My honest theory, being the victim feels good. It's easier to wrap up yourself in the warm blanket of victimhood when you're a loser.
Now, I should probably define "loser" a bit. Not in regards to wealth or career status. Generally, I mean someone that has zero going for them. No drive. No aspiration. No ambition. No skills. No pursuits. No self improvement. No self education. No... well... have you noticed the people loudest online regarding the whole victim this, victim that... if you took that away... what do they have? Like, you can't even nerd out with them about anything. No interests. No hobbies. Nothing really. Their entire personality and life comprises of this stuff. And I mean doing things within their control too. Sure, some aspirations are going to be out of your reach for one reason or another. Shit, all F1 drivers were pretty much chosen when they were sperm at this point. That's not in the cards for a lot of people. But to focus on a handful of things that don't work out for you and miss out on literally everything else the world has to offer... fuck, that's some childish shit. Which again, it's all just a tantrum of losers.
The real problem, kids are being raised that this line of thought is okay. It's encouraged and glamorized. Most of you here are programmers to some degree. If you have a few years under you're belt, you had that hazing period to become a "real programmer". That first problem/bug that could not be looked up. There was no pre-packaged solution. And you bashed your fucking head against that problem/bug day in and day out. You dreamt of it. You thought about it when you ate and when you shit. You refused to give up even though you thought you were NEVER going to figure it out... until one night you smashed that wall and grabbed the solution by it's neck.
Now imagine you thought it was computer science's fault because it was racist. Would you have solved it or just cried/whined?
Looking for the light in the darkest struggle is what most encouraging tales and stories are about, for a good reason. Even Beethoven's Ode to Joy has the themes of dark brooding, then the bright, large success in overcoming and not giving up. A good reason it's lasted this long. Hiding in the shadows of this racism/victimhood bullshit has got to stop or humanity is going to reap a barren field.
If it were just that victimhood feels good, that wouldn't be enough to keep this line of thinking alive. The bigger problem is that guilt feels good, and we have people thinking it's okay for powerful institutions to convince other people that they're powerless victims.
We might be arguing for the same thing, but semantics... Anyways what I'm getting at is, the victim-fetish, because let's be honest it's turned into a fetish, is a way to absolve yourself of responsibility. Maybe guilt is just that extra step of superficial absolution from your own actions. Kind of like a classical Catholic confessional. Forgive me father for I have sinned, I'm such a baaaaaaad boy. Look at me, I'm admitting to "bad". I'm innocent now....
Hell, it does seem nice to just feel guilty of stuff you literally can't control instead of admitting to the stuff you could control. Which goes to the victimhood. If you're a victim over every little thing, then "it's not my fault!" I mean... this is just going to be a long rant that's going to require me to explain one thing after another because there's a lot of nuance... probably the moral of the story, to what end does "math is racist" even serve? If someone sucks at math when it's deemed racist, they'll still suck even when it's not. Math "being racist" isn't why someone is a lazy, useless parasite on society. That person is the problem, but they don't have to face that fact not only to themselves, but society even rewards them by turning a blind eye on the dumbass waste of human potential. Maybe because society has collectively become more and more useless. Hell, maybe there's an evolutionary trait that sparks when a colony of mammals becomes too vast and wasteful, so it starts to self-cull. I don't know. Math... right... if you're too fucking stupid (this doesn't mean who I'm directly replying to by the way) to do math when it's racist, I promise you'll be too fucking stupid to do it when it's anti-racist. Because math hates you, just like it hates all of us. Equally. Put on the ball gag and nipple clamps and maybe... just maybe... math will give you a little tickle if you take your paddling well. Damn... I'm tired today... go away now...
I'm going to have to agree with the original commentor. A majority of people who stub their toe and blame racism, patriarchy or whatever else, are incredibly boring people. Anyone that's super dogmatic is typically a one trick pony. Sure there are exceptions, but I'm not going to get yelled at for having "micro aggressions" when asking someone "so what do you do for fun" when I already know the answer since they're an insufferable, self-righteous ass.
