Danger Of Social Media Quotes

In a social media world, the danger is being overexposed and when something is overexposed it is no longer interesting...if ever it was.

The growing number of gated communities in our nation is but one example of the obsession with safety. With guards at the gate, individuals still have bars and elaborate internal security systems. Americans spend more than thirty billion dollars a year on security. When I have stayed with friends in these communities and inquired as to whether all the security is in response to an actual danger I am told “not really," that it is the fear of threat rather than a real threat that is the catalyst for an obsession with safety that borders on madness. Culturally we bear witness to this madness every day. We can all tell endless stories of how it makes itself known in everyday life. For example, an adult white male answers the door when a young Asian male rings the bell. We live in a culture where without responding to any gesture of aggression or hostility on the part of the stranger, who is simply lost and trying to find the correct address, the white male shoots him, believing he is protecting his life and his property. This is an everyday example of madness. The person who is really the threat here is the home owner who has been so well socialized by the thinking of white supremacy, of capitalism, of patriarchy that he can no longer respond rationally. White supremacy has taught him that all people of color are threats irrespective of their behavior. Capitalism has taught him that, at all costs, his property can and must be protected. Patriarchy has taught him that his masculinity has to be proved by the willingness to conquer fear through aggression; that it would be unmanly to ask questions before taking action. Mass media then brings us the news of this in a newspeak manner that sounds almost jocular and celebratory, as though no tragedy has happened, as though the sacrifice of a young life was necessary to uphold property values and white patriarchal honor. Viewers are encouraged feel sympathy for the white male home owner who made a mistake. The fact that this mistake led to the violent death of an innocent young man does not register; the narrative is worded in a manner that encourages viewers to identify with the one who made the mistake by doing what we are led to feel we might all do to “protect our property at all costs from any sense of perceived threat. " This is what the worship of death looks like.

Unmoderated content consumption is as dangerous as the consumption of sewage water.

Language change is always reflective of social change, and over the decades, as our sources, of connections and existential purpose has shifted due to the phenomena like social media, increased globalization, and withdrawal from traditional religion we've seen the rise of more alternative subgroups-some dangerous, some not so much. "Cult" has evolved to describe them all.

Media has changed the way we interact with one another and what we spend our time doing. Our social norms have changed. The dangerous part of our social media and technologically saturated world is not its existence but what it distracts us from.

There's a danger in the internet and social media. The notion that information is enough, that more and more information is enough, that you don't have to think, you just have to get more information - gets very dangerous.

. . . it's dangerous to fool yourself into believing the online world is 'virtual' and the person behind the keyboard can't inflict real-life harm.

Today, despite free speech and the mass media, the prevailing social vision is dangerously close to sealing itself off from any discordant feedback from reality.

Tweets, real ones, are meant to signal danger or find food for baby birds…

So if the ending of apartheid is now universally agreed to be a good thing, and Cuba played such a central role, how is it still possible to have such differing views of Castro and Mandela and of Cuba and South Africa? The short answer is that the mainstream media has been so successful in distorting basic historical facts that many are so blinded by Cold War hangovers that they are entirely incapable of critical thought, but the other answer is rather more Machiavellian. The reality is that apartheid did not die, and thus the reason so many white conservatives now love Mandela is essentially that he let their cronies "get away with it". The hypocritical worship of black freedom fighters once they are no longer seen to pose a danger or are safely dead - Martin Luther King might be the best example of this - is one of the key ways of maintaining a liberal veneer over what in reality is brutal intent.

There are no secrets anymore. Vampires can't come into your house unless you invite them. Posting online is like leaving your front door open and telling any creature of the night it can enter.

There is overwhelming evidence that meditation can increase focus and decrease anxiety, depression, and cortisol flooding. There is evidence that it decreases activation in the amygdala, one epicenter of fear in the brain, and increases activity in the prefrontal cortex. People who meditate are able to unstick themselves from cyclical, dangerous thinking and see things from a calmer, more positive perspective. The sympathetic nervous system, or the fight or flight system, is activated by stress. This is the system that gets us ready to run. The counter to this is the parasympathetic nervous system, the resting and digesting system. It lowers heart rate and blood pressure, slows breathing, and directly counters the stress response. Meditation activates the parasympathetic nervous system. It’s literally the antidote to stress. Plus, it’s what all the evolved, cool girls who look good without makeup are doing, according to social media.

But as those who do hold Trump to the standards of any other person have found out on Twitter and other social media outlets these Trump followers are a nasty fascistic lot. Dowd is lucky he didn’t get death threats like Kurt Eichenwald. Or maybe he did and refuses to acknowledge them. If you voted for Trump and continue to support him and you think you are better than these bigoted virulent trolls, you’re not. Your silence enables them just as it did in the racist campaign that Trump and Bannon ran. In fact, hiding behind a civilized veneer in your support of fascism I consider more dangerous. We’re past describing you as collaborators at this point. That lets you off the hook. You’re Russo-American oligarchical theocratic fascists.

The internet is a dangerous place. If you are not careful it will consume you and rob you of your happiness. It can make you angry, jealous, hostile, bitter and lead to the eventual loss of enthusiasm for living your best life. Be wary and avoid overconsumption.

If the Labour Party could be bullied or persuaded to denounce its Marxists, the media - having tasted blood - would demand next that it expelled all its Socialist and reunited the remaining Labour Party with the SDP to form a harmless alternative to the Conservatives, which could then be allowed to take office now and then when the Conservatives fell out of favour with the public. Thus British Capitalism, it is argued, will be made safe forever, and socialism would be squeezed of the National agenda. But if such a strategy were to succeed… it would in fact profoundly endanger British society. For it would open up the danger of a swing to the far-right, as we have seen in Europe over the last 50 years.

The new brand of political correctness, popular on college campuses and social media, is the idea that no speech should exist that directly challenges politically correct ideas.

As an adult, he feels the same about cell phones, email, and social media. Why make it easier to be bothered by others?

Social media has put an incredible pressure on the Facebook generation. We’ve made our lives so public to one another, and as a result we feel pressure to live up to a certain ideal version of ourselves. On social media, everyone is happy, and popular, and successful—or, at least, we think we need to look like we are. No matter how well off we are, how thin or pretty, we have our issues and insecurities. But none of that shows up online. We don’t like to reveal our weaknesses on social media. We don’t want to appear unhappy, or be a drag. Instead, we all post rose-colored versions of ourselves. We pretend we have more money than we do. We pretend we are popular. We pretend our lives are great. Your status update says I went to a totally awesome party last night! It won’t mention that you drank too much and puked and humiliated yourself in front of a girl you like. It says My sorority sisters are the best! It doesn’t say I feel lonely and don’t think they accept me. I’m not saying everyone should post about having a bad time. But pretending everything is perfect when it’s not doesn’t help anyone. The danger of these kinds of little white lies is that, in projecting the happiness and accomplishments we long for, we’re setting impossible standards for ourselves and others to live up to.

the greater danger, by far, is when an older person becomes isolated and disconnected. So by all means, older adults can and should be encouraged to connect online. I’m confident studies will show that social media serves old folks well.

My basic hypothesis is this: the people who run the media are Humanities graduates with little understanding of science, who wear their ignorance as a badge of honor. Secretly, deep down, perhaps they resent the fact that they have denied themselves access to the most significant developments in the history of Western thought from the past two hundred years. There is an attack implicit in all media coverage of science - in their choice of stories, and the way they cover them. The media create a parody of science. On this template, science is portrayed as groundless, incomprehensible didactic truth statements from scientists - who, themselves, are socially- powerful, arbitrary un-elected authority figures. They are detached from reality. They do work that is either wacky, or dangerous, but either way, everything in science is tenuous, contradictory, probably going to change soon and - most ridiculously - hard to understand. Having created this parody, the Commentariat then attack it, as if they were genuinely critiquing what science is all about.

People get preoccupied with the fiction of truth. The lives we lead need to be gold-plated nowadays. A series of varnished truths for the sake of how we appear on the outside. Strangers who view us through a screen, whether on TV or social media, think they know who we are. Nobody is interested in reality anymore. That's something they don't want to like or share or follow. I can understand that, but living a make-believe life can be dangerous. What we won't see can hurt us. In the future, I expect people will long for 15 minutes of privacy, rather than 15 minutes of fame.

