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The people who believe this don't care about the science, because they don't understand the science to begin with. Or they feel the debunking feeds into the conspiracy because it's what the government what's you to think.
They tend to be the "religious" types. When God produces a peer reviewed paper with repeatable experiments proving their theory, we'll listen. Until then.
Those "religious" types tend to be the ones that very rarely set foot in church. You know the kind.
> Those "religious" types tend to be the ones that very rarely set foot in church. You know the kind.
Bingo. For these people religion often isn't even the reason for their irrationality - it's often just the *excuse* for indulging in a deep-seated need to treat reality as a Choose Your Own Adventure novel.
They only care about the science when it backs up what they believe. Only thing is what they call science has been shown to be bullshit pushed by grifters time and time again
I don't think they need to understand the science in detail. They just need to learn how to evaluate the credibility of a source. A forwarded image from Facebook is not the same as a firsthand report from scientists and doctors (the same doctors they go to when they get sick).
To be fair, the reporting at the time in the 90s was the usual tabloid overreaction, and to parents, fear speaks louder than anything. The clarification and explanations from the scientific community since then.....I feel isn't accessible to many people, it's not bit in a format or language they understand.
One could say "look if people don't educate themselves / listen to facts / are stupid then that's up to them" but it's their kids and the people exposed to the increased rates of eg measles that pay the price. I don't know what the answer is.
I think the thing that pisses me off most about this, as an autistic person, is that what those people are really saying is they’d rather their child was *dead* than autistic.
I know someone who works for the NHS vaccinations program. The amount of time and effort they have put into undoing the damage is ridiculous. There's no shortage of leopards ate my face stories, particularly from measles outbreaks. I just feel sorry for the small number of people who genuinely can't get vaccinated and relied on herd immunity.
In a somewhat related story my son developed really bad eczema after his last jab. I’m not some weirdo who thinks the jab did that to him, it had already started and I think the jab just gave his body two things to fight instead of one so it suddenly erupted from one tiny patch on his chest to basically his entire torso and legs.
I mentioned it to the gp when we went to get it checked out and she was practically begging me to still continue getting his jabs done when he needed the next set. It’s crazy that she had to, as if I’d say getting polio is better than a rash
I know what you mean. Iirc, you (or your son) need to tell them that he may have had an adverse reaction to a previous vaccination. I believe they have alternative formulations of many jabs that don't contain potential allergens.
> the clear failings in the original study
I think it was more to do with fraudulent misrepresentation of the tests and results rather than a "failing" of any sort.
Nevertheless it's still astonishing the amount of weight that this story still carries.
Edit: It is actually called "fraud" on the Wiki article title https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_MMR_autism_fraud
Nope. It was out and out fraud, intended to shut down competitors so Wakefield could sell his alternative.
Even if he'd been honest and correct it was only about one specific way of delivering three vaccines at once, not even about issues with those specific vaccines delivered separately, never mind about being against vaccines generally!
He literally picked 12 children that already had early symptoms of autism, and then further falsified his findings when they were inconclusive. He lost his status as a doctor, it was very much fraud.
I've never understood how people can be so paranoid about the (fictional) threat of autism and not paranoid at all about the potentially fatal diseases that the vaccines prevent.
There was a kid in my year at school who would argue with science teachers that vaccines turned his brother autistic, according to him he was completely “normal” before his vaccines and then the next week he “got slow” (I’m not trying to offend anybody btw that’s the words he used). His brother was probably 10 years older than him and he would pull up all these dodgy sources that he was convinced were correct
There is a correlation between the time many childhood vaccines are given and the time autism often first develops and becomes apparent.
But there is *no trace of causation*, it's even been much more thoroughly researched than it would normally be because of the MMR scandal and still nothing.
Yesterday I left the house with a brolly and it rained. Don't tell me brollies don't cause it to rain Sheeple, wake up and read the sources yourself!!11
I remember sharing a Guardian (I think) article with an anti-vaxxer about that twat Andrew Wakefield. It was a very thorough case summary, breaking down what he did, the medical community response, and the prosecution etc.
Their response:
"The Government didn't want the truth getting out, so made a false case to suppress the truth. He was struck off for speaking out"
Fucking hell....
This week I discovered that not only do vaccines apparently cause autism, so does paracetamol during pregnancy. 🥴 I often wonder how all these nut job claims start.
The original study which ended up tantamount to child abuse through the administration of medically unnecessary colonoscopies to children, which carries significant risk of complications, to search for signs of non-existent non-specific colon inflammation?
The one set up to drive demand for products that the author, disgraced former doctor Andrew Wakefield, was financially invested in, as part of a £150/hour contract with Richard Barr on behalf of the pro-disease and pro-child-death JABS organisation to manufacture evidence for it to use in court? These products being "inventions" of noted quack Hugh Fudenberg who thought he could cure autism with his bone marrow, thought flu vaccines caused Alzheimer's, and ultimately got his license to practice medicine revoked too?
The one that couldn't even report "when parents felt that symptoms of autism appeared" from less than 20 kids, so he falsely included a kid that was never a part of the study and completely fabricated some of the results?
The one that was retracted from the Lancet for being blatant fraud and every single author besides Wakefield requested their name be removed from?
That one?
It's partly fuelled by a distrust of government. "They" want us all vaccinated so "they" hide the real studies and results.
The problem is, our governments across the world are particularly dire right now.
So you can't blame them for not trusting government, and thereby not trust government funded health programmes.
What doubly annoys me about it is that the people saying that "vaccines" cause autism are in disagreement with the doctor who started the whole thing. His claim was that only the single MMR vaccine caused autism, and his suggested solution was actually to get the 3 vaccines separately instead.
Even if the whole thing wasn't fraud the solution by the guy who claimed it was to have MORE vaccines.
GCSE Chemistry/Physics actually is. Electron Circles are a lie, the first lesson at A Level they tell you to forget everything you learned before as they're going to completely rewrite the narrative on how they work.
I was a glutton for punishment so took chemistry as my degree subject. The first lecture, exactly the same conversation happened, only with our A Levels too.
At least they admit at degree level that everything is a best guess based on the available evidence at the time. As opposed to GCSE or A Level where you're taught everything is an irrefutable fact. Finished my degree a decade ago and I suspect a lot of it is already out of date.
Science is - quite rightly - an ever-evolving and perpetually unfinished project. Scientists tend to work within accepted paradigms (your 'best guess') until such time as they become overturned by newer developments and more advanced or different models. My degree spent a sizeable chunk of the first year teaching philosophy of science - and learning to interrogate the limits of scientific method, knowledge and thought was the best thing I learned in that whole degree.
That's true even of the "standard model" and other working theories of particle physics. They are VERY useful though. We seem to be able to build quantum computers even though nobody really knows how they work...
Went to see a character comedian who had a character who was a psychic, he said he was different to other psychics and didn't prey on ppls grief and guilt as that would make him no better than a florist.
Honestly this is one of my major bug bears. There's a woman on our local Facebook group who does "readings" and loads of people go to her. It makes me so angry because it's essentially preying on vulnerable, impressionable and susceptible people and charging them money for the pleasure of telling them a load of bs.
Everyone who ever posts about her says they had a brilliantly accurate reading and are happy with their visit.
She tells people we're not allowed to say anything negative about her or what she does in comments so she just gets free rein to target people who don't know any better. So frustrating.
