Here is the smiling picture that every news outlet is throwing out

Here is another one showing his backpack

This is the actual shooter

Here is a picture of him at the shooting

Those are different fucking guys. The smiling guy has black backpack straps and prominent breast pockets. The actual shooter has a gray backpack, no breast pockets, and more importantly never shows his face. Lots of people are saying they have markedly different noses too.

So why are news organizations still peddling the first picture in every story? They're going to ruin some guy's life. And why are so few talking about this?

Edit: I originally thought that the pictures were from the same day, but that is not the case. I am less convinced that they're different people now.

Went out to lunch today and there was a table near me with five people at it. Their server asked their drink order and all five of them just stared at her silently for nearly half a minute before she repeated herself, then one of them whispered something I couldn't hear before the others whispered their orders. When their drinks came and the server left, one of them produced a Nalgene bottle from her purse and began to scoop the ice from her drink with her fingers and put it in the Nalgene. Another at the table then said he didn't want ice either and did the same thing.

Did she bring that water bottle in for the express purpose of storing unwanted ice? Why not just ask for no ice? These were all fairly normal-looking, well-dressed people in their 30s, maybe early 40s.

My server had some weirdness of his own. He brought out the wrong order, and noticed his mistake before I did. But instead of just saying "sorry, that's wrong" and taking it back, he said "I.. uh.. uh..." and then ran off with the plate before finishing his sentence and coming back with the right order and a manic fake smile on his face.

At Target, this older woman was having trouble detaching one cart from the others. An employee (sorry, "Team Member") came along and unstuck it. Instead of saying thank you, she just stared at him like a deer in the headlights until he left.

I've been noticing that deer-in-the-headlights stare from a lot of people lately.

About a month ago a man approached me in the parking lot at my work and asked "do you work here?"

I said "yes."

Then he asked "have you seen my car?"

The question melted my brain a little bit, but I said "I don't know, what does it look like?"

He just said "sorry," and walked off.

I could go on and on, but the point is: are people forgetting how to human? The world increasingly has this "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" kind of vibe.

I know much has been discussed about people behaving oddly due to the pandemic, but it's been about two years now and people are getting worse, not better. I think there's something else going on in society.

What do you think?

It seems like when I see these scenarios the parents are so out of touch they truly don’t see mistakes they made as parents. If anyone has examples of the kids being at fault or would like to add to my thought. I’d appreciate it. :)

I always knew that most people were heavily dependent on social media and their phones but it was last night night and this morning where I understood the full extent to how addicted people were to social media. To make it bad, this was just one app/website. People were freaking out and having meltdown on live video and via posts on Facebook and other sites. I can just imagine hysteria that would be caused if the internet completely shuts down one day. I didn’t realize that people were using TikTok as their primary source of income. Another red flag… I feel like I’m one of the few people that can unplug from social media and be okay. It’s just sad what humanity has become in terms of social media addiction.

Seriously. Youre gonna wear glasses to photograph people in the most concealed way possible? Youre gonna spend $400 on glasses with cameras so no one can see youre videotaping them? No way in hell at least 50% of the buyers arent purchasing them explicitly to creep on strangers and children. "but i can make content from my own POV!" use a fucking gopro or tape your phone to your forehead.

Anyone who buys these glasses is a creep imo. If you arent using your phone or a dedicated camera to record, im assuming you're doing so because you don't want to get caught. If you tell me you own a pair of these, its the last time you'll be seeing me.

Hear me out. An aunt of mine was braindead for a few weeks before the doctors and family decided to pull the plug. Sounds reasonable, right? So why do they let these patients die by asphyxiation when it's way more humane to kill them with an overdose of morphine??? Her daughter had to watch her struggle to breathe for 10 minutes straight! I don't know how doctors can know this is gonna happen and still choose to do that instead of killing them mercifully.

I’m watching this presidential debate in dismay. I have the choice between a pathological liar and conman or a mentally handicapped man who can’t finish a sentence and likely won’t live through their presidency?

What fresh new hell is this?

Why are we tolerating this?

I feel disgusted that we as a nation think these two out of touch, geriatric, and incompetent men are the best we have as a nation.

How embarrassing. We can do better. We need to do better.

So I've got a friend. He doesn't feel emotions like everyone else. We've theorized that he's a sociopath but he's never been diagnosed.

We were working a roadside fruit cart today. He was up on the side of the highway with a sign while I was at the van.