What Power does present is something perhaps equally rare and surely as useful—an abundance of sheer good sense and plain speaking. To read it at the close of this troubled century is to be struck by the prescience of its warnings concerning the dangers of the control of media and propaganda, the shrewdness of its appreciation of the mass appeal of fascism, nazism, and Stalinism, and the wisdom of its admonitions concerning the spread of violence and intolerance even in democratic states. Power thus remains a book whose blend of rare good sense and uncommon wisdom speaks to us with as much eloquence and insight as ever.

Many of us no longer expose or surround ourselves with people who disagree with us politically or ideologically, we have the ability through a click of a button to silence those whose beliefs we find culturally offensive or merely different, and while this might be both convenient and comfortable it is also dangerous.

The “social pathologies” of the poor, particularly street crime, illegal drug use, and delinquency, were redefined by conservatives as having their cause in overly generous relief arrangements. Black “welfare cheats” and their dangerous offspring emerged, for the first time, in the political discourse and media imagery.

The condemnation of digital media has two sides. There is a legitimate claim that digital media has given old viciousness new visibility. . .. Certain facets of social media—speed, anonymity, the ability to "dox"—have changed the nature of harassment, making it easier to accomplish and less likely to be redressed. But are the mainstream media any different in their biases and cruelty? They do not appear to be. Mainstream media cruelty is actually more dangerous, for it incorporates language that, were it blogged by an unknown, would likely be written off as the irrelevant ramblings of a sociopath. Instead, the prestige of old media gives bigoted ranting respectability. Even in the digital age, old media define and shape the culture, repositioning the lunatic fringe as the voice of reason.

My basic hypothesis is this: the people who run the media are humanities graduates with little understanding of science, who wear their ignorance as a badge of honour. Secretly, deep down, perhaps they resent the fact that they have denied themselves access to the most significant developments in the history of Western thought from the past two hundred years; but there is an attack implicit in all media coverage of science: in their choice of stories, and the way they cover them, the media create a parody of science. On this template, science is portrayed as groundless, incomprehensible, didactic truth statements from scientists, who themselves are socially powerful, arbitrary, unelected authority figures. They are detached from reality; they do work that is either wacky or dangerous, but either way, everything in science is tenuous, contradictory, probably going to change soon and, most ridiculously, ‘hard to understand’. Having created this parody, the commentariat then attack it, as if they were genuinely critiquing what science is all about. Science stories generally fall into one of three categories: the wacky stories, the ‘breakthrough’ stories, and the ‘scare’ stories. Each undermines and distorts science in its own idiosyncratic way.

Today, acknowledgement of the prevalence and harms of child sexual abuse is counterbalanced with cautionary tales about children and women who, under pressure from social workers and therapists, produce false allegations of ‘paedophile rings’, ‘cult abuse’ and ‘ritual abuse’. Child protection investigations or legal cases involving allegations of organised child sexual abuse are regularly invoked to illustrate the dangers of ‘false memories’, ‘moral panic’ and ‘community hysteria’. These cautionary tales effectively delimit the bounds of acceptable knowledge in relation to sexual abuse. They are circulated by those who locate themselves firmly within those bounds, characterising those beyond as ideologues and conspiracy theorists. However firmly these boundaries have been drawn, they have been persistently transgressed by substantiated disclosures of organised abuse that have led to child protection interventions and prosecutions. Throughout the 1990s, in a sustained effort to redraw these boundaries, investigations and prosecutions for organised abuse were widely labelled ‘miscarriages of justice’ and workers and therapists confronted with incidents of organised abuse were accused of fabricating or exaggerating the available evidence. These accusations have faded over time as evidence of organised abuse has accumulated, while investigatory procedures have become more standardised and less vulnerable to discrediting attacks. However, as the opening quotes to this introduction illustrate, the contemporary situation in relation to organised abuse is one of considerable ambiguity in which journalists and academics claim that organised abuse is a discredited ‘moral panic’ even as cases are being investigated and prosecuted.

Social media has its benefits and drawbacks. It is useful for research, has an educational value as a medium for learning about current events and of course, as a platform for conversation and opposing arguments with others. What's not debatable however, is that it can be addictive and extremely dangerous for youth (and some adults) who do not use it sparingly and who do not exercise restraint or precaution when sharing content that is not suitable or appropriate for an open forum. 

It enjoyed a high media profile and was widely reviewed and discussed. Critical opinion was divided; those sympathetic to its social and political message liked the book, though other critics judged it dangerously radical. The Northern Star reviewer called Dickens “the champion of the poor”, while John Bull rejected his unflattering caricatures of philanthropy. It was certainly a financial success for Dickens and remained popular for many years, although in the long term its fame was eclipsed by that of A Christmas Carol.

When someone engages in the spread of lies, hate, and other societal poisons, they should be stigmatized accordingly. It is not just shameful but dangerous that the purveyors of the worst behaviors on social media have enjoyed increased fame and fortune, all the way up to invitations to the White House. Stopping these bad actors requires setting an example and ensuring that repeat offenders never escape the gravity of their past actions and are excluded from the institutions and platforms of power that now matter most in our society.

Hey Pete. So why the leave from social media? You are an activist, right? It seems like this decision is counterproductive to your message and work." A: The short answer is I’m tired of the endless narcissism inherent to the medium. In the commercial society we have, coupled with the consequential sense of insecurity people feel, as they impulsively “package themselves” for public consumption, the expression most dominant in all of this - is vanity. And I find that disheartening, annoying and dangerous. It is a form of cultural violence in many respects. However, please note the difference - that I work to promote just that – a message/idea – not myself… and I honestly loath people who today just promote themselves for the sake of themselves. A sea of humans who have been conditioned into viewing who they are – as how they are seen online. Think about that for a moment. Social identity theory run amok. People have been conditioned to think “they are” how “others see them”. We live in an increasing fictional reality where people are now not only people – they are digital symbols. And those symbols become more important as a matter of “marketing” than people’s true personality. Now, one could argue that social perception has always had a communicative symbolism, even before the computer age. But nooooooothing like today. Social media has become a social prison and a strong means of social control, in fact. Beyond that, as most know, social media is literally designed like a drug. And it acts like it as people get more and more addicted to being seen and addicted to molding the way they want the world to view them – no matter how false the image (If there is any word that defines peoples’ behavior here – it is pretention). Dopamine fires upon recognition and, coupled with cell phone culture, we now have a sea of people in zombie like trances looking at their phones (literally) thousands of times a day, merging their direct, true interpersonal social reality with a virtual “social media” one. No one can read anymore... they just swipe a stream of 200 character headlines/posts/tweets. understanding the world as an aggregate of those fragmented sentences. Massive loss of comprehension happening, replaced by usually agreeable, "in-bubble" views - hence an actual loss of variety. So again, this isn’t to say non-commercial focused social media doesn’t have positive purposes, such as with activism at times. But, on the whole, it merely amplifies a general value system disorder of a “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT HOW GREAT I AM!” – rooted in systemic insecurity. People lying to themselves, drawing meaningless satisfaction from superficial responses from a sea of avatars. And it’s no surprise. Market economics demands people self promote shamelessly, coupled with the arbitrary constructs of beauty and success that have also resulted. People see status in certain things and, directly or pathologically, use those things for their own narcissistic advantage. Think of those endless status pics of people rock climbing, or hanging out on a stunning beach or showing off their new trophy girl-friend, etc. It goes on and on and worse the general public generally likes it, seeking to imitate those images/symbols to amplify their own false status. Hence the endless feedback loop of superficiality. And people wonder why youth suicides have risen… a young woman looking at a model of perfection set by her peers, without proper knowledge of the medium, can be made to feel inferior far more dramatically than the typical body image problems associated to traditional advertising. That is just one example of the cultural violence inherent. The entire industry of social media is BASED on narcissistic status promotion and narrow self-interest. That is the emotion/intent that creates the billions and billions in revenue these platforms experience, as they in turn sell off people’s personal data to advertisers and governments. You are the product, of course.

Fabrication of necessary illusions for social management is as old as history. But in the democratic system, the necessary illusions cannot be imposed by force. Rather they must be instilled in the public mind by more subtle means. A totalitarian state can be satisfied with lesser degrees of allegiance to required truths. It is sufficient that people obey. What they think is a secondary concern. But in a democratic political order, there's always the danger that an independent thought might be translated into political action. So it is important to eliminate the threat at its root.

