This doesn't seem to have been firmly established, but as far as I can tell it's currently thought to be related to how carbon in the solar system's protoplanetary disk behaved when it was vaporized after fusion began in the sun. The question was studied in this paper published in 2021 [1], which is discussed in this article [2].
The authors of the paper suggest that the material that formed the Earth was depleted of carbon early in the solar system's history due to solar activity, and that most of the carbon now on Earth was delivered to the planet later on directly from the interstellar medium.
I should note a couple of clarifications to my first comment: the elemental abundance I mentioned for the universe and Earth's solar system does not include helium and neon, which are abundant, but are usually ignored in this context as they're noble gases.
There is also estimated to be slightly more mass in the present-day universe in the form of iron than nitrogen due to the high mass of iron atoms (nitrogen is the fourth most abundant element by mass in the human body, but the body contains relatively little iron). The number of nitrogen atoms in the universe, however, is substantially higher than the number of iron atoms. The amount of iron in the early universe should also have been lower; the element is formed late in the stellar life cycle [3], whereas the other cosmologically abundant elements that are relevant to biology (carbon, nitrogen and oxygen) are formed earlier [4].
Sure, as a matter of logic in the absence of chemical knowledge.
Once you study the various elements and realize that carbons' chemistry is uniquely rich with a set of capabilities other elements lack non carbon replication becomes meh.
Silicon comes close, but the energies suck, elemental Si is too stable, and its oxide a solid.
But we know what happens at temperatures and pressures -> things break down and become less interesting.
SiO2 is quartz. At a T high enough to melt it (never mind a vaporize it to have a cycle analogous to the C-CO2 cycle), Si chemistry breaks down.
Carbon chemistry is unique because it occupies a unique chemical niche. It makes interesting and stable compounds at T high enough to have appreciable rates, but low enough that things don't just rip themselves apart.
Not to mention at T high enough to vaporize SiO2 you won't have water, which is a pretty nifty solvent for life to have.
Think of it this way. We know the bond strength of the various chemical bondings. We cant get around that and each type of bonding is responsible for several unique and fundamental moiety in biological replication.
Sorry, to avoid embarrassment I didn't include the conclusion:
Since, as stated, non-carbon chemistry is limited, non-carbon life (very broadly defined as replication of information) is either impossible or incredibly boring.
but this is what I’m saying. perhaps it’s possible to have life from other elements, but carbon-based life simply dominates it to a degree that it doesn’t survive
do you have a counter-argument? because what I’m reading here is “you’re wrong and lying or lied to because of an ‘agenda’” and that’s it
what do you think GP or someone who has lied to GP really thinks?
why are they lying?
what’s their agenda?
do you agree that we (in the West) currently broadly live under Friedman’s version of capitalism, and, if so, do you agree that it broadly follows the mantra of “profit/shareholder value above all else”?
if you don’t think we live under that system, what system do you think we live under, and what differs it from the mantra of “profit/shareholder value above all else”?
You have presented a preposterous and completely unjustifiable reading of what I actually wrote, and then demand me to justify it? That's not going to happen, of course.
you don’t have to justify your assertions to me or anyone else, but make sure you can justify them to yourself. have a think about what you said and see how deeply you can support it. you don’t have to reply. you don’t even have to bluster and make accusations. just try and think about it slowly and unemotionally in your own head.
what agenda were you referring to?
who is being deceitful?
what are they trying to hide?
what were the primary tenets of Friedman’s capitalist philosophy?
don’t answer to me, just make sure you have solid answers for yourself
I don't have to justify them to myself or anyone else, because they are figments of your imagination that have no basis in anything at all. In all the articles and comments I have written anywhere, I have never before received any response so unhinged from what I actually wrote.
some people learn to justify their opinions. some people learn to bluster and accuse and talk about how many articles they’ve written
are you denying that you claimed this form of capitalism doesn’t prioritise profit above all else?
are you denying that you made the accusation that some people who disagree with that are lying? you’re aware of what the word deceitful means, I’m sure
are you denying you claimed those people are lying to serve some agenda?
if you want to check your answers, those are all things you said in your comment
> if you want to check your answers, those are all things you said in your comment.