The reason the person you're imagining is a one-trick-pony with no thoughts beyond claiming oppression is that you're the one imagining them that way. This isn't a real specific person, it's a caricature in your head of the worst traits of a few people, that's applied to a group many times larger.
Cant speak for OP, but I do know specific people just like that. Too many actually. I think far too many introverts on HN imagine everyone else only knows a handful of people and think people only know other like minded individuals. Outside of the tech industry, it's very common for people to interact with a wide diversity of people.
> A majority of people who stub their toe and blame racism, patriarchy or whatever else, are incredibly boring people.
This is spot-on. These folks are essentially 21st century Puritans with all the joylessness and righteous moral outrage that comes with that. And yes, like the Puritans, they are just not very interesting people.
Alright, so I know some of you Arduino/Rasp Pi experts are out there. I suck at hardware dev of any sort.
If making open source 3D printers is pretty common right now, why not this? Some of these Dymo printers are $200-$300 bucks. How ridiculous would it be to create an open standard and plans to let folks make 3d printed build kits and use the power of open markets to drive this bullshit into the ground? I think that discussion is far more productive than crying about this.
As unintuitive as it may seem, 3D printers are actually way simpler to DIY than 2D paper printers. An almost modern 3D printer could have been put together by a hacker in their basement in the 90s. The only reasons they didn't trend until the 2010s is that patents prevented them from being commercially possible until the 2010s, and then it's taken hobbyists many years to gather the knowledge about what to do and not to do. The mechanical construction is not complicated, and the necessary components and materials have been around and readily available for decades.
2D paper printers, on the other hand, are way more complicated and require specialized components that make it very unlikely for anyone to be able to DIY a working laser or ink jet printer. If you want a "free" paper printer, then a much more viable alternative is to hack a "closed" printer to work as you want. With 3D printers, if you want a "free" printer the most viable alternative is actually the opposite: you can just build one yourself since the construction is so simple.
I still think Banksy is not a real "person". It's just a team of marketers who started a prank or dare and it turned into this internationally beloved money printing scam. Because, you know, a thumbs up and spray painting a wall equals feeding a poor kid a bowl of rice everyday. "We're so anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalism, now give us money for this art".
Before Banksy became incredibly popular he made a name for himself in the graf scene. I remember Banksy from the mid 2000s and he was just another cool artist doing interesting things with stencils. For me he was in the same category as France's space invaders, or the guys in Spain (gemeos?) making giant paintings of odd-looking humans. Sometime in the early 2010s Banksy ramped up publicity stunts, and at that point I think Banksy became a collective of artists. Long story short I think Banksy was a person, but probably not anymore.
Why do you think Banksy is not an individual anymore? Many top artists run workshops, in which other people physically fabricate their works. Take Jeff Koons, for example. But few would claim that Jeff Koons is no longer an individual.
I mean even if the art is one person the numerous legally registered companies such as, BANKSY LIMITED, THE ART OF BANKSY LONDON LIMITED, etc. are corporations with directors that you can easily look up. The listed directors almost certainly aren't Banksy.
Banksy is literally a company with marketing, accounts, PR, and management. They are constantly looking for the next viral opportunity and they are big on branding.
For what it's worth i don't even mind that Banksy is literally a corporation. I just wish we were all honest about that. If there's some aspiring artist out there that wants to be the next Banksy our advice should be
"Ok go and register a new company. You'll also need some inner city office space, a management team, marketing and PR. As for the art? Let the data analysts take a look at opportunities to get the most views."
> I still think Banksy is not a real "person". It's just a team
I wouldn’t be surprised if this were true
> of marketers who started a prank or dare and it turned into this internationally beloved money printing scam.
He/she/they do produce art, so it’s definitely not a scam.