But the more I use social media, the more I realize that the great danger is not in simply overusing social media, it is in living through social media. The problem is not so much the way it wastes time, it is the way it frames time. Without limits, we begin to see our whole life through it. We see our whole day through a possible post. We look around, wondering what in our field of view is worth taking a picture of. We listen to every conversation for a tweetable quote, instead of trying to understand the human being who is talking. We avoid disagreement in public, yet we express our most ardent emotions in carefully crafted Facebook replies or all-caps tweets.

This campaign was a reaction against what many saw as an increasingly deranged and rabid resistance, which held that if you’re not “woke” to how hateful and dangerous Donald Trump is, then you and his supporters should be subjected to an ever-widening social and professional fatwa. If you’d been cast out by your relatives, dropped by friends or lost jobs because you even tolerated this man, here were further indications that the Left was nowhere near as inclusive and diverse as long proclaimed. In the summer of 2018 they had turned into haters, helped by an inordinate amount of encouragement from the mainstream media, and now came across as anti-common-sense, anti-rational and anti-American.

I quickly found the dating/hookup app to be a dangerous addition to my iPhone. A friend recommended it after shit hit the fan with my boyfriend. With enough breakups under my belt, I knew that the healthiest remedy was a solid rebound fuck or two. Tinder made it easy- too easy. Suddenly, I could sit in traffic, on the toilet, or in line at the DMV and carelessly swipe, swipe, swipe my way to dick-on-delivery. Tinder selections are based on proximity via smart phones, so there are tons of tourists, travelers, and young professionals on business trips swiping through new hunting grounds. Its loose, easy-come-easy-go method made hookups as convenient as picking up lunch. Tinder’s nonchalance went both ways. We had nothing to lose.

But the old traditions of sectarian misdirection still in spite of a certain advance in technical efficiency, cripple and distort the general mind. "All that has been changed," cry indignant teachers under criticism. But the evidence that this teaching of theirs still fails to produce a public that is alert, critical, and capable of vigorous readjustment in the face of overwhelming danger, is to be seen in the newspapers that satisfy the Tewler public, the arguments and slogans that appeal to it, the advertisements that succeed with it, the stuff it swallows. It is a press written by Homo Tewler for Homo Tewler all up and down the scale. The Times Tewler, the Daily Mail Tewler, the Herald, the Tribune, the Daily Worker; there is no difference except a difference in scale and social atmosphere. Through them all ran the characteristic Tewler streak of willful ignorance, deliberate disingenuousness, and self-protective illusion.

It was October 17th, 2084 and stupid opinions were illegal in the United States of America. Up until 2059 stupid opinions had been very legal, very common, and extremely monetized. You could make lots of money off stupid opinions back before 2059. Some people made zounds of money talking about how stupid the stupid opinions were. Other people made zounds of money defending stupid opinions and building a platform on the idea that—no matter how stupid an opinion was—it was each American’s right to have and promote stupid and dangerous opinions. Few people talked about worthwhile opinions then. Worthwhile opinions were not exciting. They did not get likes or views. If something didn’t get likes or views back then, it didn’t exist. But it was 2084. A stupid opinion had not been shared online for 25 years. The internet had atrophied. It was just a big store now. The big store mostly sold banana-flavored cigarettes. Almost everyone smoked banana-flavored cigarettes.

As with previous “drug crises,” the opioid problem is not really about opioids. It’s mainly about cultural, social, and environmental factors such as racism, draconian drug laws, and diverting attention away from the real causes of crime and suffering. As you’ll discover throughout this book, there’s nothing terribly unique about the pharmacology of opioids that makes these drugs particularly dangerous or addictive. People have safely consumed them for centuries. And, trust me, people will continue to do so, long after the media’s faddish focus has faded, because these chemicals work. Fatal overdose is a real risk, but the odds of this occurring have been overstated. It is certainly possible to die after taking too much of a single opioid drug, but such deaths account for only about a quarter of the thousands of opioid-related deaths. Contaminated opioid drugs and opioids combined with another downer (e.g., alcohol or a nerve-pain medication) cause many of these deaths.

Do you ever feel that same need? Your life is so very different from my own. The grandness of the world, the real world, the whole world, is a known thing for you. And you have no need of dispatches because you have seen so much of the American galaxy and its inhabitants—their homes, their hobbies—up close. I don’t know what it means to grow up with a black president, social networks, omnipresent media, and black women everywhere in their natural hair. What I know is that when they loosed the killer of Michael Brown, you said, “I’ve got to go.” And that cut me because, for all our differing worlds, at your age my feeling was exactly the same. And I recall that even then I had not yet begun to imagine the perils that tangle us. You still believe the injustice was Michael Brown. You have not yet grappled with your own myths and narratives and discovered the plunder everywhere around us. Before I could discover, before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils that seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed. And yet the heat that springs from the constant danger, from a lifestyle of near-death experience, is thrilling. This is what the rappers mean when they pronounce themselves addicted to “the streets” or in love with “the game.” I imagine they feel something akin to parachutists, rock climbers, BASE jumpers, and others who choose to live on the edge. Of course we chose nothing. And I have never believed the brothers who claim to “run,” much less “own,” the city. We did not design the streets. We do not fund them. We do not preserve them. But I was there, nevertheless, charged like all the others with the protection of my body. The crews, the young men who’d transmuted their fear into rage, were the greatest danger. The crews walked the blocks of their neighborhood, loud and rude, because it was only through their loud rudeness that they might feel any sense of security and power. They would break your jaw, stomp your face, and shoot you down to feel that power, to revel in the might of their own bodies.

MT: But you are. You are justifying it. RG: I'm trying to show that there's meaning at precisely the point where the nihilistic temptation is strongest today. I'm saying: there's a Revelation, and people are free to do with it what they will. But it too will keep reemerging. It's stronger than them. And, as we have seen, it's even capable of putting mimetic phenomena to work on its behalf, since today everyone is competing to see who is the most “victimized.” Revelation is dangerous. It's the spiritual equivalent of nuclear power. What's most pathetic is the insipidly modernized brand of Christianity that bows down before everything that's most ephemeral in contemporary thought. Christians don't see that they have at their disposal an instrument that is incomparably superior to the whole mishmash of psychoanalysis and sociology that they conscientiously feed themselves. It's the old story of Esau sacrificing his inheritance for a plate of lentils. All the modes of thought that once served to demolish Christianity are being discredited in turn by more “radical” versions of the same critique. There's no need to refute modern thought because, as each new trend one-ups its predecessors, it's liquidating itself at high speed. The students are becoming more and more skeptical, but, and above all in America, the people in power, the department chairs, the “chairpersons,” as they say, are fervent believers. They're often former sixties' radicals who've made the transition to administrative jobs in academia, the media, and the church. For a long time, Christians were protected from this insane downward spiral, and, when they finally dive in, you can recognize them by their naïve modernist faith. They're always one lap behind. They always choose the ships that the rats are in the midst of abandoning. They're hoping to tap into the hordes of people who have deserted their churches. They don't understand that the last thing that can attract the masses is a Christian version of the demagogic laxity in which they're already immersed. Today, it's thought that playing the social game, whether on the individual or the group level, is more indispensable than thinking…it's thought that there are truths that shouldn't be spoken. In America, it's become impossible to be unapologetically Christian, white, or European without running the risk of being accused of “ethnocentrism.” To which I reply that the eulogists of “multiculturalism” place themselves, to the contrary, in the purest of Western traditions. The West is the only civilization ever to have directed such criticisms against itself. The capital of the Incas had a name that I believe meant “the navel of the world.

Gone are those days when media platforms were available to few individuals like politicians, movie stars, artists,sports sensations, civil right activists, and religious scholars. =Today social media gives people an easy way to almost everything =It is very easy to learn from others who are experts and professionals,Regardless of your location and education background you can educate yourself, without paying for it. =It even reveals good and Mabošaedi of the most respected people who are role models to others = You can share your issues with the community and get help within an hour . = The main advantage of the social media is that you update yourself from the latest happenings around in the world. = you can promote your business to the largest audience and even employ people But it can also damage your life for good = Since anyone can create a fake account and do anything without being traced, it has become quite easy for people to frustrate others and do a damage to their names or life. = Personal data and privacy can easily be hacked and shared on the Internet. Which can make financial losses and loss to personal life. Similarly, identity theft is another issue that can give financial losses to anyone by hacking their personal accounts. This is one of the dangerous disadvantages of the social media and it even made people kill them selfs. = Addiction destroyed many families and employments.

