Random Thought of the Day

[Nyctophilia]

This is an example of the kind of earlier sci Fi book that breaks my suspension of disbelief because of the way women are depicted. I find it jarring to have these big ideas and advanced tech, but gender roles that are rooted in the 50's or 60's.

The problem with reading old science fiction is we're living in the future. This can happen with technology and other cultural and political stuff too. I think the Soviet Union still exists in Star Trek lol.

I guess generally it's best to just consider it an alternate universe.

I feel like any sci-fi that takes place in the distant future and doesn't include artificial wombs, and people altering their sex characteristics often when it likely becomes easier seems unrealistic to me based on how people use avatars online and choose gendered characters in video games and current development of artificial wombs.

Like we have AI now, very basic artificial wombs, scientists have created egg cells from the skin of male mice and then created baby mice that were genetically related to the two male mice so eventually samesex reproduction will likely be possible in Humans - probably in the next 200 years max, we should be able to use gene therapy to grow a third set of teeth within the next 6 years and so on. (Most of the examples I'm listing are biological and biotech because I pay slightly more attention to that.)

I think samesex people will be able to have kids way before artificial wombs. Perhaps that's not so weird though. IVF is already legal so that will pretty much become legal more easily anywhere where being gay is legal. Artificial wombs freak people out even more.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-...remature-birth

The Toronto group has seen blood clots and heart problems develop. So far, they've only been able to sustain a pig fetus for about a week.

But researchers at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia have safely sustained fetal sheep on a very similar device for four weeks, making the Toronto group and others optimistic the approach will eventually work.

"If this artificial womb technology could sustain a patient even for a period of weeks and get them to a later stage and a bigger size, that could potentially be quite a dramatic change in our field," says Dr. Mike Seed, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Toronto who is working with Haller.

What if it becomes possible to use artificial wombs to gestate fetuses for an entire pregnancy, making natural pregnancy unnecessary?

"We've heard people fearing that this translates into women not having to go through a full pregnancy anymore -- kind of more like a Matrix-style of dystopian future," Haller says.

"But it would be outrageous to assume that any artificial intervention in any way is better than nature. So if you're not running into problems in your pregnancy, I think there's a lot of evidence that you're better off being born as you should be from what nature intended," he says.

Assuming the technology works why the hell would you fear that? People who want to carry babies the traditional way could still do that but if you have another option nobody should be forced to go through all that.

I think I remember someone (it might have even been Grimes actually lol but maybe not, I know she brought up artificial wombs though as she almost died,) saying one day we'd look back at this expectation that women should do this as barbaric and I agree.

No this is what she said which is close enough (someone definitely said that though):

Having had a child, I can assure u the value proposition of artificial wombs is perhaps one of the most profound I can imagine for our species. We've mostly eliminated active warfare from men's lives, the violence of childbirth 4 women should be an option not a necessity

I just found this webpage (I remember seeing some of this twitter discussion at the time):

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/i-can-...that-its-going



"Why take on the risk?"

Really? Many people with wombs agree. Why take the risk? Of course people then shame people for not giving birth.

Predictably, this produced the usual torrent of knee-jerk petulant anger toward technologists, but it also produced a fair amount of interesting commentary and thought surrounding the idea of artificial wombs. As Hollis Robbins pointed out, it's pretty unlikely that artificial womb technology would substantially reduce the cost of raising a child, since almost all of this work happens after the child is born. And thus it'll be unlikely to significantly increase fertility rates. If you really want to imagine a technology that would make people more eager to have kids, imagine robot nannies.

But as Grimes noted, artificial wombs would significantly reduce the physical strain that pregnancy places on women's bodies

Yeah unsurprisingly (given the social circle,) a lot of the people involved in that discussion were out of touch lol like in the twitter screenshot above. The main pro would be reducing the physical labour of pregnancy and childbirth. Economically speaking though it won't make a huge difference. In heterosexual relationships women generally take on more childcare duties with kids while men (assuming they're present at all) are less involved.

I don't really expect that wage gap to change unless people start paying women for raising kids since most women have a greater prefence to be around their kids more. There are a bunch of guys who are ambivalent about having kids in the first place despite having them, some get pressured into having them by their partners which isn't good.

We don't talk much about this "violence"; it's one of our last remaining taboos. Instead, we relegate the gory details to the realm of parenting classes and raunchy comedy. But it's absolutely real. We've eliminated many of our burdens through the magic of technology -- carrying water all day, washing laundry by hand in the river, chopping firewood to heat our homes -- but pregnancy remains.

Unless you're rich, of course. My wealthy friend, whose first pregnancy required a hysterectomy due to placenta accreta, will have her second child via a surrogate, using pre-frozen embryos. This costs upwards of $100,000, which is approximately equal to the entire median wealth of an American household.

Who would begrudge my friend this? And even if she were able to bear a second child herself, who would begrudge her the opportunity to outsource it? Artificial wombs are simply a way to take a privilege for the upper class, and make it possible for other classes of society to enjoy it as well.

