Ask Lemmy

9/11 truther. Missile pods on military jets and fed reserve gold heist. WTC7 got me in. But I was also a welder and I'd been making thermite for fun since I was a teenager so I knew that jet fuel didn't have to melt steel beams to significantly reduce its tensile strength, just several hundred degrees was enough to weaken steel. And I know the difference between thermite products and liquid aluminium pouring from the buildings, thermite looks like straight up lava, and in any case, you need way, way more thermite to melt through a steel girder than you might expect from watching movies. It takes at least half a kilo just to melt through the hood of a car, let alone and engine block like the anarchist cookbook would have you believe, I know because I did it.

Used to believe that humanity would inherently self-improve, especially the more easily information became accessible.

People couldn't read and write at first, and didn't know much about the world, and now we have instant communication and access to vast repositories of knowledge.

I believed that people were naturally curious, and wanted to learn and figure things out. Education systems sucked, but with improvement it could foster that curiosity in everyone!

Turns out that was incredibly naive. Humans have an inherent ego that tries to make themselves more than reality. Their problems are more real than another's. Their inconveniences are more important than anything bigger-picture. I thought religion were old dinosaur structures of primitive belief systems that lasted for too long, but humans will literally make shit up or believe in some made up shit from someone else if it helps them ignore the inconveniences of reality.

COVID-19 really helped sink that in.

I used to think that thinking had deep intrinsic significance. (That's what I get for growing up in a thinking-obsessed culture)

Not a hard experiencer of the highly strange, but I'm becoming less and less of a skeptic.