One thing to note is that there are a lot of bad American beers in small and mid-sized cities. Basically what happened is that in the 2010s it became trendy to go to a brewery with a food truck and just hang out. As a result a ton of “breweries” opened that were more or less selling the experience, with a handful of low effort trendy selections to serve as a hook.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t good beers though. America is the land of people who do their own thing, often regardless of social norms and established conventions. There’s a lot of great beers across a broad range of categories, it just takes a bit of digging.

As a sidenote a lot of these D tier breweries are closing and/or rebranding. Changing consumer sentiment means merely being a craft brewery is no longer a hook, while rising real estate costs make the entire endeavor more expensive. The breweries in shitty locations tend to close. The ones in good locations tend to massively reduce their own output, while offering a variety of local alcohol and expanded food options.

Also why the US highway system was built, btw. The president who championed it, Eisenhower, was the commander of US allied forces during WW2. While there were other benefits, his goal was to be able to quickly transport troops in the event of a Soviet invasion.

So, this is a lot.

I guess I’ll start with you calling Elon Musk “Muskrat”. This is like a middle school level insult. It makes your already immature argument seem even more immature. I’m straight up not sure if I’m arguing with a literal child at this point.

Two, Twitter was better before Musk bought it, but it wasn’t in any way good. A million different toxic trends either started or blew up on Twitter. The 2010s was filled with a million different dumbass pearl clutching moments that started with a bunch of terminally online Twitter users making a mountain out of a molehill. It was basically just a constant stream of outrage and sanctimonious nonsense.

That’s not to mention there was plenty of hate speech and attempts to undermine democracy, because the moderation team only really enforced the rules when it came to conservative talking points. You had NYTimes reporters tweeting out how white people should all kill themselves without consequences, while Twitter went around banning people for clowning on laid off journalists by telling them to “learn to code”. Donald Trump was banned, but the Supreme Leader of Iran was welcome with open arms.

Even then, Twitter played a huge role in the formation of the alt right because they were always at least six months too late when it came to banning anyone. The culture war doesn’t get off the ground if Twitter just blacklists a bunch of straight up Russian propaganda websites and banhammers Milo. They also were extremely late to the party when it came to banning those ISIS recruitment videos, which is even more inexcusable.

I reject the idea that reddit was ever really that good. It was better in some ways, but a lot of the most toxic reddit moments happened before it went corporate. Off the top of my head:

• The softcore child porn
• The stalker pictures of women
• The time they had a huge thread where they all collectively gained sympathy to rapists
• The “seduction” subreddits that basically attempted to convince naive young men that “seduction” meant putting women into a situation where they consented due to extreme social pressures.
• The time they identified the wrong person as the Boston bomber

The non toxic content was extremely hit or miss. You’d get more in depth discussion, but it would be between a ton of extremely myopic pseudo intellectual posts. Basically half of reddit was something like:

• Religion bad, but only Christianity
• I am euphoric because my atheism and intelligence enlightens me
• Republicans bad
• I have literal superpowers now that I stopped masturbating
• Some half true historical fact that gets repeated a million different times because it fits everyone’s worldview
• Keanu Reeves
• Rage comics
• DAE hate sportsball ???

Finally, a huge portion of the reason reddit went downhill was the unpaid mods. They were often unwell individuals who used their position to push progressive politics. There was a good five years where basically every sub over a certain size was essentially a progressive politics sub, because they were all modded by the same people who saw the users as a captive audience.

Social media just isn’t a good place for unique content or discourse. That’s not gonna change no matter who the owner is.

I reject the idea that things like Mastadon, Bluesky, Lemmy, etc will ever actually be good things.

Elon turned Twitter alt right, but it was a shithole for years before he bought it. Twitter started being a bot infested outrage farm echo chamber with questionable moderation practices in like 2014.

Reddit was in some ways better before it went corporate, but in a lot of ways it was much worse. Like all things considered I’d rather be on a website that has a shitty mobile app and mods that sell access to corporations than a website where there are communities dedicated to softcore child porn and teenagers getting death threats over jackdaws.