And this is how it'll almost certainly be received. Angry Twitter people always seem to envision new technologies as something that government imposes on the populace, possibly at the behest of mad billionaires. In the real world, what usually happens is that people simply adopt a new technology because they realize it makes life easier for them. Roon has a good thread about how this is likely to proceed:

Yeah the knee jerk naturalist anti tech responses disgust me when you consider what people are expected to go through and the current inequality with surrogacy.

I imagine the cost varies considerably as there are some countries like the UK where it's illegal to pay surrogates beyond like general expenses related to the pregnancy so they have to volunteer. It's considered more ethical since they can't be argued to be doing it out of desperation, and to avoid trafficking I guess, but it seems better that people would get paid for that like other high risk jobs. Even then though you still have to pay to freeze eggs since the NHS only covers it for people undergoing cancer therapy or who medically transistion if trans I think (which I have to say is an incentive to do that.)

Maybe in China the government will try to force womb tanks on people to try to raise the birth rate; in America, it'll start out as a luxury purchased by the rich and the infertile, and then in a few years we'll have online socialists angrily demanding that the tech be provided free of charge to all via a program of universal health care. Eventually we'll wonder how we ever did things any other way.

I hope so but I think the US might be doomed in that sense because there's no precedent. They don't listen to left wing Americans about universal healthcare in general after all and I said even in the UK egg freezing isn't covered except in very limited cases.

In fact, I've been hoping for womb tanks for a very long time, because of science fiction. One of my favorite sci-fi authors, Lois McMaster Bujold, includes "uterine replicators" as a prominent feature of her futuristic "Vorkosigan" universe (which you should definitely read if you haven't already). The tech is initially reviled as unnatural by the conservative inhabitants of the somewhat backwards planet Barrayar, but eventually it turns out that everyone loves it and it just makes life a lot easier. Like Grimes, Bujold envisions womb tanks helping push the world toward greater gender equality.

Artificial womb technology is bound to face plenty of pushback on the somewhat backwards planet Earth, just as it does in the fictional Barrayar. Because, well, it's artificial. The idea of abruptly mechanizing such a basic and fundamental part of human life as pregnancy causes some people to recoil in future-shock. Even when it becomes relatively commonplace, some will probably continue to argue that it's unnatural, some on religious grounds. In fact, as innovation shifts from gadgets and code to biotech and wetware in general, I expect such pushbacks to increase.

But in order to embrace biotech innovation, we need to understand that it's not really any weirder or more unnatural than the kinds of innovation we've been almost continually embracing for a century and a half now. Technology isn't becoming weird; technology has always been weird. In fact, in a very deep sense, that's what technology does --- by increasing human capabilities, it changes the fundamental shape of human life.

Technology doesn't just increase human capabilities. Technology weirds the world.

Just to drive this point home, I thought I'd make a list of some human experiences that were very basic and normal -- almost universal -- in 1980, but which are now so rare as to be almost unimaginable for much of the population. [...]

9. Getting chicken pox. This was a rite of passage for every kid. You got chicken pox, you itched like crazy for a week, and then you were done with it. It was so inevitable, and so safe, that some people would even intentionally infect their kids with it, just to get it over with. Now, thanks to the varicella vaccine that was introduced in 1995, almost no one gets chicken pox.

Unfortunately people do still get chicken pox often in many countries including the UK because we don't vaccinate against it except for people who have weakened immune systems or who are in contact with someone who is high risk for getting seriously ill from it. I think they might be planning to change that soon or maybe already have but the NHS website still says that. So I was born in 1991 and still got chicken pox as a kid.

Essentially the decision over this was because it was considered not cost effective and because it was believed that exposure to children with the virus would prevent older adults from getting shingles which is usually worse (since the virus basically stays dormant and can be reactivated in later life.) You could still get the vaccines privately for like 150 pounds, but most people wouldn't think to do that due to a lack of knowledge about potential rare side effects that are more severe.

Unfortunately in rare cases the disease is also serious and fatal in children so this decision has led to multiple deaths:

In Easter Sunday 2009, Angie Bunce-Mason noticed that her three-year-old daughter Elana had developed a rash on her body - the tell-tale sign of chickenpox, the common childhood infection which is caused by the varicella-zoster virus.

Her older brother, then six, had contracted chickenpox a week earlier and recovered normally. As an otherwise healthy infant, Bunce-Mason assumed that her daughter would also have few problems. "Like many parents, I just viewed chickenpox as a part of childhood life," she recalls. "I had never heard of anyone experiencing any problems, so I wasn't worried. I even commented to my husband that I was glad she would be getting it out of the way before starting school," she says.

But as the week went on, Elana became worryingly lethargic. On the Friday night, her parents took her to see a doctor who diagnosed her with possible pneumonia. She was rushed to accident and emergency where she went into cardiac arrest a few hours later. By 7am Saturday morning, Elana had died. A pathology report found that the virus had spread to her lungs and wreaked widespread damage, causing lesions which proved ultimately fatal.

"The doctor who performed the post-mortem said that Elana had the worst case of chickenpox that he had ever seen," says Bunce-Mason, who has spent most of the past 15 years attempting to raise awareness among parents and health professionals that chickenpox, a disease encountered by almost all children during their first five years of life, can turn fatal.