> Because, you know, a thumbs up and spray painting a wall equals feeding a poor kid a bowl of rice everyday. "We're so anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalism, now give us money for this art".
I can criticise whatever I want however I want, let it be a pamphlet or a painting, without having to give money to the poor or feeding random children.
Speaking of artists who are suspected of being a collective team, the identity and back story of "Netochka Nezvanova" aka "integer" aka "antiorp" was finally revealed.
Netochka Nezvanova is a name of a character from a Fyodor Dostoyevsky novel, and translates as "nameless nobody".
Her real name is Rebekah Wilson, and she was teamed up with another women who she never met in person, but she kind of fell in love with, but who actually turned out to be a man.
>Netochka Nezvanova has been described by cultural critics as "an elusive online identity" and "a collective international project". In 2020, art critic Amber Husain describes NN as an "avatar of avant-garde internet performance" that "became as known for her abstract and usable software artworks as she did for aggressive displays of anonymous cyber-domination".
portrait #02 Rebekah Wilson aka Netochka Nezvanova
>Bravo! If you enjoyed that anti-Max performance art trolling, but thought it wasn't spectacularly hyperbolic and sociopathic enough, I recommend looking up some of the classic flames on the nettime mailing list by Netochka Nezvanova aka "NN" aka "=cw4t7abs", "punktprotokol", "0f0003", "maschinenkunst" (preferably spelled "m2zk!n3nkunzt"), "integer", and "antiorp"!
>Nato.0+55+3d (released in 1999) was an amazing but notorious extension for Max that enabled live programming of real time video manipulation, networking and display.
>Netochka Nezvanova is a software programmer, radical artist and online troublemaker. But is she for real?
>[...] Netochka's medium is the online mailing list. Posting as "antiorp" and, more recently, "integer," she capriciously takes over technical and artistic discussions in forums such as the European Net arts list Syndicate, says Steev Hise, a Bay Area electronic artist. "Nobody really knows how many real people are involved with this," he says.
>[...] "As a community destroyer, she's fantastic," says Bernstein, the Brooklyn artist. "She's perhaps one of the Internet's first professional demolition experts. She's a real talent."
>[...] Bernstein says his own license for the NATO.0+55 software was revoked after he critiqued the software publicly in a paper published on his Web site. "Netochka, whoever she and they are, has done a brilliant marketing job by making the whole thing this exclusive little mysterious club."
>[...] Ask Netochka a question about herself, and the answers appear illusory, like water running through your fingers. "Is Netochka a figment of the Net's collective imagination?" meets with this enigmatic reply: "A ty budesh chitat? There is only 01 of me."
>[...] Netochka refuses to be pinned down. As she puts it, in e-mail: "Being ambiguous, we are deemed confused, rather than praised for the complexity of the order in our minds."
Quick search, macaques's lifespans are roughly 20-30 years. The old alpha was 31... so, in human terms (roughly), it's like a 20-ish year old woman beats a man in his 60s-70s... and she's "brave".
you want to like respond to the weakest version of what I say so you can pretend that I'm so bad for saying this so you want to connect all the words in the worst possible interpretation. First point is it's only a bad interpretation if you want to take it from a human moral point of view I'm not doing that--so you need to impose your different moral view on my comment and judge it from the point of view where you can find something bad. I'm considering it from the monkey point of view. secondly I'm not even saying that's the brave thing. The brave thing is this this female monkey took the alpha position and did what she needed to do to get there... like female alphas are rare so you got to be brave to do it right? I know you want to hate on my comment and pretend it's so bad but why don't you hate on it from the real version like if it's really so hatable for you why do you need to pretend it's the weak version in order to hate it why not just hate on the strongest version? Hahaha.
