Can’t.

I’ve had literally insane run-ins with the US healthcare system, and have a bad enough health issue that I’ve been absolutely ruined by it: physically, mentally, financially, and socially. I do mean utterly – that was not hyperbole.

I have nothing else to add right now, because I have medically-induced PTSD and can’t even think about anything medical without having a panic attack now.

Just wanted to chime in with how bad it can get, and I know my situation isn’t as bad as it can be. It ruined everything for me and destroyed my family, but I never had to care for a dying child. There are no forbidden depths.

Well that seems to have backfired.

Excuse me, I seem to have facepalmed my eyeballs into the next room. Fuck.

Five people here think Nazi business is fine. Yikes.

e: wait, 6.

e2: hey guys! Lemmy doesn’t have vote fuzzing yet! (just noticing. there’s no conspiracy here … or is there?)

Fascism’s major hallmark is fervent hypocrisy. That’s how people could live within half a mile of death camps and just casually brush the ash of burnt people from their hair, then smile like they’re going on a picnic as they’re led into the death camps at the end of their street, then ten minutes later, after seeing actual corpses stacked like cordwood, they’re vomiting and swearing they had no idea.

We can’t let the uneducated masses lead us into that kind of horror again, We need to educate them of what they’re advocating for and why that’s so horrifically dangerous. We need to stop hedging and beating round the bush, and lay out in detail what they’re actually enabling. People die when this kind of nationalistic ignorance is allowed to proliferate. We need to stop this ignorance before it kills people.

On a drive when I was ten, I asked my dad why the tall, skeletal towers had blinking lights. He said so planes wouldn’t crash into them. So I asked what the towers were for, and he said to hold up the lights.

That fucked with me for like ten more years.

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I was being mostly facetious (I’m not originally from either place, but I lived in Florida for a while and live in Michigan now).

You’re right, and I don’t disagree with you at all. Yes, we’ve had an emotional need for stories – more for connection with one another than for individual understanding, which cultural stories provide.

I’m saying there’s a difference between cultural stories and organised religion. The former is benign and can translate our questions into a semblance of meaning, and the latter which becomes dictatorial dogma that amplifies the worst of us, turning our basest instincts into abhorrent action.

I don’t think we disagree that much, you and I. I used to think organised religion wasn’t something I could get behind, but I thought to each their own.

The more I learned about it and the more I saw the bad influence it did to people I loved, the more I realised it’s nothing but a terrible influence in the world, holding us back as a people, and causing needless suffering and death.

I’m a user experience designer. My favourite story is from aviation engineering. I don’t remember the year or all the details, but the US Navy had put stupid amounts of money and time into engineering a new fighter jet. It was worked out on paper and built to exact specifications. Then, during the first human test of it, the pilot ejected on the tarmac before it took off. The plane crashed, obviously, but the pilot couldn’t explain what happened (apparently he had a concussion from his unscheduled landing).

The plane was built again, and shortly after takeoff, the pilot again ejected without explanation.

What the fuck was going on?

In the retelling I heard, someone finally noticed the design of the cockpit was to blame. In trying to cram all the standard controls plus new ones into the smallest amount of space, the designers had moved the eject lever right next to the lever to adjust the seat position – they’d coloured the eject lever red, but the pilot couldn’t see that since it was below and slightly to the right of his ass, and both levers were the same size and shape. Nobody noticed this was a problem until at least two pilots accidentally ejected on takeoff.

This might be apocryphal, I don’t know, but I learnt it as an example of how things might look good on paper, but you can’t really know until a user fucks everything up.

I assume you’ve quit your day job.

Wait. We’re unironically calling social media for women Giggle and then we’re surprised it might be sexist? April first was like a week ago…

I call shenanigans. This comment was a damp fish at best. It felt like haddock.

This bullshit has convinced non-psychotic people to commit atrocities. It’s not a leap to think it convinces actually psychotic people their delusions are true. Especially when they say so themselves.

I abbreviated their story to keep my comment short, and linked the full thing for people who want to learn more.

In truth, the reason she was so susceptible to his offshoot of their religion was because she’d been raised believing in the mainstream religion, which he warped a bit in order to gain followers to his cult. She was primed for it because she couldn’t imagine a reality outside of the belief system in which she was raised, and his cult was only slightly outside that and built upon it.

Look up the story yourself, if you like. That’s why I linked it. My quick summary wasn’t ‘too tidy to be true’, and I can give you links to many, many more stories exactly like that one. Loads of normal people have committed atrocities – often against their own children – because their Christian faith told them to. A great many of them weren’t mentally ill until they became religious. Many committed those atrocities because they became convinced heaven was a better place for their children, that demons were real and trying to corrupt their kids, etc. Google it yourself; I’m not trying to filter knowledge here. These were normal people until they became religious.

Like I said, we should be talking about the damage these fables are doing. We should be talking about the damage done by indoctrinating children so they can’t discern reality from fantasy and right from wrong. We should be questioning our leaders when they say morality only exists in their stories, when the opposite is true. This shot is causing us irreparable damage as a society.

If you’re from Michigan but living in Florida, you, sir, are a moron. I barely care about jurisdictional laws you’re breaking; your lack of judgement is already disqualifying. To be so close to Canada and choosing to spend time tucked beneath America’s ballsack is in very poor taste.

Of course there would still be people like that. What I’m saying is there are exponentially more people like that when they’ve been raised from birth to believe in nonsense that warps their sense of right and wrong.

Take the story of Chad and Lori Daybell. She was a normal, successful woman who wasn’t a psychopath. She fell in with a pastor who convinced her of extreme religious ideals, after which they murdered their own children in a misguided belief they’d be safer in heaven than on earth.

I can list examples like that until the cows come home. Normal people who have become convinced to commit atrocities after being drawn into religion to extremes. It’s a psychological virus that can infect anyone. Most large-scale wars have a religious basis. All the biggest genocides have been committed in the name of religion. The best and fastest way to control people and warp their reality is to make them believe in a god.

We’re better than this.

Psychosis PLUS organised religion. That’s my point, friend. Psychosis alone is a tragedy we should work to address as a society. But many of these stories would not end in senseless violence if there weren’t an underlying system of fantastical belief that bolstered people’s delusions and convinced them their delusions were divinely inspired.

I’m not ignoring that.

My point is that religion is uniquely capable of taking the delusions of the mentally ill and nurturing them into violence.

Even for the mentally stable, it often leads to fantasy. But when mental illness and religion coincide, people who would otherwise be relatively benign in their delusions very easily become convinced their delusions are divine and their violent instincts are justified by scripture. It happens so often, we need to begin acknowledging it.

Once you’re old enough, there’s no difference. My doctor’s admin keeps calling me to schedule a colonoscopy, and we’ve been playing phone tag. That’s the closest I’ve come to foreplay in years.