Why must all conspiracy theories be bucketed together as if it's a single entity and culture. Conspiracies are real and as old as time, and treating any analysis or discussion about them as part of a greater crackpot culture just acts as cover for real ones. In fact there is evidence that the CIA is behind some of the crackpot theories to muddy the water.
I've heard very few if any "conspiracy theorists" talk about sexual blackmail because it's boring. The appeal of a conspiracy is that it grabs people's attention. And there are certain types of attention whores who will spout theories about flat earth, or fake moon landing, because it gets them instant attention and engagement. This is what I think the GP meant, that s/he hates that these people were "right" about politicians being compromised.
Do you blame them? If a global ring of elite pedophiles turned out to be true in spite of all the gaslighting and denial, then why couldn’t the moon landing also be a conspiracy?
Keep in mind that the elite class couldn’t give two shits what the peasant class thinks. In fact, having us believe in false conspiracies helps distract the masses from the true conspiracies :)
I meet kids today who haven’t heard of Microsoft, who regularly play GTA and hand in assignments made in Powerpoint. 20 years ago I discovered that a friend didn’t know Xbox and Word were both from Microsoft. It’s really hard to understand what is common knowledge in different parts of society.
Kids today don’t even know where the files are stored or anything about partitions, drives, directory structure or even how much disk space is available.
They have some files, synced to OneDrive and do everything else fully online (Canva, etc.)
Most of them have never seen a computer with a drive other than C:
My son has never seen a C: drive before. Heck, we got him a Macbook Neo a few weeks ago and I don’t think he has left more than a few coding apps since then. Thankfully he isn’t using AI yet.
Kids today don't even know the most basic x86 assembly instructions! A whole class of third graders, and not one of them could tell me the difference between MOV and LEA!!!! Can you believe it?!?!
When I visited Singapore most people retreated indoors to the AC from about 2:30-4:30 every afternoon. I don’t recall the exact temps then but the idea that everyone would be just fine in a severe heat wave leading to power grid outages is false.
I don't make any sort of claim of 'just fine'. I am saying there will be places and times where people cannot regulate their body temperature via evaporation, so they will die outside without AC within hours. And in Singapore that point hasn't been reached yet.
The point isn't that it's "just fine" right now, it's that it will get way worse.
The many possible cultures and attitudes doesn’t really seem directly relevant to a conversation that started by one user here, from one specific culture, saying that equating AI and humanity is debasing humanity.
It’s worth noting that these guys also considered women and black people not to be actual people, and made no distinction between nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and a rifle, whenever we get the idea that they had great ideas that we should apply to society today.
Teen suicide in households with a gun is a very interesting stat to bring up for this. Suicide in general is higher for gun owners, which can be handwaved away as “that’s my right”. But suicide is higher for children of gun owners? That seems like a tough risk to justify.
The thing is there's such a breadth of circumstances and behaviors involved that pigeonholing it under one giant banner is questionable. Like the people who leave loaded guns in random drawers around their houses are doing something very different with a different risk profile. Whereas once you get to teens in households that have guns and generally practice some level of safe storage it's a much more complex issue IMO. Because as a society we want teens to become responsible enough to handle things like cars, or power tools, or guns. But we also know that they're not adults yet. And we know that infantilization of teens isn't going to do anyone favors in the long run. So it's probably not as simple as ban cars and ban guns or whatever else.
No other country allows buying machine guns as easily as the USA. There are people with actual armories in their homes. That is impossible in most countries. Take it as you wish.
Shit. I have a pool. My kids like it. And I have guns! How about instead, we do nothing. We have more than enough to worry about already just with the sentient hazards in homes.
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