Zinnia

@Zinnia

Neil Kumar #pratt

Catherine Robillard, Kai Decadence & Ruth Less #transphobia

Most agender people, and some non-binary people, are indifferent to what anatomy they have. (Not always; there exist a small number of agender people who prefer entirely de-sexed forms, and some non-binary people who prefer androgynous or “exotic” physical forms, though it’s not necessarily a strong preference.) While it’s really hard to test because it’s not like people can just transition willy-nilly, nor would indifferent people be very inclined to experiment with it if they could, at present it seems likely that such people genuinely wouldn’t experience any form of dysphoria if they changed things around.

It’s also entirely valid to identify with the gender typically associated with one’s anatomical sex for reasons of convenience if one genuinely doesn’t care how other people identify/refer to them. It’s also valid to say “I don’t know what I am, and I don’t care enough to figure out, I just identify as a person”… though that’s going to seem really weird to people for whom gender (or lack thereof) matters, and occasionally people who should know better might get stupid about it. Either way, people shouldn’t be forced into an identity they don’t care for/about; that’s just as bad as gender essentialism.

Of course, while there could very easily be TERFs who are anatomy-indifferent and really don’t get the concept of being anatomy-attached (for lack of better term), I suspect that it’s still more common that they’re just cis and not self-aware enough to express their gender beyond superficialities like “I have a thing that bleeds”. As long as it’s considered the default, cis people rarely need to be self-aware about their own gender, after all.

Napoleon de Geso #sexist #homophobia #transphobia

@Taln_Reich #111019

I thought OP just had a really twisted understanding of what it means to be a cultured person.

There’s a good chance that their understanding is indeed twisted, because given the messed-up attitudes displayed here they might not be aware it’s supposed to be satire. That’s what I meant by “this one might not have gotten the memo”.

@Bastethotep #111016

Among otakus/weebs/whatever you want to call them, “man/woman of culture” is a satirical phrase, generally meaning “into perverse stuff”. There do exist people who identify as such as a form of self-depreciation. This one might not have gotten the memo, though.

Mazdak X #psycho #sexist

Lots of great milestones and coming of age memories

By which you mean rape, murder, and theft. We have a word for people who actively desire that: monsters.

I would have started a career with LIKEMINDED and TRIBALY CONNECTED brocels.

If you mean regular child soldiers, you think everyone is rotten as you? If you mean in an incel uprising… pffft, no. There aren’t nearly enough of you to matter, and incels in general are too demotivated to organize a bake sale, let alone a war.

Catherine Robillard, Kai Decadence & Ruth Less #transphobia

It’s in trans activists interests to conflate gender with sex.

Errr whaaat. Assuming there’s not a typo in there somewhere, or that they don’t understand what “conflate” means, I’m not sure I want to know how that makes any sort of sense. TERF philosophies which are derived from actual feminism are all about gender being a social construct, they just think that the social construct is entirely imposed from the outside. The ones which are feminism-appropriating reactionaries conflate gender with sex. I’m currently not aware of any variety which thinks that other people subscribe to both concepts simultaneously and also both are bad.

@Malingspann #110994

It’s a bit more complicated than that, as there are also a few types of “theys” and occasional other things, and also gender affects how you relate to things socially. But essentially.

Candace Owens #conspiracy #wingnut

To expand on Bastethotep’s post, a very early study done on cell cultures before the pandemic went global did show ivermectin having a significant effect on certain viruses, including covid-19. However, it was noted that the dosage used in that trial was well above fatal levels. In actual human trials, at safe doses, there was no notable effect. It’s a case of the dose making the poison, and the level which kills viruses also kills nearly everything else.

Honestly, sometimes I think we should stop publishing “interesting results” which don’t necessarily mean what they might suggest, because stupid people are going to misinterpret things badly. Not that it will completely stop this from happening, but at least it’s easier to point out how idiotic they’re being when they eat garbage-dump dirt or drink pee, and they’ll have a harder time convincing people who are less stupid but desperate.

