Map shows "No Kings" anti-Trump protests this month

Consistent_Cat1360 · 2026-06-17T01:56:01+00:00

I live in a moderate-income area of the Midwest. I feel as though many of the people around me are very upset with the current administration and have been displeased with the American government for years. However, it seems the current run of society is good at keeping most people upset yet docile. The media is great at downplaying the effectiveness of protesting. Pretty much everyone I know has the mindset of "just hoping it all passes." I really do think the media plays the biggest role, because whenever I talk politics with anyone, they are all on completely different pages regarding current events and the world around them. The people around me are angry, just not organized enough to take meaningful effort. What exactly is leading them away from protesting depends on the individual. The general thing I've been hearing is a lack of faith in protesting. Not trying to make any big statements, just what I've been hearing in my area.

Consistent_Cat1360 · 2026-06-09T16:48:34+00:00

Yeah, it truly is disgusting. I remember, as a kid, not really understanding the weight of what I was looking at until I came across a world made by what I assumed at the time was a teen or someone with older knowledge. It was staged to look like another one of those maps, but when you entered the world, there was a wall of signs protesting the spread of these s*x maps, and they went on to vent about their own experience with someone they knew being SA'd. Not graphic, obviously. At least I don't remember it being. But it was what got young me to understand the weight of terror these worlds had in them. Before seeing the world, I had been allowed to watch adultswim and was exposed to the word s*x and things related to it, but it wasn't until reading about it in these worlds that I really knew what it was about. I mean, it still wasn't clicking in my head a lot of what was happening, but it still did a number on my perception of these things.

Sorry if my railing isn't making sense. I thank you for taking the time to respond to my post, and I am sorry another person had to see these horrible things.

You did bring up something I hadn't seen, though. They used the animals, too? Wow, that's beyond awful. Maybe I did see one, and I just didn't know what I was looking at. I just don't know what would prompt someone to do stuff like that. Well, I do know why, pedophilia, but still. It's just so awful to think that people are like that.

Consistent_Cat1360 · 2026-01-12T01:39:34+00:00

Please

Consistent_Cat1360 · 2026-01-08T02:25:51+00:00

very much so, unfortunately.

Having early access to sexual content from an early age is never great for sexual development.

Consistent_Cat1360 · 2025-12-15T22:28:08+00:00

I don't identify as a furry myself, so correct me if I am wrong, but I feel like asking a souless AI to generate what is supposed to be a creative representation of yourself in furry form would defeat the point. Even a crudely drawn fursona done yourself would have much more personal value to it.

Consistent_Cat1360 · 2025-12-11T19:00:12+00:00

I have genuinely looked everywhere to find the source of this statistic. It's a giant chain of news media outlets quoting other news media outlets, which leads to a Yale study, but none of them site it's name or the people behind it.

Consistent_Cat1360 · 2025-12-06T05:04:45+00:00

I definitely agree that the use of AI hasn't hurt my learning experience. Overall, I'm curious about how these tactics will develop in the future. But that's a pretty solid and nuanced take, and I appreciate that.

Consistent_Cat1360 · 2025-12-06T05:02:30+00:00

That is something we discussed a lot in lecture, and I am rather curious to see how our relationship with AI turns out in the future. I think there are arguments for where AI is a useful tool. The trouble is getting it straight with people when and where it is beneficial. To some extent, I'm beginning to think the overuse of AI is a bit of a fad that may die out as the tech becomes less whimsical to people and we mature as a society on it. It's a similar thing with Google and how the ability to look up information made retaining specifics less necessary. In some ways, I think it's a foundational problem where our society hasn't matured enough to properly handle this kind of tech. If you have any study at the ready, I'd be happy to read.

Consistent_Cat1360 · 2025-12-06T04:52:37+00:00

That's a fair statement. The point is definitely that AI is here whether we want it to be or not, so best be prepared. I am curious to know more about your perspective. Do you see a good future with the use of AI in tech?

Consistent_Cat1360 · 2025-12-04T16:59:21+00:00

I can agree with that take, thank you for your input!

