No mention of the giant rocket that left the surface of the earth and the video footage of both that and the surface of the moon itself?
This is why conservatism and conspiracy go hand-in-hand. You can’t believe the things that “feel” true if the “true” truths keep interfering with this pesky reality.
I can tell you the plain, clear answer but you’re not gonna like it. Nobody does when I tell them.
Hold some yard sales.
For real. Assuming you live in a neighborhood and there are people around and it’s safe to do so, this is one of the best ways to get to know the people who live around you. People go to yard sales to talk about shit and gossip, so it’s a great way to know who’s doing what, how everyone feels about their current neighborhood policies, who is running the school and who the local police or sheriff are, who is running for what position in local city, county and eventually state seats.
Having a grasp of your local political landscape gives you the power to get involved and educate people and get to know who is representing you, what the values of your area are, and you can influence elections or even challenge incumbents who often run uncontested. Any kind of local community organization and involvement is a pushback against the powers that be.
This is all because a lot of the people we have in seats of power in the USA did not earn their power fairly, they often have run without competition or were placed there by political organizations. These are the people who support the larger governmental powers. These are the people who cut checks, who receive checks, who write the bills that let the companies do the things they want to do to make more money.
Candace Owens is a product of this system that wants you to turn away from science and follow an authoritarian, because this is good for business. If you want maximum profits, get you a population that has no time, education or capital to change anything and get them angry at people who look different than themselves instead of their own government leaders.
If we purge the nobodies and clowns and paper-tigers who uphold this vision of America, we also get rid of their mouthpieces like Owens. She is not some passionate thought-leader, she’s just a spokesperson for a bunch of rich fucks who want to keep squeezing blood from the population.
Edit: they want you to be less social. They want you to retreat to your discord friend-groups and social-media safe-spaces. They want to keep you from organizing, from connecting, from uniting and forming groups with a shared voice. This is how you beat them, with shared voice.
“But I’m not sooooooooooooociaaaaal!” You cry.
I don’t fucking care. Adapt. It won’t be the hardest thing you ever do.
Do you think people become more conservative with age or is it society becoming more progressive and leaving them behind?
I am getting up there in years and seeing this play out over and over.
I think every generation wants to be more progressive than the last, but we tend to carry baggage of fear and insecurity through the generations. Or more specifically, older people tend to gain the political and monetary capital needed to affect policy and shape our societal outlook and attitude. They will always be more conservative than the younger generation who will want more freedoms and personal rights, inherently, and as the ruling class will clash with newer sensibilities, over and over.
What we’re asking here, is the conservatism reflected in our elders and leadership now broadly more harmful or helpful? Are we out of the touch or is it the kids who are wrong?
I think it’s a mix but mostly it’s not our real problem. Our real problem is that no matter what our age, we have greatly misunderstood how our own existence works. Most people have been taught that they have brains designed to exercise logic and reason and that brains are the best thing ever if you use them and make them smart.
No, our brains are not logical tools. We are not a rational species. There was no “age of enlightenment.” It’s all a hoax. Our brains are tools designed to write a story to explain how you feel. And that’s it. It doesn’t even have to make sense. When we all learn how our brains actually work we will collectively make better decisions, have more compassion for each other, and likely sink into even deeper despair as we all start to realize we have no free will.
Our society’s rules about sex and dating have been upended several times in the last few decades, people are broadly more aware of far more social issues and the plights of others than we ever have been because we have all that access to people’s innermost thoughts on the internet, whether or not those thoughts are reflective of reality is not important, it’s the idea that we are all worried about becoming a subject of that collection of negative thoughts, and we tend to have negative reactions to even the idea of some people finding other people attractive because it’s a sharp reminder that most people don’t look like this, and most people don’t know first thing about how to compensate for not looking like this.
And many guys don’t even want to “compensate” by trying to fit some other image they don’t know how to achieve.
Also, even though broadly our standards for women, sex and dating have changed so much, our expectations and standards for masculinity haven’t really changed at all, so it’s created a huge, confusing “wall” of sorts for men everywhere who don’t really know how to find a place in a world that simultaneously expects them to live up to these standards that were established in the ice age, but also be some kind of “new male” who has feelings and is sensitive (but only if they’re the “sexy” kinds of feelings) and doesn’t threaten anyone.
