Talentless hack Jason Aldean released a song titled "Try That in a Small Town" with an accompanying music video. It's loaded with racist dog whistles with nods to lynching; which is what got the video pulled off CMT.

It's basically just a poorly arranged tirade insinuating that small, white, christian towns are safe while black, lefty, cities are dangerous. The imagery in the video strongly suggests that all of the riots, dissent, protests, and problems in the US are everyone else's fault except God-fearing white people. Typical fascist shit, blame LGBTQ people, black people, migrants, atheists, literally anyone else in order to avoid responsibility and justify killing/jailing - LYNCHING - those they seem to be causing all their woes.

Now, I am originally from a one red light town in the South and can personally vouch for the fact that these "small towns" are pits of rape and misogyny fueled by the same old Catholic concept of illiterate congregation lead by an evil fuckface telling them what they should believe and do. Just because many of these ignorant dipshits are Baptists or some other pointless protestant denomination doesn't change that the playbook is always the same. I mean this, I graduated high school in 2008 with people who literally couldn't read, if you needed any reassurance that the plummetting literacy rate in the US was accurate.

I'll finish off my soapbox here with this. I love country music. But like all other genres, there's what's on the radio, and there's everything else. I'm not gonna sit here on a pedestal and say that I never get a pop-country tune stuck in my head. A lot of them are fine; pandering and rehashed same old lyrics and chords, but they're catchy for a reason. This Jason Aldean song isn't even that. It's poorly written and the music is objectively not good. It's just loud. That's it. It's just talentless noise. One thing that has made me happy as a country music fan, is that the country community has largely come out against the song and it's message. If you happen to read more about this, you'll see plenty of country artists slamming it for being garbage. You'll also see that most of the "celebrities and influencers" standing up for Aldean are MAGA republican politicians and washed up performers who can't get work anywhere because of their shit ass opinions.

/Rant

People that keep making this dumbass "engagement" claim have no goddamn idea what they're talking about. Nobody is falling for jack shit. The "engagement" of people going on to place to troll is miniscule. Like you said, half of us aren't looking at this on Reddit. It's being broadcast everywhere else and the tech outlets that an investor will see are reading about how much the user base fucking hates the product.

Yep. That was the organization exodus for my last job. Without any warning or planning, a state government agency, demanded everyone come back first week June 2021 when not a single other state office was even considering it. It was way out of left field and threatened to completely fuck up many people's lives and there was a mass exodus. Staff left agency wide. I think it was somewhere around 300 employees of a several thousand. Which may not seem like that much, but when 300 people quit in one agency over the course of two weeks, it's extremely noticable lol. The leadership at the top got berated publicly by the governor and they had to reverse course to stop people from leaving. But hey, I got a promotion, a huge raise, and got to demand my telework schedule because I instantly became more important hahaha.

The next exodus was my specific division. The deputy director we all liked and the media relations manager we all liked were fired out of nowhere by the same agency leadership that fucked up in the telework debacle. They placed their own drones in the two spots and it absolutely decimated morale. Not to mention the stool pigeons they selected are two of the most incompetent people I've ever had the displeasure of working with. I took a high-paying job with a federal contractor and bounced. Four people left in the few months following. They hired new people, two of which left within three months. I still talk to the social media manager who's still there and she fills me in on all the bullshit they're continuing with. Out of a public affairs division of 14 people, there's only six still there that were there when I left last September.

This is the correct perspective. As it turns out, a huge amount of people that believe Bill Gates is injecting 5G chips into people absolutely don't vote. If you recall, the first amendment nuts in the loser convoys and a bunch of the J6 defendants weren't even registered to vote and yet they screeched election interference. For an election they didn't even bother to vote in.

2020 was one of the highest blue voter turnouts in national history making record first time voters in their 30s and 40s.

So yes, it should be pointed out that everyday people turning out to vote against this brain rot is just as important whether or not magats and human vegetables are voting too.

Considering many cousinfucker school districts all across the US are trying to abolish social and cultural learning and all access to political science. I'd say a governor taking a stand and making it clear anti-education curriculums won't be tolerated, is a pretty big deal.