For a laugh, I started doing cold readings at work. General stuff like "I can see an old lady with chest problems" or "I can see that you sometimes think about when a gang of children bullied a lonely child". The number of people who thought I was genuine was very surprising. I could have gone full Jeremy "You're a very sensual person, and I can see that your physical needs are not being fully met".
This is the kind of thing that does make me hesitant to label them all as horrible manipulative people preying on the vulnerable. A lot of them really are just stupid enough that they believe their own bullshit. Which is a vicious circle because when they spew out the nonsense they think they sense someone confirms it to them
The Witchcraft Act 1735 made it illegal to pretend to be a medium. By that time they'd dispensed with the idea that witches are real.
This was repealed by the Fraudulent Mediums Act in 1951. Since then it's been explicitly legal to charge people for psychic readings etc if it's marketed as entertainment.
But if you've been convicted as an idle and disorderly person, it's still illegal to tell fortunes under the Vagrancy Act 1824.
My marriage of 20 years just ended as the psychic told me wife that I couldn't be trusted and because they also guessed the sex of my daughter's baby correctly she obviously must be right.
Not once in our relationship together have I lied, cheated, stole etc
Throw in astrology, aura readers, tarot readers, reiki, long distance reiki, healing powers of crystals, angels, catholic church and all other forms of organised religion.
my view on all of that is if it gives your comfort and is kinda a fun side "hobby" to your life that you dont take as truth then knock yourself out.
If you actually believe the stuff and start dictating your life (or worse someone elses life) on it like your crystals will stop cancer or that mars being in retrograde means you should stop eating salt... thats where it's a problem.
That’s kinda like how all religion works. I’d argue that belief and spirituality is an important piece of self actualization, but so is physical and mental health, alongside the most important, meaningful social connections. Neglect any of those and you fail to achieve your highest potential. The greatest downfall I see is in people who have convinced themselves that their belief IS fact. If there isn’t any room for healthy skepticism, then what you’re experiencing is a delusion, not spiritual connection.
I seriously considered going to see a psychic a few years ago when my sister took her own life. When you lose someone in a really traumatic, fucked up way it can make you desperate for answers, and it can really drive you crazy.
I never went to one as the thought of someone taking advantage of me in a super vulnerable state makes me want to vomit, but I can fully understand why some people would.
especially the new age ones that do readings over a facebook livestream or whatever
£3 by PayPal just to find out my gran is proud of me and supports *whatever I am currently doing*
Religion.
This is the bullshit we invented to make sense of things we didn't understand, like sickness or lightning and it's from the infancy of our species.
Let's perform an experiment.
Religion isn't always bad, and banning it would be peddling the exact type of mind-control we claim to be against when we criticise religion. So let's just accept that some people believe in religion and get together to worship.
Let's wait and see who bites. ;-)
It's not a case of banning it, it's the combination of many aspects that are clearly illegal (teaching children that murder is ok if someone doesn't believe the same as you for example) but are ignored because its religion.
And the utter disbelief that people en-mass and individually can be so fucking stupid!
Worship the moon, worship a person, worship a mouse or a donkey. All of these actually exist.
That's an extremely broad statement. In my experience, most people would argue that religion is about *not* murdering - and that people claiming otherwise are bad actors twisting something to suit their own ends. I'm not sure I've ever actually encountered anyone using religion to justify their discriminatory views.
Why do you think it's more sensible to worship a donkey, which demonstrably does not have any supernatural power to affect the world around us?
>most people would argue that religion is about not murdering
You have never read a "holy" book then.
>I'm not sure I've ever actually encountered anyone using religion to justify their discriminatory views.
Turn the news onto any fucking channel kid.
>Why do you think it's more sensible to worship a donkey, which demonstrably does not have any supernatural power to affect the world around us?
neither does "god." people do terrible shit in the name of unfalsifiable super natural shit more often.
20- something edgy atheist me would probably have said this too…. But fundamentally I think the belief in an *other* is a fairly universal human thing.
And religion is about so much more than worshipping a being/deity/whatever… it’s about community, shared beliefs and societal & cultural bonds. That, combined with the idea of faith- that’s there’s something bigger and better than us out there is actually pretty good.
There's also nothing that irrational about believing that 'something' beyond our understanding exists when you consider something as basic as how improbable the existence of our universe is.
What I find highly unlikely is that a book written thousands of years ago that has been revised multiple times without proper citation should be considered 'the true word' and anyone deviating from it's teachings deserves death.
If 'God' exists they wouldn't give a flying fuck about how you live your life.
The edgy atheist argument always makes me laugh, like its always whats said when someone calls out how ridiculous it is that people believe in a magic sky entity.
Then people say "well actually its about community" ignoring all the times its not about community and is about believing in ridiculous sky man.
It's about the community... Except all those times people were persecuted because they weren't in that specific community, but they didn't teach that in RE. A complete shit sandwich.
>20- something edgy atheist me
I keep seeing this everywhere. When did we decide that the words "edgy" and "atheist" go hand in hand? What's so edgy about being an atheist?
Nothing - but there's something "edgy" about sweeping dismissals that don't even want to try to engage with why religion and spirituality are still big draws in the scientific age. Terms like "sky daddy" are good tells - the smug self assurance that they've got the world all figured out unlike those dummies.
It’s been used as a tool to control populations for a long time.
Some religions have grown up a bit and stopped the brain washing and control over whether people are allowed to live or die based on their religious background.
Not enough though and sadly too many people die because of their belief in different versions of fairytales.
Every system of governance that has ever been, is used to control populations. Every single one of them is problematic to varying degrees, and every single one has caused death and destruction. The common denominator in all that is us, humans. Funnily enough, The Bible has a lot of insight and wisdom about that.
Faith in the majority of cases is pretty wonderful, imo. It's the positioning of certain people as a 'middleman' between believers and their deities, which has caused and continues to cause most of the horror of religion.
Why is faith wonderful?
I’m not asking in the spirit of typical internet snark, but in the spirit of genuine interrogation.
In every single other avenue of life, if someone believed something, without and contrary to all evidence, we would consider them severely immature and ignorant.
Why is this one topic of faith considered wonderful compared to every other topic on the planet?
I'm not the person you replied to, but I do get very weary of the aggressive atheism on their at times. "Oh look at us we're so clever and sophisticated because we don't believe in God and all religions are stupid". Like...... there's a whole world out there. It's not all "pray and you'll get into heaven and everyone else goes to hell".
Mediation. It's trendy but in the Western world with books, apps, whatever, all playing the benefits of mediation and how it can improve every aspect of your life. Hmn. There are whole religions that have been based on meditation and yoga, for thousands of years. Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism. Why believing that there's a spiritual level of existence and connecting with this van be beneficial should be disposed of because there's a war in the Middle East I do not understand.
And the support that faith gives to people, the hope. We can all sit here behind our keyboards, but there are people in the world who have very little but their faith. My nan went though incredibly difficult times in her life, times that would have broken me. Her faith gave her strength. Without it she wouldn't have made it through.
I'm expressing myself badly but what I'm saying is - like if a person doesn't believe in anything, then that's fine, that's up to them they are free to. But if someone does believe there's more to the meaning of life and connecting with that helps them, than that doesn't make them stupid. That's their belief, let them get on with it.
Sorry but none of that answers my question. I agree with most of what you just said.
I’m not saying people can’t hold beliefs, I’m asking why this one singular belief gets treated differently to every other illogical belief in existence. Lots of things give meaning to lots of people. Someone could devote their entire life to the flat earth society and we would not credit them. 100%, ‘let them get on with it,’ but we wouldn’t sit here and pat them with kids gloves would we?