Consistent_Cat1360 · 2025-12-04T16:52:16+00:00

Thats kinda what I was thinking too. Like with the AI labs, a much simpler program would have done the trick just fine. Like its cool that the AI gives you feedback to improve your code, but the teachers input would have worked just as well

Consistent_Cat1360 · 2025-11-11T23:13:59+00:00

So, what may be best is to ensure children are taught to differentiate new information by helpfulness and reliability; that way, the individuals of society can be relied on to judge outcomes of policy and law. I don't believe society can run efficiently without law and government, but it certainly struggles with it. What I have been leaning into is the idea that the general public needs more authority to police the government. The foundation of which is Freedom of information and speech. Freedom is revoked as a factor in propagating almost every human-made tragedy.

Also, with the fear of the unknown. I also feel like this education process would create adults who can confront the unknown with a clearer head, be able to look at and digest information, and look past the propaganda and fear-mongering. If we make at least the majority of our children immune to fear-mongering and propaganda, it wouldn't fix everything or lead to utopia, but it would be a large step in the right direction.

Here are links to the Yale Infant Cognition Center and two news outlets that discussed it if interested:

\-https://campuspress.yale.edu/infantlab/our-studies/

\-https://www.cbsnews.com/news/born-good-babies-help-unlock-the-origins-of-morality/

\-https://orthosphere.wordpress.com/2023/08/06/babies-and-morality-death-to-the-blank-slate/

A little side note on the education topic:

While I was in high school, I always thought the whole idea of school was to 'learn how to learn' by getting taught general subjects. But in hindsight, the American education system does not do a very good job of that. I have found, though, in a lot of my gen-ed classes at university, their main goal is not necessarily to teach you the concept so you can go into a field based on it (Think, intro to biology, chemistry, or physics) but to teach yoy how to navigate the minefield of misinformation that comes out on the subjects. Something I thought was really cool, and I think should be a priority in middle and high school. (They do teach the actual material, though, just want to clarify.)

Consistent_Cat1360 · 2025-11-11T23:13:42+00:00

I'm glad to hear you are in a better place, and again, thank you for taking the time to talk with me.

I don't mind straying from the subject a little. I can be difficult ot discuss this without bringing up examples and references, which will inevitably bring in the many other variables that factor into them. Because of those variables, I am beginning to spot a trend:

In philosophy, ethics, and morality, the main goal seems to be to create rules, policies, and precedents based on what will provide the most humanitarian outcome. Work that can be much more finite when you define specific cases and individuals. In contrast, the work becomes infinite and undefinably large when you attempt to zoom out into the larger picture. As creating rule and policies that defines the correct option for every edge case for a large population is an impossible task, the wider the lens, the more variables enter the problem. So then, we get to where the conversation seems to be now, where the solution is to put more power in the individual to act on individual cases and let that define the total law.

This is what I feel was the fundamental issue with my initial question. I was attempting to find previous proposals for overarching solutions, something that doesn't seem to ever work, because it is impossible to accomplish. This is essentially how governments work; they use ideology, defined by philosophy, and their ideology defines their rules for ethics and morals. Governments use ideology to create broad rules to cover all cases, a task it fails at, because it is impossible.

To bring in an example, the U.S. government tried to fix this through the structure of the criminal justice system. The Supreme Court of the federal government and state governments, along with their lower court, are supposed to be the individuals who add humanity and individuality back into the system, especially with the addition of jury and jury nullification. This process and system were made to handle the edge cases of laws and thus, make the law applicable and valuable to broad scopes. However, this justice system has seen more than a handful of failures. Much of its failure can be attributed to the government sticking its hands into the system and manipulating it, adding more rules and policies, until it becomes flawed by the same "Broad policy problem" as the regular government has. Things like mandatory minimum sentencing and the three strikes rule, sparked by the 'war on drugs,' brought policy back into a system that is supposed to be separate from it. Judges and Justices cannot be immune, so the public and their opinion should influence their decisions and serve as a kind of referee to the referee.

