fear

Man people are judgy as hell. I like to think that I’d notice and stop too, but at 11pm, tired in the middle of nowhere with no street lights? How many of us know 100% that we would have stopped in time? It’s understandable how this happened.

After an entire decade of directing people to drive off a goddamn bridge, Google should apologize to the family and settle. It’s shameful. Get a better update team if you’re going to provide a mapping service.

1. Don’t use Tiktok (and other low quality social media like Twitter) and encourage people you know to do the same. Suggest alternatives like federated sites, and help people navigate it if you can.

2. Firmly correct disinformation when you see it. If you have a topic of interest you find yourself repeatedly addressing, keep a short copy/paste response with easily digestible sources to make the process quick and painless.

3. Engage as little as possible with disinformation, since any kind of engagement is exactly what they’re looking for. When you stumble upon it, state a brief sourced correction and quickly leave. If someone beat you to it, simply leave and avoid in the future.

4. Teach your friends and family about the dangers of misinformation, and the importance of vetting sources. Peer reviewed journal = great. Random youtuber/tiktoker = needs sources to confirm validity.

5. Try to be as polite as possible when addressing disinformation because aggression can cause people to dig their heels in and push them further into the false narrative.

6. Learn terms to describe the spread of disinformation that are easy for people to grasp. Learning and teaching others about things like “good/bad faith arguments” so you can spot and effectively counter trolls, recognizing “irony poisoning” that is a driving force behind the normalization of extremist views, and understanding how “woke” actually means “tolerant and respectful of the differences between human beings” can all help people to see what’s happening and protect against disinformation.

7. If you’re motivated enough, start your own publication that provides accurate, well sourced information on your topics of interest, or join an already established publication as a freelance contributor.

8. Don’t give up. Don’t let anyone convince you that the fight is already over and that we’re doomed to live out 1984. The real fight hasn’t even begun, because so many people are too caught up in their own stressful lives to realize there’s a full blown culture war going on here. Once more people open their eyes to it, sanity will prevail. These points here are exactly how you can begin opening people’s eyes.

Pretty sure you could substitute “autism” with any topic at all and the point would be accurate.

Why would you assume it’s an emergent property and thus should be dismissed as not being a force of nature? I’m making fewer assumptions than you are by wanting to list it alongside the other forces until we can determine if it is emergent or not, and the implications of such emergence. It’s kind of a big deal that we can sit here and ponder the forces of nature with some degree of control over our little sack of atoms.

It’s safe to say that this list is going to change over time and represents a current snapshot of humanity’s limited understanding. Under the current snapshot of human understanding, leaving it off of the list seems to me to indicate an ironic bias on the behalf of researchers who must use the very force in question to do anything. By necessity, it is the overarching phenomenon surrounding all other forces since the only place we can definitively know these forces even exist is within our own mind. To say anything more is to make assumptions.

While I agree that a certain level of assumptions are necessary if we’re going to get anywhere, I’m also acutely aware that they’re still assumptions and that assumptions are not scientific. If we’re going to be scientific about this, we need to make as few assumptions as possible.

Forces of Nature

1. electromagnetism
2. strong nuclear force
3. weak nuclear force
4. gravity
   5?. whatever the hell might be acting on the muons in this article

Quick, everyone ignore 0 because it’s “too hard”, even though it’s the only reason we can study 1-5: consciousness

J&J should have taken action years ago, they could have prevented so much suffering and death. This is a great article on the issue from back in 2020, explaining how J&J could still profit even if they only charged 25 cents per pill. Instead they charged several tens of thousands of dollars for a course of the medication, leaving 80% of people in the world who need treatment unable to access what might save their lives. It’s unconscionable.

Thanks for speaking out and sharing. I’ll do what little I can on my end and boycott this company until they do better. At this point I trust the no name brand over J&J anyways so it’s an easy option.

People who have good reasoning skills can see it for what it is, so we need to collectively get into the habit of calling out disingenuous manipulation and put a stop to it. Rather than focusing on refuting each specific point, draw attention to the most ridiculous points, refute one or two, then stop engaging entirely because it is self-defeating.

The fact that this man is still given televised platforms after everything is unreal. All that does is give the illusion that there is substance to his manipulation. He needs to be shunned to his echo chamber and the world needs to move on.