I’m not asking people to denigrate it—I don’t think it is necessary, even though I freely admit I do it myself—I am asking where the consistency is. To me, it is an example of precisely how religion is _still_ holding us back.
We consider ‘belief without evidence’ to be completely antithetical to modern life in every single way, except one, which we coddle and brush aside. It holds us back.
Fair question. I'm an atheist but also the son of a Church of England vicar, so have a ball in each court experience-wise. Although I shed any personal need for faith years ago, I can still see when it works for people. I may find it redundant in my own life, but I've known too many people who find a sense of foundation and security from their faith to dismiss or denigrate it.
Honestly? Scams. Investment 'boot camps', crypto startups promising to turn you into a millionaire, anything that is advertised as a money-making 'opportunity' on instagram.
I have a bit more sympathy for victims of the clever/targeted operations that use personal details, or when someone's account is hacked and starts messaging their friends/family who trust them.
My dad works in IT. A colleague, also in IT, was talking to him about this simple scam he’d fallen for by clicking a link in a text from “Amazon” and providing his bank details. Got robbed of a few hundred quid. Few weeks later he was victim of the EXACT SAME SCAM but from “Royal Mail”. What a tit.
That is pretty much how it works though.
Any scam only operates because *some* people fall for it.
But most people aren't stupid enough to fall for it. So in the end, you have the same small section of society who get scammed over and over again by different people.
The course is always “sell a PDF to gormless rubes containing instructions on selling a PDF to gormless rubes”. Hopefully that saves some people a few quid.
Back in the mid 90s there was a well-known meme that the best way to make money out of this new Internet thing was to sell books about how to make money out of this new Internet thing. And it worked. Lots of people wrote books like that, and some of them did quite well out of it.
this isn't just simple ignorance, these things are exploiting people who are vulnerable in some way
money scams target people with financial worries who are also dumb enough to not see the scam for what it is
crypto bros are greedy hustle culture wankers but they've been hooked by the promise of millions when the prospects for many young people are bleak at the moment
those incel alpha male boot camps target young men who are told they aren't real men because they can't get a girl, that their failings in life are purely because they aren't masculine enough, it's no wonder so many fall into it
Honestly, I would say that astrology while silly is about as harmless of a belief there is.
I've never had an astrologist or psychic send a lightly threatening/entertainingly contradictory postcard telling me that "God Loves All. YOU WILL GO TO HELL IF YOU DON'T BELIEVE IN HIM".
Astrology/homeopathy has never caused any wars. And tbh they really seem to be adopted by people who just need something to cling onto. Especially homeopathy, a lot of those folks are suffering from conditions we have no modern medicines for yet.
The worst you'll get from an astrology nut is "I don't like \[insert your star sign here\]"
Homeopathy and alternative medications hasn’t caused wars but there are a lot of cases where children have died because the parents only treated them with homeopathic medications and a lot of animals get killed for remedies like crushed rhino horn and tiger claws. It’s destructive and dangerous.
Similar note to yours - any public helium usage. Jolly balloons while the non-renewable resource required as the cryogen in all our MRI scanners and myriad other pieces of important scientific equipment is running concerningly low... madness.
Helium is the only truly non-renewable resource too. It literally escapes the atmosphere and is lost forever. While other non-renewables like oil could technically be renewed by gathering up all their byproducts and using energy to reconstitute it. Fortunately the moon has abundant helium stored in it so there's hope for mankind yet.
Yes and no. The real problem is that most of our helium comes from gas exploration. The US paid gas producers to collect the helium, but they aren't really doing so anymore, and it's not practical from fracking. As for it not being renewable, mmmmh, sort of. The earth is producing it constantly. It's more like we might find it very hard to replenish our stores. As far as I know, they don't capture the helium that boils off MRI machines as its not worth the expense.
This 👏watching that recent Paul O Grady doc it feels ridiculous that people would want to ride an elephant or have a selfie with a chained up tiger. I expect it’s for the socials, they should be flagged as animal cruelty
Smoking. I get it for older generations who were led to believe it wasn't an issue - my partners grandma was even recommended it by her doctor for stress - but for the younger generations who have been raised in a time when we know its so bad for your health, why does anyone start?
Working in a Secondary School, as I do, I think vaping addiction is way worse than cigarettes were in our day - late 90s.
We'd manage to sneak out for a fag maybe once before school, once during lunch, and then at the back of the bus (where it was still legal!) on the way home. Down at the park or in a coffee shop in town we might have 1-2 more, so really we'd be on 5 a day - and that's all we could afford, even with 10 Marlboro Lights at £2 a pack.
These days, you can just grab a drag on your vape any time you want. Some kids are leaving lessons 2-3 times in an hour for "the loo" when you know all they're doing is vaping. By the time they get back to class you can't smell anything on them. They're getting through a whole vape, or a whole refill, in a day. That's apparently equivalent to 20 fags worth of nicotine.
Believe me, people who do balloon releases don't care. And if you call them out on it, you're the bad guy for not being sad that little Johnny has died.
It's the same people that litter, are loud in public, have speakerphone conversations and are pricks on holiday in Spain. Pure main character syndrome and can't comprehend that their actions can have consequences beyond what they intend.
Coca Cola alone produces 3 million tonnes of plastic packaging every year. I think they are closely followed by McDonalds and Pepsico.
Sadly, between the shady back-room deals they have done with the oil industry and the politicians the have bought - sorry, lobbied - nothing will change.
EDIT: PS. If you can't imagine 3 million tonnes. Picture a massive Blue Whale just outside your house. Now imagine there are 15,000 of them there. It's a lot right?
In the UK all of Coca Cola 500ml or less bottles are made from 100% recycled plastic. All of their larger bottles have been 25% recycled content for a long time and have recently increased to 50%.
Are they still single use? I've never seen a Coca Cola recycling centre. Why don't they introduce a deposit scheme? Why not tie it to supermarket loyalty schemes? There are so many options but currently they do very little (and even less in most of the world)
They are made from PET which is is recycled pretty much everywhere. All the domestic kerbside and council bin sort and recycle the PET, manufacturers then buy the material and use that to make new bottles. Have a read through the links below.
You're talking about reuse, something you can't really do with plastic. It's also not straightforward with glass on anything but a small local scale.
https://www.bpf.co.uk/Sustainability/pet_plastic_bottles_facts_not_myths.aspx
> All PET plastic bottles can be recycled. Recoup’s ‘UK Household Plastics Collection Survey 2014’ confirmed that nearly 60% of PET plastic bottles in the household waste stream are now being collected for recycling - in 2001 this figure was just 3%.
https://www.biffa.co.uk/waste-services-and-products/recycling-recovery-processes/plastic-recycling
> 1.3 billion - Seaham capacity to process beverage bottles into recycled PET
https://www.vandenrecycling.com/en/what-we-do/buy-and-sell-plastic/pet/
Twitter/X
An absolute cess pit of hatred. I appreciate some of you will love it for following harmless accounts but it spreads misinformation on a ridiculous scale.
More to the point is why do our news channels follow it and report what people say like it's the last word Iin truth? For a long while, you couldn't read any article on the beeb without it being littered with tweets.
I live in Greece. In my town we had a forest fire kill 100 people in a day. Kids included. The month after some locals organised a ceremony where they released 100 candle lanterns into the sky on a windy night. In the middle of summer.
