I would wager that a lot more do.

My mother got drunk one night and sat me on her bed and described in detail when she got raped as a teenager, and the resulting abortion and the details of how that went. I was eleven.

Of course, being a male I can’t go around talking about the lasting effects of many such incidents that happened to me, and I’m not really expected to even connect those things to any feelings about sexual shame. So instead what it does, and what it does to many men who had any kind of sexual trauma, is we just block out the incidents and internalize the feelings and associations inward and it just wrecks our self-esteem, our standards for ourselves and our perceptions of attractiveness in ourselves.

A lot of guys process this in different ways, and trauma like this can take many forms. But it’s often expressed as later over-compensation and bravado and an image of being “in control” sexually and performative masculinity and hyper-objectifying notions of sexuality, or for more people I suspect, just an internal, festering self-esteem that doesn’t want them to be happy or feel good about themselves. For every loud, angry incel, I suspect there are thousands of men who have the same background or traumas and they just sit quietly on it forever and it robs them of joy.

Yeah, maybe my people just messed me up.

I’m pretty sure we’re now in a situation where most of our society’s contention is driven by childhood-induced shame over sexuality in some form or another.

And there’s not shit we can do about it because every time someone tries to make a campaign to encourage better sex-education, or even scarier, sex positivity among children, those people or groups get attacked for being pedos and predators.

This is going to be a social dividing line that gets sharper as time goes. There will be people who have a shred of intellectual capacity and haven’t been hollowed out be capitalism, who raise their kids to be free from shame and shackles of toxic social norms and let them just live and discover on their own what sexuality means to them.

And the orcs, who want literal dark-ages levels of shame, hate and fear and of course power-imbalances as deeply rooted foundations to anything and everything related to sex, and they will only want children associated with sex when it involves controlling them or worse.

That’s great, now how?

Do you think if this message alone spread (it already has) that anyone is going to take it seriously? The top polluters and the ones deciding what our packaging is like are the most wealthy corporations on Earth and they are the ones doing the most climate damage, and the ones who control the narrative and our politics.

Do you think “ban plastics” will ever be a populist political talking point in these conditions? Do you think it would gain momentum?

Or are we looking at it wrong? What if more of us targeted the system that is sustaining climate destruction with an actual populist idea? What if we started wresting control and money away from the companies filling our sea with plastic?

Do you want to spread a message of lasting change? Start spreading “pro family, pro children” messages like the need for social help as millions become jobless as capital starts digesting itself in its current late-stage. You want to see plastics away? (No we’re never seeing an end to cardboard, that’s unrealistic to push for.) Then start advocating for Universal Basic Income and other measures that put control back in the hands of the people.

The chances of first-worlders putting up with packaging and preserved food habits that are essentially post-collapse “The Last of Us” levels of mild inconvenience: about -100% if such a ratio is possible.

“Ya’ll telling me I gotta feed mah kids dried beans? How da fuck they gonna eat dried beans? they too crunchy!” will be the viral soundbite from a Kansas parking lot.

Capital won’t allow change until it can no longer bleed a dime in it’s present state. We’re living under a locust plague and we’ve called it the modern world.

I think I read that no matter who you are and what you’ve done, only about 10% - 15% of all plastic you’ve recycled actually gets recycled. The vast majority ends up on barges being shipped overseas or to landfills.

This isn’t to say stop recycling, if it compiles plastic into places instead of just distributing across the globe, then maybe later when people get off their ass and realize we’re in trouble, they might make some kind of bacterial-world-ending-zombie-plague type solution for breaking down plastic waste, at least the plasti-zombie-plague will be isolated to particular regions and countries.

Yah that’s the one that will do him in and crumble his empire. Surely.

A lot of males or kids raised masculine have that habit broken real fast.

For the majority of the western world, it’s still considered cute and more than acceptable for women to have stuffed toys into adulthood, or that it’s feminizing in some way. Try that as a guy past a certain age though and you’re more likely to flip a coin on social acceptance from friends, family and strangers alike.

It’s a funny example how social pressure to conform to arbitrary standards and social norms is generational even if it makes no objective sense.

(For the dense out there, if you’re here to reply arguing about the acceptability of having a teddy bear as a man or woman because of your personal story/kink, you’re missing the leading subtext.)

I think it’s saying you can factor out the zero because it’s zero and we’re looking for “base sets” which for us 1’s? Factoring every number system down to whatever their base set is equivalent to that original 1’s relationship with zero?

It seems a little more esoteric than the practical reality that an alien might just count on it’s digits which could be any base number, and we should understand that, particularly if it gets so bad on Earth we have to leave soon.

I haven’t taken math in a very long time.

It’s not that 60% was “okay with fascism.”