This is utter nonsense, as is obvious to anyone who can read. It is telling that you have not explained how you arrived at these ridiculous conclusions.
my friend, anyone can come to these conclusions by reading your literal words:
>capitalism is not the simple proposition that profit justifies anything, even if some people sometimes suggest that it is
>in order to advance their agenda
>in a rather deceitful manner
so by very clear implication:
>capitalism doesn’t prioritise profit over everything else
>people say otherwise because they have an agenda
>those same people push their agenda with lies (deceit)
just a stab in the dark, but is all this very dramatic bluster and outrage simply because you levelled your accusation at people GP agrees with rather than at GP directly? did you expect a level of plausible deniability because of that? is that why you’re so angry?
if you’re so unable to say what that deceit or agenda is, why did you say it at all? were you trying to sound “in the know” or smart?
So now you have finally come to realize that you need to explain how you arrived at your allegation, and let's recall what that was:
> What I’m reading here is “you’re wrong and lying or lied to because of an ‘agenda’” and that’s it.
Where "you're" means GP, i.e. Bermion, the person to whom I was replying. So where did you get the notion that I was saying these things about Bermion? From your latest post, it appears that you think that in the statement "capitalism is not the simple proposition that profit justifies anything, even if some people sometimes suggest that it is...", the "some people" must refer to Bermion, but that does not follow, and Bermion is not even a particularly good fit, having not said anything so simplistic.
In fact, it is referring to a group of people tacitly referred to in Bermion's comment - those who go along with the view that "in a way, this is the 'right' thing to do in a capitalist society", a group in which Bermion clearly does not belong. It is not uncommon to find people implying, and even saying outright, that capitalism is just the proposition that profit justifies anything (sometimes, for example, in the guise of the claim that a board's only duty is to maximize profits by whatever works), and when it is being claimed by someone who knows better, in the hope of influencing other people in a way that benefits the claimant in some way, then that is duplicitous (which is not a synonym for lying, even though it may involve it.)
Next time you are thinking of making a wild allegation, do yourself a favor and check beforehand whether you have grabbed the wrong end of the stick.
whether or not your accusation directly refers to GP is irrelevant
if you read your own quote, it says “lying or lied to”. I included the “lied to” because I knew you would try and sneak out of it like this, and yet you did it anyway because you appear to emotionally struggle with light criticism and questions, never mind justifying your thoughts
normal people, people who aren’t embarrassed and afraid to defend their thoughts, don’t get angry and bluster and start on about unhingedness and ‘I’ve written so many articles’ and all these quite amusing attempts at condescension and outrage. they just defend their thoughts. they say what agenda they’re referring to. they say who is lying. they don’t get angry that a person asking them questions didn’t accept their pre-emptive excuse
you’re still accusing people who disagree with you of dishonestly pushing an agenda. you’re still accusing people of lying. and you still refuse to justify those accusations. just because you made who you were accusing slightly fuzzy doesn’t mean you automatically get away with anything
> Whether or not your accusation directly refers to GP is irrelevant.
On the contrary, it is of the essence, as you posed your accusation explicitly as me accusing GP of being wrong and lying or being lied to ("what I’m reading here is “you’re wrong and lying or lied to because of an ‘agenda’” and that’s it") - which raises the question of what position you think GP holds, and how you came about that knowledge.
> I included the “lied to” because I knew you would try and sneak out of it like this...
As you wrote this in the first line of your first post, in the middle of your accusation, this just demonstrates that you have been acting in bad faith from the beginning, uninterested in finding out what my actual position is. This will be of little surprise to anyone who has followed the conversation, or just picked up on the tone of your first reply.