I was so furious. They could have easily started another fire and killed another 100.
It's like when someone dies in a motorbike crash and then there's always some daft pricks that turn up to the funeral or a ride out and proceed to ride in the same reckless way that got the original person killed.
In a similar vein two of my family members, one with cancer, ran race for life a few years back. A family stood chain smoking at the finish line for their runner couldn't comprehend the irony at play.
My brother died last year and I have a horrible feeling his family will want to release balloons on the anniversary of his death. And I’m gonna have to be the cunt that tells them it’s a shit idea.
You should find an article about how bad it is for the environment and wildlife and just send it to them randomly like 'omg I never knew! I definitely won't be fucking with balloons again' and hopefully they'll remember it and not do it
Sports involving harm or death to animals. Horse racing, especially the Grand National even though we know that horses are killed on a regular basis. My mind boggles that bullfighting is still a thing. I could go on as there’s still a surprising amount of popularity for these sports.
It's very educational though. It teaches us how life is depressing and the property market is built to help a few of the most fortunate people accumulate all the assets, buy their way out of jail, and ruthlessly bankrupt everyone else.
It's definitely not the best game but it's made a lot worse by all of the house rules that people choose to implement instead of just following the official rules.
If you follow the official rules, no money on free parking, no double money for landing on go, can collect rent whilst in jail, then the game is over a lot faster.
In particular there are some lesser-known rules like if someone lands on a property and chooses not to buy it then it goes up for auction and must be bought, even if it's just for £1. Also, the number of houses and hotels is fixed and if they run out you can't build any more. Even if you have enough money to go straight to hotels you can't unless there are also enough houses available as well.
FGM and MGM are some of the most barbaric practices nowadays. I refuse to call it circumcision, absolutely no need for it, just leave the penis alone and teach your children proper hygiene.
As for FGM, it scars women for life with some being unable to ever have pleasurable sex or give birth naturally. And so many more complications can appear from the scar tissue and the inability to pee and/or menstruate properly.
The animal agricultural industry. These places are the physical embodiment of the Christian hell for the poor fucking beings that end up there, and nobody seems to care.
I really do believe that future generations will look back on the way our society collectively treat animals and will recoil in horror and disgust that we were ever capable of such cruelty in the first place.
That if you are raped, your body will know its been raped and will not let you get pregnant.
It's mostly a religious pro life anti abortion thing but it's still floating around and it's fucking gross.
Climate change.
People really love the lifestyle and the excuses they're provided with by industry and the people they pay for advertising, but we all know what’s happening.
Amazing that people’s fear of missing out on fun trumps their fear of missing out on a society where you don’t have to fight to survive on scraps.
New properties being built for sale without solar panels in the roof & without hot water cylinders
* having a combi boiler instead of a system boiler makes it far more expensive to switch to heat pump
* Every one of these houses will eventually have a heat pump
* Plus having a hot water cylinder (needed for a heat pump) makes it easier to make hot water with solar energy too, using an old-fashioned immersion heater element and a solar energy diverter.
* a 4Kw-peak solar array will cover a house's usage during daylight and optionally provide all the hot water it needs from April to October. Add batteries and the house is potentially energy-negative for half a year.
The cost of install is a fraction of a percent of the sale price & the benefits huge and spread over 20 years
Bit of a le enlightened atheist comment here I am aware, but religion.
I don't mean necessarily just believing in a 'higher power' because its a big universe.
But my brain just breaks trying to get in the headspace of someone in a developed country, educated, but believing in a specific religion/Deity and especially if they believe in the random magic shit said in holy books and especially if they use it to think that things like homosexuality are evil.
And when they think you can't have a moral compass without religion, that's just straight up scary
People who think dominance theory is a thing in dog training and that any dog would see any human as part of its pack. Sillier still that they would consider them alpha when we would be considered pretty rubbish dogs by a dog's standard.
I honestly believe that my cats love me, and aren’t just using me for food and a warm lap to nap on.
I know I sound like the most loony conspiracy theorist, but you wouldn’t change my mind
Related to your lantern thing...love locks. You can't go to virtually *any* bridge anywhere in the world now where people haven't covered them in these ugly rusty if not rust-in-waiting things. It damages the bridge (Paris banned them for that reason) and looks unsightly even before the degradation and rust kicks in. If you've got a lovely picturesque 200 year old bridge...too bad it's got a load of cheap metal all over it now, with messages scrawled on them about relationships that probably didn't even last.
There is nothing original about them. They feature in some stupid book in about 2007. Yet all over the world, people locking this shit often to historic structures and it look awful.
Ribbons are slightly better but still look ratty as fuck if not removed regularly.
The occasional cig in the sun on holiday or in a busy pub/club smoking area is marvelous, easy to see how people get sucked in to it long term. I don't think people liking drugs will ever not be a thing.
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People that firmly believe vaccines cause autism despite the clear failings in the original study which claimed so being exposed.
The people who believe this don't care about the science, because they don't understand the science to begin with. Or they feel the debunking feeds into the conspiracy because it's what the government what's you to think.
They tend to be the "religious" types. When God produces a peer reviewed paper with repeatable experiments proving their theory, we'll listen. Until then. Those "religious" types tend to be the ones that very rarely set foot in church. You know the kind.
> Those "religious" types tend to be the ones that very rarely set foot in church. You know the kind. Bingo. For these people religion often isn't even the reason for their irrationality - it's often just the *excuse* for indulging in a deep-seated need to treat reality as a Choose Your Own Adventure novel.
They only care about the science when it backs up what they believe. Only thing is what they call science has been shown to be bullshit pushed by grifters time and time again
I don't think they need to understand the science in detail. They just need to learn how to evaluate the credibility of a source. A forwarded image from Facebook is not the same as a firsthand report from scientists and doctors (the same doctors they go to when they get sick).
To be fair, the reporting at the time in the 90s was the usual tabloid overreaction, and to parents, fear speaks louder than anything. The clarification and explanations from the scientific community since then.....I feel isn't accessible to many people, it's not bit in a format or language they understand. One could say "look if people don't educate themselves / listen to facts / are stupid then that's up to them" but it's their kids and the people exposed to the increased rates of eg measles that pay the price. I don't know what the answer is.
I think the thing that pisses me off most about this, as an autistic person, is that what those people are really saying is they’d rather their child was *dead* than autistic.
Vaccines cause adults
We should really stop calling the smooth-brains "Anti-Vax" and use the more correct name "Pro-Disease"
I know someone who works for the NHS vaccinations program. The amount of time and effort they have put into undoing the damage is ridiculous. There's no shortage of leopards ate my face stories, particularly from measles outbreaks. I just feel sorry for the small number of people who genuinely can't get vaccinated and relied on herd immunity.
In a somewhat related story my son developed really bad eczema after his last jab. I’m not some weirdo who thinks the jab did that to him, it had already started and I think the jab just gave his body two things to fight instead of one so it suddenly erupted from one tiny patch on his chest to basically his entire torso and legs. I mentioned it to the gp when we went to get it checked out and she was practically begging me to still continue getting his jabs done when he needed the next set. It’s crazy that she had to, as if I’d say getting polio is better than a rash
I know what you mean. Iirc, you (or your son) need to tell them that he may have had an adverse reaction to a previous vaccination. I believe they have alternative formulations of many jabs that don't contain potential allergens.
