Western psychology, and I say this as a former psychologist.
Like so much else, any potential at being a science was bastardized long ago in order to make it an industry focused on getting people productive again instead of focusing on their wellbeing which usually has an inverse relationship to getting them back to work in the short and medium term.
Meanwhile the small population of people that can afford actual psychoanalytic therapy that isn’t throwing pills at them and teaching them coping strategies within 3 covered sessions tend to be the reason so many others are miserable.
For the non-wealthy, mental healthcare in the US is a complete and utter scam that is geared to serve others at your expense and shoehorn you right back into the stressors that got you into therapy. If you need help, you’re out of luck.
vaguely gesturing at everything
America.
And my dad.
The worshipping of the self-made man and entrepreneurship in popular American culture
I think I was just too young and fashionable, maybe I was one of those guys that saw themselves as a “temporarily embarrassed billionaire”… then got old enough to see through the nonsense
Law. I was pretty hyped up when i went to university to study it, but the more i learnt on the foundations of it and discovered the people it created, the more i hated it. Now I’m doing completely different things, and i’m glad my parents didn’t force me to keep doing it.
The United States government and the United States citizens.
Growing up I was taught about all these checks and balances. How the government is slow and that’s good because it makes sure people get what they really want. Come to find out in just one presidential term, this one guy just executes executive orders left and right and just gets things done.
I thought U.S citizens would vote in their best interests but they would glady vote for a facist who’s against their best wishes.
Google. It was once a good search engine. Now I find myself getting only the most irrelevant results based on my keywords and more often than not an advanced search turns up nothing of value
It went downhill when they got rid of search within results, I don’t know why they did that
Me neither! Really frustrates me when companies remove good features for no apparent reason
They had a reason; money. It’s always about money. The worse the results, the more time you have to spend searching for what you want, the more revenue they can generate.
You can usually trace all decisions a company makes, good or bad, back to money.
Corey Doctorow’s podcast Understood: Who broke the internet? does an amazing job of explaining this. It’s only like 5 episodes and worth everyone’s time.
Republicans. When I was a child, slogans like “fiscally responsible”, “family values”, “smaller government “ sounded like good things. Republicans always claimed the moral high ground. But they’ve spent my entire adult life proving it as manipulative bullshit for personal greed and power, holding themselves above the law, the worst in humanity, rising to our current flirt with fascism.
Grown ups.
Google. Do no evil
Capitalism.
Jk Rowling. She was (I think) the only billionaire to ever debillonaire themselves without dying (i.e., she donated so much wealth to charity that she was no longer a billionaire).
But then she decided to dedicate herself to making trans people’s lives miserable…
I’m curious which charities she was donating to before she turned into a massive cunt. Cause all she donates to now are hate groups.
Good question, I never actually looked into it. According to her Wikipedia page:
She established the Volant Charitable Trust in 2000, and co-founded the charity Lumos in 2005. Rowling’s philanthropy centres on medical causes and supporting at-risk women and children. In 2025, Forbes estimated that Rowling’s charitable giving exceeded US$200 million. She has also donated to Britain’s Labour Party, and opposed Scottish independence and Brexit.
Can she just die already? I normally don’t wish death on anyone. Just people that do extremely evil things.
Nintendo.
Things got worse once Bowser got ahold of the American castle.
The fun dissolved with Iwata and Reggie gone.
The line to far for me was their retroactive bs patents used to attack Palworld. It’s one thing to be strict on your own systems, but another to do it to others. 80s Nintendo is back and possibly worse than before.
It wasn’t Bowser, it was the finance guys that were placed at the head of the company after Satoru Iwata’s death.
I haven’t played with a switch very much but I think the joysticks are worse than what they made for GameCube. I am under the impression that switch has what amounts to a directional pad underneath a joystick. Like that Gameboy peripheral with the lights, magnifier, and joystick that clips over the D pad. The joystick is there on the switch but output is only an analog 8 directions.
Pardon me if I’m wrong here but what I see with Nintendo is them making bad hardware. I know it’s made for kids but even they deserve better. The switch version of any big AAA game that got a switch port is generally really really dumbed down and looks and runs like garbage. I can’t wait to hear about Cyberpunk 2077 looking and running like garbage again. 5 years after it came out.
The joy cons are legitimately awful to use. The buttons are like needles after a while and the sticks just feel weird on my thumbs. What’s weird is that the switch lite fixed both of those problems. (None of this is about drift lol which is awful and another problem)
None of this is about switch 2. Idk anything about it.
Police
Cops (1989) ruined america, taught us to trust these ass holes and they royally fucked us over.
Not making light of everything before 1989, but even after all that shit, the show painted them in a decent enough light to where people spill their guts and trust them, just because they have a uniform and they took full advantage of us.
Police propaganda goes way back before Cops (1989). Dragnet started in 1951 and inspired dozens of police procedurals that made cops look like street smart scientists who studied at the intersection of crime and humanity. In reality they are just a disappointment. ACAB
I wasn’t alive during that, but I remember the cop propaganda from the 90s well.
Airbnb. I used to think they were a perfect business. Saw a gap in the market, created a decent product, invested in their users (back in the day they would even send a photographer to take good photos of your property).
Unfortunately the consequences turned out to be awful.Yeah, I’m pretty torn. In my small community (on an island), housing and rent are insanely expensive, and also pretty scarce. There are people who have full time jobs living in tents in the woods or in their cars (in Alaska) not because they can’t afford a place to stay, but because there are no places to rent.
It’s also a major tourist spot, and the population more than doubles regularly on days during the summer, and for those that fly in, the hotels book up quick. So there’s a huge AirBnB market. Which means houses are getting bought up and then set up as AirBnBs instead of renting to residents, so housing becomes even more scarce. So I hate AirBnB.
But… I just bought a 4 bedroom house, where one of the beds is in a built in 1-bedroom apartment, with its own kitchen and everything. We wanted a 4bedroom house so we could have a guest room for people visiting, as well as just have extra space for us. Well, once I retire, one of our plans is to rent that out as an AirBnB during the times we don’t have guests staying. It doesn’t deplete housing in the area (we wouldn’t be renting it out anyway), and it helps pay our ridiculous mortgage.
So I hate it… but if it’s used properly/ethically, I feel like it could be pretty good.
This is actually I think how Airbnb was originally supposed to work… You rent out a room or an in law suite that you aren’t otherwise using. Or maybe your condo in a resort town when you’re not there. Unfortunately became so lucrative that you can make more money doing that than renting. I stayed in one in a ski town recently that was clearly at least two separate apartments before and had all been combined to house large groups. Felt kinda crappy about that, and it goes to show how it eats up the housing stock
AirBNB would work better if the owner was required to live in the property 160 days out of the year. Where it went wrong was in letting corporations buy up housing and use it to skirt hotel taxes and regulation.
AirBnB is almost directly responsible for the surge of housing prices in my local town, and they should die in a fire.
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