University of Maine professor Michael J. Socolow: "Gawker began as a crusade to save journalism"
Dying on the hill to keep a sex tape of a washout wrestler was in the name of journalism? There are real journalists out there that lost their careers fighting to publish real stories about political and corporate corruption, war crimes, human suffering and more. Not sex tapes. Gawker didn't have any real journalists. This was a group of frat boys enjoying causing mayhem in random people's lives as long as they got to profit from it. So no, you have no principles.
crucifying an entire enterprise & saying they "didn't have any real journalists," as you do, for one single place they pushed the edge too far is not a reductionism I could get behind.
it absolutely was journalism, of a very real variety, dishing all kinds of dirt on all manners of people we would never really know anything about.
it seems so exceedingly sad that people will take this example or that & use it to reject what an insanely rare view this was into the sometimes pretty weird ass lifestyles of the (tech) rich and (tech) famous. and sometimes some other random stories that came by.
Those are just three that popped in my head. War journalist, Iran-Contra, Watergate. Their work didn't contain where someone put their prick or what someone put in their snatch or ass during a vacation getaway. Galivanting Gawker as journalistic because it may have broken clocked onto a handful of stories while 99% of it was just trash means you have a pretty warped mind on what constitutes as information. Desire for "dirt" on someone's life, no matter how poor or rich, is a sign of a trashy person who religiously watches the Jersey Shore.
what sad gatekeeping of what is permissible to write about. i was more about the Valleywag days, not on Gawker, but there is legit public interest in just being nosey as shit, building a practice around it, & being non-discerning in what you publish.
most media coverage is polished & spun. having a raw read on what important people are like, what they get up to: that is a worthy thing for the world to be tracking, to have some sense of.
you seem just to not like it. and be willing to judge on ultra simplified shallow assessment, of the lowest easiest to hit points, without respecting that even low journalism has a function & role. you revert to slandering & badmouthing at the end to impress your "moral" point ("a sign of a trashy person who religiously watches the Jersey Shore") which reads to me as narrow minded in it's refusal to consider gawker's truth telling value & heavy handedly belttilting in it's moral judgementality. I expect at least some sign of recognition, some acknowledgement of the value of showing the unfiltered truths. we people imo were greater for having some ability to see the unseen background of the valley's famous, it seems obvious & clear to me, even though it was often an inglorious reality. without this we have no context. we have only the manufactured, the presented, the PR. the world needs more than prescriptivist upstanding reporting, in part because the world is just too interesting & weird & odd, and that's okay too be part of the story too. even when it's not spit and polished great stories.
there's countless stories of internal Google etc dramas, the weird execs & their odd lifestyles behind these shifts, how they allies & clashed that Valleywag/Gawker gave that no one else would ever have brought to light. an extremely informative moral service. because the point was to be undiscerning. the point was to tell, to fill in some of the background in the paintings. that seems to be too much for many. people don't like hearing this part or that, like you seem to oppose. I don't get how people can turn their nose up at this stuff. they probably judge only by what few small sensationized examples they know: they probably aren't fit to judge, don't know what they were missing. unlike jersey shore, unlike most celebrities, these are real people with colossal power being described. having some context, some view, meant everything, made the companies look like a collection of people. something no one else does. and that was taken. by the powerful. worth mourning.
Nature isn't kind to anything. I completely agree with you, but that needs to be said better since the root concept here is how humans, but nothing else, has fallen out of line with nature. Bullshit. Yea, it's pretty to see a monarch butterfly and how peaceful it must be... except it's probably the lone survivor of its swarm after a flock of swallows decimated all the other butterflies it was with just 20 minutes ago. Animals and plants went extinct pre-humans. All. The. Time. They get slaughtered or diseased without us.
The only difference between humans and everything else, we as a species collectively said, "no" to nature ruling our lives. I mean, for fuck's sake, we're such assholes about it, we setup animal sanctuaries and clinics to rescue wild, injured animals. Any other form of nature would have called it "lunch".
