ameancow

how is this blatant lie allowed to remain published online?

A lot of people still think there's consequence or rules or regulations on what publications can say or do. We abolished those laws a long time ago.

tl:dr

Fact is, for it to work as a placebo, you need to believe it will work.

What's even wilder is you don't have to consciously believe it, you can unconsciously believe it and it will still work! Doctors will routinely prescribe placebos and be very open about the fact that it's just a placebo, that there is no chemical compound in the medication.

And yet, the act of taking a pill from a bottle seems to trigger something. Recent research has actually identified part of this mechanism in rat brains. There really is a part of the brain that can be tricked into releasing a set of chemicals that relieve pain, reduce inflammation and create better moods. Someday we might have a placebo pill that actually has medication in it. Wildly convoluted how the brain works.

I stopped listening to this bullshit when we had one party openly wanting to roll us back to the dark ages, allowing raped children to die and rolling back the civil rights... and another who just wanted like, healthcare mid populism. If you think it's extremist to think we need to push back on fascism at all costs then we have nothing to talk about, there is no compromise with hate. That's literally what they want. You are playing right into their tricks.

See, I agree with you on everything here, and I even used to hold this same position:

But I don’t think intellectual cowardice / laziness explains all centrists.

I really, really wanted to be charitable, as a former conservative, as someone who grew up in the deep rural south surrounded by hardline conservatives, and then flipped a hard 180-degree later in life, I figured my own unique perspective allowed me to see both sides.

Then the fire nation attacked.

And by that I mean covid happened, and with it came off a lot of masks. Now I believe that not only is centrism intellectual laziness, so is ALL political dysfunction. It's as close as I will get to a twinge of centerism myself, that I have seen into the hearts of people and have seen that they share a common factor that unites us all: laziness.

It's too broad of a term, and would take an essay to define properly in this context, but at heart it's what drives everyone, a desire to avoid challenge.

Learning and becoming politically astute to even a grade-school level takes some amount of effort and self-improvement and betterment and study and acceptance of new ideas, and we have left the age of self-challenge. Just look at the state of video games with quest markers to do anything, and 30-second popular video clips for the shortest of attention spans, or make a comment more than three paragraphs in a popular forum if you need evidence that people are not out to challenge themselves broadly. They set into a position that feels comfortable based on who they're around and who validates them, and they generally stay there. We don't celebrate people changing their minds, if anything people treat it with shame, and not without good reason. I have been shouted out of leftist spaces for saying I used to be right-wing in some of my views. (Purity testing appears to be another common trait.)

And here we thought it was bad trying to get a coherent message accepted on the left. Leftist infighting is legendary because the left has no idea how to dog whistle, which is a good thing. But the fact that there are 900,000 splinter groups with wildly different ideologies perfectly willing to fight tooth and nail to be the One True Leftism means the left knows infighting. Experts at it even. That's why leftist policy is so timid and careful usually.

The right has ridden long and hard on the basic fact that most of their base are too stupid to think hard enough about ideology that they could worry about having to make them all work together. You easily get anti-vax moms riding alongside armband-wearing nazis on the right, because they're both too dumb to realize that they're supporting each other.

But all that is finally starting to come to a head (hopefully) as the current Democrat contenders are talking actual policy, as in, things they will do on a legal, prescriptive, professional level to enact changes. The right has gotten away with not doing anything for a long time because the left became basically the opposition group instead of actual challengers.

So they have to put their actual desires on paper, AND get them universally accepted by everyone on the right. It all looks a little different in that light. Seeing abolishment of birth control right next to their desire to abolish Civil Rights is making them sweat. These are NOT universally held positions of people on the right.

And honestly, most on the right, even the most frothing zealots, they don't really want social disruption and rollbacks to the dark-ages. They are children. They are toddlers. They want to be heard and be recognized that they are angry, and they want to share that anger with the rest of their own little WWE Wrestlemania audience that lives in a fantasy world. That's all. They don't want to work on coalition building, they don't want to phone-bank, they don't want to have debates, they don't want policies signed into law that will change their comfortable lives.

These are people who really need to discover some kind of Dungeons and Dragons gaming system that appeals to their anger and stupid worldbuilding.

Conservatives clearly don’t even understand words.

Which is wild because these are the same people who treat words like we found them in a fucking meteor crater and have to uphold the ancient definitions of gender, sex and relationships between people AT ALL COSTS.

in the real world

An entire generation of people have been all but ruined because their parents raised them saying "Don't believe anything on the internet, it's not the real world" and as a result it's become the place where we all get all of our information, opinions and news and do most of our social interactions, and yet have this "out" we can always pull when it makes us uncomfortable.

Don't like what some people somewhere think or say? Don't need to engage or weigh in, retreat to a bubble. Don't like what someone said about your comment? Say the whole thing isn't real, call light to the "bubble" while still being in it.

It's so, so many people. Just avoiding uncomfortable realities, repeating lines that sound like they work to stop arguments or discomfort, not actually engaging with anything in a way that would challenge your own feelings or beliefs.

Who and what exactly are you talking about? It's nearly impossible to have an intelligent conversation when it's all hand waving and vibes. Have some balls, what's on your mind.

Otherwise people should think ahead.

The vast majority of people are thinking ahead when they get a loan to get an education. The rest of your comment is telling people with problems "fuck you, got mine" and I'm done with it. Enjoy your block. Enjoy your blessings and enjoy being hateful to people who had different luck in life, I'm sure abandoning human decency will really help in everything you do.

ITT people conflating liberalism with centerism.

Exterminate.... feed and provide healthcare, you know, same thing.

edit: i realized that I had blocked the user below in another thread because they are obtuse, unkind and stupid. I won't get any answers from them unless I unblock them. Oh well. What's for lunch.