I love that whenever something really awful happens to you, they try to justify it by saying, “God never gives you more than you can handle.”
I know people who have been driven batsh*t insane by what God has given them.
If there is a god he is an asshole and doesn’t deserve worship. I heard he’s the bastard that lets all those children die all the time!
I mean, are we assholes because we let ants die? I agree if he exists he isn’t deserving of worship, but calling him an asshole for letting kids die is kinda rich from a species that mostly gives no fucks about creatures with lower intellect.
Do almost 1/8th of the ants worship humans as their saviour?
would anything change if they did?
Likely, I mean, humans are real, and if a few hundred billion ants started building temples to us, I suspect things would change.
Nope, and they have actual proof of our existence.
Just goes to show how dumb we are as a species. Or maybe there would be less people worshipping God if we knew he existed and gave no fucks about people suffering or dying? Who knows.
Agreed
Yep, but if you ask them why babies have cancer they suddenly don’t have time to debate you.
They won’t debate you but they will tell you that “God has a plan for you” or something like that. Even if that plan is living a super short life and dying and agonizing death.
Yep. Apparently babies deserve to suffer for…being born? I’ve been told I should see my horrible migraine as a gift from God that he thinks I’m strong enough to carry. 🤬 Ah yes, the “gift” of unending pain. That’s not a gift, that’s a curse.
Presumably, people who say that have never read the Bible.
They hide their inhumanity behind some magical sky wizard with a greater plan and misconstrue their privilege as strength of character and confidence.
It’s all survivorship bias.
The only folks who cling to that belief are the ones who haven’t been broken on the wheel of life
And the ones that do snap and do horrible things aren’t really true (insert religion here) anyway.
It’s survivorship bias with an added dash of No True Scotsman.
Unless the horrible things are done to people they hate.
I made this connection a month ago - that a couple of generations of humans grew up breathing exhaust from leaded gasoline and dust from lead paint and had a bit of an epiphany about the state of the world.
I admire your optimism about the human race.
Yeah, I’ve unfortunately encountered more than a fair share of younger human-shaped excrement that definitely weren’t exposed to high levels of lead.
Maybe we’ll find out PFAS has similar effects.
You gotta consider a lot of rural areas don’t have as strict ordinances for dwellings, so it’s entirely possible the 20-year-olds you’re talking to ate lead paint chips growing up.
Dude. As a whole the world is stupider by several tens of IQ points solely in specifically due to lead poisoning.
Lead poisoning is the single most detrimental effect ever experienced by humanity so very few people even understand that!
Lead poisoning is the single most detrimental effect experienced by humanity, so far.
Wait til they find out what microplastics do to us, if we last long enough to get the results on that shit.
They’ve been poisoning people with lead since before Roman times. They used to make drinking glasses from lead
When it comes to lead tainted… drinking glasses are bad, breathing air are worse.
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Makes me wonder if we’re not undergoing something similar. I imagine that a lot of people didn’t know the effects it’d have on them when those things were first introduced
Plastics are the modern lead.
Having made that connection, how does it feel about the criticisms we have toward our previous generation? I say this being born in the late 80s, so my folks are from this generation, although I can say at least 50% of them somehow escaped the associated issues, which to me I wonder if there’s some genetic predispotion, and widespread, to exposure to lead causing essentially cognitive disabilities.
Anyway, if you buy into this (and I do), were essentially chastising this generation for fucking our shit up, knowing full well they have intellectual disabilities. And I have no idea what their OG knew about lead exposure, or when we learned about its effects on the majority of the population, so I’m not trying to point fingers at the moment.
But we essentially have a generation of mentally handicapped people, who because of their handicap have terrible reasoning skills, and me and you and our generation point our fingers at them and say you’re fucking our shit up. It’s like that Mitch Hedberg joke, Dammit Otto, you’re an alcoholic: dammit Otto, you have lupus.
Just rambling. Perhaps I had a little exposure myself. I just don’t want to assume the worst in people, that they’re knowingly fucking our shit up. They just don’t know better.
You say you don’t want to assume the worst in people, and so do I, but at some point we have to be realistic.
Yeah, and I’m being purely philosophical, I think we are able, as humans, to say hey, you may have been dealt a bad hand insofar as being raised around Stupid Smoke, but your personal responsibility skills are shit, and there’s no two ways around it.
Your philosophical dilemma is valid, but I would point out that pointing fingers is the best choice we have in this matter. Say, indeed, the ones fucking shit up do have intellectual disabilities, they still continue doing it. Reprimanding them for it is perhaps society’s way of trying to get them to stop. Sort of like in the case of a child I guess - children being considered in this argument as having not enough understanding of the consequences of their actions. Equate, if you will, ‘goddamn it Billy, stop running in the street’ to ‘goddamnit grandma, stop voting for idiots’.