I'm going onto a soapbox now. I blame modern animal/nature shows for this gradual misunderstanding of "nature". If you're old enough, you remember old school nature programs showed how metal, destructive and viscous wildlife actually IS. All the shows I see my nieces and nephews watch... they haven't watched footage of a bear tearing into a still kicking deer or wolves taking down a screaming baby bison or moose. They need to know if they see a bear, wolf, snake or cougar in real life, it's not going to be cuddly or do a song/dance number. It's going to fuck them up and they need to keep their distance. Going to stack one more soapbox for me to stand on... and this will get me flamed... koalas and pandas deserve to go extinct. Mono-food source creatures are asking for trouble and need to evolve to diversify their diet to properly outpace extinction.
The plant kingdom is almost entirely mono-food-sourced. They almost all rely on the sun, which, pending a nuclear winter, might indeed become a scarce resource. Do plants deserve to go instinct?
You do realize plants are far more complex than that, right?
I mean, there's water, nutrients in the soil and the importance of mycelium in the dirt. Most plants you can throw in a dark closest for like a week or two easy, then take them out and they'll come back to life. Don't forget, ground level plants in a forest or jungle barely get shit for sun. I'm a cheap bastard that buys "dying" clearance plants from Lowes and Home Depot, then bring them back to life. My dumb redneck green thumb has a lot more respect for plants.
Shit, watch some wild bonsai collectors on youtube. They massacre small trees to bare wood, purposely put them in too small pots, under nourish them and the fuckers still grow.
Plants are no where near as fragile as a koala and panda. Hell, there was an oak tree on my parents property that was struck by lighting some ten some odd times in a five year period (Florida). We cut it down to a 2 or so foot stump since it seemed too dangerous to keep up with all the damage. Fucker started brand new shoots and refused to accept death. After 10 years from cutting, it grew three solid trunks about 10 feet high or so. A bit taller than a house, never measured it.
I've only been into mycology for a few years now, but I think oak forests may be somewhat rare in that regard. An oak tree is more like a whale, orchids are koalas.
Orchids are my guilty pleasure. I'll say this, they die way too easy in Idaho (personal experience). Florida, not so much. In my buddy's neighborhood here, someone put orchids on an outdoor palm tree. Like, they just plopped them into the crevasses of the trunk. They grow and thrive just fine. You don't "water" orchids, you "humidify" them. They're jungle, swamp plants. Along with being slightly parasitic. They do grow best on wood matter than anything else (my experience). Moss and other crap is just too much of a pain in the ass. So yea, in the wrong environment, orchids are a goddamn nightmare to keep alive and honestly, not worth it. But for the most part, most plants in the "wrong" environment are a pain in the ass.
oh, I didn't expect you to have experience with them. kudos and shimmy. I know that there are plenty in greenhouses, but not having grown them I have been under the impression their fungal relationships are so misunderstood that there must not be many varieties in circulation. I know most are endangered in my area in the appalachias. If you'd ever like to grow an odd one and need help finding mycorrhizal fungi or substrate I could probably help. Orchids and and fungi together are akin to sophonophores in my mind, floating around the woods like a man of war waiting to sting the right tree.
And... what has happened in the past billion some odd years of life on this planet? If any organism does not adapt, especially due to fragility it... gets a participation trophy? There's no deserve. It's simply a fact of the circle of life. Why are you throwing morality at this? Is there morality in physics or math? No grandstanding will alter that reality. It's neither sad nor good. Just is.
"Going to stack one more soapbox for me to stand on... and this will get me flamed... koalas and pandas *deserve* to go extinct." -Fern_Blossom, 2 hours ago
"There's no *deserve*.... Why are you throwing morality at this?" -Fern_Blossom, current comment
This was an exercise in friendly ribbing. I think we should save the koalas and the pandas, if we can. We've destroyed enough already. And c'mon, they're cute.
> The only difference between humans and everything else, we as a species collectively said, "no" to nature ruling our lives.
Indeed, it's not kind to anything.
