Real. I can’t stand fake things, especially fake nature. Wood veneers, marble painted plaster laminates, LVT, no no no. I’d sooner have no tree at all.

In my experience, it’s because as part of becoming millionaires they also become obnoxious money-obsessed losers who are totally unenjoyable to talk to

Yeah, far be it from me to rush to the defense of religion, but this is not quite as scary as it sounds. You could very well have a religious person answering this survey who absolutely hates Trump and thinks he is a force for evil. Like you said, most Christians believe literally every event is part of God’s plan (which is quite reasonable given their axioms tbh).

In fact the article clarifies this:

"That survey, of a nationally representative sample of 8,937 Americans from across the U.S., found that overall, 4 percent believed God chose Trump because He believes in his policies, while another 32 percent think Trump’s election is part of God’s plan, although God may not necessarily agree with his program. Nearly half, 49 percent, said God doesn’t get involved in elections, while 14 percent said they don’t believe in God.

When it comes to white evangelicals, those numbers are much higher, with 8 percent believing God ordained Trump because He agrees with his policies, and 63 percent thinking his election is part of God’s plan, whether the deity agrees with his policies or not. Their beliefs held firm with regards to Joe Biden’s election in 2020 with 67 percent of white evangelicals believing his victory was part of God’s plan – but with the stark difference that a negligible percentage believed that God agreed with his policies."

Depending on the social media in question, I’m not sure there’s much difference! I may be misinformed about the state of Tiktok and Instagram though, as I don’t use them myself. It’s just my observations from seeing others on them

This is definitely not true. Gooning usually means like multiple continuous hours of masturbation, usually with the purpose of entering some kind of zoned-out trance state. I think it is somewhat niche, as I’m pretty sure most people just masturbate for 5-15 minutes, just looking at porn but not by any means “entranced” by it. The term gooning has gotten so popular because the activity itself has gotten more popular. Personally I attribute it to people’s strong need to dissociate from the world in a way that isn’t expensive, and that isn’t so harmful that you can’t do it really frequently. It used to be that drugs would fill that void for the populace, but now people need more drugs to cope than they used to, and they can’t afford it anyways. Plus drugs fuck with your ability to stay employed, etc.

Another major contributor to it, imo, is the deluge of horny-bait content on Tiktok and Instagram. Even things that aren’t trying to market an onlyfans still are gonna feature people doing forced cleavage jiggles and whatnot. Sex sells, there’s nothing new there, but nowadays it’s almost like you NEED sex to sell. Basically anybody who is into vtubers or modern anime is an example of someone that just can’t really engage with something unless there’s constantly some ass or titties on screen, or some kind of horny undertone or subtext at the very least.

Ultimately I think gooning is a better form of “indulgence” and dissociation than the alternatives, but its popularity is a sad sign of the times. All humans like to turn their brain off once in awhile, but if a large subset of the population is basically crying out to have their brain off every day for hours at a time, and for it to be in every form of media and relaxation, I can only see that as a sad situation.

Probably not at all, it’s just that humans have a wide variety of beliefs

Yeah it really sucks. I was in the middle of developing an Android game and now I don’t really want to. Luckily I’m working with Unreal so I can just build it for desktop distribution anyways. But still, ugh.

How does this even matter if phone manufacturers block apps that aren’t approved by them? Forgive my ignorance, never done much mobile dev stuff

Thank you for saying it so I didn’t have to. It’s so disappointing to see people on “my side” say dumb crap like “wait so if ur anti antifa that means ur calling urself fascist haha 🕵️‍♂️🕵️‍♂️🧠 Q.E.D republikkkan”. Like fuck me. Just like you said it’s the same shit as Republicans saying “oh you’re socialist??? Google what Nazi stands for sweaty 🤭🤗”

You’d think people would learn not to use shitty reasoning when it’s used against them. But it seems like instead people only care that the reasoning is bad if it contradicts them. And as soon as they want to throw things at their enemy they’ll pick up whatever flawed garbage they can, not worried about how it reflects on them or how it undermines the state of reasonable public discourse. Any weapon is valid as long as it’s used against the Enemy. So disappointing.

Note: My rant against people here is not directed at OP who seems to be genuinely confused about the dynamic of misrepresentative naming. And to clarify further, it doesn’t matter that antifa isn’t a misrepresentative name: it’s opponents think it is.