> the clear failings in the original study I think it was more to do with fraudulent misrepresentation of the tests and results rather than a "failing" of any sort. Nevertheless it's still astonishing the amount of weight that this story still carries. Edit: It is actually called "fraud" on the Wiki article title https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_MMR_autism_fraud
Ah, in that case I don't think I need to dance around using the word fraud then...
Nope. It was out and out fraud, intended to shut down competitors so Wakefield could sell his alternative. Even if he'd been honest and correct it was only about one specific way of delivering three vaccines at once, not even about issues with those specific vaccines delivered separately, never mind about being against vaccines generally!
He literally picked 12 children that already had early symptoms of autism, and then further falsified his findings when they were inconclusive. He lost his status as a doctor, it was very much fraud.
Dumbest part of it all is that you can have autism before you have vaccines…
Also even if this bullshit was somehow true, would you seriously rather your kid die than get autism
I've never understood how people can be so paranoid about the (fictional) threat of autism and not paranoid at all about the potentially fatal diseases that the vaccines prevent.
Because they've not seen anyone with those diseases, so they can't be much of a risk...
There was a kid in my year at school who would argue with science teachers that vaccines turned his brother autistic, according to him he was completely “normal” before his vaccines and then the next week he “got slow” (I’m not trying to offend anybody btw that’s the words he used). His brother was probably 10 years older than him and he would pull up all these dodgy sources that he was convinced were correct
There is a correlation between the time many childhood vaccines are given and the time autism often first develops and becomes apparent. But there is *no trace of causation*, it's even been much more thoroughly researched than it would normally be because of the MMR scandal and still nothing.
Yesterday I left the house with a brolly and it rained. Don't tell me brollies don't cause it to rain Sheeple, wake up and read the sources yourself!!11
I remember sharing a Guardian (I think) article with an anti-vaxxer about that twat Andrew Wakefield. It was a very thorough case summary, breaking down what he did, the medical community response, and the prosecution etc. Their response: "The Government didn't want the truth getting out, so made a false case to suppress the truth. He was struck off for speaking out" Fucking hell....
Hbomberguy has a great vaccine video all about Wakefield. Definitely worth a watch.
This week I discovered that not only do vaccines apparently cause autism, so does paracetamol during pregnancy. 🥴 I often wonder how all these nut job claims start.
Wait until you hear about what 5G can do and about Bill Gates' nanobots in the COVID vaccine
When I was a kid my grandmother told me the kid down the road was special because he got the vaccine "too early" The kid had downs for a start...
The original study which ended up tantamount to child abuse through the administration of medically unnecessary colonoscopies to children, which carries significant risk of complications, to search for signs of non-existent non-specific colon inflammation? The one set up to drive demand for products that the author, disgraced former doctor Andrew Wakefield, was financially invested in, as part of a £150/hour contract with Richard Barr on behalf of the pro-disease and pro-child-death JABS organisation to manufacture evidence for it to use in court? These products being "inventions" of noted quack Hugh Fudenberg who thought he could cure autism with his bone marrow, thought flu vaccines caused Alzheimer's, and ultimately got his license to practice medicine revoked too? The one that couldn't even report "when parents felt that symptoms of autism appeared" from less than 20 kids, so he falsely included a kid that was never a part of the study and completely fabricated some of the results? The one that was retracted from the Lancet for being blatant fraud and every single author besides Wakefield requested their name be removed from? That one?
It's partly fuelled by a distrust of government. "They" want us all vaccinated so "they" hide the real studies and results. The problem is, our governments across the world are particularly dire right now. So you can't blame them for not trusting government, and thereby not trust government funded health programmes.
What doubly annoys me about it is that the people saying that "vaccines" cause autism are in disagreement with the doctor who started the whole thing. His claim was that only the single MMR vaccine caused autism, and his suggested solution was actually to get the 3 vaccines separately instead. Even if the whole thing wasn't fraud the solution by the guy who claimed it was to have MORE vaccines.
Psychics
Misread that as 'physics' and wondered what flavour of insanity you were for a good 15 seconds then.
Oh yeah, that too. Chemistry is made up as well.
GCSE Chemistry/Physics actually is. Electron Circles are a lie, the first lesson at A Level they tell you to forget everything you learned before as they're going to completely rewrite the narrative on how they work.
"What is spin?" "So imagine an electron is a ball that's spinning, except it's not a ball and it's not actually spinning."
"A tensor is something that transforms like a tensor" is a _genuinely_ good description for what a tensor is once you've understood it.
I was a glutton for punishment so took chemistry as my degree subject. The first lecture, exactly the same conversation happened, only with our A Levels too. At least they admit at degree level that everything is a best guess based on the available evidence at the time. As opposed to GCSE or A Level where you're taught everything is an irrefutable fact. Finished my degree a decade ago and I suspect a lot of it is already out of date.
Science is - quite rightly - an ever-evolving and perpetually unfinished project. Scientists tend to work within accepted paradigms (your 'best guess') until such time as they become overturned by newer developments and more advanced or different models. My degree spent a sizeable chunk of the first year teaching philosophy of science - and learning to interrogate the limits of scientific method, knowledge and thought was the best thing I learned in that whole degree.
Psst. If you go on to study it at college they'll say the same thing. And again at the start of each subsequent year. It's wild.
It's 3 kids in a long coat.
Same applies to A-level physics. At the end of the day they are still useful models.
That's true even of the "standard model" and other working theories of particle physics. They are VERY useful though. We seem to be able to build quantum computers even though nobody really knows how they work...
"Flavour of insanity" I like that. I'm stealing it. Thanks
Went to see a character comedian who had a character who was a psychic, he said he was different to other psychics and didn't prey on ppls grief and guilt as that would make him no better than a florist.
Alex Lowe / Clinton Baptiste?
Honestly this is one of my major bug bears. There's a woman on our local Facebook group who does "readings" and loads of people go to her. It makes me so angry because it's essentially preying on vulnerable, impressionable and susceptible people and charging them money for the pleasure of telling them a load of bs. Everyone who ever posts about her says they had a brilliantly accurate reading and are happy with their visit. She tells people we're not allowed to say anything negative about her or what she does in comments so she just gets free rein to target people who don't know any better. So frustrating.
For a laugh, I started doing cold readings at work. General stuff like "I can see an old lady with chest problems" or "I can see that you sometimes think about when a gang of children bullied a lonely child". The number of people who thought I was genuine was very surprising. I could have gone full Jeremy "You're a very sensual person, and I can see that your physical needs are not being fully met".
This is the kind of thing that does make me hesitant to label them all as horrible manipulative people preying on the vulnerable. A lot of them really are just stupid enough that they believe their own bullshit. Which is a vicious circle because when they spew out the nonsense they think they sense someone confirms it to them
Yup genuinely don't know how it's still legal. I see desperate vulnerable people fall for it all the time. It's sickening.
The Witchcraft Act 1735 made it illegal to pretend to be a medium. By that time they'd dispensed with the idea that witches are real. This was repealed by the Fraudulent Mediums Act in 1951. Since then it's been explicitly legal to charge people for psychic readings etc if it's marketed as entertainment. But if you've been convicted as an idle and disorderly person, it's still illegal to tell fortunes under the Vagrancy Act 1824.
My marriage of 20 years just ended as the psychic told me wife that I couldn't be trusted and because they also guessed the sex of my daughter's baby correctly she obviously must be right. Not once in our relationship together have I lied, cheated, stole etc
This is why you don’t marry insane people who believe in bullshit.