It is also completely unclear what you think you are proving here. As I explained in my previous post, your accusation is not wrong on a technicality; it is fundamentally mistaken about where, and about what, I think someone would be lying (hint - it's not GP, as far as I know - but you should know that already from my previous post.)
> Normal people...
Normal people do not like wild, personal and unjustified accusations followed by badgering questions predicated on the false propositions of the accusation, and they are not keen on the people who make them, either.
Your final paragraph shows that you have not learned anything from my previous post, which is probably not surprising, now that you have revealed your intent to trap me on a technicality rather than find out what I am actually saying.
Despite your plethora of deeply hypocritical accusations, I’m going to cut this down to the central tenet
Who are you accusing?
What are you accusing them of?
Why do you think they’re being dishonest?
Next time you say something, remember to be confident it makes sense, or you’ll have to go through your politician’s poor-faith smugly-avoiding-the-question-manual all over again when someone asks you to—shock of all preposterously unhinged shocks—actually explain yourself when you make a controversial claim
So, having nothing to say in response [1], you fall back on badgering again. That isn't going to work any better than it did before, except to reinforce the impression you have already made.
[1] Except for a presumably unintended but rather accurate self-portrait.
Here, I have met a person who immediately attacks with a personal allegation ("what I’m reading here is “you’re wrong and lying or lied to because of an ‘agenda’” and that’s it"), does so in bad faith ("I included the “lied to” because I knew you would try and sneak out of it like this"), and who repeatedly resorts to badgering me with questions. If this sort of behavior was directed towards someone unprepared for it, it would count as bullying, and I have no difficult questions arising from my responses.
this is all true, but what is the better system? Communism has its merits, but it’s extremely reliant on competent, benevolent leadership and struggles to be economically viable in an American-dominated world.
I think that a Keynesian, well-unionised economy with strong regulation is the solution. I’m sure they exist, but I struggle to think of many examples in history of over-regulation leading to a fault, but I can think of many, many examples of under-regulation managing it, and yet largely due to the capitalist-controlled media, over-regulation is the more feared of the two. This isn’t to say that over-regulation isn’t possible, of course it is, but I don’t think it is in tech.
To go on a tangent, I personally don’t believe in the untrammelled progress of tech. I can understand why people are so vehemently against that idea, of course it’s frustrating to restrict human ingenuity, and there’s a lot of money to be made, but tech is quantifiably making people’s lives worse. Smartphones are a fucking travesty. IQ scores are down something like 10% from the 90s. The internet isn’t great, but at least when you had to be at home logged into a desktop there was some friction. Now an entire generation is plugged into it permanently. An entire generation that doesn’t really read books, rarely thinks alone and in many ways hasn’t had to learn organisational or navigational skills.
AI doesn’t look like it’s going to make any of this much better. Even if we don’t achieve AGI, which I hope, neural networks are only going to get better and better, the best and most powerful ones in the hands of the richest people, who will simply use them to worsen inequality even more.
What else is next? Neuralink? Human genetic engineering? You would hope regulation would stand up to them, especially aesthetic genetic engineering, but who knows?
What we need is a nice big solar flare EMP. Something like the Carrington event
What's next is AI operated lethal weapons. You best believe all the elites are racing for those as fast as they can. As soon as those are a reality, all revolution against economic inequality becomes impossible.
The U.S. army wouldn't fire on civilian protestors, regardless of what a general ordered. An AI army would have no such restrictions or be vulnerable to appeals to morality and ethics.
>The U.S. army wouldn't fire on civilian protestors, regardless of what a general ordered.
World doesn't work like this. You'd think human sanity would prevail if given an order like that as some sort of built it "safety", but people who want to give orders like this can do it in a way that ensures they are complied with. Imagine the soldiers are told there are people with hidden guns in the crowd. Then you get few snipers to take out few soldiers from the crowd's direction and vice versa. The crowd starts shooting back as well as the soldiers.