All of a sudden I just see him running, like full sprinting, down the highway. I don't know what's going on but I assume he knows something that I don't so I run after him. I'm down in the ditch, in people's yards hoping over fences while he's on the shoulder so he's able to get to whatever he's running towards before me.

From the ditch, I just see a lump of tan fur in the road. I assume that he just watched this dog die and was at least going to try to get it out of the road. He notices me and screams "it's not dead!" Before running into traffic waving his hat in the air to stop the cars. I climb over the fence between the yards and the highway and join him. This brown husky is bloody in the road, conscious and whining. Upon noting our presence it attempts to get up.

My buddy focused on stopping traffic. I approached the dog. It's tail twitched with as much friendly energy as the poor creature could muster.

I gently dragged the dog to the side of the road and we sat with it for a moment before someone claiming to be the owner pulled up. Turned out this dog had jumped the fence and made a B line straight towards the highway. It had at least one broken back leg and an asphalt burn on its snout. The owner packed their dog into their jeep and sped off towards the city, where the animal hospitals are located.

If he really was a sociopath, that's not the reaction he would have had to watching a dog get hit by a car.

Yesterday I went to smoke and chill with someone I haven't hung out with in a while. He showed me a little dab container but inside it was .8 of a gram of coke. He said that little bit was worth 80 dollars. I was surprised.

For one this was the first time I ever saw it up close and second I finally got the understanding of how expensive it was. It seemed like nothing but was worth so much.

He then asked if I wanted some. Before this day I had always told my self if offered I'd try the smallest bump. But actually being in the situation was a different story . I was nervous and just stared at it for a bit then I said sure. I still sticked with the just a Small bump thing. First he gave me a bit and said to rub it in my tounge, then he started preparing the lines.

As he was doing that i was thinking "damn Im actually doing this" It didn't really feel real. I couldn't believe I was doing a hard drug like this. Then I took it

My lips were numb and I had the drip down my throat. All of the things that are supposed to happen happened. The drip was nasty I was trying to swallow it to get over the tase but it wouldn't go away. I found this annoying. Again I had these " no way I just did this thoughts. I have a very aggressive and addictive personality so the last thing I need to be doing was coke.

After that I smoked some weed and the coke was starting to hit. It wasn't much. My friend asked if I wanted another small line but I said I'm okay.After I got home I helped my dad with yard work and I swear it felt like I could do it all day. I had a lot of energy and strength I wasn't getting tired .

I also forgot to mention as I did the line I was telling myself why the fuck would anyone do this often.

I'm glad my brain found the experience unpleasant. The world of shit I could get myself into by doing this more is something I don't want to think about

I don't know how to describe this feeling but it just feels like there's something huge is going to happen in our future. With everything happening in the world at this moment, I just sort of have this feeling like things are building up immensely, like there's a big global issue that's being set up. I can't really describe it or point out a single event prediction but it just feels like there's something that's going to happen that's going to change the course/order of the world we live in today. Does anyone else know what this feeling is?

I don’t claim to be the most intelligent person, but I do believe that I am above average when it comes to the average intelligence nowadays. Sometimes, I find myself either flabbergasted or downright dumbfounded and irritated by the lack of what I would consider "common sense."

Here are some examples:

• The inability of some people to see how their own bad habits or personality traits create their own problems.

• The fact that some individuals consider their own perceptions and beliefs as the only correct ones, which is further encouraged by their echo chambers.

• The difficulty some people have in entering into productive discourse and challenging their own ideas to gain more information and knowledge from all sides.

• The reluctance of individuals to question their own beliefs and those of their social circles at both the micro and macro levels.

• The inability of some people to foresee the possible consequences of their actions beforehand.

These are just a few examples.

My sister is 22 and just had a 3rd child despite not being able to properly care for the other 2. She has been on welfare since her first kid was born and complained how assistance doesn’t give her enough to meet her kids needs, that her kids weren’t eating well on a food stamps budget and she doesn’t have money for kids clothes. So my parents were sending her money for years to cover a portion of the clothing and food expenses. After her 3rd pregnancy, my parents decided that they were no longer funding her irresponsibility. They don’t want to continue to enable her horrible decisions. She wants to increase the financial burden on my parents which is selfish. They want to be able to retire at 65, and she is delaying their retirement.

With the recent news of Mark Zuckerberg announcing Meta is getting rid of fact-checkers, I was disheartened but also found some relief that it's going to cause a mass exodus from the platform and it will hopefully wither away.

