Is gender dysphoria not considered a health issue […] Feel like having pre-transition gender dysphoria compared to other mental illnesses like anxiety/depression/etc is a positive thing because it normalizes it to a degree.

There’s an inherent problem of definitions here:

Consider: does the DSM classify transgender as a mental disorder? Hard to say. It includes 302.85: Gender Dysphoria, defined as “a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender”. It also includes approximately one million caveats saying that transgender definitely isn’t a mental disorder. Why the contradiction? Because regardless of the philosophical definition of mental disorder, the practical definition is:

• If you call something a mental disorder, insurance has to cover treatment for it, which is good.
• But if you call something a mental disorder, people will accuse you of trying to stigmatize them, which is bad.

The DSM writers are trans-friendly and want to make sure trans people can get the care they need (for example, in most states, people need a psych evaluation before they can get gender affirmation surgery), so they want to force insurance companies to cover transgender, so they have to include it. But they also don’t want to stigmatize trans people, so they also include a lot of paragraphs about how even though they just listed it as a mental disorder, it definitely isn’t a mental disorder.

“I’ve seen it first-hand” isn’t significant evidence because the frequency illusion effect is a thing. If you see dozens of ads a day and ignore them unless you notice them matching something you talked about, you’ll end up thinking ads can track what you talk about whether or not it’s true.

Oh, the lab leak/zoonosis debate is a good thought, but I don’t think it counts as a conspiracy - if I search for news articles from before 2022 mentioning it, I immediately find, say, this BBC article from 2020 that treats lab leak seriously, so it was a mainstream-ish idea quite early on. This seems to match with my own memories, I’ve seen lab leak being discussed in 2022 and I think even earlier.

In general, though, there’s probably some good COVID-related example, even if I can’t think of one immediately (I think it’s pretty disingenuous how media demonized every prospective COVID drug, especially ivermectin - but they did turn out to be ineffective against the virus itself, and I don’t think there were any conspiracies about the drugs that ended up actually working, like Paxlovid).

Thanks, that’s a nice askreddit thread. A lot of these have the same problem though, which is that I have trouble believing (and have no idea how to find evidence, since they were well pre-internet) that these were conspiracy theories before they were revealed.

(I note now that I didn’t actually mention, in my comment, that by “was a conspiracy theory” I don’t just mean “sounds crazy” but rather “sounded crazy and there were actually people saying it”. I’m not interested in every insane thing secret agencies did*, I’m interested in stuff people successfully predicted.)

*well, I am, but it’s not what the question is about

I’m not sure what you mean. Arresting random intelligentsia is not a “well reasoned response” to foreign interference. And it’s also unrelated to the topic - I’m asking about conspiracy theories that were later validated, and “foreign governments are trying to sabotage us”, in Stalinist USSR, wasn’t a conspiracy theory - if anything it was the party line.

Sure, the fact the US government spies on every single citizen without warrant or cause.

Ah, that’s true, I totally forgot about Snowden. Technically I don’t think I’ve heard of there being a conspiracy about it before 2013, but it’s a good example.

Stalin wasn’t crazy nor did he overreact with his actions against ‘enemies if the state’

Very questionable phrasing (I have some Soviet ancestors who spent years felling forests for the crime of being too educated and teaching things that didn’t quite align with the party line; that’s not an ‘overreaction’ to anything, but just tyranny), but anyway, this doesn’t count - it was definitely not considered a conspiracy theory in the Soviet Union to think that foreign states were doing espionage there.

Are there any examples of something that was a conspiracy theory being validated by confidential documents later? I can’t think of any, even though secret agencies sure did do a lot of crazy stuff.

Invidious alone has been working quite badly this year (stopped working for months until inv-sig-helper was invented, etc), but combined with FreeTube it almost always works; can recommend.

Have you considered just not watching shortform video like tiktoks and youtube shorts?

How did you notice that?

It’s Mafuyu from Project Sekai. She looks like that all the time. Wasn’t able to find this specific image, though.

People have already said how to fix this, but I’ll add this different piece of advice: start using FreeTube.

If you actually read the article, this is just a normal-ish (although peer-to-peer, which is interesting) free VPN, it isn’t actually oriented towards cheating. The funniest part is that if the article is to be believed, the “cheating” consists of simply increasing your ping. Which… you don’t really need a VPN for.