you better watch out for the DS9 people...

Not going to agree with the commenter above, but I want to point out that this happens a lot:

A person who holds views that are detrimental to others comes to a community of those people and cries "why, when I am not quite like other people who hold these views, but agree with them on the detrimental stuff about you, do you not accept me?"

The people in the community try repeatedly to explain why holding views that harm others is harmful and that the person asking may need to revaluate their own views.

The person then says they're being attacked. Everything they predicted about this community is coming true! They feel like they're being kicked out!

And they are! Because when they came to engage then didn't change, let alone evaluate, any of their own views, the community rightly showed them back to the door until they are ready to actually listen and put themselves in someone else's shoes.

I am sure you feel like you have been badly treated at this point. What you do with that now is up to you. I'll say this: I have no hate for you, I would like nothing more than to give you some feedback that might help change how you view some things. I hope there is enough food for thought here for everyone.

Yes, many people are raised to have pride in the town, city, state, country or planet they are from. It's so common and cross-cultural that I am extremely surprised you would need an explanation by the time you're capable of writing comments on the Fediverse.

Now that we have the pedantry out of the way, how is your comment meant to be helpful or move us forward? If it's neither of those things, why are you doing it? All of this is rhetorical, of course. Just food for thought for us both.

I wasn't prepared for that. The views. Wow.

I know you don't want advice, but I want to share some information that may be important and helpful for you: recent studies have shown ulcers are essentially an infection and antibiotics have some success in treating them.

For too long doctors thought it had to do with stress or diet, but it's an infection.

The sad truth is it will need to get much worse until conservatives will admit there is a problem and let progressives solve it.

It has always been this way. You either live in a progressive, upwardly moving state with improving quality of life or you get stuck in a conservative, stagnant or downward trending place where people are more concerned with "others" than they are with doing anything productive as a society. As a species, we seem to slowly wobble back and forth between these extremes. It's maddening.

"The West" is essentially the group of nations attempting to abide by a moral code. It is not always, or maybe even often, successful, but there is a vast gulf between their morality-based approach and what China, Russia, DPRK, and other fascist/semi-fascist nations are doing.

How much do you think you'd need to get out? (Asking, in a kidding way, as a Californian who is tired of these memes about how it's bad to live here when you're just describing any major urban center in the world.)

Edit: you're not wrong about the challenges, it's just that they're not unique to California.

Because one of the parties is better for lifting people up. Like, immeasurably better.

I won't even say which one I think it is. You can decide for yourself.

Sorry, but this is such fatalistic bs.

So much has changed.

I remember acid rain.
I remember leaded gas.
I remember 12mpg cars.
I remember the photos of terrible brown smog floating over Los Angeles.
I remember before anyone had a recycling bin.
I remember...

The list goes on. And I'm only a handful of decades old.

Can we do more? Yes.
Should we do more? Absolutely.
Are more people aware of that than ever before? Yes.

Humans have technologied their way out of so much shit, I am not ready to give up on us yet.

I mean, they've definitely lost people to the fediverse, the majority here at this point are probably reddit refugees.

They may have gained in total users for all I know or care. This place just feels more like the old internet I like. Really looking forward to the slow decline in people here caring about what's happening on Reddit, regardless of how big and successful or how terribly failed it is.

Some people haven't realized almost all animals are just tubes with various fancy shit glued on.

Edit: including humans