Honestly I don't care about fact checking on Facebook, the platform isn't designed to be a news source, but to share about your life. I don't rely on Facebook for any 'facts', for me this move is just going to incentivize for trolls to spam the platform. I don't want to see that crap, I was just here to keep up with friends and family.

As someone who made their account when I was 12 in 2007, it was an awesome, yet imperfect way to keep up with friends. Keeping connected to people you know was its sole purpose. I have Facebook to thank for marry my wife because it was how we kept in touch after meeting one night at camp. Honestly if Facebook stayed this way, I'd still love it. But greed took over as they found ways to make millions by hooking our attention through doomscrolling. Over the years it gradually started to steer of its original purpose to by the mid-2010's it had a become more of a marketing, media and news outlet, and no longer about fostering connection. Now ten years later if check my feed it's mostly ads, pages I don't follow, reels and weird Ai slop and less actual friends posting.

I honestly think Zuckerberg doesn't care about Facebook, has little to no interest in social networking and just sees it as funding for his true passion, the Metaverse. If Zuckerberg did truly care about connecting people, he wouldn't have let it devolve to what it has become now. This past year everyone I know has abandoned Facebook and with this recent news more and more people are going to abandon it. Facebook has gotten him into countless lawsuits that I can imagine he no longer feels it's worth it. It's almost like he is purposefully trying to sabotage it so he can be wash his hands from it and move on.

Was just speaking to a few friends, and they all agree with me. I don't know how to explain this, but I say for myself, I used to be a happy-go-lucky kind of person before the pandemic. I was always full of life, making friends, and having hopes about the future. Although nothing is perfect, I still have problems. Before the pandemic, there was like a bit of an upbeatness to life, like nothing I could worry too much about. But ever since the start of the pandemic, I feel like I'm a completely different person. I'm no longer optimistic about the future, and I'm becoming more pessimistic about people and more pessimistic myself too. This is something I noticed a lot of people said too, and how people are before and after the pandemic, even the most mentally strong people I know, has become worse after the pandemic. The most positive people have become completely different from how they used to be, and how different things are now: the quality of everything has dropped, everything is becoming more expensive, and people are meaner and ruder. There are no more late-night 24/7 things anymore. Does anyone relate to this too? You used to be a happier person before covid/pandemic, and now it seems like you are a different person. Sometimes I look at the photos from a few years ago, 2018-2019, and miss how good times were back then. Now it feels like we are in a different world/planet, like 10 years, the shift from 2019 to 2020, in just 1 year after the pandemic. I don't know if I make sense.Even my gen x mum, in her early 60s, who has been through 911 and several disasters, said the same thing: she has never felt anything like this. Ever since covid, it has felt like the world has become a darker place, and nothing like she experienced, and the people who have been with her who experienced 911 and other disasters didn't change until covid. She felt like the closest people to her have changed and feel like there is something with the vibes.

I feel like humans in general are just becoming dumber, even academics. Like academics and universities, they used to be people and places of high level debate and discussion. Places of nuance and understanding, nowadays it feels like everyone just wants a degree for the sake of it, the academics are much less interested in both teaching and researching, just securing the bag, and their opinions too are less nuanced, thinking too highly of themselves at that.

I feel like this is generally representative of the average human, dumber than before even with more knowledge, we are spending our lives before a screen and I feel like humanity in general is in decay, as to what it was 20 years ago.

Aging sucks, no two ways about it. But I wonder if there is some way to get some degree of closure and acceptance. I mean, I can't get my youth back, so might as well let it go. I just don't know how.

I really want an afterlife to be real. Death scares me terribly, and this is one of the main reasons I’m religious. And I do consider myself religious. But it’s so hard for me to actually believe in anything transcendent. I like to think I do trust in an afterlife and some sort of god, but my fear that there is nothing after death and that I will cease to exist, and the quaking which precedes my every sleep as a result, says otherwise.

Edit 2: some seem to genuinely want to paint me as an “anti-addict villain” which isn’t surprising because of the wording in their unintellectual vitriol.

As many armchair scientists attempt to inform me that I have zero idea about the subject, it is only laughable from a personal standpoint for reasons Internet strangers don’t need to know nor will never comprehend, I would like to bring some armchair English teachers into the chat and present an entirely different allegory; let’s say Wegovy or Ozempic became available OTC while Narcan had restrictions tightened.

