The Satanic Panic was around long before D&D and heavy metal music and it never really left. It just moved on to new targets. Someone, somewhere has always been doing something satanic as a plot, it's just easier to find people talking about it in the age of social media.
Same with conspiracy theories. The alt-right never invented anything new, they just recycled things that wingnuts and cranks have been spouting for centuries and adapted them to modern settings. Look at the parallels between "Hillary tortures children and drinks their blood to stay young" and the old Blood Libel conspiracy for example.
I go back and forth as to why I think this kind of thing is so enduring. Either people need to believe in some kind of evil because it allows them to feel good about being on the "right" side of something. It could make them feel smart to find "secrets" that people won't openly admit (because they aren't true). Or they feel some kind of cognitive dissonance if they don't have an enemy and invent one to quiet it. Or maybe it's just a convoluted effort of taking control over something they aren't comfortable with in a "he who can destroy a thing, controls the thing" sort of way. Maybe all of them even.
I dunno, like you said, people are goddamn stupid and fucking nuts sometimes. Shame they're so often dangerous because of it.
I worked nights at a local Walmart once. In the first week I saw multiple drug addicts using in the store, a violent mentally ill woman yelling at her shopping cart because it dropped her frozen carrots, and a man openly masturbating in the women's underwear section.
Wish I'd had the presence of mind to make myself some armor.
One thing that gives me hope is that these chucklefucks will happily eat each other alive over the smallest imagined things. If they don't have a "big evil thing" to organize against they're just one giant fucking bucket of crabs, man.
I imagine that along with the arrest quota, there might be recruiting quota as well. It would be completely in line with how the rest of this administration operates, and large bureaucracies in general, for the people in charge of hiring to only worry about hitting their numbers and covering their own asses.
If there's not a rule that says "don't hire left-leaning reporters" and the guy was otherwise "qualified", the recruiter just wasted an afternoon of work and missed a coffee break because he backed out.
If the reporter had taken the job, his political leanings would have been his first supervisors problem and not the recruiters.
These two have a chance to do something right, to show real leadership and responsibility, and to kick the fucking doors open and shine the light of day on the whole damn mess.
How many working years do they have left? How viable are they as politicians? What purpose does trying to save their own image serve? Do they really think people give a shit about them anymore? Do they really think they're relevant as anything other than a symbol of why their party has failed the nation?
It's not shame. It's insurance. It's to make it difficult/impossible to file a complaint or win a criminal case in the event that the administration crumbles and someone tries to hold them accountable.
A bike just for weight loss or something similar can be cheaper, of course.
Dan John, a prominent figure in the strength and conditioning community, once argued that the best bike for weight loss was a cheap, steel framed, single-speed beach cruiser, especially if you lived in a hilly area.
Most of this kind of drivel relies on people not knowing how to spot an equivocation fallacy when they see one. But there's no need to teach critical thinking, just give them enough reading, writing, and arithmetic to be useful office drones...
As I pointed out in another thread, they act like intimidation is a shield against harm in exactly the same way that schoolyard bullies do. It relies on people's tendency to freeze up and panic when surprised by a violent confrontation to work, and if it doesn't work, things escalate quickly.
The other problem is, those kinds of bullies aren't normally equipped with firearms...
Got pissed at corporate social media for the way they've accelerated the damage being done to our already degraded public discourse but I still needed somewhere to doomscroll and find... gifs... of... nothing in particular...
Not exactly sure what you missed or what your point is supposed to be.
The same would be true of any ad platform. I hate Facebook for all the ills it's caused society and it pisses me off that my breakfast cereal is slightly more expensive because of Zuckerberg's compensation package too.
But Facebook, et al. aren't being discussed here. Reddit is.
Even if I stay off the internet completely, a portion of the money I spend STILL goes in their pocket, and the only way to prevent it is to spend hours exhaustively researching every product I buy to find the one or two alternatives out of hundreds of others that don't feed into the system somehow. And even if product A doesn't buy ads on these platforms, the place I shop for it probably does. If I can't buy direct, as is the case with so many purchases, all that time and research are robbed of any real impact by the fact that my closest retail outlet spends millions on targeted Internet ads.
But it's not really about the money though, it's about where it's going.
In an alternate timeline, Spez, Zuck, and the rest are decent human beings with a functioning conscience and use their platforms for the common good. I don't mind those versions of them getting a piece of my alternate self's dollar. But I don't live in that universe.
So, because I'm stuck here, every single one of these modern-day Prometheus wannabe, god-complex, techbro shitheads can kiss my hairy ass.
Don't they teach them anything before they let them out on the street.
Possibly not. If feel like that's been brought up in the news before.
Or maybe it's just a one time class or a video, and people do get complacent. Or maybe he's just a fucking dumbass and a bully. There's a clear pattern of highschool bully-style confrontation and escalation in many of the videos we're seeing, and standing there is as good a way as any to do just that.
These goons want people to be afraid of them, and act as if they believe that intimidation is a forcefield of some sort, like if they're enough of a threatening asshole that it'll mean they never get hurt.
The whole "act like a scary hardass and people will comply" strategy relies on shock and the tendency for people to freeze up and get rattled when suddenly confronted with a threat from authority or power. They want people to go all deer in the headlights when they get in their face and comply without a fight, or if you fight you're off guard and rattled and there's less of risk to them so they just get to wail on you for a while. It's gratifying for bullies when things are one-sided like that, it makes them feel powerful and righteous. In terms of getting what you want from people, it works well... up to the point that it doesn't.
After that point it's one type of catastrophe or another.
Reddit's main source of revenue is advertising. Other companies pay Reddit to shove ads in your face. You probably buy products from at least some of those companies, and while market forces and consumer perceptions have large influence, operating costs are still a factor in setting those prices. Just like everyone else, Reddit sets the prices of its advertising services based in part on its operating costs, which includes Spez's salary.
Even if you avoid Reddit, things you buy are more expensive because this fucking toolshed gets paid $193 million a year just to be a sociopathic jackoff with a popular website.
I quit Reddit years ago, but I'm still fucking pissed about this shit and I have every right to be.
Some people need an enemy or they can't make sense of the world. I'm not talking about a run of the mill competitive streak, they simply can't understand society as anything other than a struggle for dominance. If they don't have some sort of conflict to focus on, they make one just to quiet the cognitive dissonance they're feeling.
I don't know if it's learned or innate, but it makes people easy fodder for conspiracy theories and the sort of high-functioning sociopaths we've been electing recently.
The Satanic Panic was around long before D&D and heavy metal music and it never really left. It just moved on to new targets. Someone, somewhere has always been doing something satanic as a plot, it's just easier to find people talking about it in the age of social media.
Same with conspiracy theories. The alt-right never invented anything new, they just recycled things that wingnuts and cranks have been spouting for centuries and adapted them to modern settings. Look at the parallels between "Hillary tortures children and drinks their blood to stay young" and the old Blood Libel conspiracy for example.
I go back and forth as to why I think this kind of thing is so enduring. Either people need to believe in some kind of evil because it allows them to feel good about being on the "right" side of something. It could make them feel smart to find "secrets" that people won't openly admit (because they aren't true). Or they feel some kind of cognitive dissonance if they don't have an enemy and invent one to quiet it. Or maybe it's just a convoluted effort of taking control over something they aren't comfortable with in a "he who can destroy a thing, controls the thing" sort of way. Maybe all of them even.
I dunno, like you said, people are goddamn stupid and fucking nuts sometimes. Shame they're so often dangerous because of it.