Kulturkampf

[Potato]

How is this sketch somehow getting EVEN MORE relevant after 6 years? 

[Uncle]

Cross posting because I couldn't decide between dumb news and culture wars.


Publication which encourages its readers to behave in a way which sucks the joy out of life unironically posts an article asking why life is so joyless...

Can't make this shit up!

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jul/26/age-of-decadence-pleasure-ai

Why does everything feel so joyless? Welcome to the age of decadence without pleasure

Do you want to have a good time? You know, really enjoy yourself? Click here, and tell us your desires. Maybe it’s a new outfit, or some exotic cuisine delivered anonymously and steaming hot to your door. Maybe it’s porn or gambling. Perhaps you prefer the infinite scroll, the endlessly unfurling ribbon of glossy images and videos starring people you’ll never meet doing things you’ll never do. Or maybe you favor talking to a chatbot who will assure you that you are the most special of all its users.

[Potato]

One again for those in the back, "In all of human history, we have never lived in more prosperous, peaceful, free and fruitful times and Millennials still aren't happy. Maybe the problem isn't the times we live in, but the people who live in it unhappily."

[D3RANG3D]

The stuff we used to use to distract ourselves with...like music, TV, videogames and movies, are mostly dog shit for one. I mean most stuff either sucked or were mediocre even in the 70's-00's...but there were more new and original ideas...don't get me wrong there were a lot of remakes and reimagining's like The Thing, The Blob, Scarface so on and so forth. But even if some of those were good and even if they were not very good they were at least made with some kind of care and sometimes they were even so cheesy that it pretty much made up for it. Everything used to have somebodies world view or political slant. But not to the point were it wore it on it's sleeve...like nowadays to the detriment of everything. That one ex KGB guy that went off about commie subversion...was right...about all that demoralization shit. Because here we are with the soy leftists, the autistic right chuds, and their asinine culture wars as proof of that. 

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

[HaughtyFrank]

Very funny how she was claimed to be the woke villain leading up to it and now she lays in haaaaard. An easy path for her would have been to claim the movie and coast on saying that it's partly a success because of her but she actually cares about the Poem. Honestly respect, lol

[Uncle]

I keep seeing all this anti-chud cope stuff like

   

but I actually listened to one of the "ringleader" streams (critical drinker) and long before it came out everyone agreed that it was probably going to perform really well? no real competition from other movies, big tentpole film with famous stars, imax, nolan has practically never had a flop, etc etc

they do say they don't like the historical inaccuracies and some choices made, but "this will be a huge marvels snow white flop" was not one of the claims

it's people making up a guy to get mad at

[Ethan]

Cross posting because I couldn't decide between dumb news and culture wars.


Publication which encourages its readers to behave in a way which sucks the joy out of life unironically posts an article asking why life is so joyless...

Can't make this shit up!

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jul/26/age-of-decadence-pleasure-ai

Why does everything feel so joyless? Welcome to the age of decadence without pleasure

Do you want to have a good time? You know, really enjoy yourself? Click here, and tell us your desires. Maybe it’s a new outfit, or some exotic cuisine delivered anonymously and steaming hot to your door. Maybe it’s porn or gambling. Perhaps you prefer the infinite scroll, the endlessly unfurling ribbon of glossy images and videos starring people you’ll never meet doing things you’ll never do. Or maybe you favor talking to a chatbot who will assure you that you are the most special of all its users.

One again for those in the back, "In all of human history, we have never lived in more prosperous, peaceful, free and fruitful times and Millennials still aren't happy. Maybe the problem isn't the times we live in, but the people who live in it unhappily."

Time will tell, but there's always the possibility that 2011 (the year the CK video is from) was the year we reached "peak joy" and it's all downhill from there. Let's just take his example about flying. The experience has become quite a bit more miserable since then.

Add to that some of the worst wars in decades, heatwaves upon heatwaves, enshitification of tech, tech stagnating and becoming more expensive, algorithmic social media becoming the main source of entertainment, the sorry state of Hollywood, the end of "prestige television", the woke era and then the chud era, low Covid interest rates fucking up housing for a generation, the opioid epidemic, the gambling epidemic, broken political landscape, careers on the path of extinction, etc.

Things are still alright in the grand scheme of things, but I can't really blame pampered westerners for being depressed about the future.

[HaughtyFrank]

Fun read about plagiarism and highly questionable claims (says he ran 30 Marathons in 35 days and 300 miles. "As long as you have the willpower it supersedes skill")

Though I also wonder if AI will make future plagiarism really difficult to discover. Here you can see him being pretty lazy and copying words verbatim but with AI it's very easy to ask it to rewrite the whole thing

Multiple sites have picked this story up. Lets check in on the discourse

I remember when Claudine Gay was accused of plagiarism a common defense was also that "loads of people do this in academia" and I can only think of the "You realize that's worse" meme

[DavidCroquet]

i wish my name was Liverpool John Moore.

[Besticus Maximus]

I find academic plagiarism waffle nauseating.  They’re just cunts trying to sell books. Under glorious social democracy all libraries and textbook pdfs will be free

[benji]

Time will tell, but there's always the possibility that 2011 (the year the CK video is from) was the year we reached "peak joy" and it's all downhill from there. Let's just take his example about flying. The experience has become quite a bit more miserable since then.

Add to that some of the worst wars in decades, heatwaves upon heatwaves, enshitification of tech, tech stagnating and becoming more expensive, algorithmic social media becoming the main source of entertainment, the sorry state of Hollywood, the end of "prestige television", the woke era and then the chud era, low Covid interest rates fucking up housing for a generation, the opioid epidemic, the gambling epidemic, broken political landscape, careers on the path of extinction, etc.

Things are still alright in the grand scheme of things, but I can't really blame pampered westerners for being depressed about the future.

2011 was worse for almost, if not, all of those things. It's more likely they believe things are worse because they thought in 2011 they were beginning the process of establishing utopia by complaining to a friendly media: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_movement