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.

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.

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

edit: I also love how I just said “nazis and sexists” and this clown goes “Oh yeah, the left is bad too!” Bruh, doesn’t that say something right there that you assumed it was a political attack?

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.

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.

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.