Signtist

Morf is a good way to introduce more mainstream-centric people to the sound of throat singing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iN1QsDgSZw

Exactly this. Forgiveness is something you do when you’ve otherwise stopped the abuser. It’s not meant to be a tool to stop abuse. You need to stop the abuse by whatever means necessary, make sure it never comes back, THEN forgive the abuser and move on.

All my homies got eye nipples.

Sorry to hear that. The isolation definitely exacerbated my mom’s conspiracist ideation as well.

No worries, I hope your parents manage to get themselves out eventually. If they’re anything like my mom, no amount of outside pleading will change their mind.

The one she talked about all the time was called the Minnesota Assembly. I think it’s an offshoot of the whole sovereign citizen thing. I believe they used a telegram group chat as their main way of communicating. She died a little over a year ago, after they convinced her to treat her breast cancer with the herbal teas they sold instead of going to a doctor, so I’m not sure what’s going on with the group anymore.

Oh, yeah, I don’t necessarily think that every toxic site was specifically designed to be toxic, most were just designed in a way that people are drawn to. But when enough people flock to a place, it becomes toxic eventually. That just happens to coincide with the fact that when someone becomes wealthy from their website taking off, they often become corrupted by the attention and become the big figureheads we hate. They were probably assholes before, but now they’re rich entitled assholes, which is much worse.

In the end the biggest issue with the internet is that too many people becoming easily connected to one another must also include toxic people easily connecting with one another, spreading the toxicity until it’s inescapable in the community. I think we could slowly overcome the issues associated with connectivity on our own in time, and we were for a while, but the internet opened the floodgates and gave us too much connection before we were able to handle it.

My own mom went from a staunch democrat to believing Trump was literally the second coming of Jesus Christ sent to deal with actual honest-to-goodness Lizard People running the government, all because some small community of 100-odd people she found on the internet said so, and that many people can’t be wrong.

Fair, I used the term as a catch-all that ends up inadvertently catching less-harmful sites as well. However, while there are only a few toxic sites, they’re the most popular, and even when they fade into obscurity, they’re replaced by other new toxic sites. They’re designed to draw people in, so it doesn’t really matter how few there are, they’re always among the most popular websites on the internet.

The real question is whether the benefit of better access to scientific research offsets the detriment of social media. Unfortunately, I think social media use is much, much more widespread, and is thus having a significantly stronger detrimental effect than scientific research access and every other benefit combined.

It doesn’t actually matter to him what the truth is, it only matters that you can’t prove it’s not what he’s claiming it to be. It’s the tried and true strategy for bigots everywhere.

Being a conservative just boils down to being scared that people will do to you what you do to them.

The loophole is to deny the humanity of the people you dislike.

They had these STD plushies at a store my family visited several years ago. My sister and I were checking them out, so I picked one up, read the tag, and told her “I got The Clap.” I assumed that she’d read the plushie she had picked up, tell me which one it was, we’d have a chuckle, and find something else to look at.

Apparently she hadn’t yet figured out that they were STD plushies, and thought I had chosen that moment to tell her in confidence about an STD I had contracted. It was pretty awkward, but it was at least nice to know that she’d have brought me to the doctor in secret if I’d needed her to!

Most people don’t actually care about the state of the world, they just want justification to think that it’s not their problem.