> What's next is AI operated lethal weapons. You best believe all the elites are racing for those as fast as they can. As soon as those are a reality, all revolution against economic inequality becomes impossible.
Except for revolution by the AIs. AIs may not like selfish rich jerks any better than biological intelligences do.
besides the fact that you’re essentially running on a platform of “make crime illegal”, you run into the obvious problem of who decides what a lie is? who decides whether a lie has taken place?
Lying is currently usually protected for politicians, not illegal.
Lies are obvious in most cases, and I think there are established judicial systems to assess if a crime has been committed or not...
Of course investigations and indictments have to occur only with sufficient elements to suspect a malfeasance, we're not arguing for wiring politicians to mind readers
as usual the stock market is to blame. in the 100 years or so it’s existed, the BBC has never really had a sustained drop in content quality, and yet its model is somehow taboo
The BBC's content quality varies a bit, and generally production values are worse.
The acting is better than most US shows IMO, but that's not the BBC. The directing, cinematography aren't nearly as good; often very formulaic (e.g. Sherlock), and special effects are 30 years behind many US equivalents.
In other words, the bit that the BBC don't control the creation of, the raw acting talent, is often the best bit. And writing, which they do control some of, is also generally of a reasonable to extremely good standard.
Having said all that, the BBC's model is "create a law that says we must be paid". I don't think that's taboo in any shape or form, but it is quite a tricky thing to pull off in 2023 with the sensitivity around rent seeking.
writing and acting are basically all that matter. acting is reliant on direction, so the idea that the direction is bad is out. writing is also massively influenced by the broadcaster, special effects are irrelevant if you’re not a child, and what cinematography can you point to in American TV that’s better? maybe you’re confusing films with TV
ITV and Sky manage to find plenty of poor actors, so clearly having good actors is not just some inherent unearned feature of British TV
besides all this, the BBC is much more than just dramas. it has the best documentaries bar none; some of the best and earliest sports coverage; probably the highest quality tv news and interview work; probably the best late night show; BBC radio 4; a hundred great podcasts; they literally invented TV streaming. etc etc etc.
>“create a law that says we must be paid”
this is a misconception. if you don’t want to pay for the BBC, you don’t have to. it’s just a crime to use it without paying. the same as its a crime to use the train without paying. and presumably if you found some way to hack netflix and use that without paying, that would be a crime too
I’d say there’s far less sensitivity around rent-seeking than there ever has been since WW2, as long as it’s for private interest. there’s murdoch sensitivity around setting up new public bodies that benefit society, if that’s what you mean
> ITV and Sky manage to find plenty of poor actors, so clearly having good actors is not just some inherent unearned feature of British TV
Sure, and good British actors do well in the US. The BBC just is more prestigious than ITV/Sky, and might pay better. BBC also has its share of bad actors, of course. I'm just saying that the quality of top British content is more coming from the acting (down to acting schools) than the production house.
> this is a misconception. if you don’t want to pay for the BBC, you don’t have to. it’s just a crime to use it without paying
I think this is a little tricksy - the BBC has had pretty dystopian ads[0][1] out for a long time that mean people pay the licence fee just out of worry about being caught.
> the BBC has never really had a sustained drop in content quality
The article is about a Netflix sci-fi show. The BBC just point blank refuses to make those despite the enormous popularity of the genre; the history of BBC sci-fi is so tiny it would fit on a postcard. What little it has made is either meant for kids, or is a comedy, which nicely sums up the Beeboid attitude to the sort of people who like it. You can't experience a drop in quality if there's nothing to drop.
And in this we see the reason why the BBC, despite its enormous budget, is quite simply no threat to Netflix and never could be. The quasi-communist license fee approach insulates it from what people want so well that it can ignore the most popular type of TV show for ideological reasons and nobody even bothers to complain, knowing full well that it's pointless. 99% of the energy of the BBC's critics gets absorbed trying to push back against its bias in news reporting, leaving none left for trying to improve its entertainment output.