Napoleon de Geso #sexist #homophobia #transphobia

@Vgal #110993

Kemono = “beast”. In this case it’s probably short for kemonomimi = “beast-ear”, which is a generalized term for humans with animal ears and sometimes tails, such as catgirls.

Hey, if somebody wants to be a catboy/catgirl/dogboy/doggirl/kitsune/whatever for real when such a thing becomes possible, I have no issue with that. But if you’re going promote engineering a slave race, or forced transformation for the “worthy” (regardless of how one would define it) then I’m going to have a real problem with it.

Napoleon de Geso #sexist #psycho

Winter Rose, Reverend Coffin's Other son & sdsmt1169 #transphobia #pratt

@Anon-e-moose #110920

So why does it matter so much to you...?!

It matters to some people, because by giving something identity-related a label, it suggests [to them] some form of deviation from the norm. This often further suggests [to them] that people are trying to normalize being transgender and de-normalize being… not that. There’s no good reason why anyone would want to do that, so clearly [to them], it’s cult mentality.

Robert Stacy McCain #transphobia

You know, I am now mildly concerned that there are certain people, once you get them to accept that “cis” isn’t a slur, will start arguing that certain slurs aren’t actually slurs, using whatever misguided/wrongheaded logic they used to convince themselves of cis = not-slur. That’s going to cause some headaches.

For anyone who wants to know the real reason, “cis” (short for cisgender) was originally what is known as an “outgroup label”. Such labels are used by members of a social/cultural/religious group to refer to people who are not part of the group, because saying “non-[us]” or similar negative constructions are sometimes awkward and/or self-othering. For a few examples, Jews refer to non-Jews as Gentiles, nudists refer to non-nudist as textiles, and autistic people refer to non-autistics as allistic. Sometimes outgroup labels can be problematic, and some people find being personally referred to by an outgroup label to be disconcerting because it’s not a self-identified label, but the general idea of it is not a problem in of itself.

What makes “cis” different from most outgroup labels is that some non-trans people are taking it up as a personal identity label. And some other people find this to be deeply weird, because to them labels are about how one deviates from the “norm”. So it doesn’t make sense to them to specifically identify as a trait which is considered a societal default. (That being said, most people who are straight/hetero *do* identify as such, they just rarely think about it, so even people who think that way usually make an exception already.)

“Shemale” originated as, and is still largely used as, a porn term. Even ignoring the term’s inappropriate implications, and that it has been used by hate groups in the past as a genuine slur, there’s still the matter that most trans people would prefer not to be associated with porn.

Modi, and other Hindu extremists #psycho #racist #fundie

Unfortunately, it seems that the early 21st century is seeing quite a lot of countries trying out some form of race/religion/culture based nationalism, the kind which tends to result in genocides if left unchecked. For some of them, it’s nothing new; for others, there’s a degree of denialism because that kind of thing “can’t happen here”. Fortunately, most of them pulled back from the brink, though not without a bit of self-inflicted damage in the process. Unfortunately, it’s still happening in a few places, and there may still be more to come. It’s not like Modi’s aggressively pro-Hindi views weren’t already known to people who have been paying attention to global affairs since he was first elected back in 2010. Let’s just hope that India doesn’t go there, or failing that, manages not to go full Nazi.

Jesse Lee Peterson #conspiracy #wingnut

Maybe I’m not in the right spaces, but conservatives whining about liberals talking about George Floyd seem to greatly outnumber liberals talking about George Floyd.

Also, most conservatives either hate MLK or present him in a severely watered-down form, so that’s not even an effective clobber rhetoric generally.

mysteryca #magick

When you do not fit into the mainstream, there’s a strong tendency to try to find a place outside of it. That doesn’t mean that non-mainstream communities/social spaces/practices can’t be toxic, unsafe, and/or full of woo. It does mean that LGBTQ+ people, neurodivergent people, highly traumatized people, and people who simply find cultural norms weird and unpleasant are over-represented in anything which isn’t hostile or specifically exclusive towards them… which does sometimes have the unfortunate effect of making “different” seem “weirder” than it really is to those in the mainstream. At least trans people aren’t commonly associated with tulpamancy, if for no reason other than most people don’t even know what that is.

