It impacts different people differently. I’ve seen people blow hundreds of thousands of dollars up their nose. It was known as a massively addictive and expensive substance for a reason.

I was never impressed by the shit, but stimulants aren’t my thing either.

I’ve seen entire families torn apart by cocaine though, for some people it’s so completely overwhelming in their life it becomes all they think about.

I saw cocaine destroy a lot of lives, including my own parents and family and connected people.

It is not a “safe” drug in the same way that caffeine or cannabis are.

I agree that it’s “as safe as alcohol” because the people who’s lives were destroyed by cocaine were also deeply addicted to alcohol and alcohol alone kills more people than “regular” drug overdoses every year and climbing.

As a species we’re not capable of handling responsibility in the face of addictive substances. We’re just not. We can’t handle marketing and politics, how are we supposed to make better decisions about substances that make us feel pleasure?

I don’t think that means prohibition and drug wars are the better alternative, but we can’t just give everyone whatever they want without some kind of barrier or they will literally destroy themselves.

If you don’t combine this with massive efforts to set up mandatory education on addiction and health, and create the same resources that other countries have who have decriminalized drugs, such as rehab centers and single-payer healthcare so people can get treatment immediately and without question, we’re just going to see them used as another addictive tool to acquire and consolidate capital, and with lethal impact.

In the US particularly, people are too dumb, numb and tuned-out to handle pretty much anything responsibly. We already have tens to hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths a year, (not counting alcohol) so I could easily see that spiraling out of control if people had access to even more ways to harm themselves while feeling pleasure.

The entire criminal justice system needs a revolutionary overhaul, drugs are just one part of it. If we remove one thing without checking all the other things, we tend to just make pocket-vacuums that other horrible things fill.

While I don’t care about people who want to do drugs, I don’t believe for a moment that if cocaine didn’t become legalized for recreational use that it wouldn’t cause massive amounts of harm.

Speaking as someone who saw his father snort millions of dollars up his nose so he could appear functional while drinking like a fish all day, every day, and the damage it did on his family and future and prospects.

Our species isn’t ready for responsibility. When left to their own choices, people do not make good choices for themselves or others. We absolutely need shepherding by organized institutions and groups of thinking people who can make plans for our continued function and growth.

I don’t know if prohibition at all works for saving people from themselves, but I think we need a much larger effort broadly to get people to understand how their own minds and bodies work if nothing else. People still broadly have no clue how addiction works because they have no idea how their own brain works and the difference between feelings and facts. We’re dumber than ever as a species, and getting dumber. We are too easily compromised by outside influence to make good decisions for ourselves or our communities. It’s not going to get better. Nobody is coming.

Even if the picture was taken in a bad light, I would still vote for tacos.

Watch his messaging when he tours FOX and other right-wing podcasts and youtube channels. He talks to the right without without resistance or pushback from the hosts because he’s advocating preservation of existing systems instead of actual overhaul to our nation’s policies and financial systems.

He is likely going to be our next Obama. Charming and beloved by many, but secretly propped up by the billionaire class who want to keep feasting from the table of status-quo. Obama was a great leader, but as a president, he passed on very real opportunities to make lasting change over and over. He didn’t exercise his power in any remotely overreaching way even when he had house and senate. He didn’t pack the Supreme Court and didn’t enshrine rights in any way that would protect people. He could have rammed single-payer healthcare through and been hated and loved by many, probably impeached, but we would have had something great from it.

We really need to do better as a nation understanding the different between leadership and management. And we need to pick people for our local and community elections that have these qualities. They are the ones who prop up the larger system and the ones who largely run unopposed because people are far more fascinated with Buttigieg’s dazzling blue eyes than what their local comptroller believes.

Buttigieg is establishment democrat. Actually listen to him instead of doing what most people do, which is stare at him and wait for him to “say something gay” and then be impressed that he’s such a great orator. He’s never advocated for the social and financial overhaul that the US needs. He’s argued that the system is sufficient for our best outcomes, the same system that is currently on fire.

This reminds me of Obama so much. On one hand it would be nice to have another leader who unites the country, but Obama wasn’t necessarily good for our nation’s long-term future. He was not a leftist or advocate for the poor, he was also establishment Dem/Liberal who passed every opportunity to create real and lasting change in the country.

Buttigieg is currently touring the right-wing spaces and dropping his messages there without resistance because he’s advocating for preserving the wealth in the country. He’s tacitly being endorsed by the billionaire class. They want a return to normalcy, and Buttigieg may have exactly what the country needs to get there, which is clear messaging, hypnotic blue eyes and an appeal to many men’s latent curiosity about what what a strong homosexual male even looks like… or if nothing else, an avenue for libs and neo-libs to feel performatively progressive by dropping his name. It’s enthralling to the masses and we should all be terrified.

He is going to be a strong candidate if we have elections again, and I would take him over Trump, but we need to understand what he is. He is NOT our leftist savior, he’s barely more progressive than a liberal savior.

I want to make it clear, if he’s the final candidate against like, Mecha Trump or Don JR or Vance or someone equally absurd, we all better push Buttigieg’s booty up that hill and I will wave that rainbow flag along with everyone else. But we have to understand that it’s a band-aid on a massive infected wound that’s bleeding out.

Hey now, he didn’t say he was working close with Trump, he said he was working closing with Trump.

I’m sure there’s a distinct difference.

To stop insisting upon itself for like, five fucking minutes.

Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer”.

Bruh, it’s not game of thrones. People just need to work.

Burn all your tracking cookies associated with reddit, kill all your browsing history, then reset your router for a minute, then use a fresh e-mail and not a disposable one to register a new account. Using a VPN will also get you insta-flagged.

Keep in mind most subs will not let you comment or post without a karma history, find some large meme subs that let new accounts post and just say bland shit for a day.