Most young men growing up in the developed world right now have no idea how to date and be loved or even how to have positive emotional states or feel proud of anything while swimming in this social-media-soaked landscape. A lot of young men who haven’t developed emotionally choose to either “disappear” from the world of dating and romance, or go the opposite direction and latch onto horrible grifters promising simple answers like the Andrew Tates and Sneakos of the world, and this is all also why the rates of intimacy and relationships between younger people is plummeting right now, to a degree that is seriously going to become a major problem.
I too am taking advantage of the summer sale and am about 20 hours in and still wildly infatuated with this weird, weird amazing game.
After a while you start getting a slightly better idea of what’s going on, but that doesn’t make it more “game like” if anything, the more you learn about the game, the more it reveals itself to be a giant tool to explore meta-narratives and there are some moments of conversation regarding this that are absolutely chilling.
The impact of human fertility cycles ("concealed ovulation’) and human evolution is a vast, deep field of study and speculation in itself, but I am making some very sweeping generalizations here, referencing people’s capability to choose when to reproduce on the broadest levels, not that there was a period or specific instance of this having an impact… more like, it made a difference over very large scales of time, as evident by the fact that our breeding cycles are nothing like most other mammals.
We should all be learning that we’re all children. Some of us, over time, gain a lot more baggage and issues, but that shit just layers right on top of the “child” parts so we’re all just basically children with complex problems.
The brain doesn’t “prune” itself. The brain you had when you were 12, you have that same damn brain. It doesn’t change. Stuff just gets added to it.
Almost anyone with an irrational political stance betrays their youth.
Political ideology has always captivated the passions of youth, but isn’t successfully implemented or even internalized except by people with age and experience and emotional regulation.
Bears can be trained to drive cars and communicate through various means, it’s thought they may be as smart as great apes like gorillas. This is why they were a choice circus animal for a long time.
Yes, this should be terrifying information.
We had the tall stride thing going, we had the super-endurance thing going already, we had gotten good at tool-use like many other primates, in that we could use sticks and rocks to beat things and poke things, just like modern chimps and apes. (Modern primates also throw stones, it’s not the evolution-killer on its own that the meme is making it out to be.)
No, the REAL thing that soared us beyond all members of the animal kingdom is how we started abstracting information and sharing it. IE: language, writing, and the cognitive processes behind those skills that allow us to plan ahead. Not just planning ahead, but being able to set up actions far in advance, like planting seeds because we know a plant will come out of it. Moving our camps to where animal herds migrate to so we can stay close to the food, and just the day-to-day actions like preparing a fire in advance so you can see when it gets dark, bringing things with you to use later, having an idea how to ration food, being able to share your plans with others, communicating your movements to other hunters, and yes, all this made us exceptional hunters. When other primates were still mostly foraging for plants and bugs, our ancestors used this “thinking” thing to start getting massive doses of meat. Amino acids, proteins, high-density fuel, food for growing brains.
Not to mention, we’re the only creature that chooses when to reproduce. We used this foresight to plan our futures and our families. This is a massive changeup from how nature has handled reproduction. For the vast majority of life on Earth, breeding is just this thing that “happens” at certain points and everything leads to that event, and nothing really has control over how that event plays out.
Breeding is still a big deal for us, just look how horny we all are, but we decide when we’re going to have babies, and while it doesn’t seem a big deal here and now, it was a game changer when we were migrating packs of hunter-gatherers, following the seasons and the herds of animals.
Our story of how we got here is without question the most fantastic story ever. You are the product of over four and a half billion years of uninterrupted successes. A family tree going back a thousands of millions of years without break, surviving apocalypses that have turned our entire globe to ice, to fire, to water and other unimaginable catastrophes that sometimes lasted for millions of years.
So now you made it, your billions of generations of ancestors secured your survival against all odds, whatcha gonna do with it?
I have this feeling that the “X months” we have, as well the other periods of special recognition, serves a primary purpose of just setting people off.
For real, the ONLY people who really have a strong reaction to things like Black History Month are racists. The ONLY people who really care that there’s a “Gay Pride Month” are the frothing homophobes. For everyone else, particularly the people whom those days or months celebrate, it’s just Tuesday. Or some such normal day where nothing changes and they still have to constantly look over their shoulder.