I’m a bit confused by the idea of “etheric body” as presented here. If that’s not a “soul”, what is it? Some kind of tripartite existence thing where two of the three are immaterial? If it is a soul, why is it considered normal to hate your soul for not matching your body? Most religion/spirituality tends to assume/teach that the soul is the “real you” and that self-hatred is a bad thing, so… ???

Malevolencel #sexist

I look forward to the day when gendering people in contexts like this is virtually never relevant, only their occupation matters. I expect there will still be occasional “[gender] shouldn’t be [occupation]” screeching, but it wouldn’t be mostly limited to the versions we expect to hear today.

Kerry Cassidy #crackpot #conspiracy #wingnut #quack

There exist people who define “cyborg” in a manner which most would find far too broad: basically, any manner of technology which people regularly use as an extension of their minds/bodies to perform useful tasks makes one a cyborg. Working out a multiplication problem with pencil and paper? Part of your thinking is being done “outside” of you, so in that moment, you’re functioning as a cyborg. Hitting a nail with a hammer? Also cyborg. Even a spider sensing its environment through its web probably counts as a cyborg by this standard.

And then there are people who define it in a way which is more reasonable, but still not what most would consider a “cyborg”. Like, if there’s some specific handheld (or occasionally, wrist-worn) device which you carry with you most of the time and use multiple times throughout the day, and your life would change very drastically if you lost access to it and were unable to get a suitable replacement, then you’re a cyborg.

And of course a lot of people with prosthetic limbs, or any sort of artificial organ/bone regulator/replacement, consider themselves “cyborgs”. Even though most of the cutting-edge stuff still isn’t quite as “futuristic” as most people would associate with the term, this is probably an entirely reasonable use of it.

And then there are biohackers, extreme body modifiers, and even occasional post-op trans people who consider themselves “cyborgs”. There’s no real agreement on what the term “should” mean outside of a sci-fi context, only that the meaning of the term will eventually evolve to encompass… something. And likely, something common. But whatever it ends up being, it will probably not mean “soulless half-robots who force you to become one with them” like the cybermen or the borg. That’s paranoid idiot thinking. (I mean, there’s always a slight chance, but some of the worst dystopian stuff is very unlikely precisely because enough people are aware of the possibility…)

Regardless, this person has probably encountered references to one or more versions of already-existing “cyborgs” and completely misunderstood.

Fraktalreise #mammon #magick

I’m not sure if it’s better or worse that they’re using emoji instead of ALL CAPS for (mostly) inappropriate/excessive emphasis, like I’ve occasionally seen others do elsewhere.

SiliconGlass #homophobia #fundie

I would like to point out that people who claim “it’s okay to be bigoted against homosexuality because unlike race or physical sex, it’s a choice” are also, with very rare exceptions, still bigoted against women and people of other races.

Eskimocel #sexist #crackpot #psycho

This whole bestiality thing seems to be a weird way of saying “women have sex with anything that moves, except me” which is in turn part of a larger idea of “women are mindless, sexually depraved rape-beasts, so it wouldn’t cause any meaningful harm to rape them in return” which the vast majority of them know on some level that this isn’t true… but they desperately want to believe it, anyway.

Frank Schlernitzaver #fundie #crackpot #dunning-kruger

Science and medicine have always been “highly disputed” by those who don’t understand it.

Matt Walsh #fundie #transphobia

I’m pretty sure Matt Walsh isn’t that stupid; he’s just mocking concepts which he would never accept because they don’t fit into his worldview.

That said, he’s always been bad at satire.

Wayne Allyn Root #conspiracy #fundie #quack #wingnut

“The left wants non-cishets to be able to marry” = “The left is offended when cishets marry” due to the magic of… um… bad logic?