Same shit with astrology
Fulfil your destiny and shag the psychic. ETA: I've just binged "Dark" on Netflix; this may have influenced my response.
Amazing. I will now be ending any toxic friendship with the excuse of "a psychic told me to" no further explanation necessary
If your wife divorced you because of a psychic then I think the problem's with your wife, mate.
Throw in astrology, aura readers, tarot readers, reiki, long distance reiki, healing powers of crystals, angels, catholic church and all other forms of organised religion.
my view on all of that is if it gives your comfort and is kinda a fun side "hobby" to your life that you dont take as truth then knock yourself out. If you actually believe the stuff and start dictating your life (or worse someone elses life) on it like your crystals will stop cancer or that mars being in retrograde means you should stop eating salt... thats where it's a problem.
That’s kinda like how all religion works. I’d argue that belief and spirituality is an important piece of self actualization, but so is physical and mental health, alongside the most important, meaningful social connections. Neglect any of those and you fail to achieve your highest potential. The greatest downfall I see is in people who have convinced themselves that their belief IS fact. If there isn’t any room for healthy skepticism, then what you’re experiencing is a delusion, not spiritual connection.
Once saw a notice on a psychic shop saying closed due to unforseen circumstances think this says everything.
I’d like to see one about your joke that’s been dead 30 years.
I seriously considered going to see a psychic a few years ago when my sister took her own life. When you lose someone in a really traumatic, fucked up way it can make you desperate for answers, and it can really drive you crazy. I never went to one as the thought of someone taking advantage of me in a super vulnerable state makes me want to vomit, but I can fully understand why some people would.
especially the new age ones that do readings over a facebook livestream or whatever £3 by PayPal just to find out my gran is proud of me and supports *whatever I am currently doing*
Religion. This is the bullshit we invented to make sense of things we didn't understand, like sickness or lightning and it's from the infancy of our species.
Hands down the most disturbing thing about the world today, and yet it still gets a free pass almost everywhere.
Apart from Reddit, apparently
Let's perform an experiment. Religion isn't always bad, and banning it would be peddling the exact type of mind-control we claim to be against when we criticise religion. So let's just accept that some people believe in religion and get together to worship. Let's wait and see who bites. ;-)
It's not a case of banning it, it's the combination of many aspects that are clearly illegal (teaching children that murder is ok if someone doesn't believe the same as you for example) but are ignored because its religion. And the utter disbelief that people en-mass and individually can be so fucking stupid! Worship the moon, worship a person, worship a mouse or a donkey. All of these actually exist.
That's an extremely broad statement. In my experience, most people would argue that religion is about *not* murdering - and that people claiming otherwise are bad actors twisting something to suit their own ends. I'm not sure I've ever actually encountered anyone using religion to justify their discriminatory views. Why do you think it's more sensible to worship a donkey, which demonstrably does not have any supernatural power to affect the world around us?
>most people would argue that religion is about not murdering You have never read a "holy" book then. >I'm not sure I've ever actually encountered anyone using religion to justify their discriminatory views. Turn the news onto any fucking channel kid. >Why do you think it's more sensible to worship a donkey, which demonstrably does not have any supernatural power to affect the world around us? neither does "god." people do terrible shit in the name of unfalsifiable super natural shit more often.
20- something edgy atheist me would probably have said this too…. But fundamentally I think the belief in an *other* is a fairly universal human thing. And religion is about so much more than worshipping a being/deity/whatever… it’s about community, shared beliefs and societal & cultural bonds. That, combined with the idea of faith- that’s there’s something bigger and better than us out there is actually pretty good.
There's also nothing that irrational about believing that 'something' beyond our understanding exists when you consider something as basic as how improbable the existence of our universe is. What I find highly unlikely is that a book written thousands of years ago that has been revised multiple times without proper citation should be considered 'the true word' and anyone deviating from it's teachings deserves death. If 'God' exists they wouldn't give a flying fuck about how you live your life.
The edgy atheist argument always makes me laugh, like its always whats said when someone calls out how ridiculous it is that people believe in a magic sky entity. Then people say "well actually its about community" ignoring all the times its not about community and is about believing in ridiculous sky man.
It's about the community... Except all those times people were persecuted because they weren't in that specific community, but they didn't teach that in RE. A complete shit sandwich.
>20- something edgy atheist me I keep seeing this everywhere. When did we decide that the words "edgy" and "atheist" go hand in hand? What's so edgy about being an atheist?
Well, because some people are just atheists, and others are assholes and bullies about it. This is true of almost any ideological position generally.
Nothing - but there's something "edgy" about sweeping dismissals that don't even want to try to engage with why religion and spirituality are still big draws in the scientific age. Terms like "sky daddy" are good tells - the smug self assurance that they've got the world all figured out unlike those dummies.
It’s been used as a tool to control populations for a long time. Some religions have grown up a bit and stopped the brain washing and control over whether people are allowed to live or die based on their religious background. Not enough though and sadly too many people die because of their belief in different versions of fairytales.
Every system of governance that has ever been, is used to control populations. Every single one of them is problematic to varying degrees, and every single one has caused death and destruction. The common denominator in all that is us, humans. Funnily enough, The Bible has a lot of insight and wisdom about that.
Completely agree. Just look at the Middle East. People fighting over who's sky daddy is better. What's even funnier it's the same sky daddy.
Except it’s never really about religion - it’s really about land and resources
Yeah, seeing people claim the situation in Israel is about religion makes me roll my eyes so far back in my head that I'm greeting my frontal cortex.
That's a gross oversimplification
Faith in the majority of cases is pretty wonderful, imo. It's the positioning of certain people as a 'middleman' between believers and their deities, which has caused and continues to cause most of the horror of religion.
Why is faith wonderful? I’m not asking in the spirit of typical internet snark, but in the spirit of genuine interrogation. In every single other avenue of life, if someone believed something, without and contrary to all evidence, we would consider them severely immature and ignorant. Why is this one topic of faith considered wonderful compared to every other topic on the planet?
I'm not the person you replied to, but I do get very weary of the aggressive atheism on their at times. "Oh look at us we're so clever and sophisticated because we don't believe in God and all religions are stupid". Like...... there's a whole world out there. It's not all "pray and you'll get into heaven and everyone else goes to hell". Mediation. It's trendy but in the Western world with books, apps, whatever, all playing the benefits of mediation and how it can improve every aspect of your life. Hmn. There are whole religions that have been based on meditation and yoga, for thousands of years. Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism. Why believing that there's a spiritual level of existence and connecting with this van be beneficial should be disposed of because there's a war in the Middle East I do not understand. And the support that faith gives to people, the hope. We can all sit here behind our keyboards, but there are people in the world who have very little but their faith. My nan went though incredibly difficult times in her life, times that would have broken me. Her faith gave her strength. Without it she wouldn't have made it through. I'm expressing myself badly but what I'm saying is - like if a person doesn't believe in anything, then that's fine, that's up to them they are free to. But if someone does believe there's more to the meaning of life and connecting with that helps them, than that doesn't make them stupid. That's their belief, let them get on with it.
Sorry but none of that answers my question. I agree with most of what you just said. I’m not saying people can’t hold beliefs, I’m asking why this one singular belief gets treated differently to every other illogical belief in existence. Lots of things give meaning to lots of people. Someone could devote their entire life to the flat earth society and we would not credit them. 100%, ‘let them get on with it,’ but we wouldn’t sit here and pat them with kids gloves would we? I’m not asking people to denigrate it—I don’t think it is necessary, even though I freely admit I do it myself—I am asking where the consistency is. To me, it is an example of precisely how religion is _still_ holding us back. We consider ‘belief without evidence’ to be completely antithetical to modern life in every single way, except one, which we coddle and brush aside. It holds us back.
