I feel like one part of the internet is like “Eew you’re autistic” just for being the slightest bit of weird while also going to actually autistic people and saying “You’re not autistic you just want attention” just because they’re not miserable all the time and hate their autism (like “fake disorder cringe” on Reddit where they accuse people of faking disorders over a TikTok and none of them are actual therapists or have any physical evidence.)
That’s a pretty good point, too. The erosion works well enough from both ends (by design) to render it pretty much meaningless for everybody involved. Whether they struggle with something pretty serious or not, there’s always someone in the shadow there to cast doubt or to make everyone feel a gripping sense of meaninglessness about it. The same goes for the ever-expanding spectrum, where anyone with just a few normal idiosyncrasies can be led to believe they have a serious disorder. All of this attempts to erode true issues that people actually deal with, outside the realm of considerable normalcy. Aside from general ‘human condition’ woes.
Chaos, calamity and meaninglessness. Just how they want it 
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Its like a bisexual diarrhetic dichotomy of competitive farting
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And don’t forget the other side of the extreme which is just as bad if not even worse where people accuse others of faking with no evidence and they go and harass people
When I found out about this I actually got physically dizzy and it was crazy
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You’re right about that, actually. I think when you’ve lived through decades of that type of commentary all around you, you just become hardened and you hardly even notice it anymore, but it’s still the way the world unfortunately works. To me it just seems like this is the common way to treat high-functioning / high-masking people, and I think most of us just go with it because we know how deep the spectrum goes and how much worse issues can be for others, but you’re correct that it doesn’t make it right in any sense at all.
If anything, this has made me take people at face value more than anything else. If someone says they’re going through something, the worst thing you can do is cast doubt. People just want to be understood and share some common ground as humans. It sucks that we’ve complicated and made this difficult – since obviously, for some of us, it was already difficult enough 
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Agreed. The best thing to do is not to mindlessly believe everyone but not to automatically think they’re lying about everything.
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Y’know after looking through Reddit over the past couple of days I’ve noticed that social media is a very selfish construct. Everything you do is for your benefit. Technically the same can be said about everything in life, but online it becomes a much more prominent bruise.
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I actually am of the mindset that any amount of free will means there is some amount of selfishness in everything you do - I don’t believe in altruism. To be clear, that doesn’t mean I don’t believe you can do nice things for other people with no expectation of any sort of favor in return, altruism is defined as taking yourself out of the equation and I don’t believe that is possible as long as you have free will. An extreme example would be something like throwing yourself on a grenade to save the people around you, but even then I would still argue somewhere in your mind was a cost benefit analysis in which you decided you received more marginal utility from jumping on the grenade than you did from saving yourself and allowing others to be harmed. Through that lens, even something that selfless can be thought of as selfish. I’d still say the person who does that is a good person who did a good thing, and even for the right reasons. But I’d also believe that they did it for themselves deep down - and I wouldn’t think less of them for it.
I think what social media does is force everybody to use the same measure of marginal utility (likes, hearts, follows, etc) and then display your stats for everyone to see. So where normally our cost benefit analysis is internal, and you can’t see what factors people are weighing when they make a decision, on social media everyone is using the same factors. Even an apparently selfless action in everyday life on social media is rewarded with likes and such, and that cheapens it. Whether that person did something just for likes or did it because they were really trying to be a good person, we see them get externally rewarded with likes and the logical assumption if they shared they did something was that they knew it would get likes, so they didn’t do that something for the right reasons.
I don’t have a neat tidy conclusion to wrap this thought up with, but that’s what I think is up with social media. I don’t share much because I am mostly doing stuff for me, not other people. I occasionally will share things so that my friends can see what I’m up to and know I’m OK, but I’m not interested in what strangers think of me.
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Completely agree regarding altruism and selfishness.
The other side of this is while we’ve dumbed down the societal carrots, we’ve also done away with the sticks while online. There’s rarely any real downside to being a raging asshole, and people that would never have the courage of their stance in the public square feel like they can say anything they want without repercussion.
What worries me is that this has been going on for so long that it’s normalized online bad behavior to the point where being an asshole is its own dopamine hit for a lot of people. I think it’s also starting to bleed into the real world where people think they can act out in ways that shatter any conventional social contract, and we’ve become so numbed to why those traditional carrots and sticks were in place that people have stopped calling out a lot of bad behavior in general, or simply responding with their own.
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I think I might have said in a different time, different place, but I totally agree with everything you said regarding that sort of infinite selfishness. Anyhing you do is selfish in some way, and there’s no real way around it. The only problem is intentional selfishness. When people do things for clout nobody is happy. Like those assholes who give homeless people money or food on camera and then take it from them post-recording. Other than that, I don’t feel like being a genuine good person and getting praise for it is a selfish thing.
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i never, ever watch the national news just for the blatant propaganda techniques that they use to achieve this emotional manipulation. their favorite one is called card stacking. basically showing one side of the story and never the other, since the other side would go against their clear-cut bias. i learned these propaganda techniques from my favorite history teacher of all time and now i only read/watch the local news. they don’t ham anything up and its problems actually relevant to me.