However, even by saying "no" to nature, we're still transforming it (or it transforms itself through its parts, of which we are one type) and part of it; we're not extracting us or whatever from it, in the long term.
My 2 cents on the same topic, except to literature and a potential "cure" to the issue. I'm trying to break into being a fiction writer. Once you learn the tools of the trade of storytelling, it doesn't really matter the medium, you know where the story is going. There's an editor that mentioned this in passing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP_SmnCQA_Y It's in the first 5 minutes of the video. But he explains about some little challenge of being able to predict the end of a novel based on a page or two. The editor slam dunked the literary scholars. When you see a story as a bunch of gears, chains and a motor or two (writers and editors) instead of some ethereal wisp of magic beyond mortal understanding (literary twats and "scholars"), there isn't much that surprises you. Sorry, storytelling isn't magic. It's more formula and structure, no matter how much chest beating "analysts" drum up. Like, when everyone was "surprised" by Knives Out's ending, I was more confused since I figured it out after about 15 minutes into the movie. I enjoyed the little thriller part that was thrown in. That was unexpected. Beyond that, it was a paint by numbers story. With a SJW writer/director and the basic setup of the family, you immediately know what's going to happen and how. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Christie, another one of those where every writer figures out who killed the guy once the body was found because it's stupid easy when you know the mechanics. Analysts, "What a surprising twist!" Also, like no "movie reviewing/analysis expert" has picked up that The Tomorrow War is an allegory to climate change (more important the sacrifice theme of a generation for a future generation) in the disguise of an alien/monster flick. Either none of them actually watched the movie, just watched the trailer or I'm some sort of genius. I'm the first to say I'm an idiot by the way.
Anyways! I had a slog of a time with this when I started to realize this with every movie, show and book. "Alright, they got their milestone and in 3, 2, 1, kick in the balls to the protagonist (things get worser-er). And then in 3, 2, 1, Chekhov's [object/wisdom] helps them out of the problem..." Then I went to a friend's grill party during this woe-is-me phase. Basic American outdoor party. Hamburgers, hot dogs, chips, soda, beer, etc. Nothing surprising, yet, still enjoyable. Maybe this is more of a philosophical, Buddhist, enlightenment change in perception or just me over analyzing, but... who the fuck cares? No, seriously, who the fuck cares about things being completely different every single damn time? Sure, I like variety in food. Fish, salads, chilis, soups, pierogi, curries, sushi etc. But when you really think about it, there's a level of expectations even when you eat "variety". A level of, "not surprises" I and like 90+% of people out there demand in food. 10-20% surprise is okay, but I have to be in the mood for something completely different. Yes, that looks different to everyone. Everyone has different expectations. But you still expect certain things because you like it. This weird demand that everything is different, every time, is really weird.
Beating to the punch: No, you are not Andrew Zimmern. There's a 99.9% chance you're in denial that you like eating a small subset of food on a regular basis. Nothing wrong with trying and appreciating new, I do it too. But new happens extremely rarely with 99.9% of the population. You don't eat new anywhere as often as you may imagine. My point is, don't pretend you don't enjoy eating the same foods you've enjoyed hundreds of times before.
The same thing goes in stories. There are elements and methods those elements are brought together that I enjoy, just like food. Once I learned to enjoy the things that I actually enjoy in stories, I think my love of books and movies skyrocketed. Doesn't mean I think other genres/subgenres are bad. I just learned, "That's good, but it's not for me and that's okay". I like scifi settings more than fantasy. I used to think I had to like fantasy. Thus, I always chased the "new" to fantasy or I thought it was "derivative". Honestly, if someone ever says a story is derivative, it's code for, "I don't like this genre, setting or general intent of this story. Thus, I'm going to get on my high horse and speak down to this." There's a reason some people can watch all 20+ seasons of Law and Order, but others can't watch more than 1 episode. Or read all cozy mysteries and love them all while others read one and go, "Yea, you read one, you read them all". Which is true. You read 1, maybe 2 different cozy mysteries... they're all the same. But you can also say the same about scifi, fantasy, political thrillers, horror, etc. If you didn't like what it's generally about to begin with, you're probably not going to like it anyways. Other than breakout pieces, this is the truth to story telling. You gravitate to aspects of a story. Settings, character types, plot types, certain themes, etc. Learn what those are and enjoy those. Nothing wrong with hating "popular" or "classics" because they don't speak to you. If it doesn't, it doesn't. Oh well. Find your own pond and build your own cabin. Then enjoy it.
