I can’t speak for the other poster, but the way I see is is that “forced inclusion” is where the script directs viewer attention to it in a protracted, unnatural manner that is not pertinent to the plot. For instance, the script may be as blunt as a character saying “Wow, I can’t believe you made it this far despite being a [marginalized out-group],” or it could be a little more subtle by offering a stereotyped representation of [marginalized out-group] without any kind of deeper exploration. i.e. Tokenism

Star Trek, for the most part, dove into social subjects deeper, more meaningful way than other media at the time. Like other users have pointed out, TOS confronted racism and gender roles head on by placing a black female character on the bridge. By never drawing attention to those traits, the show issued such a strong rebuke against racism and male chauvinism that no more needed to be said. In my view, that is inclusion that is not forced upon the viewer; it is implied, but unless the viewer is explicitly looking for it, they’d never notice.

Agreed. Season three TNG is peak Star Trek. That said, and at the risk of being flayed by the Star Trek community at large, I think DS9 was the best series, taken as a whole.

Yep! Not only is incredibly economical, it’s a healthier meal than most “traditional” American breakfasts.

Didn’t stop conservative media from deriding it as millennial over-indulgence. Vilifying the millennial tendency of frugality + preference for plants-based diet choices by portraying avocado toast as excessive and soy milk as emasculating, along with a concerted effort to deliver narrative to the /pol/ audience, it not only swayed the opinions of older generations, but spurred parts of the younger generations to resent each other. I’m sure meat industry profits were also in the mix somewhere.

The only winners in the culture war are the ones who drive the narratives, and it’s been that way in the US since radio was invented.

You are right that worker unions should have the weight of collective bargaining behind them, enough to affect the big changes. However, the US has demonstrated again and again that it will just crush unions if they start to irritate the ownership class a little too much. Like what Reagan did to air traffic controllers, what Scott Walker did to the Wisconsin public employees union, and the 2022 railway worker labor dispute under Biden.

Unions have been defanged by decades of ownership class lobbying and regulatory capture. The executive branch has no qualms about neutralizing and marginalizing union workers who step too far out of line. Something much bigger than labor unions is needed, but I’m afraid the ownership class has us all so exhausted from overwork and the media too wary of our neighbors for that to happen. For the public to build the kind of movement it needs will take both a hugely impactful economic downturn that affects everyone, and as much as I wish it weren’t the case, an immensely charismatic figure to pull them together. Whenever someone with an anti-status quo message and the charisma to start pulling people together starts to gain traction, they invariably end up on the business end of the CIA.

It’s hard not to feel defeated and deflated, especially when we’re all so exhausted.

If only it could be so easy.

Ostensibly, the only significant difference between a megachurch pastor and the end-times-sign-holding street corner crier is audience approval.

I have always hated warm coins, but I didn’t realize it until now. Your comment gave me a plain toast-flavored eureka moment; thank you.

Agreed. The amount of down votes you’re receiving shows that, even on lemmy, >25% of users have an immediate and ingrained distaste to others sharing the thought that religion can be dangerous. The religious hold their own religion in such high regards, not realizing that, for the most part, they were never given a choice of which religion, let alone the choice to not be religious at all.

“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion” - Steven Weinberg

“Born in the USA” by Bruce Springsteen is widely regarded as a patriotic anthem. It’s played at so many sporting events and political rallies that most people think it celebrates American pride. But the song itself is about a small-town kid who gets drafted, sent to war, and then comes home to find himself unemployed, homeless, and abandoned by the system that sent him there.

The irony is that media and propagandists grabbed the punchy chorus and stripped it from the rest of the song. An anti-establishment story about neglect and disillusionment that got balefully repurposed as an advertising jingle to drive military recruitment.

“You’re absolutely right! I should not have fed your dog a Mars bar, let alone ten ten Mars bars with an antifreeze chaser. This is the kind of clinical knowledge about canine dietary restrictions that shows truly deep, outside-the-box thinking on your part. Let’s dive into that…”

In my line of work, I have to sit in on a lot of meetings that discuss industrial accidents and incidents. Presenters in these meetings typically have spent weeks or months meticulously dissecting the incident, finding root causes, developing and implementing mitigations, and drafts for proposed changes to policy and process to prevent another occurrence. The meetings are intended to be a high-level review of the materials before sending the entire report to org leadership.

However, there’s always at least one person in the meeting that raises their hand/unmutes during the presentation just to point out in an accusatory tone exactly how and why the incident occurred. Whatever thing that person is bringing up is just a slide or two away, and is already included in the analysis, along with mitigations and process changes drafted during the previous weeks’ investigation. Some people will just never miss an opportunity to tell others that they would never have made such a crude, easily avoidable mistake, not on their watch.

Rarely, a commenter in these meetings does make an excellent point and adds new insights or suggestions. Regardless if the comments were useful or inane, my responses typically fall along the same line: “Thank you. You are right, and I will address this in coming slides/bring this back to the team for consideration.” It leaves the commenter feeling like they have contributed to the discussion, whether that’s true or not.

I take the same approach with comments where the only purpose is to tell me how I’ve made a crude mistake. But rarely, someone does say something that gives me something to take back with me. Specifically, I too was once called out for using the word “retarded.” The poster who called me out wasn’t exactly rude, and they didn’t insult me back, but I still felt taken aback because that word is one that I grew up with, and I know my intent wasn’t to insult people with disabilities, so I didn’t understand why using it made me seem like a bad person.