STEP 4: BEWARE OF LIMINAL MOMENTS Liminal moments are transitions from one thing to another throughout our days. Have you ever picked up your phone while waiting for a traffic light to change, then found yourself still looking at your phone while driving? Or opened a tab in your web browser, got annoyed by how long it’s taking to load, and opened up another page while you waited? Or looked at a social media app while walking from one meeting to the next, only to keep scrolling when you got back to your desk? There’s nothing wrong with any of these actions per se. Rather, what’s dangerous is that by doing them “for just a second,” we’re likely to do things we later regret, like getting off track for half an hour or getting into a car accident. A technique I’ve found particularly helpful for dealing with this distraction trap is the “ten-minute rule.” If I find myself wanting to check my phone as a pacification device when I can’t think of anything better to do, I tell myself it’s fine to give in, but not right now. I have to wait just ten minutes. This technique is effective at helping me deal with all sorts of potential distractions, like googling something rather than writing, eating something unhealthy when I’m bored, or watching another episode on Netflix when I’m “too tired to go to bed.” This rule allows time to do what some behavioral psychologists call “surfing the urge.” When an urge takes hold, noticing the sensations and riding them like a wave—neither pushing them away nor acting on them—helps us cope until the feelings subside.

This linking of bullying to mental illness and the idea that it causes 'life-long damage' really concerns me. I fear it is the anti-bullying industry that is the real threat to young people's state of mind. Rather than reassure, it adamantly stresses, indeed exaggerates, the harmful effects of bullying. Such scaremongering is impacting on young people's coping mechanisms and possibly exacerbating the problem. As such, it actually contributes to the young feeling overly anxious, and ironically creates an atmosphere likely to encourage symptoms of mental ill health. The headline should be 'anti-bullying causes mental illness'. The anti-bullying industry has made a virtue of catastrophizing, always arguing things are getting worse. With the advent of social media, bullying experts are quick to point out there is now no escape: 'Bullying doesn't stop when school ends; it continues twenty-four hours a day'. Children's charities continually ratchet up the fear factor. Surely it is irresponsible when Sarah Brennan, CEO of YoungMinds, declares that 'if devastating and life-changing' bullying isn't dealt with 'it can lead to years of pain and suffering that go on long into adulthood'. Maybe I am being over-cynical about the anti-bullying bandwagon, and there is a danger that such a critique will cause me to be labelled callous and hardhearted. Certainly, when you read of some young people's heartbreaking experiences, there is no doubt that it can be a genuinely harrowing experience to go through. But when we hear these sad stories, surely our job as adults should be to help children and young people put these types of unpleasant experience[s] behind them, to at least put them in perspective, rather than stoking up their anxieties and telling them they may face 'years of pain and suffering'.

There are kinds of food we’re hard wired to love. Salt, sugars, and fats. Food that, over the course of the history of our species, has helped us get through some long winters, and plow through some extreme migrations. There are also certain kinds of information we’re hard wired to love: affirmation is something we all enjoy receiving, and the confirmation of our beliefs helps us form stronger communities. The spread of fear and its companion, hate, are clearly survival instincts, but more benign acts like gossip also help us spread the word about things that could be a danger to us. In the world of food, we’ve seen massive efficiencies leveraged by massive corporations that have driven the cost of a calorie down so low that now obesity is more of a threat than famine. Those same kinds of efficiencies are now transforming our information supply: we’ve learned how to produce and distribute information in a nearly free manner. The parallels between what’s happened to our food and what’s happened to our information are striking. Driven by a desire for more profits, and a desire to feed more people, manufacturers figured out how to make food really cheap; and the stuff that’s the worst for us tends to be the cheapest to make. As a result, a healthy diet — knowing what to consume and what to avoid — has gone from being a luxury to mandatory for our longevity. Just as food companies learned that if they want to sell a lot of cheap calories, they should pack them with salt, fat, and sugar — the stuff that people crave — media companies learned that affirmation sells a lot better than information. Who wants to hear the truth when they can hear that they’re right? Because of the inherent social nature of information, the consequences of these new efficiencies are far more dramatic than even the consequence of physical obesity. Our information habits go beyond affecting the individual. They have serious social consequences. Much as a poor diet gives us a variety of diseases, poor information diets give us new forms of ignorance — ignorance that comes not from a lack of information, but from overconsumption of it, and sicknesses and delusions that don’t affect the underinformed but the hyperinformed and the well educated.

It is the very impersonal quality of urban life, which is lived among strangers, that accounts for intensified religious feeling. For in the village of old, religion was a natural extension of the daily traditions and routine of life among the extended family; but migrations to the city brought Muslims into the anonymity of slum existence, and to keep the family together and the young from drifting into crime, religion has had to be reinvented in starker, more ideological form. In this way states weaken, or at least have to yield somewhat, to new and sometimes extreme kinds of nationalism and religiosity advanced by urbanization. Thus, new communities take hold that transcend traditional geography, even as they make for spatial patterns of their own. Great changes in history often happen obscurely.10 A Eurasia and North Africa of vast, urban concentrations, overlapping missile ranges, and sensational global media will be one of constantly enraged crowds, fed by rumors and half-truths transported at the speed of light by satellite channels across the rimlands and heartland expanse, from one Third World city to another. Conversely, the crowd, empowered by social media like Twitter and Facebook, will also be fed by the very truth that autocratic rulers have denied it. The crowd will be key in a new era where the relief map will be darkened by densely packed megacities—the crowd being a large group of people who abandon their individuality in favor of an intoxicating collective symbol. Elias Canetti, the Bulgarian-born Spanish Jew and Nobel laureate in literature, became so transfixed and terrified at the mob violence over inflation that seized Frankfurt and Vienna between the two world wars that he devoted much of his life to studying the human herd in all its manifestations. The signal insight of his book Crowds and Power, published in 1960, was that we all yearn to be inside some sort of crowd, for in a crowd—or a mob, for that matter—there is shelter from danger and, by inference, from loneliness. Nationalism, extremism, the yearning for democracy are all the products of crowd formations and thus manifestations of seeking to escape from loneliness. It is loneliness, alleviated by Twitter and Facebook, that ultimately leads to the breakdown of traditional authority and the erection of new kinds.

The most comprehensive studies of racial bias in the exercise of prosecutorial and judicial discretion involve the treatment of juveniles. These studies have shown that youth of color are more likely to be arrested, detained, formally charged, transferred to adult court, and confined to secure residential facilities than their white counterparts.65 A report in 2000 observed that among youth who have never been sent to a juvenile prison before, African Americans were more than six times as likely as whites to be sentenced to prison for identical crimes.66 A study sponsored by the U.S. Justice Department and several of the nation’s leading foundations, published in 2007, found that the impact of the biased treatment is magnified with each additional step into the criminal justice system. African American youth account for 16 percent of all youth, 28 percent of all juvenile arrests, 35 percent of the youth waived to adult criminal court, and 58 percent of youth admitted to state adult prison.67 A major reason for these disparities is unconscious and conscious racial biases infecting decision making. In the state of Washington, for example, a review of juvenile sentencing reports found that prosecutors routinely described black and white offenders differently.68 Blacks committed crimes because of internal personality flaws such as disrespect. Whites did so because of external conditions such as family conflict. The risk that prosecutorial discretion will be racially biased is especially acute in the drug enforcement context, where virtually identical behavior is susceptible to a wide variety of interpretations and responses and the media imagery and political discourse has been so thoroughly racialized. Whether a kid is perceived as a dangerous drug-dealing thug or instead is viewed as a good kid who was merely experimenting with drugs and selling to a few of his friends has to do with the ways in which information about illegal drug activity is processed and interpreted, in a social climate in which drug dealing is racially defined. As a former U.S. Attorney explained: I had an [assistant U.S. attorney who] wanted to drop the gun charge against the defendant [in a case in which] there were no extenuating circumstances. I asked, “Why do you want to drop the gun offense?” And he said, “‘He’s a rural guy and grew up on a farm. The gun he had with him was a rifle. He’s a good ol’ boy, and all good ol’ boys have rifles, and it’s not like he was a gun-toting drug dealer.” But he was a gun-toting drug dealer, exactly.

