what you meant, then yes, I wholeheartedly agree and support your friend. Just trying to cancel their service alone was traumatizing.

We haven’t left the liberal world of tone policing and word-crimes unfortunately. When we started attacking the way people talk instead of what they talk about, it was the last nail in the coffin of progressivism, right after guns and flags.

Groups of armed, patriotic people united in a cause and unflinching in their language have been the political capital that have overthrown systems and preserved democracy or at least order and governing for better outcomes for literally thousands of years. (Or they are what we need to defend against other groups of armed nationalists.) I am still baffled why we let this hyper-soft, stupid, pandering-to-the-lowest-most-sensitive-denominator movement represent progressive policy in America.

What is our point here.

Q-anon broadly was never about saving any kids or fighting evil.

For the poor, dumb believers, it was always about figuring out some word puzzles so you can become a chosen-one, journey-of-the-hero type protagonist who saves the day and is hoisted to a glorious victory on the shoulders of cheering masses.

The people who believed it were not bright people, they don’t understand politics broadly, they have no sense of scale for national affairs, they are… lets just say their mental faculties have been stunted and held back to some arbitrary point. Whatever the word for that is.

Yes, that’s over 34 million Americans.

Thank you for this, this is actually a fantastic story for me, I have spent the last few years (since Covid actually) trying to learn about cognitive dissonance in people and it turned into a deep, dark rabbit hole that shed a lot of light on heady ideas like free-will and how the brain actually works. (2/10, would not recommend this journey. Caused a small breakdown.)

But the short of it is, as a species logic and consistency is not only not that important to us, it’s not even natural to us.

Our brains are not the things we think they are, even time itself is not what we think. We just have these crazy machines in our heads that write storylines and narratives to explain how we feel and to tie events together to form a coherent story for how time is unfolding. But none of that is anything more than how a large language model “predicts” what should take place via odds and probability.

No part of our minds defaults to logic and sensibility, it defaults to “yeah, that makes sense I guess.” and for the vast majority of people, this is enough to get through the day, but we each are just absolutely swimming in logical inconsistency. Granted, some more than others, but it’s a hard-wired, built-in feature of being alive… your mind tells you stories to explain your experiences and feelings, and this story need not follow any rules of logic.

This is why we have flat-earther scientists and climate-change denying climatologists and doctors who don’t believe in vaccines. Those are extreme examples but if you search, you will find you also likely have dozens of smaller-scale contradictions in your thoughts, your life narratives, your reasoning for anything and everything you do.

BREAKING! THING YOU ALREADY KNEW IS STILL A THING, PLEASE CLICK ANYWAY, PLEASE BRO JUST ONE MORE CLICK