why do people need so much money

Mental illness.

Really.

I grow more convinced every day that I've somehow been stranded among a bizarre race of insane savages.

That's really the only feasible explanation I can come up with. There's no way that a race of even reasonably intelligent and rational beings could fail to recognize that Netanyahu, for example, is profoundly and dangerously mentally ill - a clear psychopath - and shouldn't even be allowed out in public unaccompanied, much less granted power over others. So it can only be the case that human beings by and large - at least the not inconsiderable portion of them that support Netanyahu (or Trump or Putin or any of the other vividly insane people in power) - are both stupid and insane.

And somehow, I, with a working brain and an actual set of functioning moral principles, have ended up trapped among them.

It's not necessarily the case though that fewer crimes are being actually "solved," in the most precise sense of the term.

It could be that the current heightened interest in police oversight and focus on investigation of (and huge lawsuit payouts as a consequence of) wrongdoing by the police has made it less likely that people will be railroaded/framed for crimes they didn't actually commit, so the rate at which crimes are marked as solved has declined, even as the rate at which they actually are solved hasn't.

Of course they are - they're psychopaths.

They're each and all people who, in a sane society, would be institutionalized in order to protect others from the harm they inevitably do as a consequence of their complete lack of principles, morals, empathy and remorse. But instead they're allowed to run free, and this is what we get.

And I have the same reaction I have to most of these types of things - I wonder what it tastes like, and wish I could try it.

I've never understood why these things trigger such uproar. It's not like it's poison or some sort of bodily secretion or something - it's just a somewhat unusual but entirely edible ingredient. And it could be good. So what's the problem?

The thing you're apparently calling "traditional" seems natural to me.

I've never really stopped and thought about it before, but as far as I can figure, my brain expects the part of the system that does or would actually touch the surface to drag the screen in a particular direction through the simple workings of physics.

On a touchscreen, it's simple - it's my finger actually touching the screen and it drags the screen around exactly as I'd expect.

With a mouse, my finger isn't the important part because it's not touching the surface (or more precisely, the mousepad that substitutes for the surface). Rather, my finger is contolling the mouse, and the underside of the mouse is touching the surface. And as far as that goes, the "traditional" way it works is correct - when I move my finger downward on the mouse wheel, the bottom side of the wheel - the part that would actually be touching the surface if it was a purely mechanical system - is moving upward, so would drag the screen upward.

So to me, that's what's natural.

It's just game theory in action.

People with morals, principles, integrity, honor and/or empathy will exercise self-restraint - there are choices they will not make and courses of action they will not follow.

Those without those qualities will not be so constrained. They can and will do absolutely whatever it takes to gain whatever they might want.

So all other things being more or less equal, psychopaths actually have a competitive advantage in systems of institutionalized, hierarchical authority - governments, corporations, police departments, armed forces and so on. For all intents and purposes, those institutions reward and thus select for psychopathy.

It's sort of akin to the way that cancer spreads through an individual by outcompeting, dominating, displacing and destroying healthy cells.

And it's just as ultimately fatal, and for essentially the same reasons.

As already noted, on all of them.

The easy way to grasp how it works:

When you, on instance.alpha, view a community on instance.beta, you aren't actually on community@instance.beta. You're actually on an entirely separate copy - community@instance.beta@instance.alpha. That's the community you're reading and posting to and upvoting/downvoting in. Meanwhile, people on other instances are each on their own locally hosted copies of the same community.

The lemmy software (or kbin or mastodon or whatever) then periodically syncs up all the local copies of community@instance.beta, so you all end up looking at (more or less) the same content, even though it's actually a bunch of technically separate communities.

My theory is that many westerners in our current era have effectively replaced traditional religion with shallow political ideology.

So instead of going to church so they can be surrounded by fellow believers and hear a sermon telling them that their faith is the one true way and that every evil is rightly blamed on the loathsome unbelievers and heretics, they go online so they can be surrounded by fellow believers and hear a sermon telling them that their faith is the one true way and that every evil is rightly blamed on the loathsome unbelievers and heretics.

Seriously.

Of course it's Crowder at the forefront of this - the narcissistic manchild who was caught on-camera being such a vile piece of shit to his eight-month-pregnant then-wife that even his biggest simps couldn't pretend that it was defensible.

Yeah - the whole dynamic of claiming that you don't intend to do the specific shitty thing that you then intentionally and specifically do is infuriating already, and "yuck your yum" just adds an extra layer of cringe to it.

The point isn't to either support or oppose LGBTIQ interests - the point is to fund two sides who will then fight, and distract attention from their ongoing economic rape of all of us.