Due to me not wanting to implement any kind of analytics / statistics on this website, I don’t have any reliable source of information on how many people actually read my website. And I don’t care, either. I can scream into the void and I’m just as happy as if someone stumbles upon my website and actually reads the shit I post.
However, I already got many requests for mailboxes on my still standing iusear.ch mailbox offer, so there must be at least a couple readers out there. Thank you, you beautiful bastards.
Many of you might even come from reddit, as I’m an active redditor and I also linked this website on my reddit profile, as I mainly post on FOSS, Linux and privacy related subs. I also tend to comment a lot on other subs as well and while my comments tend to sound harsh at times or may actually sometimes come from my ass instead of my brain, I’m not an evil troll or whatever.
But I’m often treated and portrayed as one. The thing is that many redditors don’t seem to understand that in a normal conversation, you can see your conversation partner. You can see their face, their body language and you can hear them. All of this is not possible when reading an online comment, leaving the true intentions of the poster to assumptions. And this is what usually gets me in trouble when posting online.
In times not long ago I used to frequent Facebook. I wanted to kill it off, but I couldn’t, since it’s the only means of contacting some of my friends who live in Japan.
While on Facebook, I often had to deal with (mostly) boomers who were totally into stuff like conspiracy theories, alternative “healing” methods (like homeopathy), etc. and who were just too stubborn to accept cold, hard facts. Instead, they usually stay in their own little world made out of expensive sugar pills that don’t do jackshit…
I live in Flensburg in the north of Germany. That’s why I was also part of the local group “Flensbook” (which is now called “Flenscom” due to Facebook prohibiting the suffix “-book” in group names now). I liked the group, because it recieves regular news posts about my region and it also has a separate group with the same name for buying and selling stuff.
Now, I also tried to be polite and I never broke a rule when I posted something myself. But… Ah-butt-ah-butt-a-BUT: There were Karens. Many of them. Female ones. Male ones. In all colors and shapes and on all levels of the idiocracy scale.
From the top of my head, here are some of the things they usaully posted:
“I’m looking for a doctor who will treat my kids and who is ‘sceptical’ about vaccines.”
“My kid has many warts on her hands and I’m looking for someone who can ‘speak off warts’ 1.”
“Who can recommend a healer for ‘laying hands on me’ 2?”
“Anyone know a good tarot card fortune teller?”
See, if you believe in shit like that, I’m fine with it. Do all your esoteric shit next to your regular doctor visits as a supporting measure and it’s totally cool, since the placebo effect is proven to work (also by proxy, that’s why it works with small children and even pets, as well).
But as a dad of two wonderful little kids, I could shit bricks when I see that children are involved. Large bricks. Coming out of my ass, rupturing it in the process. And I usually let the Karens know, because not getting your child’s ass to a fucking doctor when it needs any kind of medical attention is child neglect in my books. Ignoring or even condemning vaccines is another thing that will cause trouble for every single one of us if too many people write vaccines off as dangerous. Especially in COVID times. I’m looking at the fuckfaces who think that Bill Gates wants to inject us with microchips and bullshit like that.
Guess what? I understand why Trump won the election in 2016. I get why the Brexit went through (I hope those fuckers don’t get a deal). I also understand why conspiracy groups, as well as right-winged political parties grow in size right now… The reason? Too many idiots in the world.
The majority of people were on the Karen’s side, which basically left me speechless and made me loose faith in humanity a bit. Well, since there are also Schwurbler 3 like that among the administrators of the group, I was muted one or two times, unable to comment or post. That’s when I had enough and just messaged the admins to ban me so the group would stop getting my blood boiling on a daily basis. My wife recently faced a similar fate, as she also discussed a lot with the same type of people about the same topic. She has the same point of view as I do and we discuss people like that on a daily basis at home up to the point that I don’t even want to hear about it any more, because it actually makes me sad.
There are so many smart people in the world. So many scientists doing their best to make all our lifes better. Then, some Karens discover the internet and visit the YouTube academy to brag about how they’re smart and people like doctors, scientists, etc. aren’t. Really? I mean… Seriously? Sure. The years it takes to obtain a PhD are nothing compared to your 5 minutes of googling, Karen. Sure.