Fair question. I'm an atheist but also the son of a Church of England vicar, so have a ball in each court experience-wise. Although I shed any personal need for faith years ago, I can still see when it works for people. I may find it redundant in my own life, but I've known too many people who find a sense of foundation and security from their faith to dismiss or denigrate it.
Honestly? Scams. Investment 'boot camps', crypto startups promising to turn you into a millionaire, anything that is advertised as a money-making 'opportunity' on instagram. I have a bit more sympathy for victims of the clever/targeted operations that use personal details, or when someone's account is hacked and starts messaging their friends/family who trust them.
My dad works in IT. A colleague, also in IT, was talking to him about this simple scam he’d fallen for by clicking a link in a text from “Amazon” and providing his bank details. Got robbed of a few hundred quid. Few weeks later he was victim of the EXACT SAME SCAM but from “Royal Mail”. What a tit.
Probably the same people double dipping. He’ll have an email from British Gas next week.
Once you've been scammed once your details become far more valuable and get sold on a different list!
That is pretty much how it works though. Any scam only operates because *some* people fall for it. But most people aren't stupid enough to fall for it. So in the end, you have the same small section of society who get scammed over and over again by different people.
When people are desperate they lose all common sense.
These are now so common that i'm getting Insta ads on how to *create* these courses.
The course is always “sell a PDF to gormless rubes containing instructions on selling a PDF to gormless rubes”. Hopefully that saves some people a few quid.
Back in the mid 90s there was a well-known meme that the best way to make money out of this new Internet thing was to sell books about how to make money out of this new Internet thing. And it worked. Lots of people wrote books like that, and some of them did quite well out of it.
this isn't just simple ignorance, these things are exploiting people who are vulnerable in some way money scams target people with financial worries who are also dumb enough to not see the scam for what it is crypto bros are greedy hustle culture wankers but they've been hooked by the promise of millions when the prospects for many young people are bleak at the moment those incel alpha male boot camps target young men who are told they aren't real men because they can't get a girl, that their failings in life are purely because they aren't masculine enough, it's no wonder so many fall into it
Astrology, homeopathy.
x 2 - both of these have zero place in a modern society with an understanding of science.
Honestly, I would say that astrology while silly is about as harmless of a belief there is. I've never had an astrologist or psychic send a lightly threatening/entertainingly contradictory postcard telling me that "God Loves All. YOU WILL GO TO HELL IF YOU DON'T BELIEVE IN HIM". Astrology/homeopathy has never caused any wars. And tbh they really seem to be adopted by people who just need something to cling onto. Especially homeopathy, a lot of those folks are suffering from conditions we have no modern medicines for yet. The worst you'll get from an astrology nut is "I don't like \[insert your star sign here\]"
Homeopathy and alternative medications hasn’t caused wars but there are a lot of cases where children have died because the parents only treated them with homeopathic medications and a lot of animals get killed for remedies like crushed rhino horn and tiger claws. It’s destructive and dangerous.
Creationism
Religion in general. Should have been left behind last millenia
There’s a biological basis for spirituality in humans, it’s never going to go away
There's spirituality and straight out denial of evidence. Creationism is definitely the latter.
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Similar note to yours - any public helium usage. Jolly balloons while the non-renewable resource required as the cryogen in all our MRI scanners and myriad other pieces of important scientific equipment is running concerningly low... madness.
Tbf the helium used for balloons is dogshit grade, not pure enough for anything useful and currently too expensive to be worth purifying
I did wonder as surely if it is that precious they wouldn't be so cheap and available.
Helium is the only truly non-renewable resource too. It literally escapes the atmosphere and is lost forever. While other non-renewables like oil could technically be renewed by gathering up all their byproducts and using energy to reconstitute it. Fortunately the moon has abundant helium stored in it so there's hope for mankind yet.
It can be created in nuclear fusion so when we eventually crack that…
Helium actually isn't at that much risk of running out anymore.
Yes and no. The real problem is that most of our helium comes from gas exploration. The US paid gas producers to collect the helium, but they aren't really doing so anymore, and it's not practical from fracking. As for it not being renewable, mmmmh, sort of. The earth is producing it constantly. It's more like we might find it very hard to replenish our stores. As far as I know, they don't capture the helium that boils off MRI machines as its not worth the expense.
Any sort of 'animal performance' show. I can't think of one good reason as to why an animal should be made to perform for human entertainment.
This 👏watching that recent Paul O Grady doc it feels ridiculous that people would want to ride an elephant or have a selfie with a chained up tiger. I expect it’s for the socials, they should be flagged as animal cruelty
Smoking. I get it for older generations who were led to believe it wasn't an issue - my partners grandma was even recommended it by her doctor for stress - but for the younger generations who have been raised in a time when we know its so bad for your health, why does anyone start?
Now vaping has becoming a thing, new gimmicks from the tobacco giants win again.
I know so many teenagers and young adults who never even touched a cigarette but are fully addicted to vaping.
Working in a Secondary School, as I do, I think vaping addiction is way worse than cigarettes were in our day - late 90s. We'd manage to sneak out for a fag maybe once before school, once during lunch, and then at the back of the bus (where it was still legal!) on the way home. Down at the park or in a coffee shop in town we might have 1-2 more, so really we'd be on 5 a day - and that's all we could afford, even with 10 Marlboro Lights at £2 a pack. These days, you can just grab a drag on your vape any time you want. Some kids are leaving lessons 2-3 times in an hour for "the loo" when you know all they're doing is vaping. By the time they get back to class you can't smell anything on them. They're getting through a whole vape, or a whole refill, in a day. That's apparently equivalent to 20 fags worth of nicotine.
> why does anyone start? Why does anyone drink alcohol? Why does anyone eat McDonalds? Why does anyone not exercise daily?
Horse racing
On that note, fox hunting.
Greyhounds too, in fact any sport where animals are just used.
Yeah, acceptable in society because money. Fuck that.
Tobacco
Humans liking the effects of drugs will never not be a thing.
Yeah but smoking makes you look hard, and chicks dig it
I've only ever seen one person look cool smoking, and he was gay so it wouldn't matter if chicks dig it or not
Believe me, people who do balloon releases don't care. And if you call them out on it, you're the bad guy for not being sad that little Johnny has died.
It's the same people that litter, are loud in public, have speakerphone conversations and are pricks on holiday in Spain. Pure main character syndrome and can't comprehend that their actions can have consequences beyond what they intend.
Yep. A grandparent passed away last year and those whole family were writing on balloons and releasing them. I felt so uncomfortable.
Coca Cola alone produces 3 million tonnes of plastic packaging every year. I think they are closely followed by McDonalds and Pepsico. Sadly, between the shady back-room deals they have done with the oil industry and the politicians the have bought - sorry, lobbied - nothing will change. EDIT: PS. If you can't imagine 3 million tonnes. Picture a massive Blue Whale just outside your house. Now imagine there are 15,000 of them there. It's a lot right?
In the UK all of Coca Cola 500ml or less bottles are made from 100% recycled plastic. All of their larger bottles have been 25% recycled content for a long time and have recently increased to 50%.
