The strangest part of this was how conservatives used to be the ones pushing for wearing masks as alternatives to vaccinations, because the mindless fear of needles goes waaay back. See, chances are I’m older than you, so I’ve seen these cycles repeat themselves over and over. You’ve only seen it once or twice tops.

What happens is that a politician will dangle a new fear over you, and you will attach to that fear because that’s how our brains work. I am talking universally, not specific to one party or ideology, this is how we ALL work, and leftists are equally guilty of grifting their base the same way.

But you HAVE to understand where this came from, why you’re fighting with people about this, where this came from.

Never mind that people have been wearing face covering for millenia to reduce spreading disease, we have paintings and etching of lepers and plague victims going back thousands of years wearing something to prevent accidental spreading of saliva or body fluids. This isn’t a complicated idea, and a lot of people wear face coverings anyway to prevent illness or for safety around immunocompromised people. This isn’t new, this isn’t something that was planned or contrived, the ONLY reason you’re having arguments with people about face masks of all things is because someone out there knows how to connect your brain to a story to explain how it feels. To make you expend your energy on this, not making our world better or focusing on your elected representatives and what they’re signing into law, and I bet it works great. I bet you don’t get involved in your local politics. Nobody does, nobody spends as much energy on their actual neighborhoods as they do arguing online about props.

See, like with a lot of other things, a lot of us were unsure and worried about the future, so a lot of people trying to get power used masks as their props to fixate that insecurity on. I am not even going to talk about their effectiveness or not, it’s like wearing a hat in the sun, sure it won’t save you from sunburns but it’s just a thing we do to try our best to protect what we can, it’s not a big deal.

Your brain is not a tool of logic and reason, that’s an illusion. It’s a tool to tell you a story to explain how you feel. And it LOVES when someone provides a story for it. Because your brain wants a story that makes sense, not one that’s accurate. There is a difference. A lot of things can make sense and not be true.

It should be a giant, glaring alarm that someone is fucking with your brain when you start feeling contentious about what other people wear on their faces. That HAS to trigger something deep inside that makes you wonder why you’re so emotionally connected to this “debate.”

You got chains around you and they’re going to keep attaching chains until you realize how deeply you’re playing in the WWE theater of political rhetoric. Let this one go, just walk away, it’s objectively a nonsense campaign designed to distracted you.

The outraged reply you’re already pounding out in your head is part of that distraction. You are giving your soul away to others to use as they will. Doesn’t that bother you?

I’m going to immediately distrust the motives.

Additionally, the data is self-reported surveys with questions like “Have you ever been contacted by someone from a company or corporation?” and… yeah? This part shouldn’t be surprising to any platform that allows private messages. And “Have you ever seen someone promoting a product?” and most people are going to either shrug or already have a strong opinion, it’s not very scientific for actual data on the actual traffic from bots and corporate shills, more how the human users feel about the platform.

I would much rather see an independent investigation from a technical point-of-view, which tracks the comments and timing of user comments to determine how many are actually bots just quietly gaining karma with innocuous comments, or how many are just programmed to go to certain subreddits at certain times to push a narrative.

The average middle-class capitalist moron view of economics is when you get rich the government fires up it’s money machine and delivers you sacks of cash. The only thing keeping us all from getting our own sacks is momentary inconveniences and they too will be rich one day just as soon as they [fill in a thousand blanks.]

A billionaire has deprived vast numbers of people of something. You do not hold onto a billion dollars in your hand without the knowledge that some… or most of that would have paid for medical procedures, some of that would have been baby formula, medicine, overdue rent payments, gas to get to work for a struggling family, heat and water bills and so on. But you have found ways to skim that money from enough people that few notice. Because you don’t miss something that was intercepted before it made it to you.

You simply cannot ethically hoard money.

This is the better answer. People don’t want a bleak, colorless world, they want art that makes them feel good.

But art isn’t something that makes you feel good necessarily. It can but it also can make you feel other things, it’s a tool for conveying feelings and ideas to someone else, it’s a type of communication. We were supposed to have been taught this as children, that art is communication and we have to be able to hear and see things that make us uncomfortable or we will never, ever succeed in life at the things we want.

Fascists don’t want people empowered, they want people’s imagination squashed so people don’t imagine an alternative narrative to the propaganda that keeps people propping up their dear leader. All channels of communication will be controlled.