I’ve been treated the same way, lost about 7 accounts each over 12 years old because some mod didn’t like me telling off an incel and from there sent it to admins and from there it’s been repeated bans and shadowbans.

I am done with reddit, I’ve seen behind the curtain in my time there, I know how bad it really is. The whole platform is now an AI training-bed and in some communities more than half the users appear to be bots. Very clever, very well-disguised, but you can tell if you check their history. They want to be able to control large-scale narratives and it’s working.

But if anyone wants to try to keep fighting the bot army, you can create a new account by deleting all your reddit cookies and browsing history, resetting your modem for a minute, then making a new account with a new email. (Use Gmail or another name-brand on, they now shadowban accounts made from disposable emails.)

Also, do not use a VPN ever. Instant permanent shadowban, and you have to start all over.

From there you just need to establish some karma history so you can post. Memes and other content-grind subreddits let even new accounts last I checked.

If you don’t want your account banned immediately, do not make political opinions, do not argue with anyone, do not sass reddit even through they deserve far worse. Don’t reply to yourself or your alt accounts, they can now tell immediately. Do not report anyone, they now will use reporting as an excuse to ban you if they decide they don’t like you.

Ideally, #3’s head on #1’s handle

This is the way.

I remember growing up watching PBS and actually thinking the world I would grow up in would surely be better than the world before, especially with so many people watching people like Mr Rogers and Sesame Street and the slew of educational programs like NOVA.

I realize now that I was a shut-in nerd without involved parents and PBS was one of the only channels I could tune in on my little black-and-white television set.

Nobody else watched this stuff. If they did, they didn’t internalize it, and if they did, they took all the wrong lessons from it. (“I AM special just the way I am, that means I deserve to have anything I want! yaaah white power!”)

I appreciate that at least someone read it. I feel bad for people trying to do right and just find some decent, non-hateful place to socialize online, but we all gotta remember there’s no such thing as a safe space online. It’s all going to alter your brain in some way. It’s like how there’s no such thing as a “healthy” amount of alcohol, even nice, decent spaces online are not necessarily good for you if you’re not limited your time and not maintaining healthy distance from other people’s thoughts.

It’s hard because we all want to connect, but our brains aren’t wired to absorb the thoughts of so many other people… especially how we read them in our own voices inside our head. It confuses the many, many sub-layers of your consciousness. (Neurology is a bitch to learn about because you realize all at once how complex we are, but also how vulnerable.)

This lemmy forum is far more about kids crying about authority existing than it is about actual structured critique of the business world and processes. It is absolutely exhausting hiring, and sadly most of the people here will never know that stress, and will hold onto these cartoonish notions that only elite, wealthy, privileged cartoon villains are the ones who make decisions who to hire and how.

Meanwhile, people like us have to somehow dance around pleasing both bosses and employees and potential employees without making mistakes that everyone seems to be looking for you to make with a hunger.

Says the link in the chain.

All you have to do, as hard as it is, is compartmentalize your mind a little better.

When you read menslib-super-academic, everyone-is-a-gender-philosopher and everyone scores points for being better and more progressive than everyone else, you need to be able to read that with an understanding that some of it is has value in terms of understanding the world and how arguments work, but you can cut it off there. You go back to outside-land and look around at your life and understand that it’s not related to two strangers online yelling at each other about different brands of socialism versus how problematic Brad Pitt’s performance is.

If you then left all that baggage BACK at menslib, and then enjoyed your movies and media and talked like a grown up to other people about the media you like, you will find that MOST people will share your interests or at least give it a shot. It’s about having some level of sovereignty and not letting the internet infect your mind with nonsense. And it is. I don’t care if there are actual protests on campuses from people screaming how evil Fight Club is, it doesn’t matter. You can still like it and not feed the chain. Have some shred of pride in yourself and the things you like.

Because the next step after feeling ashamed to like what you like, is feeling angry at the world for “not letting you” like them, and then starts the slippery slide into being hateful and angry and suspicious of everyone and everything. To say nothing of how you will want to spread how frustrated you are more and more, inflaming an already degrading situation.

Okay i’m done, I just had to address this because it sounded wrong in so many ways. We’re all getting our heads yanked up our own asses by reading the voices of too many other people.

As someone who knows far more about Menslib than I should probably say in the open, I can safely tell you that you need to get off the internet and not read gender-oriented material at all. Podcasts too. This is media, it’s meant to create conversations and most people don’t take it seriously. Or at least they shouldn’t.

The internet has this way of seeping into your head and making you think the constant barrage of sensationalism, of intrusive thoughts-turned-posts, of fake people pretending to be outraged, it makes you think all of this is any way how people actually view the world and it programs you to do the same.

I lived in the before-times, I know how people thought before. It wasn’t like this. When you’re not infected with the aimless thoughts of thousands of faceless voices in space, you can just enjoy what you enjoy and nobody cares. And if someone does care and not like a thing you like, you say “oh that’s too bad, I like it though.” And that was it. End of story. Those two people would then go on to like, get married and have a pile of kids because back then, we weren’t always looking for contention. That’s the other thing these spaces do, is make you aware of contention that doesn’t impact you and only serves to clutter up your mind.

This entire fetid mess is screwing up our minds, and then you take this screwed-up vision of the world and post it somewhere else, so the thousands hundreds of super-sensitive, sheltered Lemmy users read it and now all the tender boys here are wringing their hands over a non-issue as well and absolute nonsense spreads and spreads and spreads.

You like something? Like it. Stop trying to please people while at the same time stay respectful and kind and just get on with your day and life without excuses or hand-wringing about things that aren’t real.

Which people and where? I am dead serious, there is reason why I want to know.

what the… then, how could you possibly be attacked for liking them?

Are you just creating things in your mind to feel bad about???