Even if the fediverse fulfills its promise of not going down the corporate rabbit hole, they are still going to end up being a collection of inherently toxic echo chambers.

I feel you’re being disrespectful of my viewpoints, and intentionally being obstinate in refusing to understand them.

I am mad about toxic behavior that is justified by liberal rhetoric. It is more egregious when it comes to sexism, but that is not the only issue. These behaviors are upsetting to watch, and it is frustrating to live in an environment where this is not only justified but portrayed as moral.

This post is about the real world. As in, in person social interactions. That limits your options, and means you have to on some tolerate things that frustrate you or become a hermit.

I live in a city of moderate liberals. I am a nerdy college educated millennial. While I have made a choice to avoid the worst of it after witnessing a lot of things that just crossed the line for me, on some level I simply have to live with elements of liberal culture that I find toxic.

I have no idea where you live that you can find people that perfectly match your political/moral philosophy in such numbers where it’s possible to meet people and strike up friendships, but let me assure you that isn’t how it works where I live.

A lot of my friends are good people overall, but do or believe at least one thing that frustrates me. I consider that part of life. However there’s some line I have to draw. In my experience the type of people who are extremely vocal about being liberal and how morally awful conservatives behave in really shitty ways, but get away with it by leveraging progressive rhetoric.

I have made a decision that on some level that rhetoric is bullshit, and to not involve myself with people who do things that I think are beyond the pale regardless of their justification. That by definition means rejecting or displaying extreme skepticism in regards to some parts of liberal culture. Hence the “more conservative”. You seem hung up on the words conservative, so you can use the term “less liberal” if it makes you feel better. I am friends with a grand total of person who defines themselves as conservative in absolute terms.

What you’re saying makes sense in theory, but I don’t think it makes sense in practice. The word that has defined politics since the mid 2010s is intersectionalism. There simply isn’t any sort of genuine political lane for, say, a socialist who hates #girlboss culture. I’ve actually watched the video you sent me and while I appreciate it, the opinion is rather niche. There isn’t really a corresponding political faction or identity to really latch on to.

I also personally haven’t experienced this lack of intersectionalism when I “touched grass”. In general there is such a tight coupling of all things political to the point where you can do things like guess someone’s opinion on the middle east by how they feel about bat roosts in suburban areas. To be fair, that has faded significantly since immediately post covid. However, it’s still strongly present. There simply aren’t people I meet in real life who espouse those kind of unique political values.

At the end of the day, I’m sort of in a rut. I can avoid certain people who behave in what I define as a toxic manner, but I can’t really avoid all of this toxicity in the context of modern society. Identity politics coding is everywhere, and on some level I need to “pick a side”.

I get where you’re coming from, but I think you misread my original post. I said more conservative.

Pretend the temperature is 0 degrees outside. The next week, it is thirty degrees warmer. Someone would be 100 percent correct in saying that it’s much warmer today than yesterday. However it would still be objectively cold.

That is what I am saying. I’m not conservative, but I am more conservative. I don’t see myself belonging to either group.

I also live in a liberal area of the country. I don’t really have to worry about running into someone who says homosexuality is a sin or a woman who isn’t white and pure on her wedding day is a whore. On the other hand I do run into women blatantly hate men or will leverage tolerance rhetoric to gaslight and cheat on their partners.

Look Trump is a uniquely awful candidate, but why should I be associated with liberals? I’m a Jewish man. In liberal culture sexism towards men is normalized and antisemitism is normalized.

There’s nothing stopping me from just coming up with my own philosophy while treating both liberal and conservative culture with skepticism. While right now that’s gonna be more on the liberal side, I don’t see why I should associate myself with people who normalize toxic behavior towards people of my religion/gender. That’s basically asking to be next on the target list.