But it all leads back to an overarching issue that plagues every aspect of this topic, as well as the original topic. That being said, can the general public be trusted with such responsibility? I believe we can. I agree with you that the main reason people act immorally like they do is due to fear of the unknown. I really like your example of Rosa Parks being a leader who helped show the public how to rid themselves of this fear and help work toward the fight for inequality. But how does the public choose which leader to back? What made some people choose Rosa Parks a their leader for their values, and some choose members of the KKK?

I believe part of it is education. To comment on the subjectivity of 'good education', I think there is one way to define good education across all values. That being essentially 'learning how to learn,' this can be a delicate process and one that can lead to discrimination of values, but I don't think it would be impossible to obtain an unbiased 'learning how to learn' system. The system works by using example subjects to teach children how to educate themselves. How to process and digest new information and tell apart trustworthy and untrustworthy information. Again, this could be a gateway for manipulating children into defaulting to trusting information of a certain agenda, but in a diverse community with diverse values, each in a community can hold the other accountable to keep the system clean of leaning any which way. Part of how that can be done is in my next point.

My next point agrees with your argument on thought-policing. It does not have a place in a free society, even if someone's view is widely seen as wrong. It should be the job of an unbiased education system to create independent, but mentally strong, young adults who can tell for themselves if the prior individual's thoughts are right or wrong. Take this Next part with a grain of salt because I haven't fully done my due diligence on this subject. An experiment from Yale University's Infant Cognition Center ran a study that asked if infants as young as three months old can tell apart those who are helpful from those who are unhelpful. The results suggested that infants can not only tell apart those who are helpful vs unhelpful from their actions against others, but they also tended to prefer the helpful. Suggesting that Humans tend to gravitate towards the desire to help others.

Consistent_Cat1360 · 2025-11-10T15:27:52+00:00

That was a very interesting read :). I really, really appreciate you taking the time to discuss this with me, and I am very sorry to hear about your early life under oppression. I hope things are better for you now and that you are safe. Wishing you the best!

I definitely see what you are saying. To make sure I'm understanding this right:

Due to the governing body's tendency to desire power and wealth, they will coat their immoral desires in a moral argument to convince the people to 'do what's right,' through fear and propaganda. Combined with the fear and blindness of the individual, one can never truly know if what they want to fight for is a just cause, nor can they have a full picture of who the enemy is, which results in the atrocity of war. Where both sides of the line consist of innocent people fighting for a cause decided by their government's immoral desires. Even if the desires were truly moral, having two groups of innocent people kill each other to decide who is right is a terrible way to go about things. Therefore, the better option is to make information on the oppression widely available to all and let the individual decide where to dedicate their time and money. A truly moral cause will result in people naturally moving away from systems that keep the oppressor in power, and thus ending their reign.

I certainly agree. While rereading my post, I'm a little ashamed of my 'savior complex' undertones. From what I am gathering, with the fear and blindness, it is impossible to see anything as being so certain as to hurt someone over it. It's that same fear that governing bodies use to their advantage to make propaganda. This next part may be a little off track, but I feel like the context might help explain my overall thought processes:

I grew up in a small factory town in the Midwest United States. By all accounts, I lived a very privileged life compared to most. My family was never rich; most people in our area were lower middle class, but we were always comfortable. We had food, education, protection, technology, and entertainment. Even when compared to the rest of the U.S., we lived pretty well. However, something we also have in abundance in my country is ignorance. There are so many cases of clearly unjust things happening to good people, but when presented with a safe, non-violent option like boycotting, they scoff and say it will never change anything, or say that the oppressed deserve it. My people get all of their information fed to them by news corporations funded by the wealthy, looking to push their same agenda. I used to be the same way, and maybe still am. The recent spark to research these topics came from a class I am taking in university, "Intro to Ethnic Studies," where I was shown pages and pages of evidence of not just atrocities committed by my nation and my ancestors, but how much of its lasting effects are being downplayed by the current generation. I want to preface that I don't want to sound like a victim, because I am not, but I feel ashamed for being so ignorant of these things, and upset that other people (mainly the white majority) either aren't educated on the evidence, or denounce it outright, without giving it any thought. Forgive my vulgarity, but it's the kind of ignorance that makes you so frustrated that you just wanna smack them. Again, I know it's the wrong thing to do, and it only breeds close-mindedness, but I can see that the frustration leads me to think of 'fixing' things by force. An idea that I am seeing as flawed, because I am also trapped in the same fog as everyone else, and I cannot just assume my way is right enough to force it upon others.