22. Giving up Distraction Week #4 Saturday Scripture Verses •Hebrews 12:1–2 •Mark 1:35 •John 1:14–18 Questions to Consider •What distracts you from being present with other people around you? •What distracts you from living out God’s agenda for your life? •What helps you to focus and be the most productive? •How does Jesus help us focus on what is most important in any given moment? Plan of Action •At your next lunch, have everyone set their phone facing down at the middle of the table. The first person who picks up their phone pays for the meal. •Challenge yourself that the first thing you watch, read, or listen to in the morning when you wake up is God’s Word (not email or Facebook). •Do a digital detox. Turn off everything with a screen for 24 hours. Tomorrow would be a great day to do it, since there is no “40 Things Devotion” on Sunday. Reflection We live in an ever connected world. With smart phones at the tip of our fingers, we can instantly communicate with people on the other side of the world. It is an amazing time to live in. I love the possibilities and the opportunities. With the rise of social media, we not only connect with our current circle of friends and family, but we are also able to connect with circles from the past. We can build new communities in the virtual world to find like-minded people we cannot find in our physical world. Services like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram all have tremendous power. They have a way of connecting us with others to shine the light of Jesus. While all of these wonderful things open up incredible possibilities, there are also many dangers that lurk. One of the biggest dangers is distraction. They keep us from living in the moment and they keep us from enjoying the people sitting right across the room from us. We’ve all seen that picture where the family is texting one another from across the table. They are not looking at each other. They are looking at the tablet or the phone in front of them. They are distracted in the moment. Today we are giving up distraction and we are going to live in the moment. Distraction doesn’t just come from modern technology. We are distracted by our work. We are distracted by hobbies. We are distracted by entertainment. We are distracted by busyness. The opposite of distraction is focus. It is setting our hearts and our minds on Jesus. It’s not just putting him first. It’s about him being a part of everything. It is about making our choices to be God’s choices. It is about letting him determine how we use our time and focus our attention. He is the one setting our agenda. I saw a statistic that 80% of smartphone users will check their phone within the first 15 minutes of waking up. Many of those are checking their phones before they even get out of bed. What are they checking? Social media? Email? The news of the day? Think about that for a moment. My personal challenge is the first thing I open up every day is God’s word. I might open up the Bible on my phone, but I want to make sure the first thing I am looking at is God’s agenda. When I open up my email, my mind is quickly set to the tasks those emails generate rather than the tasks God would put before me. Who do I want to set my agenda? For me personally, I know that if God is going to set the agenda, I need to hear from him before I hear from anyone else. There is a myth called multitasking. We talk about doing it, but it is something impossible to do. We are very good at switching back and forth from different tasks very quickly, but we are never truly doing two things at once. So the challenge is to be present where God has planted you. In any given moment, know what is the one most important thing. Be present in that one thing. Be present here and now.

Over the past quarter century, by contrast, the rise of the internet, and particularly of social media, has rapidly shifted the power balance between political insiders and political outsiders. Today, any citizen is able to share viral information with millions of people at great speed. The costs of political organizing have plummeted. And as the technological gap between center and periphery has narrowed, the instigators of instability have won an advantage over the forces of order.

Finally, we need to learn to withstand the transformative impact of the internet and of social media.

Our fascination with the gothic peaks in times of anxiety, panic, and upheaval. The Victorian gothic revival of the 1890s was stoked by scientific, technological, and social change. Industrialization and urbanization sparked feelings of alienation. Darwin's theories of evolution and the changing roles of women fanned racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and colonialist fears of 'primitivism,' moral decay, and sexual depravity. In the nineteenth century, terror-inducing imagery had shifted away from crumbling castles to crime-infested cities, and fear of villains and ghosts was supplanted by a fear of madness and degeneration. In the twentieth century, we celebrated/mourned the death of authorship, of the grand narrative, of the self, 'going-one-better in eschatological eloquence,' as Jacques Derrida put it, 'the end of history...the end of subject, the end of man, the end of the West, the end of Oedipus, the end of the earth, Apocalypse Now.' A few years into the new millennium, we were zombie hordes, stalking social media for brains. The gothic is the fucked-either-way-and-freaking-the-fuck-out school of artistic interpretation, the hysterical framework of doom. And this tension between horror as morality tale and horror as decadent spectacle is, I believe, what fueled the pandemic of tabloid stories about wayward starlets that raged throughout 2006 and 2007. Celebrity train wreck stories begin, conservatively, as cautionary tales. A young woman, unprotected or legally emancipated, has moved alone from the relatively sheltered and secluded condition of parent-managed child stardom (because who, nowadays, is more cut off from the world than a child star?) into a corrupt and dangerous world, where her beauty, fame, youth, fortune, and sexual allure are regarded with a charged, ambivalent awe. She is instantly besieged with dangers, and preyed upon by unscrupulous adults. Until they can be contained again, by marriage or paternal protection, she exists in a constant state of uncertainty and peril. The peril is created, of course, by the 'author' - the media outlets that shape the train wreck's life, again and again, into thrilling, chilling tales of suspense.

Social media is the modern version of OSHA.

Companies that have engaged in dangerous or illegal activities in the past are now at great risk as social media has gone mainstream.

When OSHA fails, social media prevails!

AI Con (The Sonnet) Everybody is concerned about psychics conning people, How 'bout the billionaires who con people using science! Con artists come in all shapes and sizes, Some use barnum statements, others artificial intelligence. Most scientists speak up against only the little frauds, But not the big frauds who support their livelihood. Am I not afraid to be blacklisted by the big algorithms! Is the sun afraid, its light will offend some puny hoods! I come from the soil, I'll die struggling in the soil. My needs are less, hence my integrity is dangerous. I am here to show this infantile species how to grow up. I can't be bothered by the fragility of a few spoiled brats. Reason and fiction both are fundamental to build a civilization. Neither is the problem, the problem is greed and self-absorption.

Vulnerability is an amazing gift to people who have empathy, who know your heart, and who you can trust. But vulnerability can be dangerous in the hands of those who don't know your heart or care to protect it.

Social Media Is giving everyone power and sometimes that power goes to the wrong people. A mental , unstable or Insane person, who has a lot of followers or fans on social media. Has more power, control and Is believable more than a normal, sane civilize person. That person is setting up standards and principles for normal civilized people In the society and everyone follows , because of majority rules. Nowadays we are not even surprised by people doing crazy things. It is how crazy can you be. That Is why today laws are changed. People are doing weird stuff and are uncultured, ungovernable, ill disciple, reckless, negligent, dangerous, ill mannered and not respectful. It is not doing something right, but It is doing something everyone Is doing.

As with previous “drug crises,” the opioid problem is not really about opioids. It’s mainly about cultural, social, and environmental factors such as racism, draconian drug laws, and diverting attention away from the real causes of crime and suffering. As you’ll discover throughout this book, there’s nothing terribly unique about the pharmacology of opioids that makes these drugs particularly dangerous or addictive. People have safely consumed them for centuries. And, trust me, people will continue to do so, long after the media’s faddish focus has faded, because these chemicals work. Fatal overdose is a real risk, but the odds of this occurring have been overstated. It is certainly possible to die after taking too much of a single opioid drug, but such deaths account for only about a quarter of the thousands of opioid-related deaths. Contaminated opioid drugs and opioids combined with another downer (e.g., alcohol or a nerve-pain medication) cause many of these deaths.19 People are not dying because of opioids; they are dying because of ignorance.

Twitter and Social media are 1,000 times more dangerous than Radio Rwanda. This is the world's biggest and only Propaganda tool for fascism and hatred politics. Billions of people are wasting their time there, and in return, it's making them violent, filling their hearts with hatred and their minds with irrational fake information. And forcefully turning them into political slaves.

I fear women who will do and say anything for attention and money. Who will hate you for calling them out. Who have plausible deniability. Who want to be correct all the time. Who never take any accountability. Who don't take no for an answer. Who always want their way. Those ones are dangerous and are capable of doing unspeakable shocking things.

