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Pandering to egos, or what I see more frequently, predating on fears. I run my own email server, partly because I enjoy watching the diversity of spam and trends, partly so i know what new scams to look out for. I receive far more "drink this to cure your disease once a day!" types of emails than I do "smoking hot babe wants to send you a message" types of emails.

I like to pretend it's a 5D chess long con (it's not, but pretending is fun). It's much easier to scoop off the scum when it floats to the top, and trump got a whole bunch of them to take the mask off so they can be arrested for treason.

Similarly it's fun to pretend Apartheid Clyde went full fascist so that neonazis would replace their coal rollers with low-poly 90s video game pedestrian crushers to own the libs.

I think it's important to realize that almost everyone is at least occasionally a sucker. There's a grift that targets basically every personality type. There's grift for health conscious folks, for worried parents, for 'I'm so much smarter than others', for gamers, for outdoorsy types, there's something for everyone. If you aren't careful you'll be laughing at the other 'idiots' while you yourself fall into a different trap.

Honestly once you start paying attention it's really scary how many different and seemingly totally unrelated topics can be used to pull people into facism. So many times I've clicked on a different YouTube video or something and then all the sudden my feeds been taken over by right wing bullshit.

People refuse to try to address that sort of wooly thinking when it is low stakes then when it becomes high stakes act shocked to see the people around them acting irrationally. One's hypothetical friend who refused to take the vaccine because they thought it had a mind control chip in it and died as a result invariably was previously banging on about how their acupuncturist was going to help them win the lottery and people simply indulged them because "what's the harm in them having funny beliefs about things?" The only time you actually could get through to people around you about these harmful ways of thinking is when it's about things that don't really matter much. If you wait until it's life or death it's too late to get though to them.

Nutritional content of grains, fruits and vegetables has declined over the past 70 years

The world is decidedly off-track to reducing Sodium levels in foods by 2030, salt is considered the leading dietary indication for non-communicable disease. I think we're off-target for all the diet-related sustainable development health goals?

Moderate to severe food insecurity has risen for the past 10 years, nearly half of people cannot afford adequate nutrition

And this is before more localised issues like food deserts, natural disasters, recommendations influenced by industry, etc. Or even other issues like additives, factory farming, sugary drinks being cheaper and safer than the water supplies...

Don't get me wrong, many of us have access to a much larger variety of food from across the world, if we can afford it, the fortification of many foods helps maintain some forms of nutrition, and regulations have made a lot of our food safer. But overall, our produce is worsening in quality and the cheaper per calorie/time foods are what people are forced to eat, and it is killing them.

But I also meant less literal forms of diet too.

It's such an exhausting problem that so many people hold society back from meeting everyone's needs, because society fails to meet everyone's needs and thereby creates people who hold society back from meeting everyone's needs, because...

It feels like being locked in a room full of people flinging shit at each other because they are mad that people won't stop flinging shit at them and everytime you try to gently suggest they all just stop flinging shit they just start flinging it at you until you shut up.

That privilege had its price.
Our medical knowledge didn't come from from doctors sitting down with pen and paper and figuring stuff out. It came from field research, trail and error on alive and dead subjects. Subjects that two world wars provided by the millions. It just so happened to be that those subjects were mostly white men between 14 and 50 years of age in dire need of medical treatment. Naturally our knowledge of male physiology skyrocketed during and after that period. On the contrary, when it comes to psychology, men are light years behind women. While trying to """cure female hysteria""", we got a far deeper look into the function of our brains on the female side than on the male side. Even though most of these women took part as voluntarily as someone would take shrapnel in the war. I'm trying to say that it's not just as simple as men or women have it better, it all boils down to historical availability of patients for research.

You'd think so, but I knew a guy

You should check out the cottage-core tradwife trend going around. Some extremist Christians are doing the "going off grid" and "back to our heritage" thing on social media.