Signtist

You shouldn’t have to, but you do have to. The world isn’t going to fix itself - these things are happening because our country and its people have been slowly influenced over the course of decades specifically not to put up a fuss about it. We need to fight against that conditioning that tells us we deserve to be able to step away and ignore it. We do deserve that, but to allow ourselves that out is to continue allowing these atrocities to happen. We’ve been pushed into such stressful, overstimulating lives that putting up a fight seems impossible, but we need to fight it even if it means putting our lives on the line.

Not even your own money, you’re killing people for more money in the pockets of weapons dealers, oil barons, and the politicians they employ - I mean “lobby.”

Guilty in the legal sense means you’ve been found to be guilty in the court of law. Until you’ve been tried, you’re not guilty. Otherwise anyone could just say “that guy committed a crime” and it’d be their word against yours.

Videos that pushed this rhetoric were the first step in turning my mom from a normal shitty person into a full-blown conspiracy theorist. This is definitely going to be a problem.

Ugh, the “both sides” argument again… /s

I used to have a 1.5" leg length difference, so I had to wear a big lift in one of my shoes throughout middle and part of high school as I had a few surgeries to slowly fix the difference. It was a major pain, and I often rolled my ankle in gym class and sports.

True. Think of how many you’d be able to inspect from up there!

That’s the heart of the issue, though, isn’t it? Most people do care about the state of their washing machines even as countless children have nothing to eat. People chastise their kids for not eating their vegetables by saying “kids are starving in Africa,” without doing anything to help any kids in Africa. People want more for themselves even while acknowledging that others have so much less. Studies like this assume that human selfishness is negligible, while it’s actually one of the largest variables that needs to be factored in. Most people don’t actually care about human suffering unless it’s happening to someone they personally know - they care much more about their washing machine.

Forbidden PEZ

Fuddruckers still exists, but they’ve downsized significantly since the mid 2000’s when my friends and I used to go there a lot in high school. There aren’t any locations left in my state anymore.

…those are all corporations. Nationalization would make it a public service, rather than a corporate profit-driven service like how it is now.

You can bet that if libraries, for example, became privatized, we’d quickly see several different library companies pop up, each with their own paid book subscription service with exclusive partnerships with various popular authors, much like we have today with streaming platforms. Conversely, if we were to nationalize those streaming platforms, we’d likely see the service transformed to be more akin to our current library service.

It’s why the rightmost parties generally want to defund many public services and move them to the private sector - it transforms services that we spend money on to benefit the people into services that the people spend money on to benefit corporations.

I wish the US had a system like that. It’s unfortunate that even a more inclusive voting system suffers from a surplus of voters fueled by hate and selfishness, but here in the US even protest votes for the far left play into the far right’s hands since all 3rd party votes together wouldn’t even come close to rivaling the 2 established parties.

Technically those trees generally became coal, while oil is generally from marine life.

Yeah, she had just broken up with her boyfriend and found a bunch of “self-help” youtube videos that basically just said everyone who disagrees with you is a narcissist, then the algorithm started recommending her videos that said everyone who disagrees with you is actually an “energy vampire” literally and maliciously draining you of your life force. From there she got into all the crazy health conspiracies - which of course happened right as she was diagnosed with DCIS, which is easily treatable, but if left untreated becomes breast cancer. She dove head-first into all of the conspiracies after that, throwing money at anyone claiming to cure cancer so long as the method wasn’t backed by “big science,” and died of breast cancer a few years later.

It took my mom less than 4 years to go from crying in horror when Trump was elected in 2016, to crying in horror when he wasn’t elected in 2020, and lamenting her inability to join Jan 6 due to her cancer that was mysteriously worsening in spite of all the 5g blockers and expensive heal-all herbal teas she bought.

Yeah, I’ll often spread spilled water across the table just so that it evaporates within a couple minutes.