I'd argue the opposite. People have been fed up with the mainstream platforms for a long time now. Now that we know how social media grew grassroots terrorism and that the platforms allowed it for ad clicks, I'd say it's a good time to pivot away from the traditional models of the last 15-20 years, move away from the Facebooks and Twitters, and try something new.

Professionally, I lead a team of digital artists and oversee digital marketing efforts for a government client. The chaos and burning out of Twitter and Reddit has been a great time for my team as we've finally been given the latitude to do new work and build new strategies instead of just doing the same bullshit over and over. I've started enjoying work again and my team has been energized because everyday there's something new to overcome. And because the social media ecosystem is so turbulent, it's actually removing the pressure from us because our client understands that we are operating in new territory. Essentially, we are being allowed to fail in the pursuit of innovation.

I'm pumped to be a part of this evolving shift. There's so much potential. Also, I'm selfishly enjoying watching these fucking assholes like Musk flail and burn through billions of dollars as a result of their hubris.

It's honestly extremely humorous. I made a Twitter account in 2015 because it was a requirement for a emergency management crisis communications class I was taking for work. After the course ended I didn't log into it again until Musk bought Twitter. I knew it was going to be a hilarious dumpster fire and wanted to watch it melt down in real time. It hasn't disappointed. But this most recent thing about the rate limits is so hilariously dumb I figured I'd seen enough. Deleted the app off my phone yesterday.

As you point out, Twitter's death is going to mean a huge improvement to journalism. Someone on Lemmy mentioned yesterday how nice it is to not be on Reddit which had gotten to be like 80% Twitter screenshots. Twitter and Reddit diving like this at the same time is going to be a net positive.

Agreed, and not only that but holy fuck we just broke up a week ago. I was in a relationship with that bitch for 12 years, I don't need my homies over here telling me it's time to forget about it lol

Yeah that was obvious horseshit. The county employee he was in conspiracy with took the entire shaft for that. I'm curious as to what Gaetz promised that dude not to flip, because his corroboration was needed to bring the Venmo receipts and some of that other shit out of circumstantial and into real shit.

Meh. Sure, she's gonna be able to leverage some of that stuff into a paycheck, but she squandered the influence of more powerful Republicans and generally acted like a spoiled child. Even MTG has more focus on the evil shit conservatives are doing and that's saying something.

Boebert isn't going to get near as many speaking invites and won't be able to charge anywhere near what other ejected Republicans can. Fucking Mike Flynn and the pillow man can charge more than boobert

I'm pretty sure her TV appearances are mostly going to be Newsmax and OAN.

And honestly, the only reason that CO repububs are being this open about ditching her is because everyone already knows her reelection bid is dead in the water. Dem Adam Frich lost by less than a thousand votes in the midterms and all projections anticipate him handily trouncing her in the next general. Its not because they actually care about her giving handies during Beetlejuice.

Same. And I don't like to admit it, but I was a "power user". When Bacon Reader went dark, I never went back. Like others have pointed out, Reddit was always going to "win" the protest, even with over 1800 subs still out. But the platform's frontpage quality is in the tank. Google doesn't want to list Reddit at the top of search results anymore. The corporate failure to retain money making accounts made national news. Huffman completely missed the investment boat, and although the site itself is still generating traffic, the raised interest rates and lack of ROI for the unpopular changes spells out nothing but a slow death rattle.

And, lmao, anyone that publicly announces they're following the "Musk Model" for social media platform leadership is clearly a fucking dipshit doomed to drive their site into the ground.

Not to derail your point, but I am 100% positive that the meme isn't saying Barbie is a bad movie at all. This meme isn't near as deep as you're giving it credit for.

It's making the observation that Hollywood has eroded its creative foundation to the point that there have only been two movies that anyone is talking about this year. Whereas in years past there would be dozens.

I have certainly noticed that over the last few years I care less and less about yet another Marvel movie or remake of an awesome 80s or 90s movie. It's extremely obvious why masterful productions like Barbie and Oppenheimer stand out above everything else this year. These would have been great movies in the 90s too, but they would have actually been competing against substantially more films that are worth talking about.

I shit you not, this is uncomfortably accurate. I was living it up, having finally tossed Reddit and also called it done with Twitter. Loving this space. Loving the vibe. And then all this Threads shit just becomes everything and I really do feel like this meme.

Ruud took care of it a week ago. They answered elsewhere in the thread. OP posted this without bothering to check if it had been handled.