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beware: card stacking occurs everywhere where news is reported, with remarkably few exceptions, if any.
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not so sure about that, seems overly cynical and paranoid. i’m enough like that already.
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There’s a shocking rise in racism now. Especially against Black, Indian, Jewish, Arab and Muslim people. I don’t know where it came from. And it wasn’t just because of Trump because it was even when Biden was president. Even Gen Z and Gen Alpha is doing it now which is shocking because I’m Gen Z. This is what happens when the internet raises you! But it’s not mainly the parent’s fault, but rather the channels that make, and social media companies that promote racist videos to children. CHILDREN! Why are people making racist videos for kids?! They’re just children! They should be playing outside, and playing kid friendly games and kid friendly video games, and they should be watching kid friendly videos such as children’s shows and cute animal videos, not racist videos. The kids wouldn’t even find racist videos without the algorithms pushing these videos to them. There’s even people who believe in white replacement theory (which is a conspiracy theory) And these social media companies don’t do anything about these comments, but they get people in trouble for saying “die”.
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Everyone is being racist towards everyone…
And more antagonistic towards each other.
Its about accountability for fucked up experiences…mixed in with ethnocentrism and advocating for social darwinistic agendas.
Its exactly like everbody hates everbody equally. and are engaging in a sort of a really stupid shadow war/pissing contest.
The whole pushing for “we should be more ethical and treat each other better” is completely missing.
Even though race is completely a bullshit constuct that was invented…that evolved and is a nonsensical reason why so many atrocities have occured historically.
In fighting the fight…people often forget to be a better example…or properly conduct themselves
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One thing very few people know is that Fuck News and a few others people think of as “national news” are pretty much allowed to do whatever they want and call it “News”.
”The FCC regulates broadcast networks, since the airwaves are free and public. But cable channels, which rely on subscribers, viewers and advertisers, are beyond government control. (…) Fox News (as well as CNN and MSNBC) is not an accredited news station because no regulatory body exists in the United States that has the authority to make such a classification.“
Source: Snopes (fact-checking site)
I would also highly recommend you read this book I talk bout in this other thread:
Finally, if you want factual news sites that report events instead of showing whatever makes them the most money and constantly amplify the US popular divide, look no further than the sites Pedonald hates the most, as well as international news outlets not owned by American oligarchs.
A shortlist:
This is not true and unfortunately amplifies the belief that nothing can’t be trusted anymore, which plays right into the fearmongers’ hands, as well as any corporation willing to profit endlessly on relentless fact distorting and the misery it creates.
The problem of the widespread use of a stupid expression like “fake news” is that it implies that news are true or false. The most common definition of the word “news” is: “information about recent and important events“.
This information can be interpreted and distorted to push one’s agenda. As soon as this happens, it ceases to be news. It simply becomes false statements about the news.
There are news agencies and websites outside the US that are not biased. You have to look for them. Check some links I posted above, that’s a good start.
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Whether people want to admit it or not, racism in the US has ALWAYS been present. While it’s become less blatant from the 70’s onwards, it is very much alive and not going away. The current resurgence is not surprising at all. Every period in History when there was widespread economic turmoil brought exacerbated racism. This is the basis of populism: the masses need someone to blame for their misery so the immigrants and minorities are usually the easiest target - anyone who is deemed not to belong and can’t defend themselves.
Corporations will use any available means to make money, as we’ve mentioned already in this thread. Tech companies don’t care what their algorithms push to any audience - and lobbying has made sure that they cannot be liable for the content that exists on their platform. There’s a reason why all the tech CEOs happily donated huge amounts of money to the new administration and posed on the inauguration pictures happily ever after: their fear of what Dear Leader could do to their bottom line if they didn’t kiss the master’s feet.
The social media algorithms then create echo chambers that are very hard to escape from. Watch a video, “like” or stay too long on a post, and, insidiously at first, you’ll get more and more of the same content in your feed until it overtakes everything else.
Children are the easiest age group to manipulate. If you ingrain certain ideas and ideologies in their heads while they’re young, they are more likely than not to carry those nefast ideas throughout their lives and pass them on to their own children, whether they realize it or not, continuing the abuse loop that makes sure racism never truly goes away. The American population must remain “the right color”, according to the 0.1%/the generational wealth that owns the country.
Why do you think the GOP lost their shit so hard when Obama got elected (and still hate him with a vengeance, making sure their brainwashed cultists view him as the devil)? Because he isn’t the right color. that’s as simple as that.
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Yuri bezmenov ideological subversion.
Ive read so much stuff from various political alignments. And theres just so much damn political media content its exhausting.
Its not going away…
People like to hear themselves talk.
We gotta learn to coexist with people that we disagree with as well as work together.
We are slowly forgetting the idea of america.
For america is a secular democratic republic that protects the freedoms of all of its citizens regardless of their demographic and that america should function solely like a meritocracy.
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