It’s been 5-7 years in most places, you’d think it would be noticeable by now if that were the case.

Odessa14 #psycho #racist #wingnut

Roe v. Wade is one of those decisions where it comes down to “Which matters more, State’s Rights or the right of citizens to not have their quality of life dramatically impacted by where they live?” During the mid-20th century, when Roe v. Wade happened, the Supreme court nearly always came down on the side of “states should not directly impinge on people’s quality of life” even when the issues only carried a 40% or so popularity.

The general precedent is so strong at this point that it wouldn’t even be an issue if the Federal Courts hadn’t been stacked with people who put loyalty to the Federalist Society and/or Republican Party above precedence given even flimsy justifications. The only mercy is that the Republican party has been very bad at law to the point where they keep torpedoing those flimsy justifications and ignoring the courts’ not-so-subtle hints at how to not completely fuck things up. Some are probably doing it on purpose to generate outrage and fleece the rubes, because their own political career depends upon it, but others are definitely that stupid.

nancyzatanna #wingnut #pratt

Uhhh… what?

I’m not 100% sure what he’s saying, other than he appears to be inventing his own meanings for certain words.

In addition, this was during an era when the US did not have undeclared wars. Congress declares the beginning and end of wars, the president only leads them. I don’t know to what extent Lincoln negotiated (the South seceded ~~a month~~ 4 months before he took office! the war didn’t start until ~~5 months after the succession though~~ 1 month after he took office though) but it wasn’t really up to him.

[Edit: corrected due to Peacemonger343 pointing out my timeline was a bit off, I forgot that presidents didn’t always take office in January]

Lindsey Graham #wingnut #pratt

Shut up, drama king. Go leech off Kevin McCarthy or Mitch McConnell or someone else deserving of your famesucking.

Charlie Kirk #fundie #racist #wingnut

Chick-Fil-A is in a weird place in the fundie landscape: their corporate culture is strongly ant-LGBTQ+, they promote the “traditional family structure” without being complete asshats about it (most of the time), but unless I missed something they’re either not keen on any of the other bigotries typical to American fundamentalism or they don’t dare to show it. And if the fundies boycott them enough to hurt, they’re not likely to go full anti-civil-rights just to appease them, as this would run a severe risk of suicide. So fundies love them because they’re among the few corporations who they can semi-reasonably call allies, but also lament that they’re not nearly fundie enough.

It would be better if they either reformed completely or disappeared, but as long as they exist in their current state, at least the dissonance it causes fundies is occasionally amusing.

Napoleon de Geso #sexist

1. No understanding what “consent” means. Sadly there are people out there who think that “consent” is granted via external factors rather than the choice of the people involved, or know that this isn’t what consent means and consider actual consent to be blasphemy because sex *should* be governed by external factors, or consider “I don’t consent to your lack of consent, or to other people’s mutual consent” as being somehow valid arguments for violating people’s autonomy.

2. No understanding that for a lot of people, personality matters a lot more than looks, and looks are often just a bonus. Also, having a “fetish” has not been considered a medical disorder in of itself for longer than most people have been alive, it’s only considered disordered if it’s obsessive to the point of being life-ruining or dangerous to others. Good luck trying to change the medical establishment on that.

Reverend #pratt

Based on the responses to that tweet, there are a lot of people out there who hold the views that “profiting off the public domain is bad”, “content warning about old-timey racism is bad”, and “if you do both at the same time by profiting off public domain works which have roots in old-timey racism and give content warning about the old-timey racism you stripped out in case they want to do some research on the source material, you are a hypocritical monster”. And also a few here and there who insist that Lovecraft’s works weren’t racist (to be fair, most of the best-known stories in the Cthulu Mythos weren’t even written by Lovecraft, so they might just be oblivious).

