You can blame whoever you want, but the real blame comes down to one simple thing.
Religion.
The true cancer of society. The ultimate grift and control. The ultimate lie that turned millions into monsters. I hope that when soceity resets itself that all religion is abolished or at least a real law that restricts all religions from public services. Apparently, the separation of church and state is a smoke screen in today's society.
While I hear you and mostly agree, “abolishing” religion will not have the intended effect.
Example: Much of Japan was atheist or basically non-religious before christians came along. Fast forward a couple hundred years, once christianity was legally banned in Japan, it just created a fuckton of martyrs and actually galvanized the remaining christians, who’ve persisted to today.
Probably the only/most effective way to stamp out religion is education—plain and simple. Education and creating a secular culture is the way to go imho.
Unfortunately, the phenomenon of social dogma that gives rise to religion has an evolutionary advantage. It's how you get a bunch of people to focus on a common ends without spending too much time and energy being critical of the means. Humans who rally unquestioningly behind some percieved commonality get stuff done, regardless of how ethical it is. It's why the Catholic church is immune to "cancel culture". If any other modern institution had a documented history of figureheads systematically abusing children, they would be finished. But if everyone involved can say "that's just the actions of a few evil individuals, they don't represent my faith," then they've achieved social immunity.
I honestly believe that until we see a belief system that emphasizes human dignity over corporate profits, we will continue our race to the bottom of capitalism. This isn't something a democracy "reasons" its way out of, because falsifiable beliefs based in reason will always lose some argument (by design).
I think the Japanese religion of Shinto is pretty close to a best case scenario for a religion. It's actually really fascinating. At its core is a belief that a spirit or godlike entity inhabits every single thing, living or inanimate, so you should treat everything with the respect of a divine being. But what you wouldn't expect is, most people don't literally believe these gods exist, they just see that practicing the religion makes their society better. In the west, we have a huge number of "non-practicing religious" people, but in Japan there is a huge number of "shinto-practicing non-religious" people. Combined with the fact that it (somehow) doesn't have any figurehead trying to coopt it, it's basically exclusively a net win for their society.
Btw abolishing religion is also be the quickest way to convince a bunch of people to start/join a religion.
The Tea Party was an astroturf'd campaign cooked up by the Koch brothers to realign conservative ideology with oligarchy under the guise of "originalist" patriotism. A very successful farce.
Much like the "right to life", "Moral Majority" (which is a useful misnomer for Christian Conservative minority), and the rest of American Conservatism. Effective smoke and mirrors. All of it.
To be fair, though, popular myths are what led us here.
Ancient Aliens is the perfect gateway to anti-science, which gave us figures like RFK Jr who now has the power to fuck all the progress we’ve made in the hundreds of years since vaccines.
Creationism is now being taught in public schools, which undermines centuries of science. Public science is being dismantled, all for their rapture fantasies.
They’re not hiding climate science because they disagree, but because they think it’s a sign of the apocalypse and a good thing, so they don’t want people to fight it.
They’ve said this out loud, many times. It’s all on video. Again, Pikachu face.
I feel like nobody read Project 2025. Everyone seems all Pikachu face lately, when they’ve not only told us all this, but blatantly captured all the levers of power.
Also spoiler: This stuff regarding pornography is built so that they will soon define existing as a trans person as being pornographic, and if you're seen existing as a trans person in front of children, you've committed a pedophilic crime against children, and oh yeah, they want to bring back capital punishment for those kind of crimes.
This is just an excuse to literally start murdering the LGBTQ+ community at large.
I don’t think they’re thinking it through like this. Yeah, that will likely happen, but I doubt this is an end goal they have. They don’t think things through like that. They’re reactionary, and trans people make them feel things they don’t want to feel, because Jesus watches them touch themselves. It’s really that simple.
The genocide is on the horizon, but most of them don’t know that – and won’t know it for decades afterwards. That’s why this is so dangerous.
e: look at the porn they watch then tell me this isn’t true. They think these are fetishes, not identities, because they’re devoid of empathy. It’s horrible, but if you understand this, their actions, however reprehensible, make sense.
Is this federated? I use Voyager on iOS exclusively, and that link doesn’t resolve to a community for me. I searched for those terms on Lemmy and didn’t find anything.
If this doesn’t exist on Lemmy, I might start a community and dedicate my life to it.
It's defeating. I remember telling folks left and right. Anyone that would listen. I really don't even feel like talking to folks about it anymore now. It's been a very numb year...
Jokes on them. My 100s of TBs of downloaded porn has a backlog that will take me decades to get through. Funny enough my steam backlog is in the 500s but I'll only keep playing the same 10 games until I die.