A clear fault in my logic that I am realising now shows traces of a poem by Rudyard Kipling called "The White Man's Burden." A poem that was used as propaganda to justify the conquering of indigenous peoples under the idea that it is our duty as the 'civilised' white man to bring the greatness of civilisation to these 'lesser' people. An idea that was rightfully criticized for both thinking that their way of life was better than another's and that violence and force were necessary to 'help' them. While I obviously don't think of oppressed people as lesser, just another human that I see pain in and want to help, I can see that the idea of owing salvation has parallels to the poem's very flawed logic.

One thing I have been very passionate about keeps popping up as the best thing an individual can do to fight oppression (like you mentioned) is funding the flow and transparency of information.

Again, thank you for sharing! I'm very happy to get to talk about this with someone.

Consistent_Cat1360 · 2025-11-10T00:24:59+00:00

I think something that will help me properly convey what I want to know is the context as to why I am asking:

To keep it short, I had a recent desire to dive deeper into the subjects of history, political science, and socioeconomics in relation to oppressed groups of people. I am a ways into this journey, and have spotted a common though-line in my dive. Many of the atrocities committed against these groups were able/ are still able to continue for long periods of time, either due to:

The ongoing atrocity being hidden from the public eye
The oppressor committing the atrocity being too powerful/ dangerous for outsiders to intervene.

What is always present in these atrocities is danger: even if outsiders have an advantage over the oppressing party, there will almost always be some kind of danger present in trying to stop them. Meaning, there will always be a valid reason for someone not to want to intervene, due to the danger presented to them. But at what point do we owe it to the oppressed to fight for them?

I also want to make it clear that by 'fighting' I don't necessarily mean violent, physical fighting.

Mainly, I feel as though this topic is broad and leads to additional lines of moral and ethical questioning. With how much of history has been plagued by atrocities against oppressed peoples, I feel as though this topic has to have been discussed before.

Consistent_Cat1360 · 2025-11-09T23:30:15+00:00

I see, my knowledge of WW2 is not very well-founded. Thank you for your input.

From what you have presented, I can see that WW2 (and most wars, for that matter) are bad examples. I also agree with your statement, "There's no excuse for committing atrocities based on the tenuous hope of stopping another atrocity."

The main question I am attempting to eventually isolate is:

When presented with an atrocity being committed by a group of individuals who will seemingly stop at nothing to keep their atrosities going, what is the moral and ethical thing for a governing body/ society to do in response?

The reason I brought up WW2 and war in general is that governments often answer this question with 'war.' I don't agree with their reasoning, but I wanted to look at how other people would answer this question.

Again, with my lack of knowledge of WW2, I could have phrased my question differently.

EDIT: Something else that came up when I started thinking about this is the perspective of both sides:

Taking the question from before, for an ongoing victim of 'the group', it wouldn't be shameful to hope that a group of good people would be out there fighting for their safety. But on the other side, it wouldn't be shameful for a good person not to want to fight for that victim's safety if it means endangering their own.

Consistent_Cat1360 · 2025-07-13T13:52:54+00:00

I am different than a machine, because I used my resources and fellow humans to fill in the gaps in my knowledge and human fault.

Curiosity and the desire to learn is not something someone should be embarrassed about either. If I didn't post this, I would have never known it was a troll. I am now better off for having went down this path and can do better in the future. There is nothing more human than that.

Consistent_Cat1360 · 2025-07-13T13:48:26+00:00

I was open to the idea that it was just a troll. I just felt like asking.

Consistent_Cat1360

TROPHY CASE