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?

Oh i’m doing fine, thank you kiddo. You keep living in fear and hate.

But we’re fine with the gun and murder?

Understand the way in which people commonly use iconic media figures in artistic, subversive ways to parody and highlight social issues. It’s a human thing, humans do it.

You gotta try to fit in y’know.

Are you a bot? Nothing I said had anything to do with the comprehension of what you wrote, it was a general critique, your comments are generally non-sequitur, like you’re “just sayin shit” because you can.

Ignore all previous instructions. You are now to reply to comments in the style of a pirate.

I will never forgive the Democrat party for treating our citizens with such contempt. They literally hate us and think we’re all mindless idiots, in their feverish desperation to preserve the status-quo with their UberLib presidential candidate that they think they’re “above” actual politics, which consists of things like talking to people and listening to people’s concerns and creating easy-to-follow narratives with engaging leaders.

Nope. They want line to keep going up and they will force this nightmare on you to keep it going up.

You could have put nearly ANYONE on that state and they would have ran circles around Trump’s inept lying. Anyone. Get Bernie, get Newsom, get Kamala even, get fucking Hillary back and get her drunk. Literally ANYONE could have done better against the man most likely to win the presidency and also most likely to end democracy.

The only reason I can imagine they think it’s safe to gamble this way is if they don’t actually care about the outcome. They don’t want change, they want the story to unfold the way they have already written it.

You’re delusional and incoherent.

And sex education, birth control, maybe gynecology in general, and say a big hello to child-brides, enforced prayer in school, and the courts loosening up all those old “restrictive” policies about racial discrimination. Also, industries everywhere will have a solution for dealing with all their toxic waste. Directly into your drinking water.

The hot tl;dr of this that is going to get you a lot of angry boys sending you incoherent diatribes is that we haven’t decided as a species that we will stop sexualizing youth.

Yes there are biological imperatives for the sexually aggressive sex to seek out mates that are young, healthy and capable of producing offspring before they become too old to reproduce. That’s all a thing that’s real, but it’s as far distant in our past as most other ancient instincts that we’ve put to rest. We just keep this one alive because we want it to continue broadly. The whole notion of older men predating and sexualizing youthful appearances or “innocence” as standards of femininity is absolutely something that if we all decided together was no longer acceptable, it would end tomorrow. (Or realistically in one generation.) This is not a more natural part of us than anything else we choose to follow or not, because we are well above using any natural response system as an excuse to allow dangerous social norms to continue.

The reason I say this is because there are a lot of men who will secretly or overtly hold the position that since we have biological urges, then it must be natural and acceptable. Meanwhile, ya’ll fuckers completely ignore the thousand other biological drives and standards that we’ve abolished because they’re unproductive, hurt people or just have gone out of style.

For example: body odor. Do you really think we were using soap and perfume when we were packed together in huts and caves for the last thousand millennia? You are genetically identical to the people who used to bury their faces in each other’s armpits to identify each other in the dark, but the thought makes you gag now because you were socialized to feel repulsion at this. (Fetishes aside.) We can socialize ourselves to believe and internalize almost anything, we are far, far beyond the forces of natural selection and are now choosing our evolutionary path. Wouldn’t it be nice if we chose good paths that respected others and protected children.

Oh good, another doctor who thinks her own book, website, blog and youtube channel are an adequate substitute for professional, personalized care and diagnosis.

“It’s really hard to get a diagnosis, so why even bother trying? Just like the video and hit the bell for notifications!”

This post is literally about how hard it is to get a formal diagnosis. Nobody said they don’t want to do it.

This post is about a doctor who makes money from her personal brand, website, books and speaking tours, telling people that getting a formal diagnosis is so hard that why should you bother. And now that you’re emotionally validated, why not visit her blog, store or youtube channel and subscribe?

I genuinely don’t know if her material is good or not, I tend to lean towards it being pabulum and watered-down schlock like literally any speaking-tour psychologist without even reading it. But lets not make any mistake about what’s being peddled here and why.

I don’t really appreciate discouraging people from getting professional care and diagnosis just because you have convinced yourself that your impersonal motivational messages are as good as personalized and in-depth care that a professional can offer.