If all it does is make some backwards, broken asshole lose his mind and rage about how “unfair” it is that nobody is giving them their special day, then it’s a victory. If all these recognition periods do is remind us all that there is a sizable segment of our population who hate you personally then it’s actually doing good on the long-term, because we can use it as a barometer. We can use these days and months to gauge how much more work we have to do squashing nazis and purging hate groups, and how much protection our friends and neighbors still need simply for existing outside the “white CIS straight male American” spectrum.
a guy who claimed trans people had their minds rotten by the porn industry.
Holy shit that projection, and how they can’t disentangle their kinks from human beings with human experience.
Mods finally took it down along with a lot of his other BS. Just waiting for the wounded screaming about censorship.
I love the ringing silence as they chew on their own tongue trying to decide to even respond to actual data.
There’s a lot of data and hard work in that article from the CDC, I bet a lot of people worked very hard and seriously to assemble that information and give it to the public. Shame how many people will put their own sources: conspiracy blogs and subreddits and AM radio shows, at the same level. Imagine how insulting that is to people working in these major institutions to have idiots who never leave their couch screaming about far-fetched plots from George Soros.
Half the time these are 17-year-old middle-class white kids with no worries in the world, raging emotional hormones and a desire to “thrash someone with their incredible intellect” and have no real care for the issues beyond that, they just want to fight and they will lie to their last breath to feel like they’re special and smart.
I really feel like if we could see who most of the people are who push back on so many modern social issues, we would have a lot fewer social issues, because we would be able to roll our eyes and close the door on these literal children who are turning every conversation into a debate with children.
I actually need data to make conclusions.
No, you don’t. I can prove it.
If you get emotional reactions seeing other people make choices about to wear on their faces, you’re dumber than horse shit, you are a toddler, a child, a baby who needs to grow up.
See? That wasn’t hard, no data needed, just plain ol’ simple “common sense.”
Aren’t you guys all about “common sense?” I think It’s common sense to let people make their own choices and not get so hyper about someone else’s political agenda that you have to chime in about… mask bans. It’s just awful. I can’t imagine doing that and looking at the mirror and saying “Yeah, I am making the world better.”
Okay but that addresses no part of my comment, why do you get mad when you see people wear facemasks? Isn’t that kind of strange? Is it helping anyone?
Doesn’t it make you feel manipulated to have others able to make you start having emotional reactions to things you see that you wouldn’t have thought about before?
it never went away, it was just removed from sight.
But the people who segregated water fountains and chose where people should live based on their skin color? They’re still alive and kickin’ and making laws and business policies and decisions that impact us all. They have learned how to change their language but they have the same exact values that they did decades ago, or the same attitudes and values that their parents did. They have learned to hide in plain sight while also making sure that we remain divided and afraid and deeply obsessed with the superficial appearances of society.
America is funny, we tend to forget anything beyond about a 5-year window when events are still current, otherwise a lot of people here think that women and people of color have had rights here for like, a century or more. To the average liberal American, the idea that there are full-on, hateful nazis living next door to them seems radically unthinkable, and this is why they’re getting so comfortable taking off their hoods.
Racism is so America right now always.
While true, we can be more specific here what quality or trait allowed us to become engineers. Being able to engineer is by itself something that can even exist in genetic memory, instinctual. There are a lot of animals that do engineering, but have never come anywhere close to what humans do. Beavers, birds, ants and termites arguably are better engineers than most humans on an innate level. (I’ve also known some engineers who are incapable of some very basic life skills.)
What separated us from evolutionary processes and also allowed us to become engineers is the capability to abstract information and use those abstractions to predict the future, extending our “reach” of influence into the further future than most animals can calculate. This required us to develop strong continuity of thought and experiences and with this also came the ability to analyze and compare complicated events to find patterns. This gave us a huge edge when we were surviving around predators that were able to easily dominate us. Nowadays these abilities mostly cause of mental health conditions as we try to use tools designed for navigating glaciers to navigate a world of social media, zoom meetings, Tinder profiles, electric car recalls and democratic electoral politics.