I always bring up the ethical non monogamy because it’s the most objectively insane thing. It’s so obviously toxic and unfair. It would soon obviously be considered emotional abuse if genders were reversed. Yet the more liberal someone is, the more they’ll suggest I’m sexist for having an issue with that behavior.

You’re literally making excuses for women cheating on and gaslighting men. Bullshit you’d be behaving the same way of genders are reversed.

You didn’t read my comment with an open mind. You asked for my input so you could give me specific things to lecture about.

I am not in an “ethical non monogamous” relationship. I have never been. However I have seen multiple men in long term relationships get strung along because their partner decided they want to leverage dating apps to have a harem. It has always ended up being a slow motion train wreck, that always ends up essentially being akin to cheating plus gaslighting. They always justify it in the same way you are doing.

You are sexist, plain and simple. You are sexist because you hold men and women to completely different standards in a comical way. You just use liberal rhetoric to justify it.

Your mentality is incredibly common. The world is full of assholes justifying shitty behavior under the guise of liberalism. It’s just an updated version of how evangelicals operated in the 80s and 90s. I’m sick of giving this shit a free pass.

Jesus fucking christ why do I bother. You didn’t ask because you wanted to actually know what I thought. You just wanted to lecture me why I’m wrong. There was absolutely nothing I could have said that you wouldn’t have used as a launching off point.

So the behaviors are the same kind of things that you’ve seen forever among people who can get away with it. Immaturity, bigotry, cruelty, etc. However I myself am a liberal, and live in a liberal area of the country. A lot of people use liberal rhetoric to behave in an objectively toxic way, often by coding criticism of their actions as conservative or the toxic actions themselves as liberal.

I mentioned sexism from women, so I’ll focus on that:

• As I mentioned earlier, a lot of “ethically non monogamous” relationships that are basically a woman gaslighting their partner into letting them cheat on them. This is often talked about as a sort of a sexual identity, with the implication that hating on this is the same as hating on a gay relationship or a woman who chooses to be single.
• As I mentioned earlier, women are highly encouraged to support other women regardless of circumstances. A failure to do so is implied to be sexist.
• In general there is this default assumption that a man is nefarious, usually with some reference to true crime or “the implication”. This assumption is not only a massively sexist generalization, but is never logical. If a man is tall and built he gets the benefit of the doubt, despite being objectively more of a threat than a short chubby guy. The first thing I do when I meet a woman I don’t know in a social setting is to somehow work in that I have a girlfriend in a way that feels organic, and a good amount of times I can see their body language shift. This is despite the fact that my SO is often not with me, and that there are a million different true crime stories involving a heterosexual couple both being evil. All of this is justified with progressive #metoo rhetoric
• There are a lot of single women I know that are very much architects of their own misery. They have super shallow dating standards, unrealistic expectations, and this mentality that if a man is attractive enough red flags are just misunderstanding. When things inevitably go wrong they make sweeping statements about men. Despite this being more or less nonsense, it’s considered sexist to call them out.
• There are multi hundred member Facebook groups of women in every city that gossip about the men they date. This is obviously toxic, but the organizers frame it as a #metoo thing so it’s widely considered acceptable.
• Basically everything I mentioned would be considered absolutely unacceptable if genders were reversed, but if you bring this up then you’ll get a pseudo academic lecture about historical oppression and the patriarchy that basically boils down to “it’s different when I do it”.
• This isn’t a big deal at all, but it’s sort of ridiculous that most women I meet both consider themselves feminist but will get peeved if men don’t pay for the date.

Of course, sexism is just one example. I use it because I find this stuff is the most egregious. I also have a lot of frustration about other things, most notably shitty people making a huge deal about how much they love drag queens in what I view as an effort to obfuscate from how shitty and judgmental they are.

My response to all of this has been to become more conservative. Note the delta. I’m not conservative. However I am also in no way shape or form a progressive anymore. I don’t think liberals have nearly the moral superiority they think they do when it comes to how you treat people on a day to day basis. I support queer identities, but have become more conservative in my idea of monogamy and commitment. I even briefly considered staying home this election when it looked like the main line of attack democrats were gonna do was just to call republicans weirdos over and over again until November, because I’m personally just done associating myself with middle school mean girl politics.