And also people who seem to think that it’s literally impossible to both enjoy a work and be critical of it, and only a cynical greedhead would dare to profit off something they hate. Assuming they’re serious and not just saying whatever they think will score some anti-SJW points, somebody needs to smack them upside the head and tell them that this is not at all how it works for most other people.

Brian Niemeier #conspiracy #fundie

as they’ve done from the start

“Please do not buy masks yet, they’re currently scarce and hospital staff need them more” = “masks don’t work, never wear them” thanks to the magic of Fox News rephrasing!

Wayne Allyn Root #wingnut

Florida is the state everyone makes fun of. Some of it’s a bit unfair - if other states were infested with alligators, alligator-related stupidity would be common in a lot of other places, for example - but the general impression by “northerners” is that it’s unsafe, the education system is terrible, and there’s an awful lot of people who aren’t quite right in the head. Why would any of them want to live there? I mean, other than the never-matured-beyond-high-school retirees who move to The Village. Which is why most rich people only own a vacation home there. So, if that were real (and not, as I presume, a bad joke) it would be pretty empty.

Unless it’s a “stay off our beaches” thing, which they’re doing anyway, because those beaches are plague zones right now. Still empty.

Gladys_Kravitz #transphobia

My sex is not a costume. It's not something for them to play around with, it's my reality.

I’m going to admit that I sort of used to agree, in a very narrow fashion - but about self-described “sissies”, not transwomen. It really irked me how there were men out there who identified as men, but occasionally adopted an exaggerated femininity and were all like “wow lookee, I am so slutty and sexually submissive because I’m a girl, rape me plz, tee-hee” and then reverted to normal when the mood passed (or they had to go to work). Thankfully, the much more common current version of this, “femboys”, tend to be way less obnoxious and problematic about it, and I don’t normally have am issue with it.

I would not be surprised if a lot of people associate the worst of “sissy” behavior with transwomen, but they’re not even remotely the same thing.

John C. Wright #homophobia #elitist #kinkshaming

The fact that your language is so degraded and debased that you cannot even form a non-paradoxical sentence

I see that you are a linguistic prescriptivist, and that also your definition of words is based on Catholic doctrine (or at least your personal interpretation thereof) where applicable, despite your insistence otherwise. Also, I did a quick check of dictionary.com and there’s no definition of “sexual dyad” (or even just “sex dyad”) listed at all, so unless there’s some formal definition elsewhere I guess that means whatever you want it to - in which case that particular phrase can’t be part of any formal definition of marriage. Sadly for you, the only time prescriptivism has ever had a meaningful influence on the English language was during the 1600s when Latin professors invented “Proper English”, and even that didn’t fully stick. People will continue to use words however they use words, and it’s not “paradoxical” if it doesn’t match what you think it should mean so long as most people can understand it.

Also, amusingly, dictionary.com’s primary definition of marriage is all about “conjugal rights and responsibilities” and their secondary definition states that it’s used as a shortened form of “opposite-sex marriage” and/or “same-sex marriage”. I don’t know if it said the same in 2014, but still. This does differ from my 2001 Webster’s Dictionary, which the primary definition strongly implies that it must involve one man and one woman, but the secondary one implies that other forms exist.

Bev Gibson-Baptista #fundie #dunning-kruger

Anonymous #conspiracy #fundie #ufo

I think the word you’re looking for is “secularist”. Most atheists are also secularists, but most secularists aren’t atheists.

Not sure if there’s no meaningful distinction according to their personal definitions of the terms, or if they’re just that ignorant.

Dr. James David Manning #crackpot #fundie #wingnut

if you mean that Trump is no longer relevant but still keeps finding ways to insert himself back into the spotlight just long enough to be an attention whore, then I would agree with that aspect. I didn’t even know Kanye and Kim were ever in a relationship, I’m too far out of touch with celeb culture to know anything related to that.

John Horvat II #fundie #wingnut #conspiracy

The juxtaposition that socialism is about “elimination of all risks” as a means of “avoidance of suffering” but claims that it causes “envy, social disharmony and resentment”… seems a bit odd. What exactly is being implied here? That the latter things are not a form of suffering? That what socialism tries to do and what it actually does is different? Or are they arguing two different socialist strawmen simultaneously?

