I wonder how much we’re going to hear about the poor person who got shot in the head right behind him, or if they’re just incidental margin notes in history, overshadowed by the big WWE media theater that is Trump. Reports are saying at least two crowd members have died.
A 12-year-old cannot consent.
The people who need to hear this the most are also the ones who will respond to this statement with “No you idiot, it SAYS she initiated!” Or at least inside they will think this.
I used to think that this kind of statement would carry all the necessary information to teach people about consent, but no, it’s not nearly enough. We have several whole generations that skipped PBS and education and reading and life experiences entirely, they have withdrawn to isolated spaces that indulge whatever twisted passions they have and people make far, far less effort to understand concepts than they used to.
What you have to explain is that what a child thinks they want versus what you, an adult with adult perspectives wants, are not aligned and will lead to massive, massive power imbalances, and we protect children from their own foolish ideas ALL DAY LONG about other things.
You can do massive damage to a child psychologically by taking away their natural pace of growth and self-discovery and replacing them with your own ideas of what a sexual relationship is. A twelve year-old has another DECADE TO A DECADE AND A HALF to go before they finalize growth and development for the most part. In that time, they will draw on all their life experiences to guide them to a healthy future and a positive attitude about themselves and sex. If someone out there is reading all this and still does not get it, you need to haul yourself to therapy yesterday.
People genuinely are twisted about sex and age and consent, and there is no truer view into our massive flaws as a species. That we have anyone at all in this age and at this point in our evolution targeting children for self-gratification tells me all I need to know about the Fermi Paradox. We are NOT an advanced species. The very worst of us represents all of us.
It says a lot about life broadly that any time we invent or devise some kind of system or chemical for eliminating pain, that substance instantly becomes so addicting that we can no longer manage life at all and it has to be regulated and locked away for our own good.
Life is pain. Even if you’ve gone numb to it, every moment hurts in one way or another. You just might not ever notice it until you experience the alternative.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Should have took a lot more.
Why?
I mean it might have been, but with the modern insanity around politics and guns and violence, and the general unhinged nature of the population generally, it’s equally or more likely to be some deranged person with a gun. WHY for the love of god add to the chaos by speculating without any evidence yet? Does it help?