This is some toddler-level conceptual understanding. When we start banning forms of communication then everyone should stand up and point at someone trying to undo society. This is a real threat to everything we’ve accomplished as a species.

The porn will never even go away. Pornhub might be popular but it’s a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the porn out there.

If you removed the porn from the internet, the very next day a hundred million people will all create their own new internet and finally have a noble purpose for their saved stashes.

In tomorrow’s world it will be firing up your VPN, your ad-blockers, your anti-viruses, your anti-AI filter, your own AI that you have installed to fight hostile AI’s, all to just use the app version of your favorite social media site. Which will be entirely nazis screaming hateful shit.

It won’t. The average person in America wants the fastest, easiest consumable distraction or pleasure reward and takes no time to learn new things unless it’s dangled in front of them in bite-sized, easy-to-follow tutorials with quest-markers and all kinds of sparkles and chimes when they do something correctly.

They will go to some really terrible alternative that costs money. There are a hundred thousand porn sites right now hoping that they become the next big thing from all this.

I read somewhere that a lot of people don’t even go to websites anymore, they just use apps for their social media and have no idea how to enter a web address or URL.

I feel like the last of a dying breed of mighty wizards because I can configure windows and know how to manage files.

Pornhub’s audience is international, and in some countries they are far, far less backwards and socially repressed and Pornhub and similar companies get revenue without any controversy or danger of consequences.

They do NOT need these shitty states that are just going to continue to pearl-clutch and scream about “morality” as if humans aren’t sexual creatures.

claimed I was the one arguing with people when it’s actually people arguing with me

What is it like being actually insane?

okay so you’re a victim, maybe someone will wear a colored ribbon for you, changes nothing about my suggestion.

Media uses language like this on purpose, most of their copy comes from single-sources and everyone on every news station is repeating the same rhetoric. They did this with the soup/painting incident as well, making it seem like the protestors ruined priceless artifacts instead of spilling harmless food products on a sheet of plexiglass.

You’re just arguing from a petty and pedantic place while half the globe is frying.

Maybe just shut up. You wont’ regret it, you won’t get stuck ruminating on all these internet strangers who don’t like you, you can get on with your day and let people who care more about our world than old rocks get on with our day as well.

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Just to make up for that grevious lack of action about your case, I think we should ALL file reports about those alien peepee touchers until it gets the attention it deserves.

I mean, bathrooms are the most important thing in the world and despite it being a very modern contrivance, making sure the right people are using the right machines to whisk their poopies and pee away is critical for the survival of our species. We have to defend this noble institution against the alien peepee touchers! MAKE THEM LISTEN!

Conservatism has only ever been about the most superficial of ideals.

Many of them would have no issue at all with extending laws about gender to laws about appearance and I’m not even kidding. We have plenty of examples from right-wing governments and social trends of the past absolutely leaning into ideas like phrenology or inherent, essential qualities that go alongside things like hair and eye color.

You should be concerned for your friend, everyone should be concerned that if allowed to mature, conservatism in the US would throw us right back into a time when people can face legal penalties for what they choose to wear, for how they express themselves, for the shape of their face and a thousand other ways they would want to police the world around them so it continues to look the way they want it to look. And too bad if you don’t look like someone who should live in that world.

One of the older meanings of “spirituality” was the idea of finding the origin of your thoughts and feelings with self-exploration and meditation, it’s about asking “why” of yourself about your experiences until you find some level of more pure truth. It had very little to do with anything mystical or even religious.

Everything that happens in the world happens in your own mind, spirituality is just the exploration of the mind to better understand the world.

So yeah, fuck those scumbags and pedos for abusing yet another good thing and perverting the meaning of the term even further.

I understand if your personal stance is that there should be zero government intervention in what people choose to use or not, but we don’t live in that world and likely never will because of the complexity of society.

So under THIS society and governing system, what would you say should be done about social media and it’s growing negative influence on people, particularly younger people and children? let’s say you’re THIS government and your people are asking for help with this problem so you need to spend the money they pay you somehow.

The idea of a warning is not because anyone thinks you’re going to read it and get scared and stop doing the thing you’re hooked on.

The idea of a warning label is so your ice-age brain, the brain that loves to make up stories to explain things, has something to connect with when you start having a negative experience on something like social media, or something to help you realize that the thing, whatever it may be, is addictive and the reason you’re having problems is because of that addictive quality. We greatly overestimate our brains and our capacity to properly identify threats and tell ourselves the correct story to escape the threat.

Did you read the article?