Long story short: Fed up with Facebook, I looked at reddit as an alternative to satisfy my scrolling addiction. At first, I was astounded that many people there seem to be actually quite nice and welcoming, so I decided to go all in and participate there regulary.
But then should come …
What should I say? Not a lot of time has passed and I quickly discovered that reddit is just as bad as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and all the other shitty platforms out there. Maybe it’s even the worst of them all.
The reason for me venting here is that I was just banned from participating on r/de, the german subreddit for german-speakers, for 10 days due to me “dogwhistling”. I didn’t even know what it meant until I read the sidebar again 4.
The reason for me being banned is my participation in the comment section of this post about a woman being deported from Germany after living her since she was 2 years old. This woman, not only grew up here (and therefore is practically as German as I am). She’s also treating COVID patients in Germany right now. Needless to say: The fact that she’s being deported is absolutely fucked up, as someone else in the comments pointed out nicely somewhat along the lines:
“What’s up with Germany? Criminal clan members? Nice! Normal and actually useful people? FUCK OFF!”
Someone else answered to that comment:
“The clan members are a German problem.”
Well, they actually said something about rotten apples and that this apple is Germany’s rotten apple, etc.
I watched many documentaries about clan criminality in Germany. It’s usually arabic clans that do really bad stuff here and that are here in their 3rd generation, etc. Many of them also come here, commit crimes and can’t be deported, because they destroyed or threw away their passports and other documents, resulting in the countries of origin going: “Nah, bruh, they’re your problem. We never heard about them.”.
So, I asked:
“Since when makes you throwing away your passport german?”
Next, I get a notification that I’m banned. This is typical redditor shit.
“Bisexual doesn’t mean you like men and women. It means you like everyone. Including trans people.”
What does PANsexual mean then?
I’m bi and I like men and women. But while I do accept and support people who want to transition to the other gender, since they feel they’re born with the wrong gender, I certainly don’t find them attractive. Especially not in a sexual way. Sorry.
OP was a picture with a chat log where one mom asks something about baby formula and another mom just ignores the fact that there are women out there who are unable to breastfeed, stating that breastfeeding is the only choice, no matter what.
I commented that I’m aware that there are in fact reasons why many women can’t breastfeed, but that I’m proud about my wife who breastfed both our children as long as possible. In fact, she still breastfeeds our at the time of writing 9 months old son.
What happened? I got downvoted again and some femi-nazi said:
“You’re literally on the same page as the person in OP. Fuck off.”
Post about “What europeans think about america” starter pack… Top comment:
“They’re just jealous about all the cool stuff we have here.”
And this is probably the thing I hate the most about Reddit: Americans thinking they’re the best. They tend to take inventions of other countries and claim them as their own, call Europeans “Europoors”, etc.
What’s really annoying to me right now is that american news on reddit display the COVID-19 vaccine developed by USA’s company Pfizer AND Germany’s company BioNTech as “Pfizer’s vaccine” all the time, but actually, no funding of the US’ project lightspeed went into funding the vaccines. It was Germany’s government in Berlin and therefore my tax Euros that were used to spend 450 million € on funding.
To be honest, I could go on and on and on about this shit. I would love to quit social media for good. But on the other hand, I’m kind of emotionally attached to my reddit account and I often find interesting (mostly tech-y) stuff that I save for reading or trying out later. I could “deactivate” the account, but reddit won’t reactivate accounts once they’re deactivated. In this matter, they’re definitely worse than Facebook.
I think I might need a Firefox extension that prevents me from commenting or something. But whatever.
END OF LINE.
Last updated: 13.12.2020
There’s a superstition in Germany that there are people who can make warts go away by “talking them away”. It might not only be Germany. But obviously, this is bullshit. ↩
People seem to believe that there are also people who can heal you by just putting their hands on you. ↩
Schwurbler are people who religiously believe in conspiracy theories and use alternative “facts” while being ignorant to all official facts and fact sources, condemning them as part of a new world order, etc. ↩
I always read the sidebar of subreddits before joining a sub. But since I have many subs that I subscribed to, I can’t be bothered to memorize everything in there or re-read it everytime I comment. ↩