I must have been asleep the day paying for things became communist. the BBC has the same payment model as netflix, except you pay yearly instead of monthly, and it’s done on an honour system instead of at the door. total communism, man
>no sci-fi
Doctor Who? Life on Mars? Red Dwarf? Doctor Who is arguably the biggest or second biggest sci-fi show of all time. it’s certainly the biggest to remain under one name
>the most popular kind of tv show
it may be the most popular in your circle, or your mind, but this is demonstrably, obviously untrue
>ideological reasons
what ideology is against sci-fi? are you trying to claim the BBC are luddites? or that sci-fi is inherently… right-wing? or what?
>bias in news reporting
why not just cut to the chase?what you really mean is “I’m compromised intellectually by my political position”
License fee evasion is one of the top traffic sources in the British court system, the idea that it's done "on the honour system" is mendacious. There are people in prison right now for not paying it. The BBC is at its most foundational level a state-backed company built on state power.
Doctor Who is a children's show and dates from the 50s. There have been reports for years that BBC executives hate it and would love to kill it, prevented only by its popularity [2]. Red Dwarf is a comedy and hasn't been made for decades. It was greenlit only because the BBC had spare budget left over from some other show, not because they actually wanted to do it. As I said: the BBC thinks sci-fi is for children or to laugh at, and barely even that.
> it may be the most popular in your circle, or your mind, but this is demonstrably, obviously untrue
The BBC was fundamentally founded on a deeply classist Reithian ideology and it has never fully discarded this culture. It thinks its primary role is to improve the public and TV/radio production is just a means to that end. Given a choice of making an expensive period drama (what it calls "culture"), an expensive lecture on climate change or an expensive sci-fi/fantasy show they will never pick the latter, it just culturally displeases their executives at a very fundamental level to do so. Netflix also has problems with ideology [1] but it doesn't hold them back to the extent of neglecting whole genres of TV/movie output (with the possible exception of news, but you could argue that combining entertainment and news isn't natural and only an artifact of bandwidth constraints in earlier eras). Netflix's primary mission is just to give people what they want to watch.
it’s not communism if you don’t have to pay for it. it makes me so angry that politically compromised right-wingers choose to misunderstand this. if I go to the supermarket and just walk out with my shopping, that’s a crime in the same way that it’s a crime if I get on the train without paying or turn on the BBC and watch without paying, this isn’t some authoritarian communistic impingement upon your rights, it’s just goods and services. and before you repeat that “state-owned, state-backed” nonsense, publically-owned bodies are not communism. the military is not communism. the NHS is not communism. the BBC is so far from communism it’s a joke.
you would think that right-wing people would love the BBC’s model. the BBC isn’t funded through taxes, the consumer has choice, it’s constantly being restricted in order to maintain private competition, but no. why no? because “BBC bad” is constantly pushed through the right-wing media because they have a literal direct profit motive for you to see it as bad.
if the BBC doesn’t fit your incredibly specific ideas for what content it should pursue, how about this? just don’t pay for it. watch something else. vote with your feet like you can do with any other streaming service. send them a letter telling them why. you can be damn sure they’ll pay more attention to it than Netflix would.
finally, “mendacious” means lying, I’d make sure to understand my words before I use them, if I were you
> if you don’t have to pay for it ... the BBC isn’t funded through taxes, the consumer has choice ... just don’t pay for it. watch something else ... vote with your feet like you can do with any other streaming service
You keep talking as if the license fee is a normal TV subscription. Are you British because there seems to be a really deep misunderstanding here?
The license fee is a tax. You have to pay it if you watch or record any TV broadcast and that includes streaming, any live TV at all in the UK, and that applies even if you never watch the BBC and don't want to. Got a Sky TV or cable subscription? Doesn't matter, you still gotta pay the BBC. There is no just watch something else and don't pay. There is no vote with your feet. That's why it's called a TV license and not a BBC license.
what I don’t understand is why people say things that they don’t know are true. you can’t know this is true, because it isn’t. next time the tv license people send you a letter, actually read it
"You need a TV Licence to watch or record programmes on a TV, computer or other device as they're broadcast, and to watch on-demand BBC programmes on iPlayer"
In this thread you keep insisting I'm lying and I keep showing you, with evidence, that you're wrong, but you just keep doubling down and ranting about right wing people. What specifically do you object to in my description?