What is it that you go to Reddit for that you don’t get from Lemmy? To me, the only reason someone might look at Reddit instead is if Lemmy lacks the content they seek - do you think that’s the case for you? Or maybe it’s something else?

Yeah I swear every time religion appears innocuous it’s actually just incubating its next wave of evil. At some point people need to say enough is enough. No more being tolerant of religion or polite about it. They should be treated with the same two-faced smiling disgust they treat us with.

Just because the doomsday cultists happen to share the same name for their beliefs as people who are substantially less insane than them

Yes, the other Christians are who I am referring to here. Although I do believe that the fundamental way of religious thinking (belief contrary to logic) does inevitably degrade into the behavior of the doomsday cult, in the same way that a seed inevitably becomes a plant given the conditions that it latently seeks out. So while I do not hate your everyday type Christian, I do think it is important not to create the conditions that they seek out, as that will result in a hate-worthy entity before long. The particular conditions, I believe, are an environment where they cannot be questioned, an environment where logical thinking is not valued, an unequal ability to disperse their beliefs while others cannot, etc. Given those conditions, harmless beliefs will expand to become harmful beliefs in the same way a liquid conforms to whatever container you put it in. This goes for any kind of belief, not just religious ones. But religion is a smart enough meme to encode the importance of creating that environment as part of its core values, which makes it a belief that is at especially greater risk of degrading into harmful behavior. This much is undeniable, as you hardly ever see people getting in doomsday cults over their favorite type of cheese or other non-religious beliefs.

So no, I don’t mean all Christians, but in the same way that all Christians think I deserve to go to hell in my current state but may still treat me with kindness in hopes of what I may become, I believe all Christians deserve to be treated with suspicion and wariness in their current state in hopes of what they may NOT become. All things considered, I think it’s a pretty de-escalating stance for me to take.

It is so utterly insane that so many humans that I share this planet with are basically in a doomsday cult, and what really gets me is that you’re considered an asshole or an extremist if you ever say something like “I hate the doomsday cult and the people in the doomsday cult are stupid”. You get called intolerant etc etc. You’re damn right I’m intolerant of a bunch of morons who have literally no incentive to care about the long-term well being of our planet and species. Just because the doomsday cultists happen to share the same name for their beliefs as people who are substantially less insane than them does not mean that they get a pass on being insane or that they get to be entitled to the same degree of respect that their less insane counterparts are entitled to.

I’m tempted to say well, at least they also want the Epstein files to be released. But the people with this type of mentality are just going to sit around waiting for some literal miracle to take place to release the files, because they believe in miracles and that’s not an irrational plan of action as far as they’re concerned.

People of any race can be Muslim. When someone says “Christians are all crazy” do we say that they’re racist towards white people just because the majority of Christians are white?

So then why is it that when someone implies that Muslims are all crazy we assume that that is racism at work?

And it’s not exactly a random thing to bring up. Rapture is supposedly going to apply to Christians so even if it did happen, theoretically the Muslims would be left behind, and so in the context of the comic posted that says all the religious wackos are gone, he’s pointing out that they wouldn’t all be gone.

I’m lost on what is racist about this. Could you please explain?

Sometimes the blame falls on a non-Jew minority group!

I suppose. But if hundreds of people started accusing you of being a secret space alien, you might one day feel the urge to say “listen everyone, I am not an alien, I am a human”. It’s pretty messed up if people hear you say that and go “hmmm exactly what an alien would say tbh”

I hope that people aren’t really taking this too seriously as a reason to suspect Israel. There was a LOT of chatter saying that they killed him, by the Nazis of course. A dominant narrative on /pol/ is basically that Kirk got in bed with the Jews and now he’s paid the price for trusting them.

From the standpoint of your average left-leaning person, Israel making a statement like this seems completely out of the blue and makes them look really guilty. But there’s a whole demographic of people who really think that they did it. I don’t think it’s too unreasonable that they would make a statement about it. And let me be clear. I absolutely hate Israel with all my heart. But there are plenty of events in this world that they are not responsible for.

More importantly, this seems dangerously close to reasoning like: “You wouldn’t defend yourself against these accusations unless they were actually true!” Which is definitely not a good bar to set.

What an odd question. Why do you wanna know? Also, I don’t know.

Fair, fair

The best thing that could possibly come of his death is if nobody ever spoke of him or thought of him again. These people’s power is entirely derived from people talking about them. If it continues long past their death, they may as well be immortal.