how did my ancestors survive the brutal unforgiving wilderness when I get anxiety sweats from going to Target
to be fair im sure your ancestors would have the exact same reaction going to a Target
In the brutal unforgiving wilderness false positives cost nothing and false negatives are expensive. You’re better off being afraid of something that can’t hurt you than not afraid of something that can hurt you.
In a world where we mostly aren’t in danger, day to day, as long as we don’t play in traffic or jump off something, that’s no longer quite as adaptive.
We got our anxiety from a long, unbroken line of ancestors who were scared enough to survive, and pass on those genes!
It helps me sometimes to think about that at night, when I can’t sleep because my heart is pounding over something like “what if my usually reliable alarm clock doesn’t work in the morning for some reason and I’m late for work and lose my job and everyone hates me.” There’s nothing wrong with me, I just have a lot of extra, unused run-from-tigers juice that my grandparents left me.
“Unused run-from-tigers juice.”
I love that.
Our brains have been running Hunter/Gatherer 1.0 for 60,000 years without a software upgrade.
“Sure, Hitler did terrible things, but you have to admit he was a brilliant man!” I have to do no such thing. He was a shiftless, self-absorbed layabout who found pontificating and rabble-rousing easier than doing actual work. Like many essentially worthless human beings, he did have a great deal of skill in manipulation, which enabled him to draw people in and use them, but I don’t call that genius.
“The Nazis eliminated unemployment!” Any improvements the Nazis made in the German economy were short-term and unsustainable. Unemployment was eliminated in a manner of speaking – by running up ridiculous amounts of debt, cutting wages by 25%, and interning or declaring ineligible a sizable portion of the work force. Rationing began in 1937, two years before the invasion of Poland – a healthy peacetime economy does not have rationing. Their economic model relied on taking over other countries and stealing their resources – it was the only hope they had of making up the deficit.
“The Nazis were brutally efficient!”Nothing the Nazis did was even remotely efficient. Hitler’s idea of governing was to put businesses and state departments in direct competition with each other for his personal favor. This resulted in massive corruption, bureaucratic bottlenecks, and an untold waste of time and resources. The economy wasn’t put on a full wartime footing until 1942 because no one was able or willing to do so.
“Okay, maybe Hitler wasn’t that smart, but he was still a military genius!” Germany’s military successes during the first half of the war can best be explained by their choice of opponents – most countries were hopelessly overwhelmed, while France not-so-secretly wanted to be Germany’s girlfriend – and by the skill of the senior officers who came up through the old imperial system. When faced with opponents who actually had their shit together (and in the case of Soviet Russia that’s being charitable) Hitler’s vaunted strategic abilities were shown for their true worth – little to none.
“Nazi science was phenomenal!” Please stop learning things from History Channel specials about “Hitler’s UFOs.” The Nazis sucked as bad at science as they did at everything else, in large part because they outright rejected a lot of theoretical advances as “Jewish science” and drove some of their greatest minds out of the country (who promptly came to the US). There’s a reason we developed the atom bomb first, and it’s because we had all their best scientists and they were left with the time-servers and jackboot-lickers.
“But if they hadn’t invaded Russia they would’ve won the war!” Anyone who offers this as a counterfactual has completely failed to understand what Nazism was about, and it bugs the shit out of me. This wasn’t some accidental miscalculation. It was actually the entire point of National Socialism, the entire point of the whole war – carving out “living space” in the East. Was it a stupid thing to do? Sure! But here’s the thing you need to understand about the Nazis: hatred always won out over practical considerations. They hated Russians, they hated Communism, they wanted to destroy Russia’s Jews, and they weren’t about to let silly things like “reality” or “good sense” get in the way of their glorious destiny. It’s the same thing as rejecting good science because it was developed by Jewish people. They didn’t give a shit about objective reality; all they cared about was the glory of the German race and the destruction of all others. If you don’t understand this, you will never understand Nazi Germany, and you will continue to swallow lies like the ones listed above.
tl;dr: Nazi Germany was a huge fucking mess from beginning to end and anyone who says otherwise is totally ignorant and very likely a Nazi apologist.
And do realize that the History Channel and Military Channel have been spewing disgusting Nazi prop for more than a decade.
okay i just had a bad epiphany but corporate interest’s influence on the internet is going to become so much stronger now that generations that are internet naturalized have grown up and starting working as “social media consultants”. advertising is going to become so much more subtle, manipulate your behavior to a greater extent, and completely pervade every aspect of our lives the more we rely on the internet for everything from entertainment to social validation.
what im saying is its scary that corporate twitter accounts are getting good at twitter. to have the same avenue a human would to express themself. its like, an extreme anthromorphism of a brand, and that brand representing a corporate interest, and successfully passing itself off as a sentient entity on twitter, thats really weird to me.
like this is so fucked up. it doesnt immediately read as an advertisement, conceptually it executes the levels of irony and deconstruction that usually make for successful memes in this genre or whatever. its almost subverting itself, but ultimately it still succeeds as an advertisement. it makes me sick. for every misfire of corporations trying to relate (pepsi protest commercial), theres another company getting better at it
okay but like my thing about this is… who is actually eating at these places because shit like this? yeah it’s funny but i never go to wendy’s because a meme, if i go to wendy’s it’s because i want a gross burger and a frosty, same with taco bell and mcdonald’s and wherever the fuck.
i really think that you’re blowing this out of proportion and having very little faith in people’s ability to decide what they want for themselves. it’s just not that deep.
It’s not about the effectiveness of the ads in question, but their complete omnipresence in every aspect and moment of life, and how bizarre and sophisticated the mechanations of advertising have become. If people don’t call attention to these things, they become normal.
The effectiveness of marketing isnt one-to-one, like, “ad says burger is good, I think burger is good, I eat burger.” That was 50 years ago. Y’all, since then these multi-million dollar corporations have been hiring psychologists and sociologists and anthropologists to study how best to get under consumer skin and theyve figured out it’s not about making you WANT a burger,
It’s about creating a Brand Identity – an anthropomorphized personality that your brain fits into an established schema (system of thought) so it’s easier to just drop into the background of your everyday life. It’s not about making you want a burger, it’s about making it so, when you DO want a burger, the first place you think of is Wendy’s, because their ads have made you think about them five time already that day. And most importantly, it’s about making sure you dont realize how often they make you think about them, so you don’t resent how pervasive they’ve become. They do that by tricking your brain into thinking of them as just another human-like personality. Your Funny Meme Friend Wendy’s. Wine Aunt World Market. Woke Jock Nike. Even your Endearingly Unhip Uncle Geico.
(hey also if you want dozens of terrifying examples of what I mean, just type ‘brand identity schema’ into Google like I just did and take a gander at all those scholarly articles discussing how best to acquire consumers, like we’re a fucking commodity)
one time i said i didn’t like the wendys twitter and got called classist for hating retail employees
this shit works. it makes people like Brands. gets under their skin and in to their minds. when i said i didnt like the wendys twitter i personally offended people that viewed wendys as a friend, that viewed the wendys social media manager as a friendly individual that they respected.
the wendys social media manager is not your friend. they don’t even really exist. there’s no one person that writes the tweets for wendys. there’s a team of 20 something year olds that casually observe the latest meme trends and crank out mspaint memes because they know they’ll get retweeted if the memes are relevant.
they trick you in to thinking that Wendys is a hip friendly young person, and they manipulate you in to thinking that disliking marketing is somehow a “problematic” “un-woke” thing to do.
and it works.
install ublock origin. on mobile, block every promoted tweet you see. don’t let them convince you that this shit is normal.
ugh 