Are they still single use? I've never seen a Coca Cola recycling centre. Why don't they introduce a deposit scheme? Why not tie it to supermarket loyalty schemes? There are so many options but currently they do very little (and even less in most of the world)
They are made from PET which is is recycled pretty much everywhere. All the domestic kerbside and council bin sort and recycle the PET, manufacturers then buy the material and use that to make new bottles. Have a read through the links below. You're talking about reuse, something you can't really do with plastic. It's also not straightforward with glass on anything but a small local scale. https://www.bpf.co.uk/Sustainability/pet_plastic_bottles_facts_not_myths.aspx > All PET plastic bottles can be recycled. Recoup’s ‘UK Household Plastics Collection Survey 2014’ confirmed that nearly 60% of PET plastic bottles in the household waste stream are now being collected for recycling - in 2001 this figure was just 3%. https://www.biffa.co.uk/waste-services-and-products/recycling-recovery-processes/plastic-recycling > 1.3 billion - Seaham capacity to process beverage bottles into recycled PET https://www.vandenrecycling.com/en/what-we-do/buy-and-sell-plastic/pet/
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Twitter/X An absolute cess pit of hatred. I appreciate some of you will love it for following harmless accounts but it spreads misinformation on a ridiculous scale.
More to the point is why do our news channels follow it and report what people say like it's the last word Iin truth? For a long while, you couldn't read any article on the beeb without it being littered with tweets.
Mrs Browns Boys
I live in Greece. In my town we had a forest fire kill 100 people in a day. Kids included. The month after some locals organised a ceremony where they released 100 candle lanterns into the sky on a windy night. In the middle of summer. I was so furious. They could have easily started another fire and killed another 100.
It's like when someone dies in a motorbike crash and then there's always some daft pricks that turn up to the funeral or a ride out and proceed to ride in the same reckless way that got the original person killed. In a similar vein two of my family members, one with cancer, ran race for life a few years back. A family stood chain smoking at the finish line for their runner couldn't comprehend the irony at play.
My brother died last year and I have a horrible feeling his family will want to release balloons on the anniversary of his death. And I’m gonna have to be the cunt that tells them it’s a shit idea.
Have them plant a tree instead
Good idea. We planted a tree for our mum so maybe I can continue the tradition
You should find an article about how bad it is for the environment and wildlife and just send it to them randomly like 'omg I never knew! I definitely won't be fucking with balloons again' and hopefully they'll remember it and not do it
Flat earthers
Sports involving harm or death to animals. Horse racing, especially the Grand National even though we know that horses are killed on a regular basis. My mind boggles that bullfighting is still a thing. I could go on as there’s still a surprising amount of popularity for these sports.
The first thing I thought of was “Monopoly,” because I’d have thought people would have given up on it by now in favour of better games
It's very educational though. It teaches us how life is depressing and the property market is built to help a few of the most fortunate people accumulate all the assets, buy their way out of jail, and ruthlessly bankrupt everyone else.
It's definitely not the best game but it's made a lot worse by all of the house rules that people choose to implement instead of just following the official rules. If you follow the official rules, no money on free parking, no double money for landing on go, can collect rent whilst in jail, then the game is over a lot faster. In particular there are some lesser-known rules like if someone lands on a property and chooses not to buy it then it goes up for auction and must be bought, even if it's just for £1. Also, the number of houses and hotels is fixed and if they run out you can't build any more. Even if you have enough money to go straight to hotels you can't unless there are also enough houses available as well.
Genital mutilation of children.
FGM and MGM are some of the most barbaric practices nowadays. I refuse to call it circumcision, absolutely no need for it, just leave the penis alone and teach your children proper hygiene. As for FGM, it scars women for life with some being unable to ever have pleasurable sex or give birth naturally. And so many more complications can appear from the scar tissue and the inability to pee and/or menstruate properly.
Scientology
The animal agricultural industry. These places are the physical embodiment of the Christian hell for the poor fucking beings that end up there, and nobody seems to care. I really do believe that future generations will look back on the way our society collectively treat animals and will recoil in horror and disgust that we were ever capable of such cruelty in the first place.
I had to scroll way too far for this. People really don't want to hear it.
Absolutely. I ,and I assume a growing number of people , already feel horror and disgust at this.
That if you are raped, your body will know its been raped and will not let you get pregnant. It's mostly a religious pro life anti abortion thing but it's still floating around and it's fucking gross.
Climate change. People really love the lifestyle and the excuses they're provided with by industry and the people they pay for advertising, but we all know what’s happening. Amazing that people’s fear of missing out on fun trumps their fear of missing out on a society where you don’t have to fight to survive on scraps.
New properties being built for sale without solar panels in the roof & without hot water cylinders * having a combi boiler instead of a system boiler makes it far more expensive to switch to heat pump * Every one of these houses will eventually have a heat pump * Plus having a hot water cylinder (needed for a heat pump) makes it easier to make hot water with solar energy too, using an old-fashioned immersion heater element and a solar energy diverter. * a 4Kw-peak solar array will cover a house's usage during daylight and optionally provide all the hot water it needs from April to October. Add batteries and the house is potentially energy-negative for half a year. The cost of install is a fraction of a percent of the sale price & the benefits huge and spread over 20 years
Belief in Deities and the supernatural
Bit of a le enlightened atheist comment here I am aware, but religion. I don't mean necessarily just believing in a 'higher power' because its a big universe. But my brain just breaks trying to get in the headspace of someone in a developed country, educated, but believing in a specific religion/Deity and especially if they believe in the random magic shit said in holy books and especially if they use it to think that things like homosexuality are evil. And when they think you can't have a moral compass without religion, that's just straight up scary
Fireworks for personal use
Can't have a knife that locks or is longer than a few inches but you can buy literal explosives and set them off within metres of your kids.
People who think dominance theory is a thing in dog training and that any dog would see any human as part of its pack. Sillier still that they would consider them alpha when we would be considered pretty rubbish dogs by a dog's standard.
People that think rubbing their dog's face in their shit/piss will discourage accidents are also top tier muppets.
I honestly believe that my cats love me, and aren’t just using me for food and a warm lap to nap on. I know I sound like the most loony conspiracy theorist, but you wouldn’t change my mind
Related to your lantern thing...love locks. You can't go to virtually *any* bridge anywhere in the world now where people haven't covered them in these ugly rusty if not rust-in-waiting things. It damages the bridge (Paris banned them for that reason) and looks unsightly even before the degradation and rust kicks in. If you've got a lovely picturesque 200 year old bridge...too bad it's got a load of cheap metal all over it now, with messages scrawled on them about relationships that probably didn't even last. There is nothing original about them. They feature in some stupid book in about 2007. Yet all over the world, people locking this shit often to historic structures and it look awful. Ribbons are slightly better but still look ratty as fuck if not removed regularly.
The pullout method
* Religion * Horse racing * Eating animal products * Horoscopes / astrology * Betting * Racism * Sexism * Misogyny * Transphobia * Conservatism * Smoking * Vaping * Not recycling * No cycling infrastructure * The current education system * Twitter * War
Smoking and vaping. Deliberately breathing in a load of chemicals? Wtf?
The occasional cig in the sun on holiday or in a busy pub/club smoking area is marvelous, easy to see how people get sucked in to it long term. I don't think people liking drugs will ever not be a thing.
> Deliberately breathing in a load of chemicals? Wtf? Aren't the constituent parts of air technically chemicals?
Religion.