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Comment by h2odragon | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of "WebMD caused a spike in cancer" stories; anyone remember those?

And video games cause violence, and DnD leads to Satanism, and TV rots brains, and movies lead to illiteracy, and books lead to dangerous thought.

> video games cause violence

They don't. Nothing harmful can come out of reading a book.

> DnD leads to Satanism

It can't, ever. No subculture can wander so close to satanism that would lead their elements to coopt it.

> TV rots brains

It doesn't. There's no way of consuming TV that has a negative impact on people.

> movies lead to illiteracy

They don't. Having the choice of a movie never prevented anyone from having to practice spending time learning to consume literature.

> books lead to dangerous thought

They don't. Nothing dangerous can be transmited in print.

Well done, everything is harmless.

I suspect the gp had an implied "/s" and was referring to things like the infamous Chick tracts and so on.

Pretty sure the parent was being sarcastic in response, given obviously false statements like:

> Well done, everything is harmless.

D'oh!

Isn't the inability to detect sarcasm known to be an early sign of dementia?

My money is that the reply was itself sarcasm.

As was mine.

And HN usage leads to the inability to recognize sarcasm. Google it, it's true.

Sarcasm in response to sarcasm is evidently twice as easy to miss.

What you are saying is a false root cause, i.e. "TikTok causes rare mental disorders". Which is not what OP is saying.

TV, Videogames, and moviesactually dorot brains since normally people would otherwise be picking up new skills to make themselves more able.

Yeah, but this time China is involved, so we must take it seriously, I guess.

Normalcy bias.