Further, “envy, social disharmony and resentment” are issues which exist in every sociopolitical system. And one would think that, within a system which promotes economic equality, at least envy would be lessened. I mean, maybe it wouldn’t, humans can be screwy in some ways, but at least it would be no worse in that regard. And I don’t think you can really eliminate most forms of resentment on the societal level, just manage them.

Steve Sailer #transphobia

That’s a bit odd take on what the “blue pill” supposedly does - people in the matrix are *already* unable to truly perceive the matrix for what it is, so my impression was that it just erases the memories of learning about the matrix so that your recent life feels like scraps of an incoherent dream, or something like that (admittedly, I saw only the first film).

Regardless, “other people believe things that are very different from what was drilled into my head as a child” is an awakening of sorts, but then concluding that “and therefore the things I already believe is the true reality” would be roughly equivalent to taking the red pill and then concluding that the matrix was the true reality and that the rebellion are dangerous terrorists. Perhaps the pill they took was only a red placebo?

Marjorie Taylor Greene #fundie #wingnut #racist

Sure, pander only to White Supremacists under the delusion that it doesn’t count as “pandering” and wonder why other races aren’t too keen on supporting your party.

@Creativerealms #108500

Possibly she’s referring to Malcolm X or Louis Farrakhan? Both of them promoted the holiday, but neither of them created it.

Eivind Berge #crackpot #dunning-kruger

And of course every occasion is “rape” if the woman or prosecutors say so.

I’ve heard that stereotype as far back in the 1980s (and wouldn’t be surprised if it went back even further) but has anything like that ever really happened? Certainly not to the extent that even actual rapists should fear it much. Even in the cases where the evidence is pretty damning most accused rapists serve little or no time and suffer little or no long-term social or economic consequences. Unless they’re a black man (or to a lesser extent, hispanic) accused of raping a well-off white woman, in which case they typically get decades of prison even on flimsy evidence. #MeToo changed that a little, but not nearly enough.

Regardless, coming from a place where “consent” is a poorly-defined superstition of some sort which upsets the natural order isn’t going to win you many points in today’s world even without the pedophilia apologia.

hmimperialtortie #transphobia

Before any cis woman goes around donating uteri, might want to consider whether you really want your estrogen levels to drop near zero or if it’s worth the price of long-term hormone therapy. (I’m assuming the ovaries come with it.) Obviously not an issue for most transmen and some nonbinary/agender people.

I expect what will happen is that eventually they’ll figure out transplants well enough to do it reliably. Then the TERFs will scream about their “poor lost lesbian sisters” (transmen) being lured into “death camps” for “organ harvest” for the benefit of “pervert men” (transwomen)… even though most of the transplants will come from already dead organ donors and most of them will go to cis women. And then organ cloning will come on its own relatively shortly after, gradually eliminating “traditional” organ transplants. At that point, assuming the movement hasn’t died out or morphed into something different, they’ll start bemoaning that they fought so hard to earn their [messed-up idea of] womanhood, while those goddamn T-slurs get it instantly with a wave of the scalpel (as if it were that easy, simple, and didn’t have its own associated battles and costs, even in the foreseeable future).

Though after thinking a bit too much into it, I was amused by the imagined discombobulation and outrage of future TERFs and other bigots of various stripes at the first time an AFAB woman gets a penis instead of or in addition to a vagina and still identifies as a woman. That would probably be the hardest concept for them to wrap their heads around, though obviously Satan and/or Baphomet is involved somehow.

SlayerSlayer #wingnut #psycho

I’d put decent odds that this isn’t an incel, but someone who is trying to troll incels. Most of them seem aware enough that being depressed enough to be suicidal also strongly erodes the needed willpower to actually commit suicide.

Donald Trump Jr #wingnut

If we get together, they cannot cancel us all.