Parental anxiety isn’t new. Parents have worried about their kids ever since having kids was a thing, but we believe it’s worse now than before. Why? For one, we have a lot more information than we’ve ever had before. In days past, we had to be okay with not being able to reach our kids at every waking minute. Now it’s almost a mandate that we know their every move. Barry Glasser, a top sociologist and author of The Culture of Fear, concludes that “most Americans are living in the safest place at the safest time in human history,” but it doesn’t feel that way because 24/7 news and social media inundate us with scary story after scary story about kidnappings, drug overdoses, and freak occurrences that, in their ubiquity, muddy our perspective.1 This, combined with an increasingly litigious culture, has dramatically changed the way we think of “danger.” Let your six-year-old climb a tree and you’re considered careless. Let your eight-year-old walk to school on her own and you’re positively neglectful.

[T]he mainstream media is not interested in creating understanding or complicating our understanding about legitimate problems like white supremacy or racism, wars and violence, gender and sexuality, refugees, and so on. Rather, the mainstream media is more interested in maintaining the level of misunderstanding that ensures that all of us, including white people, don’t ask the right questions that will lead us to discover a very simple, yet troubling fact which is this: our real enemy is not the poor marginalized white people, including many who were misled into supporting Trump. Our enemy is not the immigrants, the Blacks, the LGBTQ2+ communities, the Muslims, and so on. The most dangerous enemy is the very small percentage of the extremely rich and powerful individuals that are using every social and psychological tool at their disposal to make everyone think that everyone else is their enemy. The main purpose of the ruling class, then, is to govern all these different bodies through various narratives that make each group an enemy of one or more groups in the same society. This is precisely what it means to ruin the fabric of society to maintain full control over it. [From “The Trump Age: Critical Questions” published on CounterPunch on June 23, 2023]

Fame is a dangerous addictive drug . People lose their character, morals, principles, mind , manners, sanity just to have it.

I believe the populist insurgents, contrary to the impression given by prevailing media coverage, are largely correct about what has gone wrong, but, dangerously, know far less about how to make it right. I believe we should listen respectfully, to acknowledge that the populists have a valid point, that they are not just simpletons nor backwards, racist xenophobes. I believe it is time to reflect on what policies would restore some necessary balance, a renewed role for core government and a renegotiated, reinvigorated, social contract.

When the corporate press engages in idle speculation, it’s “having a discussion.” When someone with a large following on social media engages in brainstorming, it’s “dangerous” and “irresponsible.

There are no garbage humans—no matter how easy that tweet is to write. We lean into humanity—at all costs. Humanization can be as simple as saying, "I see your pain." That doesn't meant I condone your actions. That doesn't mean I do not believe you to be a danger to myself and others. That certainly doesn't mean I have to vote for you or agree with you or invite you into my life (or social media feed). It simply means I see that you have a heart that beats beneath your chest and that heart is capable of breaking... just like mine.

Consumerism as revolution; hacker anarchism suffused with the unashamed capitalism of the Reagan ’80s. “It’s dangerous,” historian Margaret O’Mara said, “because the myth becomes Silicon Valley’s reality.

Any social media application or platform should have a psychology test when signing up for a new account. That will detect people who are dangerous and who might have an influence to make others dangerous. People who will use social media for bad ,evil and wrong intentions. People who are not mental stable. Also people who can be easily influenced by bad advices. Then run an algorithm on which information those people can see. Put a disclaimer on some accounts of those who have a bipolar disorder or who are psychopath.

Advocate for Progressive Taxation: Support policies that promote progressive taxation, where the wealthy pay their fair share. Engage with advocacy groups and contact your representatives to push for tax reforms that reduce inequality. Support Regulatory Frameworks: Advocate for robust regulatory frameworks that protect consumers, workers, and the environment. Join organizations that work towards strengthening regulations and hold policymakers accountable. Defend Public Services: Stand against the privatization of essential public services. Support initiatives that prioritize the public good over profit and work to ensure that services like healthcare, education, and infrastructure remain accessible to all. Promote Economic Justice: Engage in efforts to reduce economic inequality by supporting policies that increase the minimum wage, expand access to affordable healthcare, and provide opportunities for education and training. Join movements that fight for economic justice and social equity. Educate and Mobilize: Spread awareness about the risks of Project 2025’s economic policies. Host discussions, share information on social media, and participate in grassroots movements to mobilize others in the fight for a fairer economic system.

Reflecting on the Myanmar tragedy, Pwint Htun wrote to me in July 2023, “I naively used to believe that social media could elevate human consciousness and spread the perspective of common humanity through interconnected pre-frontal cortexes in billions of human beings. What I realize is that the social media companies are not incentivized to interconnect pre-frontal cortexes. Social media companies are incentivized to create interconnected limbic systems—which is much more dangerous for humanity.

...while social analysis must always be part of curriculum development and teaching, education policy and practice needs to be protected against the dangers of fads, obsessions and moral panics.

all along the way, a biased media, a morally bankrupt academy, and a clueless Hollywood have abetted this softening. Rugged manliness is denigrated—being “macho” is assumed to be the same thing as being a male chauvinist. Being a thug or an outlaw is cool, while being a soldier or police officer is a tool of oppression. And besides, crime is a result of social conditions, not personal choices. Children are taught that the world is full of dangers—which is true—and that they aren’t capable of handling them without government assistance—which is a lie.

Our virtual self becomes a constant reflection of what we’ve done today, what we think today, what we’ve seen today, and what other people think about what we’ve done, what we think, and about what we’ve seen. In other words, it is very easy for us to use social media as an electronic embodiment of the Narcissus myth, or—if you will—an electronic hall of mirrors.

Law enforcement officials around the country have taken to monitoring social media for signs of potentially dangerous parties, and in Keene the police combed YouTube videos and other postings to find people responsible for the destruction. In Gulf Shores, Ala., another spring break haven, the police took to Facebook, warning visitors intent on behaving in a disorderly or violent manner that “Gulf Shores may not be for you.” Some cities

It is for this reason that the anxiety about the boundaries between people and machines has taken on new urgency today, when we constantly rely on and interact with machines—indeed, interact with each other by means of machines and their programs: computers, smartphones, social media platforms, social and dating apps. This urgency has been reflected in a number of recent films about troubled relationships between people and their human-seeming devices. The most provocative of these is Her , Spike Jonze’s gentle 2013 comedy about a man who falls in love with the seductive voice of an operating system, and, more recently, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina , about a young man who is seduced by a devious, soft-spoken female robot called Ava whom he has been invited to interview as part of the “Turing Test”: a protocol designed to determine the extent to which a robot is capable of simulating a human. Although the robot in Garland’s sleek and subtle film is a direct descendant of Hesiod’s Pandora—beautiful, intelligent, wily, ultimately dangerous—the movie, as the Eve-like name Ava suggests, shares with its distinguished literary predecessors some serious biblical concerns.

I don’t think my social media obsession is dangerous.” I joked.

The lesson: Be aware of the incredible power of social media and the dangers of reacting to news that you haven’t verified.

Similarly, those Internet tycoons who are apparently so willing to devalue our privacy are vehemently protective of their own. Google insisted on a policy of not talking to reporters from CNET, the technology news site, after CNET published Eric Schmidt’s personal details—including his salary, campaign donations, and address, all public information obtained via Google—in order to highlight the invasive dangers of his company. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg purchased the four homes adjacent to his own in Palo Alto, at a cost of $30 million, to ensure his privacy. As CNET put it, “Your personal life is now known as Facebook’s data. Its CEO’s personal life is now known as mind your own business.” The same contradiction is expressed by the many ordinary citizens who dismiss the value of privacy yet nonetheless have passwords on their email and social media accounts. They put locks on their bathroom doors; they seal the envelopes containing their letters. They engage in conduct when nobody is watching that they would never consider when acting in full view. They say things to friends, psychologists, and lawyers that they do not want anyone else to know. They give voice to thoughts online that they do not want associated with their names. The many pro-surveillance advocates I have debated since Snowden blew the whistle have been quick to echo Eric Schmidt’s view that privacy is for people who have something to hide. But none of them would willingly give me the passwords to their email accounts, or allow video cameras in their homes.

A 2013 study in Computers in Human Behavior featured a series of ten statements such as “I get worried when I find out my friends are having fun without me,” and asked participants to rate themselves from one to five on how well those statements correlated with their own lives. The study found that three-quarters of respondents (mostly college-age students) experienced FoMO. Those who scored higher were more likely to report lower life satisfaction and use social media immediately before and after sleeping, during meals and classes, and to engage in dangerous behaviors such as texting while driving.