The problem then is that Billy may listen, but grandma is set in her ways and has the notion that age brings wisdom regardless, so she’s less inclined to listen to what the equivalent of Billy for her has to say.
I see no alternatives for this (that is to say, an attempt to correct erroneous behaviour) in the context of the aspirations of modern society.
As a thought experiment, in the most extreme case, what would we do? Test everyone for lead and remove, for example, the right to vote across a certain threshold? That doesn’t take into account the baseline intellectual ability of individual (which can vary across a population) and the degree to which said discovered lead levels would affect them. It’s entirely possible that a lead-laden ‘smart’ brain still has more capability than a pure but idiotic one. Not sure how we’d ever assess that. Not to mention the system would be exploited as soon as possible to channel power.
We could of course, stop pointing fingers and forgive them, for they know not what they do, and it’d probably have about the same effect.
The only answer I keep coming to is this country will tear itself apart. We’ve got groups of people who refuse to accept empirical evidence for things that don’t affect them personally; imagine when you say hey, we scienced you and you’re dumb because of your exposures to A, B, and C.
So yeah, I have so little hope, and I try to look at things on a more micro scale. I can’t inherit the problems of thousands of miles away, especially when there are some problems here that I can deal with, and hopefully make my and my family’s lives better. And then I can just hope everyone else everywhere is thinking the same way. And maybe we are. Maybe my generation will pull ourselves up by our proverbial bootstraps as soon as the generation before us is done stepping on our heads. But then I think that’s too hopeful of me.
I think you’re on the right track with focusing on the local things you can change. And keeping hope alive is important! I mean, I may not have a choice in being fucked and miserable later, so if I can avoid that now, then that’s great.
I liked Spider’s point about means testing for voting. It wouldn’t work, although it does seem like it would be a step forward. We can’t even means test our politicians which has seemed necessary more and more recently… those pesky legalities, lol.
I saw that Mr. Roger’s quote “look to the helpers” recently on here and that keeps bouncing back in my head when I get negative thoughts. I know it’s not completely sustainable, but I keep seeing the impact of positivity on my life and the people around me, which is a nice change from the norm.
I imagine the next generation will involve Zoomers corrupted by microplastics and mercury.
But we’re the plastic generation…
That’s certainly something that may have a significant impact on the future.
Plastic is what’s making everyone gay! Lol
JK I know people have always been gay. We will probably just get cancer from the plastic
Lol. Then again I’ve seen people claim that banning lead paint actually increases the risk of cancer because it blocks radiation so painting walls with it protects you like at the dentist. 🤦
I think we’re pretty far past ‘may’ at this point since they’re finding microplastics in blood and lungs.
Microplastics, BPAs, PFAs… We’re screwed.
Sherwin shouldn’t have made his paint so delicious
Lead Paint: Tasty but Deadly!
Leaded fuel or leaded pipes didn’t matter to that generation, so why do their bigoted, stuck-up views still matter now?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–crime_hypothesis
There’s reason to believe the very real crime spike in the 80s/90s was people from the 60s/70s quite literally going insane due to their lead exposure.
The survivors are both traumatized by the experience and suffering from a lower but still harmful dose of brain damage. They express this through short tempers and irrational anxiety, which they then rationalize as justification for bigotry.
Ie, going into hysterics when you see black people because your brain is polluted, but then reinforcing the anxiety with a nightly dose of Tucker Carlson.
I believe the authors of the first Freakonomics book did delve into this phenomenon.
Freakonomics gave almost complete credit to abortion, with some wonky numbers, not really mentioning lead or other factors. That whole book is interesting, but very slipshod…
I like this analysis. Fun, but dangerous to take at face value.
You’re so quick to blame lead poisoning when we all know poor mental health and Alzheimer’s is doing all the heavy lifting.
Lead poisoning will lead to poor mental health, just FYI
But it’s not a prerequisite.
It’s not a prerequisite, but it is correlated. Plenty of people have poor mental health without lead poisoning, but it’s unquestionably true that there are people who would have much better mental health had they not been breathing in lead particles for decades.
And Alzheimer’s!
The Lord works in mysterious ways!
Protestantism: “God is me!”
You had me, up until lead poisoning.
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If they were assholes due to Lead poisoning theyd be sympathetic to a nonzero degree. But the reality is that they have no one to blame but themselves.
I mean, almost everyone who grew up in a large city from the 40s-80s was a victim to lead poisoning and other toxic chemicals (hell, lead in gasoline was officially banned in 96!). Doesn’t absolve them of sin but you’ve got to feel a little sorry for how little emotional control it can leave someone with.