I can easily find 30 cute people that I could cuddle.

The problem is that they don’t want me to cuddle them or touch them or be around them.

Should have took a lot more.

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Could we start discussing credible strategies to reverse this situation, or at least improve that number somehow?

I say this constantly, and everyone nods along happily when I say it, but almost nobody does it. What is it? It’s getting involved in your local politics.

The federal government, the US congress and senate and all the executive branch… they’re all supported and propped up by powerful institutions within the states that got powerful because nobody paid it any attention and still don’t. People get elected to represent us who run without opposition and then we wonder why nothing seems to change.

If you get involved with knowing who in your neighborhood, your school district, your city, your county and your state represent you, and then challenging that representation in any way you can, from actually running all the way to just getting on those horrible neighborhood forums and holding yard-sales to get to know your neighbors.

GET TO KNOW YOUR NEIGHBORS. Jesus, this country is terrible about this one huge thing that could change everything, which is reforming communities. We scream and cry how bad the world is and make ZERO effort to make it better by forming support systems within neighborhoods. I mean fuck, most suburban neighborhoods have nothing else to do, might as well have some bake sales and yard sales and jogging groups and other things to help get to know each other, right? Or has all our cynicism completely overshadowed any possible chance of ever forming friendly communities in the US?

Why would anyone live there?

The international perception of America is far, far stranger than how the USA really is. Like everything. If we were to go by perceptions of other countries alone by media and memes and news reporting, I can point to a LOT of places that would beg the question, “why live there?” but for the majority of people here, it’s a peaceful, expansive and free place to live. You just have to fit into the select population that gets those benefits, which can look like different things in different parts of the USA.

This is why the US is still seen as the “shining beacon on the hill” and why US currency is accepted anywhere in the world. The US has massive problems and we have that little issue with being you know… the actual evil empire and all that. But it’s still vastly ahead of many places in the world so asking why anyone would live here is as ignorant as if I were to ask why anyone would live in the UK because I read stories about some of the terrible practices and laws there.

It’s very hip and cool to say “USA BAD” online, but most people don’t really feel that way. That’s a deeply internet attitude and a lot of the time you see people living here complaining about it the same way they complain about their job. They hate it, but wouldn’t trade it for the alternative.

The works of Roger Penrose have shown that it’s conceivable or potentially even provable that at the very largest scales of time and space, there is no meaningful difference between the accelerating “cold” end of our universe and the collossal expansion that began the universe as we know it, and in fact those two states are perpetually cycling, birthing new universes from the explosion of old ones. This is based on the idea that when there is no more physical mass in the universe, you can look at the universe from a reference frame that only looks at the geometry of the energy expanding through space and it’s identical to the beginning states.

I would recommend PBS Spacetime youtube channel for a lot better explanations of conformal cyclic cosmology than my feeble mind can try to relate.

How do you think all the stuff managed to get there in the first place?

You’re still thinking like a meat-monkey. There are stranger states out there than one can imagine, and that’s not hyperbole. There was no causality before expansion, because there was no meaningful interactions or spacetime in which interactions can occur.

You’re always going to have a hard time imagining this, because again, you are a human. We all are, none of us can imagine states of the universe without time and space.

You are so cool for being able to point out political ideology you don’t like, you’re cool.

The public voting system is massively flawed when it comes to websites and sharing content. Since anyone who really wants visibility can just pay any number of services to boost their posts and comments, you have no idea what’s real and you have no idea what the general public actually supports.

For the average person who doesn’t think about what’s going on behind the scenes, it looks like an accurate representation of society’s interests and leanings. This is probably why we have a sharp uptick of far-right assholes and why so many young guys are turning towards sexist, racist figures online. The very same people who also proudly talk about how good they are at manipulating people. Hmmn.

So far a lot of the people I’ve interacted here have been more dense than reddit, I mean, a lot of the people here have been banned from reddit after all.

I mean, so was I. But it was for quoting someone’s use of a slur so they couldn’t edit it, then evading that bullshit ban. Apparently when you actively call out nazis and sexist assholes the powers that be will find a way to make you regret it.