Like all animals, our relationship to and with violence has played an essential role in our evolutionary history. Violence is at the heart of who we are as a species. It shaped our past, defines much of our present, and molds our future. It is found within all our mythologies and religions. It is front and center in our news and entertainment. Videos that feature it consistently go viral on social media. It is feared, desired, shamed, celebrated, glamorized, demonized, fetishized, idealized, romanticized, and, so very often, misunderstood.

ACEs: Adverse Childhood Experiences The human brain is a social organ that is shaped by experience, and that is shaped in order to respond to the experience that you’re having. So particularly earlier in life, if you’re in a constant state of terror; your brain is shaped to be on alert for danger, and to try to make those terrible feelings go away. In a healthy developmental environment, your brain gets to feel a sense of pleasure, engagement, and exploration. Your brain opens up to learn, to see things, to accumulate information, to form friendships. But if … you’re not touched or seen, whole parts of your brain barely develop; and so you become an adult who is out of it, who cannot connect with other people, who cannot feel a sense of self, a sense of pleasure. If you run into nothing but danger and fear, your brain gets stuck on just protecting itself from danger and fear. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, “Childhood Trauma Leads to Brains Wired for Fear” (interview), Side Effects Public Media

Social media has made it simple to draw circles around what we do and don’t want to hear. Or, more accurately, who we do and don’t want to hear from. “Unfollow if you disagree.” The phrase is everywhere on social media, directing people to unsubscribe from the author’s posts if they don’t endorse what those posts are saying.

Imposing an ideological racial purity test on Black men and women is dangerous. It is divide and conquer. It is colonial. But news media companies who purport to be anti-racist are often blind to this reality.

With the right environment, such as having a severely mentally-impaired person in an influential position with lots of access to propaganda sources and social media, then we have the perfect conditions for transmission.

Maybe an underlying problem is that despair isn't even an ideological position but a habit and a reflex. I have found, during my adventures in squandering time on social media, that a lot of people respond to almost any achievement, positive development, or outright victory with "yes, but." Naysaying becomes a habit. Yes, this completely glorious thing had just happened, but the entity that achieved it had done something bad at another point in history. Yes, the anguish of this group was ended, but somewhere some other perhaps unrelated group was suffering hideously. It boiled down too: we can't talk about good things until there are no more bad things at all. Ever. Sometimes it seemed to come out of a concern that we would abandon the unfinished work if we celebrated, a sense that victories or even joy and confidence are dangerous. That celebrating or just actively fomenting change is dangerous.

Toxic people tend to shoot first and apologize later, and social media can be a dangerous space for that personal style.

Mirza Masroor is not the Present Khalifa Of Islam He is only a cozener of a fake Religion --- Misusing of the internet and Google Search has become a beneficial tool for fake ones, and even such ones neither fall in international jurisdiction nor considered dangerous that damage others' values and realities. It is a collapse of the truth in the mirror and the context of the minorities' right to freedom, which is under the process of falsehood in all its directions and dimensions. The fake Messiah, or Jesus Mirza Ghulam Ahmad Qadiyani and his all fake khalifas fooled Christianity and Islam, and they continuously practice on this false claim of the prophetic mission. Wikipedia, the unreliable and untrusty encyclopedia, facilitates the way of command to a minority of the fake prophet upon a clear majority of Muslims and Christians. The followers of a fake Hindustani Jesus Mirza Ghulam Ahmad Qadiyani entered world media and websites such as Wikipedia to publicize their wrong and false mission. Qadiyanis are doubtlessly termites of religion, who have challenged, not only Islam but factually, also Christianity with the creation of fake Jesus. Virtually, I have been the victim of Qadiyanis during my contribution to the Wiki-project to maintain standards and neutrality of it; thereupon, a gang of Qadiyanis succeeded that I left Wikipedia, and they, with the collaboration of my opponent ones, also managed to delete my article in Wikipedia. Not only that, but they also tried hard to eliminate me from the net-world, but thanks to Google Search, which significantly displayed Ehsan Sehgal more than that it was. Consequently, they stayed humiliated with their actions of bad-faith. These days on social media, a non-Muslim, non-Christian; however, self-made and self-claimed, Mr. Miraza Masroor Ahmad is in Google Search as Present Khalifa Of Islam, which is indeed not only incorrect only; it is a shameless and false claim for provoking the real Muslims. As a fact, Qadiyanis are neither Muslim nor Christian; they are just grifters and cozeners. Qadiyanis know that they deliberately victimize Muslims theoretically to become practically victimizers, for achieving empathy and sympathy from Westerners stupids and idiots, who have even not a little knowledge and study about Islam and Christianity, except media discriminations and wrong interpretations with the ill-mental context.

And you’re right. The self-care culture has gotten out of control. Now people are told they need to buy certain things or look a certain way, live a certain way, to be happy, to be healthy.” I pause. “And it’s totally backfired, spiraled into something totally antithetical to self-care, actually. Now women are just competing with other women on social media. We present this bullshit, fake image of perfection to the world, but it’s totally unattainable. And it’s dangerous

None of these things spells the death of a tolerant, morally diverse Open Society. But they do remind us that constant talk of 'tribes' - with its implicature about the dangers of being 'primitive' rather than enlightened modern individuals - blinds us to the ways in which modern hyper-individualism in moral thought is at least as much a source of bitterness and conflict. A mob of high-minded individual moralists, attacking a morally opposed view in a university protest or on social media, is not a tribe. To say so is to insult the subtle and cooperative life of tribal societies.

One of the greatest dangers of social media is that it speeds conflict up. It holds us captive in the reactive mode of thinking, by design, robbing us of time and space. In that sense, it’s like an automatic weapon. If you never have to stop to reload, there’s no way your loved ones can tackle you and bring you to your senses.

I will only post my location on social media while traveling if I am in danger.

He was, if anything, boring. The typical social media, essentially closed off. What little I could see corroborated aspects of his story. Divorced, childfree, effortlessly wealthy. Then again, Ted Bundy would have looked good on paper too.

We all numb. We all have different numbing agents of choice—food, work, social media, shopping, television, video games, porn, booze (from beer in a brown paper bag to the socially acceptable but equally dangerous “fine wine” hobby)—but we all do it. And when we chronically and compulsively turn to these numbing agents, it’s addiction, not just taking the edge off.

Though we recognize distinct cultural differences across time and place, the commonalities warrant our attention. To think about how these ancient commonalities need to be differentiated from our modern ways of thinking, we can use the metaphor of a cultural river, where the currents represent ideas and conventional ways of thinking. Among the currents in our modern cultural context we would find fundamentals such as rights, privacy, freedom, capitalism, consumerism, democracy, individualism, globalism, social media, market economy, scientific naturalism, an expanding universe, empiricism, and natural laws, just to name a few. As familiar as these are to us, such ways of thinking were unknown in the ancient world. Conversely, the ancient cultural river had among their shared ideas currents that are totally foreign to us. Included in the list we would find fundamental concepts such as community identity, the comprehensive and ubiquitous control of the gods, the role of kingship, divination, the centrality of the temple, the mediatory role of images, and the reality of the spirit world and magic. It is not easy for us to grasp their shape or rationale, and we often find their expression in texts impenetrable. In today’s world people may find that they dislike some of the currents in our cultural river and wish to resist them. Such resistance is not easy, but even when we might occasionally succeed, we are still in the cultural river—even though we may be swimming upstream rather than floating comfortably on the currents. This was also true in the ancient world. When we read the Old Testament, we may find reason to believe that the Israelites were supposed to resist some of the currents in their cultural river. Be that as it may (and the nuances are not always easy to work with), they remain in that ancient cultural river. We dare not allow ourselves to think that just because the Israelites believed themselves to be distinctive among their neighbors that they thought in the terms of our cultural river (including the dimensions of our theology). We need to read the Old Testament in the context of its own cultural river. We cannot afford to read instinctively because that only results in reading the text through our own cultural lenses. No one reads the Bible free of cultural bias, but we seek to replace our cultural lenses with theirs. Sometimes the best we can do is recognize that we have cultural lenses and try to take them off even if we cannot reconstruct ancient lenses. When we consider similarities and differences between the ancient cultural river and our own, we must be alert to the dangers of maintaining an elevated view of our own superiority or sophistication as a contrast to the naïveté or primitiveness of others. Identification of differences should not imply ancient inferiority. Our rationality may not be their rationality, but that does not mean that they were irrational. Their ways of thinking should not be thought of as primitive or prehistorical. We seek to understand their texts and culture, not to make value judgments on them.