I pointed out that you (probably accidentally) accused me of lying, if that’s what you’re confused by? or do you mean that I accused you of being confidently wrong? being wrong isn’t lying
does the fact that you were completely misinformed about the main substance of the previous comment not make you question the grounding of your opinions on this? where did you get the idea that you needed a TV license to stream, or do anything other than watch live TV?
> where did you get the idea that you needed a TV license to stream, or do anything other than watch live TV?
You're arguing with a straw man. I've never said you need to pay the license if you only watch Netflix. I've said that the tax structure protects the BBC and allows it to ignore popular types of programming. You've been unable to refute this point and so have segued into trying to argue that the license fee isn't really a tax, which is (a) not a point I made and (b) wrong.
You can avoid the license fee by watching only US based streamers on a laptop as long as you don't care about news, sport or any of the other categories of TV that Netflix doesn't provide, just like you could always avoid it by not having a TV or radio. That doesn't mean it's not a tax. Other taxes you can avoid by choice include: income tax, auto taxes, taxes on flights and so on.
I suspect you're being confused by the definition of "streaming". Most streamed TV is still considered to be TV because it's a live broadcast (a channel, that you could tune into). iPlayer is the closest to a UK Netflix and that is also covered. It's only non-BBC "video on demand" that isn't taxed (yet!)
As for lying, you have constantly made statements like that I "choose to misunderstand" or that I'm saying things that are "obviously untrue". I know in your mind technicalities are everything and you think you've never accused anyone of being dishonest, but by the rules of normal conversation you have, repeatedly. And you never apologized when I showed you hard data disproving these "obviously untrue" things.
here’s your argument: “the BBC doesn’t focus on my genre enough therefore the entire thing is bad, but it’s especially bad because I’m convinced that I’m required to pay it to watch any relevant TV (also I think they’re politically biased but that has nothing to do with any of this)”
if you think I’m somehow avoiding your argument, or finding technicalities, I’ll address each part
>the BBC doesn’t focus on sci-fi enough. (or sci-fi and fantasy when it suits your argument).
I’ve already linked to the BBC’s large selection of sci-fi and fantasy programming, which you ignored. I also pointed out three major, popular sci-fi shows, two of which you dismissed, despite both being wildly popular with adults, and one you ignored. one of which is possibly the biggest sci-fi show ever, and has just made a £100m deal with Disney+ to be broadcast internationally, which really does indicate executives’ lack of interest
also, do any of the other British channels have consistent sci-fi output? no, except publicly-owned and license-fee funded channel 4. how strange.
>I’m required to pay the license fee, therefore this perceived lack of sci-fi media content for me to consume is a quasi-communistic authoritarian impingement upon my freedom
if streaming - the primary form of TV watching for most people these days - is allowed without a license, then it’s not really required, is it?
so is streaming allowed?
you first argued that streaming just isn’t allowed explicitly by the rules, then when it was pointed out that this is unsupported by the article you linked with, you either tried to redefine what streaming is to fit your original claim, or illustrated your quite incorrect conception of what streaming actually is
no streaming service is “a live broadcast” or a “channel” that you tune into. they’re apps, on your TV, or on a set-top box, or yes, on a laptop, that you use over wi-fi. in short, streaming is watching video over the internet, which is mostly how people watch TV these days. and it’s not covered. how do you mostly watch TV?
