Ask Lemmy

Conspiracy Theorist culture has been coopted by the evangelical right in the wake of shit like Watergate and Iran-Contra making a non-interfered-with conspiracy theorist culture seem too dangerous to the right to be allowed to persist.

Evidence being that if you go far enough down the rabbit holes of the looney theories we all like to make fun of, you'll inevitably find some evangelical nut preaching about how it has to be that way either because they believe it says so in the bible or because they believe it's a sign of the rapture which is surely happening within their lifetime, or often both.

It's like the most dangerous kind of conservative appropriation of counterculture narrative.

Paper straws were pushed by big corporate polluters to build a negative association with environmentalism.

Plastic straws are single-use plastics, but seem unexceptional by those standards. It's almost a meme that they're being singled out like they're the single greatest source of plastic waste, or uniquely damaging to ocean life.

On top of that, there are way better ways of reducing straw usage. I've used bioplastics that seemed way better. You could redesign the lids. You can do the plastic bag thing and charge people a nickel for a straw or whatever. Hell, you could just not give straws with every drink, and plenty of people will just drink from their cups and glasses. Instead, we get paper straws, something that is so obviously a bad idea it sounds like a joke, or a metaphor for a useless invention. Often served with cups and lids made entirely out of plastic.

So you get a bunch of people who have their drinks kind of ruined by a frustrating straw. It's a small thing, but it's just a little nudge away from environmentalism. You build an association with disappointment and inconvenience. Maybe it doesn't cause a big sway, but it makes people maybe a little more anti-environmentalist than they already were, or just less passionate about environmentalism.

What about r/catstandingup? Videos or Pics of cats standing.

The comments and replies to comments are always: Cat.

Ken Paxton has dirt on every Republican in Texas, and the fraud we know about is probably a multitude less than what he actually does.

Windows, Android, & Apple software used to nag you about installing updates endlessly. They don't do that so much anymore. I think it's because instead of alerts asking us to install updates, they now create network outages, software crashes, and other minor issues that require a restart. How often do you have some inexplicable problem, restart your device to fix it, and your machine is like "Hey while we're in there we're also installing this update we just downloaded a moment ago."

Soda bottle caps for newer types of soda fit worse onto the bottles. They’re harder to re-thread on, for example, the new Oreo Coke than they are on the old Diet Coke.

The reason that newer bottle designs are harder to thread is that they’re trying to make people drop the cap, leading to just giving up on re-capping.

This is to reinforce the narrative that people lose their bottle caps.

Which is to lend support for the drive to make caps attached to a little ring on the bottle, like in Europe.

When windows has updated and needs to restart it purposefully gets a bit slower/buggy to make people restart the PC.

"Trad-wives" are the pick me girls' final form. I think it's also for women who want to do OnlyFans type work, but don't want to be as risqué. It's like soft core incel porn more than an actual depiction or celebration of maternity.

Firefox knows the exact worst time to force a restart on me. What's up with that?

Tiktok is a Chinese psyop to turn the next generation of Americans into drooling idiots.

Scar was the hero in The Lion King.

That all of Tom Cruise's movies ( and by extension any media created by ppl of the church) are propaganda for the church of scientology.

content warnng: Magic The Gathering

facts: a couple of weeks ago the commander rules committee, the independent group that governs the popular Commander format, started receiving death threats after they banned some boring ass broken cards (jeweled lotus? dockside extortionist? nobody is ride or die for those)

as a result, the rules committee turned over control of the format to Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro, the makers of magic the gathering

fact: last year after some magic the gathering content was leaked, Hasbro send literal pinkertons to harasss the youtuber leaking it and recover the leaked goods

conspiracy theory: hasbro hired the pinkertons to make those death threats against the rules committee so that hasbro could seize control ove the most popular independent format of magic