Lola—a girl so outwardly preoccupied with wokeness; who only read overhyped memoirs written by women under thirty having feeble epiphanies about themselves; who had “she/her” written in all her social media bios despite very clearly never being in danger of being misgendered—

Journalists fill very different social roles than those of scientists, and the press serves different roles than those of scientific institutions. Scientists and research institutions have motivations for communicating with the public that only partly overlap with those of journalists. From a scientist’s perspective, the function of media ought to be to disseminate scientific results accurately and in proportion to the strength of the evidence they have produced… Journalists, on the other hand, work to avoid the appearance of working for a “special interest.” The news media aim to entertain; warn of dangers and failures; and report, explain, or comment on events. Preventing disease is not one of these goals… Although desiring to only present factual information, a journalist with a deadline to deliver a story before the publication of a newspaper or the airing of television program may simply not have enough time to “get it right” because they interviewed the wrong people, missed important features, or were not able to follow up on sources. Long-form investigative journalism, such as Deer’s investigation of Wakefield’s conflicts of interest, can slowly fill these gaps.

a marked change occurred between 2019 and 2020. The dual crises of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests ran slam into the twin dangers of Q-Anon and the consolidation of the Trump paramilitary. In 2019, there were sixty-five incidents of domestic terrorism or attempted violence, but in the run-up to the election in 2020, that number nearly doubled, according to a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Twenty-one plots were disrupted by law enforcement.5 Violent extremists in the United States and terrorists in the Middle East have remarkably similar pathways to radicalization. Both are motivated by devotion to a charismatic leader, are successful at smashing political norms, and are promised a future racially homogeneous paradise. Modern American terrorists are much more akin to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) than they are to the old Ku Klux Klan. Though they take offense at that comparison, the similarities are quite remarkable. Most American extremists are not professional terrorists on par with their international counterparts. They lack operational proficiency and weapons. But they do not lack in ruthlessness, targets, or ideology. However, the overwhelming number of white nationalist extremists operate as lone wolves. Like McVeigh in the 1990s and others from the 1980s, they hope their acts will motivate the masses to follow in their footsteps. ISIS radicals who abandon their homes and immigrate to the Syria-Iraq border “caliphate” almost exclusively self-radicalize by watching terrorist videos. The Trump insurgents are radicalizing in the exact same way. Hundreds of tactical training videos easily accessible on social media show how to shoot, patrol, and fight like special forces soldiers. These video interviews and lessons explaining how to assemble body armor or make IEDs and extolling the virtues of being part of the armed resistance supporting Donald Trump fill Facebook and Instagram feeds. Some even call themselves the “Boojahideen,” an English take on the Arabic “mujahideen,” or holy warrior. U.S. insurgents in the making often watch YouTube and Facebook videos of tactical military operations, gear reviews, and shooting how-tos. They then go out to buy rifles, magazines, ammunition, combat helmets, and camouflage clothing and seek out other “patriots” to prepare for armed action. This is pure ISIS-like self-radicalization. One could call them Vanilla ISIS.

The conditioning of society is to destroy your capacity to be aware, to be conscious, to feel and to see. Then people can accept any kind of state in society. Just to survive they accept all kinds of humiliations. They are ready to live on a survival level. They are ready to live on a very low level of consciousness. Many people are existing below the human level. A person who is aware, conscious, who feel and see will rebel wherever he sees anything unjust and inhuman. He will not tolerate it.  There is so much injustice everywhere. To protect this injustice and all the political and economical investments that depends on it, society starts from the beginning to socialize and conform the child to live only on a minimum level. This guarantees that the control and exploitation of society continues.  The state, the politicians, the pedagogues, the priests, the media and the rich, they all control, manipulate and exploit people. The conditioning of societyis to make people unaware, unconscious and dull, because to allow people to be aware and conscious are dangerous to society. The whole society basically functions against making people aware and conscious.  Meditation is the way to learn to be aware, awake, conscious, watchful and available, which is why society basically is against meditation. Meditation makes you aware enough to find love. Meditation makes you aware enough to rebel wherever there is anything injust and inhuman. Meditation makes you aware and conscious enough to go against the unconscious mob psychology, which functions from the lowest state of consciousness.

The last decade has filled so many of us with a growing sense of unreality. We seem trapped in a grind of constant change without ever getting the chance to integrate it. Those rolling news cycles, the chatter on social media, the way that our families have split along partisan lines: it feels as though we've undergone a halving, then a quartering, and now we are some kind of social rubble. If there were a spirit of this age, it would look a lot like fear. For years now we've been running like rabbits. We glimpse a flas hof white tail, read the danger signal, and run, flashing our own white tail behind us. It's a chain reaction, a river of terror surging incoherently onwards, gathering up other wild, alert bodies who in turn signal their own danger. There is no one predator from which to escape; there are many. We are in the business of running now. It is all so urgent. Every year, it seems we must run harder. There is no other solution. We can only run, and panic, and chatter out our fears to others, who will mirror them back to us.

I’m here to tell you: under-education + lack of faith in the political and economic system that has failed them + Christianity + 40 years of conservatism becoming more and more extreme + right wing talk radio + virtually no mental healthcare + lack of interaction with anyone outside of their race mixed with stereotypes that have become “normalized” + social media + no good jobs + poor health from over-work/dangerous jobs + economic desperation x magical savior = trumpism.

The Test of Death -Would you believe someone you trust and swear to tell you the truth? -No -Why? -He may say what he thinks is the truth, which is not so, and I believe that the truth is not given, but taken, snatched, you have to fight to get it, the truth is not free. – We sent you to carry out a dangerous, sensitive task, a matter of life or death, and we sent someone you know is a deceiver and a liar to share it with you, we do not trust him either, but we need him? Do you accept it with him? -Maybe yes and maybe no -How? -Trust here has no place, even if I trust him, I may not implement it with him, and I may implement it with someone I do not trust, everyone in a certain circumstance has the ability of betrayal and treachery, as they have the capacity for honesty and sincerity, I will not trust anyone with a dangerous operation like this, but I will trust the plan; if the plan had taken all possibilities into consideration, including the possibilities of treachery, and if we put alternative plans in case of emergency, I would trust the plan itself, and implement it with those whose presence is required. -What is brainwashing? -It is a radical transformation of ideas in a short period of time, without a convincing reason or explanation. – How does the process work? -The primitive method is by coercive means, such as physical or psychological torture, to implant thoughts directly into the victim’s head. -What is the most advanced method? -By manipulating the surrounding environment of the victim, and passing ideas into his brain indirectly, to convince him that it is the product of chance, or for supernatural reasons such as your pre-written destiny, or that God has chosen you for this moment, and the more convincing the environment, and the more serendipitous, the quality of the process better. -How do you know you are being brainwashed? -I watch my thoughts, if I suddenly decide to switch them without a clear and convincing reason, and within a short period of time, then I have to study the changes in the environment around me, new people, targeted ads on social media, random videos, and everything around me seem to happen by chance It is directly or indirectly related to new ideas. Then research and focus, analyze and elicit, to try and discover the process. -What is long-term brainwashing? -A traditional brainwashing process, but it takes a relatively long time, such as repeating the idea to be cultivated weekly instead of repeating it daily, and this happens if the victim is intelligent and careful observation, so the process is done carefully and slowly so as not to discover it. -Which is more powerful, short-term or long-term brainwashing? -The short; the mind quickly ignores, when passing the idea in separate periods of time, it ignores the old ones, and buries them away in its memory, thus their impact decreases, so we are forced to plant the idea a thousand times instead of a hundred, to increase the momentum and compensate for the lack of influence of the old ideas, and with the presence of spaced periods of time when the process takes a long time, and the chance of discovering the target becomes greater. -What is a mind injection, and how is it done? -It is the process of implanting the ideas that are required to be implanted in it, in direct or indirect ways, and each has its own method and method of injection, some of them rush and some of them take longer than the necessary time, and in both cases, the injection does not take its desired effect, but it is possible that the effect is completely reversed. -How do you know that the injection process is going well? -The new and reprehensible reactions of the victim, especially the spontaneous ones. Which is issued near the end of the injection process.