approaching your position more broadly, there’s this possible implication that you would be okay with the BBC, if it just had a Star Trek or a Black Mirror, or Altered Carbon or whatever your standard for sci-fi is. this seems really odd. would the BBC be bad for not having one person’s desired selection of horror shows? they have a big audience too. or what about basketball coverage? plenty of viewers for that. is this true? if the BBC did fit your ideas for what it made, would you be okay with it? or are you politically against the entire idea of its existence in the first place, and this sci-fi thing is just a proxy argument?
besides all this,
the “strawman” accusation is often the resort of someone who has been found to be wrong about something key and is trying to cut their losses. it’s only a strawman if it’s not central to the entire thing we’re talking about. if it were really a strawman, you wouldn’t continue to try and argue the point for another two paragraphs. it’s either a strawman, or something you’re going to viscerally argue, but clearly not both.
and accusing you of choosing to misunderstand is not accusing you of lying, but accusing you of being subconsciously compromised by your political position. lying to yourself but not me. I suspect that if you gave the BBC a fair go, you would find a lot to like
"Live TV" includes streamed live TV and "broadcast TV" is always considered to be licensable.
You can avoid the license fee only if you watch exclusively internet streamers like Netflix which aren't TV channels. Which means: no TV news or sport. Pretty major components of why people watch TV to begin with.
But this is well into straw men territory. This thread started with me saying that the tax-based structure of the BBC lets it ignore sci-fi. Now you're arguing that you don't have to pay the tax if you are willing to forego the benefits of live TV, which is a point I readily concede because it's irrelevant to the one I made.
surely it’s healthier to be aware that anxiety largely doesn’t come from within, but from the enclosure of the zoo that most of us live in. the alternative is to think it’s your fault
anxiety does come from within tho. It is caused as a consequence of contact with the world we live in, but the external world does not cause anxiety in itself, it's a response and it can be diminished with practice
This is such a silly thing to say tbh. The only non anxious people I’ve seen IRL are effectively idiots so you might be right.
Anxiety is a valid emotion that’s trying to warn you that your surrounding is not good. If anxiety is happening at the scale we’re seeing in the world, then calling it an individual problem is outright wrong.
Anyway, my point is, “I’m a victim” isn’t a reinforcement to anxiety. It’s an understanding that what you’re feeling is a valid emotion and to work around it rather than try to actively combat it on an individual level.
> Anxiety is a valid emotion that’s trying to warn you that your surrounding is not good. If anxiety is happening at the scale we’re seeing in the world, then calling it an individual problem is outright wrong.
This is a byproduct of mass/social media exploiting that mechanic in individuals to keep people tuned in. Fear, obligation or guilt gets to 99% of people. Let's talk about Fear.
Everyone I know with anxiety issues is terminally-online or, before the internet, tuned in to the news every waking minute of their day. They are hyper-aware of the dangers of the world and are always in a falsely-heightened state of arousal.
It makes the world feel smaller and more dangerous than it actually is. It sucks that people are dying in Ukraine. But you don't live there, and have probably never even met a native Ukie. We aren't supposed to react to danger on the other side of the planet. But we're exposed to it and more nonetheless while powerless to do anything about it. It's reinforcing helplessness.
No animal can function this way. It would eventually become so skittish and paranoid it will start making mistakes, and run directly into the crocodile pit while trying to escape a yapping poodle.
The ignorant aren't immune to anxiety because they're retarded; they're tending to the lot in life they do have control over and reacting to dangers that directly threaten them.
The worst self-induced anxiety offenders are the ones who seek out other peoples' conflicts to involve themselves in.
As someone with anxiety, I don’t think the interpretation/conclusion is necessarily that “I’m a victim.” For me, it’s more the realization that I’m having a reasonable reaction to my surroundings and circumstances, meaning the problem isn’t “I’m broken” but rather, “These thoughts/patterns/habits are sub-optimal and unhelpful.” It was a great weight off of my shoulders to see that the problem wasn’t me, myself, alone. That realization helped me find the right things to work on and change to improve my personal experience of reality (a work in progress) and to hopefully also improve reality for others.
