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.

Not only are you correct, we will never have any real sense of scale of just how correct you are, since we’ve only been exposed to about less than 0.01% of life that’s ever existed on Earth in the last several billion years.

For all we know there were clans of synapsids that were exclusively homosexual for terms of child-rearing and had complicated social systems with language and structured hierarchy, etc.

The idea that we can even remotely determine what this world’s natural systems have been like from looking at a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of the total picture is once again peak human hubris and self importance.

This planet has been a thriving source of life in the universe, maybe the only one like it for far, far longer than any human alive can comprehend. In the last several billion years nothing complained about homosexuality. Humans will be here for a brief blip on the larger picture, and there will be no record nor impact from anyone’s hate or fear of sex acts. Earth will keep spinning through the void, life will keep evolving. Protest signs and hateful messages will dissolve back to the systems that created them.

All you people screaming and crying about “woke” this and that, and who get confused by terms like LGBTQ+, it doesn’t matter. You will be dust for far, far longer than you will be a human screaming about what’s “natural.”

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?

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.

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.

Good for this guy, but there is nothing positive or uplifting about this story.

The police were not materially harmed in any way to encourage a change in behavior, the officer who was obviously just another giant asshole in a sea of assholes is enjoying a healthy retirement where he can sit and fondly remember how many dogs he’s shot.

This never should have happened, this doesn’t happen in every country with a police force, we don’t have to put up with this as a cost of “freedom.” We don’t accept “a few bad apples” in hospitals or airlines, so why is one of our most important jobs run effectively with no oversight or independant review?

I used to think it was entirely corruption, but lately I think it’s darker. I think a lot of people want to be persecuted by an authority. Maybe not having a danger to worry about makes humans idle and angry and that’s why we have so much contention and anti-social behavior.

Or it might just be boomers running shit and laughing at 1-dimensional social media memes.

Should have took a lot more.

What’s weird is how anyone really cares?

I genuinely cannot believe that people still care about this in the year 2024.

Like, does anyone care if people draw animal people looking cute or sexy or just with human proportions or anything in between? Does it really bother anyone or is it just fun to try to bandwagon something that freaked some housewives out in the 90’s because some inside edition episode? It’s just drawings of animal characters like have been done for literal millenia. Imagine if some of the more “notorious” disney films came out today, people would lose their minds.

Whether any of this is ironic or not, either way it says a lot about how profoundly lacking our understanding is of what actual attractiveness is all about.

Not a single one.

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?

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.