It's because a lot of preppers are sovereign citizen, conspiracy theory, right wing nut bags. The idea of prepping got really popular right before the turn of the century and again in the run up to 2012. Obviously nothing happened and many of those people prepping for the end of the Mayan calendar or the 2000 apocalypse looked like certified lunatics. Definitely where a lot of the ridicule and stereotypes come from.

In reality, prepping takes many forms and covers a broad spectrum of ideologies. Lately, prepping has been rebranded, especially in leftist circles, as sustainable living or homesteading. In the general public, you'll probably still get a lot of assumptions that a prepper is a Nazi with a bomb shelter and a million guns. And there are quite a few of those people, to be fair.

In practice, prepping should be more like community resilience, sharing resources, and making as much use as possible of any amount of space you have. Loading up your basement with ten years of MREs and cans of bullets is basically useless. A real prepper stores enough to get through the worst of an emergency but has a plan for continued life in the event the economy completely collapses or something like that.

For example, my wife and I are members of a local farm co-op and have hydroponic gardens in half the corners in almost every room of our house. We have chickens, and our entire front plot of yard is loaded right now with squash, peppers, tomatoes, and more. We give away or trade what we can't consume ourselves. And believe it or not we live just outside of the center of a small town and have neighbors all alongside and behind. I also own guns, and keep a store of a few months worth of shelf stable goods and have a solid selection of tools. It's not set up right now, but I have solar power if I need it and the ability to get rain water collection going.

I don't refer to myself as a prepper because that's not the primary goal of what we are doing, it just so happens to be a bonus of the marriage between community engagement and self-reliance.

This is extremely interesting. So many products that I've never heard of and many of them were actually around for 6-12 years before being axed or coming up on death soon. A lot of these I had heard of and even used occasionally over the years and I didn't realize were gone now.

In my observation it has been industry and sector dependent.

Corporate tech and finance are calling for remote work to end. Most of the articles I see where going back to the office is touted are all "silicon valley" type companies and finance/investment firms writing opinion peices.

PR, marketing, and news media, comms fields - which I am in - are doing the opposite. I work in digital media with government clients and my office just had a building contractor come in and walled off 2/3 of our empty cube space that was full pre-pandemic but is now vacant because all those employees remained remote. The positions in that area of the office were mostly copy editors, graphic design, and technical writers. The building owner turned that area into a new office but hasn't rented it to anyone new yet.

Many of my colleagues are active duty military and government civilians. They all telework as much as 3-4 days a week currently. All of their jobs are administrative in nature and almost all of the military people are officers.

It is important to note that the military has loosely instructed liberal telework at unit level discretion because of record low retention rates. I've been working in/for government for a long time and even before 2020, federal contractors and DoD civilians have usually had telework of some kind provided what they did was something that could be taken home.

When I worked in DC in the mid-00s it was common to see offices engage rotating flex schedules because of the insane traffic and hours long commutes in the DMV corridor.

But, I suppose it's all anecdotal. Where you live and what you do for work are going to impact reality more than anything. Watching the MSM speculate and reading nonsense opinion articles in the Atlantic or Times aren't going to give you any real information.

All I can say for sure is my office has fully remote and hybrid only. We are guaranteed two days WFH a week but all salaried employees have optional flex schedules and can work non-concurrent hours as long as deadlines are being met. But again, I work for a massive international fed contractor that does largely administrative and PR consulting. So all things that have a history of WFH schedules already.

Love the Bluey advert. Disturbed it's beside galactic space dicks or whatever that is lol.

Look up whathowwhy on YouTube. He's a dude from the UK who puts stuff into epoxy. A few years a go he put a hotdog into a cube of epoxy and would do periodic video updates on the hotdog. One year I actually watched the New Years Eve livestream of the hotdog slowly spinning on a dias. He'd put a little party hat on it and the live chat was absolutely hilarious.

I've learned not to be so certain that these dipshits like Boebert will lose. However, she barely won of Frich in the last election. Like, pulled a win by less than a 1% margin. I'm willing to let myself be quite confident she's going to kick rocks in '24.

I read an article recently regarding the influx of younger, Dem voters moving into her district. Between that and her tumbling support, Frich has an excellent chance of giving her the boot.