Sarah Valentine

Oh, you’re doing this kind of thing huh? Well, speaking of bad behaviors… bye.

Who says you have to destroy cultural beliefs? The issues with religion are behavioral.

There were a lot of bots, but my primary reason for leaving was that I got a sitewide permaban for telling someone the ideology they described was in fact a fascist one. I tried to come back on another account not associated in any way with the original to play nice, but through means beyond my understanding they made the association anyway and banned the new account before I could make a single comment.

I built a homepage but all the communities I added to it get updates so infrequently I wound up defaulting to All just to have something to read more than once per day.

White people have tried to exterminate Aboriginal religions. Because these religions were seen as dangerous and primitive.

That was ethnic cleansing using religion as an excuse. That’s not the same as doing away with religion. If your actual target is religion there’s no reason to mistreat people.

It’s disturbing to me how you can think of no other thing for me to mean than that I want to either murder criminals or let them commit murder. This discussion is over.

I get you: tell yourself they’re “just animals” so you can cage them without a guilty conscious.

Actually, no. Quite the opposite. Treat them like people who have chosen to abrogate their responsibility as humans in order to fulfill animal impulses. I’m definitely not okay with putting people in cages. Irresponsible or not, they’re still people.

It sounds like you’re both missing the core concept here: Freedom is responsibility. Responsibility for one’s self and actions. If someone is refusing to take responsibility for themselves, they are lacking self control and are not free in the first place. They are beholden to animal impulses. You get me? By not taking responsibility for their actions they are disqualifying themselves from freedom regardless of whether they’re physically arrested and incarcerated. We need to stop pretending that everyone just has freedom as an intrinsic quality instead of it being a right to which they are entitled.

The industry is not a monolith. It’s up to individuals and individual organizations to use TV for whatever purpose they choose. People like Mr. Rogers chose to turn television into an instrument to teach children about life and how to live it, about themselves and others, how we’re different and alike. To look at that and still be mad because every other individual or organization that ever went on air didn’t do the same thing is just mind-blowingly out of touch with reality.

Whatever fight you’re looking for, I’m not interested.

Shit, I’m still waiting for you to make a valid point. Get blocked then, I guess.

people had been developing good values for thousands of years, without degrading their attention spans or other mental functions

Okay, so? That doesn’t prove TV doesn’t help with that. We got along wiping our asses with sticks just fine before toilet paper, I’m sure.

in the 75 or so years of its history I really don’t see any evidence that the industry is working toward putting it to any better use.

I literally just explained how, and you agreed with it. Are you sure you’re having the conversation you think you are?

Sounds like a society that exists only because it tramples the rights of others. Nah, fuck that.

That may be true, but TV also brought me Star Trek TNG, Captain Planet, Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers, and many others that instilled values in me that are core to who I am today. Let’s not let perfection be the enemy of progress, and keep working to put our tools to better use.

Where’s the structural societal incentive to “do so much good”, and why would we need it?

That’s a great question. There are some college courses that can help you answer that. The short answer is “because in terms of the flourishing of an entire species, cooperation trumps competition, but it’s a recent evolution and doesn’t come naturally to everyone”. If we are to flourish and advance instead of strangling ourselves in the crib, we need to stop tolerating the kinds of selfish behaviors that prove detrimental to every society that permits them.

people do not know how to act properly

They do, in communities where rules exist and are enforced. Anonymity may lead some people to feel more emboldened to act out, but when handled properly I believe the vast majority of them will just settle down and either learn how to participate in good faith or find somewhere else to be. The bad behavior patterns we see in some places are, in my opinion, the result of insufficient social norms and enforcement thereof. This is also a situation capitalists will foster, because it drives engagement and inflates content.

Unless we can force people to act with civility - which implies people being fairly conscious of the consequences of their words and actions

So you already understand that this is a problem that only exists in places where bad actors are given license to continue acting out.

Social media has the power to do so much good: connecting people across the globe, enabling the sharing of information across language barriers and in circumvention of government censorship, and more. But because the world is run by greedy power-hungry pigs, we can’t have social media without it being exploited to the furthest extent possible in the name of profit. The mental health of the public is not even a secondary concern - it is completely disregarded in favor of squeezing further growth out of a saturated market for a service that should be both simple and free.

It’s always conservatives normalizing pederasty and pretending they’re not even a little bit gay. You got groomed.

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I have a Patreon and I promote it sometimes. I post novels and art made by myself and collaborators. Nobody cares. I don’t do endless shameless self promotion, I don’t have a pretty face, I’m not well connected, and I don’t have startup capital to produce the full range of things I’d like to make but can’t because I need a day job and am trying to get a degree.

It’s been soul crushing and every day is a struggle against giving up on it.

Shoplifting is a felony charge.

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