It’s that “60% of people have embraced toxic nihilism.” Shaped from years of scrolling, overdosing on dopamine, reading and participating in contentious debates on the internet that never lead to an outcome, reading clickbait headlines that stopped making sense years ago, going home and sitting in front of a monitor instead of going out with friends to hang out and just talk about life, of eating the most addictive foods and getting all manner of drugs over the counter to alter their moods, their feelings, their perceptions.

We have everything to placate us and make us happy and it’s killing everyone.

Many years ago I once sat with a local captain (like a constable) of a village in Southeast Asia. We were drinking gin and looking at the stars and he said “You know why gin here is cheap? And sold on every corner? Because as long as everyone makes their number one priority at the end of the day to come home and get drunk, you won’t get people coming together and forming groups, of protesting the injustices, of changing the system” he said with a smile as he tossed back another shot.

Since then I’ve actually pursued this and have found evidence over and over how capital uses numbing agents to keep populations subdued, from the overt tactics well recorded and planned like the use of Opium in China, all the way through more modern places like Russia and vodka. And it works. And we have a lot more numbing agents around us now than just ingestible substances.

In places with fewer numbing agents, people are still having kids, still throwing parties and looking forward to poker every night with their grown siblings, of building a new barn or getting together to open a new store, or instead of spending 12 hours a day getting better at Marvel Rivals, they’re playing basketball. Sure it happens here still, but it’s in such radical decline that we have a dictator in charge and nobody cares. This is manufactured nihilism and don’t mistake it for something else because that’s exactly what the numbing agents want you to do.

About 30% of Americans did, and that’s the segment least representative of what average people actually want.

This isn’t an “America bad” situation as much as an “Oh fuck, capitalism just took down America, who is it coming for next?” situation.

Exactly the kind “harumph, not ME” attitude I am describing.

Community made us the most successful species on Earth. But we have allowed capital and greed to form systems that pry us apart into echo chambers that are disconnected from the axioms we share and this has festered into a kind of hate so extreme that when someone tries to expose what’s been done to us, it’s attacked as “centerism” at best, or advocacy for making friends with nazis in worst-faith reactionism.

There is nuance in the non-digital world, and avoiding talking to or seeing the thoughts and ideas, no matter how dumb, of the people we’re trained to be phobic of only makes the problem worse.

We have to get off the internet. People who get off the internet are going to be the actual thought leaders and unifiers of tomorrow.

Whatever notions of privacy we used to have are all going to crumble as the newest AI tools come online for prying open people’s profiles and predicting their behavior, their locations, their personal habits and spending, their health and family and relationship statuses, simply by analyzing a few patterns in your search terms and cookies.

From that information, these same monsters are going to be able to target you specifically with the kind of manipulative effort that previously would involve teams of people working around the clock to derive methods for influencing a single target. But it will be doing it on mass-scale, putting that same kind of effort into influencing millions and millions simultaneously.

And we all have vulnerabilities. The more invulnerable you think you are, the more likely you are to be subtly shifted by long-term, 3-dimensional tactics for changing the way you think and feel. Be it the way you think and feel about the latest flavor of PRIME energy drink, to how you think and feel about genocide.

We have to get off the fucking internet.

The irony made me exhale a burst of air from my nose before closing the page, never to return.

Basically every cookie acceptance agreement popup is just a 404 to me. No webpage has important enough information anymore for me to sign any kind of agreement. It’s absurd. If you passed by a shop and wanted to go in and purchase something, but a clerk stopped you at the door and made you sign a fucking agreement that store would die in a month.

Everyone wants to add something to it.

“Okay it’s nice, but does it cover all representation equally?”

Check the user’s moderation history. They’re just a troll. Report, block and move on. Your reply was great, I hope at least other people get something from it.

There’s also “Extreme Centrist Who Will Break Their Own Back doing Acrobatics to Avoid Being Labeled And Now Just are Reflexively Contrarian to Literally Anything and Everything Anyone Says in Public.”

They will also go to the camps.

The problem is, we have to live next to them in our daily lives, and they us. Part of the reason why we’re now spinning down the drain as a nation is because everyone retreated to isolated online bubbles instead of talking to their family, friends and neighbors.

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Yah but there’s also like, 300,000 tankies and they’re ALSO that same person.

No really, you’re right, the reason this is never going to be a rival to reddit because this site network doesn’t have the diversity sauce to actually bring in large scale users. Reddit didn’t explode until they made it feel unified and comfortable for women and older people to join the conversations. This site is like reddit was about 15 years ago, a deep basement of nerdy little boys sperging out about linux and underground memes, the only difference is some of the communities here have a much further left slant and reddit appealed to… absolute scum incels and illegal porn traders.

Man, we just can’t win. I’d love a site where they just check if you’re a reasonable, sane adult before you can get in. Like how Somethingawful had a $10 gate at the front which kept the bullshit down, and when someone did decide to burn their $10, it was a public spectacle and they were driven in shame… to form 4chan which is partially responsible for the destruction of democracy.