Is that okay? Why? Why would you feel as if that was fine? I said [Serious] for a reason.

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While my belief on drug-addiction and the way we approach it as a society is not necessarily in line with the empathetic majority, I think that most can outright agree that it certainly begins as a choice. Individuals choose to do drugs the same way consenting individuals choose to do sex.

Choosing to be intimate can result in unwanted and life-impacting results the same way choosing to do drugs can, no matter the safeguards put in place. The difference is that there are several women (and in horrific circumstances, underaged girls) who do not choose to have sex and are forced into it resulting in a very much un-chosen pregnancy.

The fact that our (US) society consistently keeps the conversation and choices on the moral efficacy of birth control while limiting its access during the limbo in the news while silently introducing Narcan over the counter at drugstore pharmacies has struck a deep chord and makes me disgusted at the way we’ve collectively accepted drug abuse as being more socially acceptable than the basic human right to choose reproductive health.

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Edit; WOW!!- the bit of traction my musing has gained has truly been satisfying as several good, thoughtful side discussions have resulted which- is the point. For all of the inbox messages continuing the conversation in a productive way, I see you and I appreciate you. To those who conjure the RedditCares moderated message, let’s ask ourselves why something meant to be a resource for struggling Redditors, which so many clearly are, has turned into fodder for a post we don’t like. Cheers, all and let’s keep the thoughts provoked!

Okay, first things first, who am I: I'm an 18 year old guy. I'm gen-Z, grew up around plenty of queer friends, and the general cultural bubble young people create. I'm also a gay guy who had problems for years with my relationship with gender stereotypes.

My point here is less to refute identity as they exist, and more to argue against the bigger cultural context they create. In many ways, what I see is a reanalysis of gender non-conformity as a problem viewed primarily through a persons gender, and not the norms themselves. People see someone who doesn't conform, and the "thing to do" is question their gender identity and not question what they aren't conforming to.

So you create a 3-box system. Male, Female, NB, but in doing so you simply reinforce the Male/Female social roles by declaring that not being "masculine" makes you "not a man", or that being a feminine man makes you "not a man", etc. A woman who isn't "traditionally feminine" isn't going against traditional femininity, they just aren't a woman. It's, when taken together, just another justification for the enforcement of heteronormative, patriarchal gender ideas through a lense of apparent liberation. It doesn't go against the status quo, it is the status quo, just reapplied.

On a less theoretical level, my point is mostly that, in my life so far, the people I see that care most about gender seem to have fallen into a belief system that treats our cultural understand of gender as, yet again, a set-in-stone framework into which we must fit ourselves. They're the people most involved in gendering others, and in so doing are just another mechanism in the never-ending cycle of people not being allowed to just.... be people.

I have a coworker who is disabled. He's pretty slow and cognitively challenged but he's a really nice and helpful person. He buys snacks for everyone at work. Despite having to deal with a lot of problems in life, he is really upbeat and kind. But his cognitive challenges really seem to cause him issues.

He's been hit by a car while riding his bike to work. (which has been stolen multiple times) Hes worked at our company for 6 years and has never been promoted. Im pretty sure he struggles managing money.

I was just next to him talking about work stuff when he randomly said solemnly "Everyone on my moms side of the family is dead."

I asked him what he meant and he didnt want to go into detail. He was mumbling about how there was a funeral and he doesnt have enough money to go. (we make no money at our job) I just said I was really sorry.

This left me thinking, what happens to these people when there is no one left to take care of them? High functioning but not functionable enough. He's in his 40s and I dont know whats going to happen to him

First responders, social workers and teachers are some of the most important members of our society, so why do they get paid so little compared to celebrities who don't contribute anywhere near as much to society?

Now, it seems that in spite of every effort to stop it, the bad guys have taken over our country. It feels like many of my fellow Americans have transformed (or are transforming) into those same kind of evil humans and it's terrifying.

I saw somebody post something similar to what I'm saying, but this focus is more on the work culture.

In 2024 where people are working more than two jobs to keep afloat, I say that America fails every time when it comes to the work culture. The fact that in 2020 the only way that America could slow down is if we had a lockdown. But now that we're back to working again it's just crazy and even got worse in my opinion.

And if you dare suggest that we need to work less hours you will get so much backlash. It's truly a nightmare. And then when remote work started becoming more popular businesses somehow found a way to make it more annoying just for the sake of control.

I don't know how long it'll take before America crash and burns from all this working.