Yea... you're talking about tax code. It literally is the trees and leaves of the issue. What do you want, a Bolshevik revolution? That'll fix things.
What lots of people still aren't realizing, all tax codes apply to everyone. There are no class distinctions. New tax codes apply to the 99% as well. When the whole GameStop/AMC stock ride happened, a lot of people realized "I now have an opinion about capital gains taxes... I don't like them". You have access to all the same loopholes the 1% have access to.
Realistically speaking, most people do NOT have access to the tax loopholes that the 1%+ does. I didn’t realize this was an actual argument, because it’s well established.
Using meme stock millionaires as an example is hilarious. That’s maybe a handful of people in comparison to the rest of the normal working class population.
You most likely do - founding a corporation is trivial in most European countries and the US. But you don't even need any of these things to get "access to the same loopholes" as "the 1%" - buy some stocks and hold them. You've now achieved the same tax "avoidance" that the ProPublica article is talking about.
>And "owning" the first tweet ever sent? What does that even mean??
No, no, no. It's worse than you think. An NFT is more like a plastic cup with Pikachu printed on it. You don't own the rights to Pikachu. You just bought a cup with his face on it. With NFTs, there is no contract to own the actual "thing". Just simply the piece of "merch" (the NFT) with the likeness associated with it. Except, a plastic cup still has value to drink from or hold your toothbrushes.
This is true for many NFTs but not all. For example, cryptopunks, autoglyphs, meebits only exist on-chain. Then there are NFTs like artblocks.io where the code to generate your NFT is on-chain and the output is determined by the transaction hash.
Now, I should probably define "loser" a bit. Not in regards to wealth or career status. Generally, I mean someone that has zero going for them. No drive. No aspiration. No ambition. No skills. No pursuits. No self improvement. No self education. No... well... have you noticed the people loudest online regarding the whole victim this, victim that... if you took that away... what do they have? Like, you can't even nerd out with them about anything. No interests. No hobbies. Nothing really. Their entire personality and life comprises of this stuff. And I mean doing things within their control too. Sure, some aspirations are going to be out of your reach for one reason or another. Shit, all F1 drivers were pretty much chosen when they were sperm at this point. That's not in the cards for a lot of people. But to focus on a handful of things that don't work out for you and miss out on literally everything else the world has to offer... fuck, that's some childish shit. Which again, it's all just a tantrum of losers.
The real problem, kids are being raised that this line of thought is okay. It's encouraged and glamorized. Most of you here are programmers to some degree. If you have a few years under you're belt, you had that hazing period to become a "real programmer". That first problem/bug that could not be looked up. There was no pre-packaged solution. And you bashed your fucking head against that problem/bug day in and day out. You dreamt of it. You thought about it when you ate and when you shit. You refused to give up even though you thought you were NEVER going to figure it out... until one night you smashed that wall and grabbed the solution by it's neck.
Now imagine you thought it was computer science's fault because it was racist. Would you have solved it or just cried/whined?
Looking for the light in the darkest struggle is what most encouraging tales and stories are about, for a good reason. Even Beethoven's Ode to Joy has the themes of dark brooding, then the bright, large success in overcoming and not giving up. A good reason it's lasted this long. Hiding in the shadows of this racism/victimhood bullshit has got to stop or humanity is going to reap a barren field.