Missing the point. Nobody’s currently canceling your side as a whole, unless by “your side” you’re specifically meaning the Trump Family and no one else. If one person or small group gets “canceled”, exactly what are they getting out of a protection pact (?) or otherwise trying to “uncancel” a member of their group/movement/collective than they already do anyway, aside from being a bit better organized? That’s not nothing, but it doesn’t help nearly as much as you think. Unless you’re referring to demonizing liberals/BLM/antifa/whoever extra hard in retaliation for deplatforming, in which case your side is doing that already and it’s not working very well.

quora user #conspiracy #crackpot #wingnut

As far as any vague semblance of logic exists, it’s probably something like “authoritarianism is bad, communism is authoritarianism and also left-wing, my right-wing views aren’t getting sufficient media coverage while extreme left-wing views are everywhere, therefore communists are controlling the media to suppress what most real people believe”. Regardless, views like this are a fallacy-and-inaccuracy-laden chain which usually weren’t assembled by any particular individual, but by collectively and unconsciously fusing together various bogeymen.

Candace Owens #crackpot #quack #wingnut

The entire reason why this idiotic quackery became a thing in the first place is because silver ions are a fairly effective antibacterial and antifungal. However, colloidal silver doesn’t break down into silver ions inside the body, it just gets absorbed into tissues and gets stuck there for a very long time. Also there’s no real evidence that silver works on viruses, so even if it worked in general it’s questionable if it would do anything to covid.

Edmund_Kemper #sexist #wingnut #crackpot #psycho

Most incels seem to think we live in a porn-fantasy culture, they’re just excluded from truly participating in it. One of the problems of most porn-fantasy cultures is “how do minors exist in that reality, exactly?” This feels like an attempted partial solution to that. It is a terrible solution.

Fschmidt #dunning-kruger #psycho #god-complex

decay of religion
cultural decay
genetic decay

Cultures are always changing. The rare unchanging cultures become stagnant and eventually die. The past cultures which some people idealize were never anywhere close to “pure” or “perfect” - however one conceptualizes that supposed purity/perfection - and even if they were, most people still would not want to live in them because they’d only be well-suited for a small portion of the population. (Just like a lot of actual cultures, which I suppose is “fine” if you want a semi-dystopia where you are among the people on top just so you can feel superior. Unless you’re delusional about ending up on top even in your own idealized world. Which is not actually fine for most other people, either way.)

Religion gets constantly reinterpreted in the context of the current culture. Short of isolated cults or religious enclaves, you can’t force religion to remain “uncorrupted” for long periods - and unless the religion is relatively young, you’re just going to be preserving a particular “corrupted” form of it anyway. Also I specified “long periods” because cults and enclaves only last somewhere from a few decades to a few centuries (or sometimes even only a few years to a decade in the case of personality-based cults) before becoming more mainstream or dying out.

“Genetic decay” is not really a thing, unless you’re talking about lack of genetic diversity due to limited, closed breeding pools, which dooms a species to extinction if the environment changes too fast. Or, I suppose, it could be true in a metaphorical sense if the world was full of radioactive mutants or something. I assume that this is a dogwhistle for race-mixing.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene #conspiracy #wingnut

@TBTabby #108015

If “Natural Immunity” was worth a damn, we wouldn’t have overcrowded hospitals.

There’s this common belief, though not usually coherently expressed: if you microdose on diseases, you’ll strengthen your immune system to the point where it can handle anything.

That’s not how it works. Your front-line fighter cells never get stronger no matter how many diseases you face; their effectiveness is based on genetics and your general health. Your special-ops cells have to spend awhile “training” (sort of, it’s complicated) before they can join in the fight, and once they do, they’re only effective against the specific pathogens they’ve trained for. Also, the actual fight is often long over by then, it’s mostly so that they can utterly wreck the next invasion before it can really get started. That’s what vaccines are for, so they can train in advance and join in the fight immediately.