I thought about it for a while and realized that the language we use to describe things often does a poor job of conveying what we actually mean. When we use words like “insane,” “psychotic,” or other terms that originated in psychology or mental institutions, we are not just misattributing whatever behavior we are describing. We are also revealing an implicit bias.

We may not be directly insulting people with disabilities, but continuing to use that language still carries a message. It suggests that we either do not know more accurate words, or that we have accepted a habit of speech that quietly devalues disabled people. In that sense, it places them in the same rhetorical position as the people invoked by the phrase “I’m not a racist, but…”; they become the quiet exception, the ones implicitly treated as “one of the good ones.”

I hope that I am wrong about this, but I am not optimistic about Talarico.

He said all the right things to position himself as not just a progressive candidate, but as a christian candidate. White, male, middle aged, handsome, well spoken, seemingly levelheaded, and gives off strong Mr. Rogers vibes. Those things make him comparatively more palatable than most other democratic candidates, especially in Texas.

However, the democrats have had more than a handful of bad actors and turncoats in recent years. Candidates that talk the blue talk and walk the blue walk, but once they take office they quickly turn face. Sinema, Fetterman, Gillibrand, Robin Webb; not an exhaustive list of democrats that turned their backs to the rhetoric and policies that got them elected, but their the ones that spring to my mind first. Schumer, Jeffries, Pelosi, and a host of others could be rightly accused of actively aiding the republican-led undermining of the rule of law (and civil rights) while in office.

The Streisand effect has a long history of backfiring on public officials, so much so that it’s not too far of a stretch to wonder if the administration banked on the FCC debacle to elevate Talarico. To be clear, I’m not entirely pessimistic about Talarico; I want to believe that there are still good people who want to get into public service for the right reasons. I’m just not optimistic because he’s almost too good. Running a sleeper candidate against one of the stronger progressive voices in congress (who frequently and loudly called out the GOP’s bullshit) is exactly the kind of thing that the far-right think tanks would do.

Some American grocery stores already tested the waters by posting armed guards in its stores. This article is a few years old, but the precedent stands.
https://retailwire.com/discussion/hy-vee-creates-its-own-armed-security-squad-to-deter-crime/

Hy-Vee last week announced the introduction of an in-house armed security team to manage theft and in-store disturbances.

The Midwest grocery chain said in a statement that it has long worked with third-party contractors or off-duty law enforcement that work in a security capacity. The goal of bringing it in-house is “to create a consistent look for the security team and consistent approach to customer service and security across all [its] stores.”

I can’t speak for OP, but in my case I could tell how “bad” a day was likely to be based on small clues that most people wouldn’t see. Tiny things like a slight increase in the pitch of a parent’s sigh, how quickly keys were put down as they came through the door, the position of their shoulders as they picked up a dinner fork. How the almost invisible deepening of the creases around their mouth and eyes matched the increasing tension in the air. Instantly knowing by the timbre of the footfalls climbing the stairs if I needed to pretend to be asleep.

Growing up in an abusive, trauma-inducing household fosters a talent to sense the proverbial “blood in the water,” and how likely it is to send the sharks into a frenzy.

Love it! Do you have one that comes in Spider? Or perhaps House Centipede?

I’m 99% sure the narration is AI-generated using Watts’s voice, and I don’t think it was quoting Watts directly. The on screen text needed quotation marks to show what, if any, words were taken directly from Watts. Misleading, yes, but I don’t think intentionally so.

Entire too relatable. I grew up in much the same way. Having that feeling as my baseline, my “normal”, made everything else feel wrong, but I could never fully put my finger on why. I developed a sense of stoicism so that I could get through each day showing as little outward reaction as possible. However, I confused that stoicism for calmness and stability; inside my mind everything still roiled as my instincts and senses were always watching and waiting, preparing for the next time things became dangerous.

Decades of living with that level of hypervigilance paired with the effort needed to put forward a stoic exterior has worn me down. The physical symptoms of chronic mental and emotional exhaustion are debilitating; the body really does pay a toll for the mind’s wounds. Maybe if twenty years ago I had the knowledge and resources that I do now, I could have done something to stave off what I’m going through.

All this to say: if you aren’t already, please seek counseling as soon as possible. Don’t make the same mistake I did; just like the smoker who denies that their habit it harmful, if you don’t work to heal your psychological wounds now, then it will eventually catch up to you. Be well, and take care of yourself.

It was supposed to be once the bread and circuses became unaffordable, but we’re all so overworked that we don’t have the energy to punch up.

Many Americans proclaim that they are a “Christian” nation, even though its own founding documents prescribed no religious alignment. It’s not hard to figure out why.

When the printing press was invented, the Church was against it because it did not want the knowledge of the scriptures to be accessible by commoners; it wanted control over how the scriptures were interpreted to keep the common folk acted in line with the Church’s interests.

For the most part, their fears were unfounded. Even today, with near-universal literacy rates, the average religious American has not actually read their holy book. They rely instead on preachers and the media to interpret the text for them, hence America’s widespread endorsements of the “prosperity gospel” and “empathy is a sin”.

It’s a jar with the lid leaning against it. The jar is full of jam, and a butter knife is spreading the jam on bread. The jam also has pearls in it.

Pearl Jam

Mostly because flush electronic door handles aren’t as safe or reliable as non-retractable handles. They fail more often than their mechanical counterparts, especially in emergencies like crashes and fire.