DreamerofDays

That went from zero to apocalypse very quickly.

I think you’ve been chasing the news dragon too long and too hard. Past a point, it doesn’t make you more informed, just… sadder. More given to misanthropy and despair.

We’re here, and we’re not all bad. Most of us want the same things: health, happiness, love, and camaraderie. We want those things for the people we care about— sometimes more than for ourselves.

The vast, vast majority of us are just people. We get caught up in things, and we forget it sometimes, but that’s a people thing too. And so is helping— when tragedy strikes, or those times we create tragedy, people are also the ones running toward the danger and uncertainty to help save those who cannot save themselves.

So long as we are anecdotal, that has not been my experience.

Judgments along observance lines, and people thinking those in some denominations are crazy or lesser, but I haven’t seen it drawn on those lines.

Generally the same kind of a thing you’ll find in any religion, or any fandom for that matter— those who are more observant or more dedicated may say the less observant/dedicated aren’t doing it right; the less observant/more casual may say the more observant/dedicated are crazy.

I’m wondering if the degree of believability of the image has, or should have any bearing on the answer here. Like, if a third party who was unaware of the image’s provenance came across it, might they be likely to believe the image is authentic or authorized?

For another angle, we allow protections on the usage of fictional characters/their images. Is it so wild to think that a real person might be worthy of the same protections?

Ultimately, people are going to be privately freaky how they’re gonna be privately freaky. It mostly only ever becomes a problem when it stops being private. I shouldn’t have to see that a bunch of strangers made porn to look like me, and neither should Taylor. And mine are unlikely to make it into tabloids.

Eh, there’s also a decent chunk of non-native English speakers who might have a harder time with written sarcasm, and Poe’s law, I don’t doubt, accounts for more.

I don’t have their numbers, but this isn’t the first place I’ve seen similar quoted. First one I found through some friends’ discussion was this, which puts us, at a quick glance, at around a third of last year’s total(still plenty bad).

To use the old words: “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature”

Believing this account outright is just as foolish as dismissing it outright.

There’s a reason “the first casualty of war is the truth” is a cliche— it’s because it’s very hard to know exactly what’s going on when there’s so much chaos and impetus for people to push agendas.

I have some assumptions I’m confident about, but those are fairly broad, and based on the nature of what happens in any war. Specifics I’m trying hard to slow-roll my reactions to and full acceptance of— I’ve seen way too many news stories about active situations be proven in part or in whole false, and most of those aren’t in war zones.

I think this is ignoring the seas of dross that have fallen away in the past. There have always been bad movies, and unoriginal movies, some of them doing quite well at the box office(used as a metric to show that people were showing up to see them). We don’t hold a lot of them in popular memory because we don’t watch them anymore, and what’s left from those eras are the movies of sufficient quality or resonance that we continue to watch them.

The system has a number of issues that are well trod, and certain pitfalls which are inherent, but hanging a lack of quality or unoriginality entirely on capitalism is overselling it.

I would posit that a lack of moderation, or a form of monomania is a bigger culprit here. Too much focus on the business side can stifle creativity, but too much focus on the creative side can result in sprawling, unfinished messes. With too much focus on safety we can be stigmatised from action, but with too much focus on action we can lose our humanity in favor of feeding the gears of progress.

This accounts for the bean counters, but doesn’t grant them the power of being the one true reason for everything being bad.

A lot of the internet survives by pattern and habit. Pattern, habit, and the hope, founded or not, that things might get better with a site you’ve been using for years.