Idk being more social after covid has made me more conservative. A lot of behavior that I assumed was exclusively online turned out to be surprisingly common in real life.

A lot of the sexism parts in particular were jarring. A significant minority of grown ass women basically used #metoo as leverage to behave in a sexist and immature manner. There’s also a culture where other women are extremely reluctant to call out that behavior, or else they might be accused of “internalizing their sexism” and not sufficiently supporting women. I dismissed the postings about that as incel-bait during the pandemic, but it turns out it’s extremely common.

I think we’ve hit the other end of the pendulum and release length.

The traditional 26 season episode, each year like clockwork format had a lot of issues. It lent itself to TV shows with an episodic format, and a lot of episodes tended to be forgettable.

In that context, less episodes and more time to produce is great. However it’s gotten to the point where I think that philosophy is fucking up show quality in a different way.

First, a lot of TV shows have taken the “less episodes” philosophy as a way to cut costs. There are a ton of TV shows where I feel like important plot developments are either left out or rushed because they have to jam everything into eight episodes. Some are even going to six. Showrunners are blatantly doing this to save time/money, not to produce a lower quantity higher quality product.

Second, a lot of “filler” episodes were actually good for the show as a whole. A good amount of them had subtle character development and world building. This allowed for a much more robust main story. It also allowed writers to try out unique concepts that often ended up being fan favorites. With the eight episode format, TV shows often just end up jumping from major plot point to major plot point in a way that feels empty.

The long time between releases also can ruin the emotional investment in a TV show. With the best TV shows, you often feel some connection to the universe and the characters. Waiting a long time between releases breaks that connection. Stranger Things, the show that in many ways popularized the modern TV format, is the perfect example of this. It’s been a decade, two years since the last episode, and everyone is pretty much done. There’s probably a ton of lesser shows that died because viewers just moved on.

Finally, some shows should be episodic and have 26 episode seasons. We live in an era of binge watching. Older episodic shows with tons of seasons and episodes continuously outperform the high budget new stuff, yet nobody seems to ask themselves if maybe there needs to be a strategy shift for new content.

So one thing I noticed is that women betraying their partner has become extremely normalized

• Every “ethical non monogamous” relationship I’ve seen IRL is just a woman pressuring their long term monogamous partner into a situation where she has multiple partners and she’s struggling
• “Monkey Branching”, where a woman starts dropping hints at one guy while still seeing another in hopes of making a seamless transition, is pretty accepted. Emotional affairs are only a thing for men apparently
• While it’s always been acceptable to leave a guy if he can’t “provide” for you, it’s really fucking stupid in the context of modern feminism
• Women who use OLD are often encouraged to have a “roster” of men, who they form a well beyond casual connection to.
• There’s a large number of 30+ year old women breaking up with their long term partners to “find themselves”. I put that in quotations because this usually just involves a ton of casual sex. It’s basically the modern day equivalent of a guy leaving his wife for the secretary
• There are a million different love triangles on TV. They are almost all two guys and a woman who is disrespectful of both. The guys get mad at each other and the women’s behavior is not portrayed as toxic.
• Like 80 percent of holiday movies involve a woman leaving her fiance for a man she just met. This is always seen as romantic, instead of psychotic.

In addition to all that, women are extremely reluctant to criticize other women. This stands even when another woman is behaving in an almost objectively toxic way. I moved post covid. The first year I witnessed a fuckton of toxic behavior, but when I tried to point it out I would get dirty glances from women. The second year there I ended up getting close to other women in those conversations who took it upon themselves to tell me in a smaller setting that they actually agreed with me, but they didn’t want to appear unsupportive.

Whatever the intention there, the mentality enabled a subset of women to be shitty and probably convinced a lot of men that such behavior was something most women were okay with.