However, the decision not to vaccinate children against chickenpox is down to more than budget constraints - in many parts of the world, it's a calculated risk that aims to prevent disease in a different group: older adults.

You might want to stop constantly mentioning money then. No matter the topic I find people always doing this... It's like when there's a serious natural disaster and most of the discussion is about property damage...

The story of the chickenpox vaccine dates back to the early 1970s when a Japanese virologist called Michiaki Takahashi isolated a strain of herpes virus, which would become known as varicella-zoster, in a three-year-old boy.

This helped yield a vaccine which was initially approved in Japan in 1986, before one became available in the US in 1995. Anne Gershon, professor of paediatrics at Columbia University in New York, recalls how before it was introduced, there would be rare but horrific cases of children who recovered from leukaemia, but later died of chickenpox as their immune systems were too weakened to fight off the infection. "While it's usually a mild illness, it may be severe in immunocompromised children," she says.

Overall, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that during the first 25 years of the chickenpox vaccination programme, the jab prevented an estimated 91 million cases, 238,000 hospitalisations, and 2,000 deaths. While numerous countries have since followed suit, with Australia funding the varicella vaccine under their National Immunisation Programme in 2005 and Israel making varicella vaccination mandatory for children in 2008, there are still many countries that remain reticent to incorporate it as a routine childhood jab. This includes the UK, France, Denmark, Portugal, Norway, and Sweden.

So why the reluctance? Some of the concerns have stemmed from the potential consequences of vaccine hesitancy, which was named as one of the top 10 threats to global health by the WHO in 2019. If a large proportion of children are receiving the varicella vaccine, then the virus will no longer circulate to the same extent in the community. This could leave any unvaccinated children more susceptible to contracting the virus for the first time as adults, where the consequences can be more severe, especially in pregnant women as there is a risk of the virus harming the unborn foetus.

But the biggest fear has been lingering concerns that chickenpox vaccination might increase the risk of shingles among unvaccinated individuals in later life. This often painful and debilitating condition is also caused by infection with the varicella-zoster virus. Shingles rates are also expected to rise around the world as the population ages.

At first, the connection between chickenpox vaccine and risk of shingles might seem opaque and even counterintuitive. Essentially when we contract chickenpox as children, the virus' DNA lingers deep in our nerve cells, giving it the capability of reactivating many decades later. However, being exposed to small children carrying the virus during our midlife years and even old age is thought to have a protective effect, as it exposes us to small doses of the virus which act as a booster to the immune system and help to prevent the varicella-zoster in our cells from flaring up again.

One of the concerns has long been that if most children received a chickenpox vaccine, this boosting effect would be removed, possibly causing adult immunity to wane faster and leading to more shingles cases. Pollard says this led cautious public health officials to question whether a chickenpox vaccination campaign would really represent value for money.

"If the number of shingles cases started to rise over time, it would be a lot harder for the chickenpox vaccine to be cost-effective," says Ellen Rafferty, a researcher at the University of Alberta in Canada, who has attempted to model the various scenarios in the past. "But while there still remain a lot of unknowns, we have not seen any conclusive evidence of this," she says.

I think possibly in response to this they've also changed the age where you can get a shingles vaccine to 65 if you turn 65 in 2023. But older adults have to wait till they're 70 still.

I'm not sure this would help me personally anyway because I'm basically never around young children and I'm not sure how long you'd have to have exposure for it to work. No one I spend significant time with has kids (one has a nephew he hangs out with at christmas but I don't see him often and I don't think exposure can work like that.) I don't leave the house that often and when I do I don't necessarily run into young kids often either. Of course in Japan (they have the vaccination anyway probably since they created it,) there are villages with no or very few kids where this would be especially useless.

For some reason there's a trend to decorate these dying places with stuffed dolls ?? It's quirky and creepy:

A village is replacing young people with mannequins as population dwindles: 'Outnumbered by puppets'

The village has a population of 60, with the last baby being born two decades ago

With fewer than 60 people living in the Japanese village of Ichinono, and a majority past retirement age, residents have installed handcrafted stuffed mannequins to recreate the once bustling community.

According to data from the internal affairs ministry, only one baby was born in Ichinono in the last two decades.

The youngest member of the village is two-year-old Kuranosuke, who came to the village in 2021 with his parents, Rie Kato, 33, and Toshiki Kato, 31. The couple chose to move to the rural area from Osaka because of the sense of community, which they found lacking in the city.

So that's one place I was reading about another village thought this might have been the same one but it's not:

JAPAN: In the village of Nagoro in western Japan, there are no cheerful voices or laughter of children playing on the streets.

The school, the bus-stops and even the streets are eerily quiet. That?s because there are no more children in this community where the last school closed in 2012.

Tsukimi Ayano, 69, is one of only 27 residents remaining. To inject some life back into the village, she created life-sized dolls and scattered them all around the community.

They dot the landscape - along the streets, outside empty storefronts, clustered in the defunct schoolroom, like a scene from a creepy movie set.

"Some (of the dolls) resemble people who used to live here or passed away," said Ayano. Once a thriving village of 300 folks, Nagoro faded after residents died or moved away looking for employment. The youngest villager today is 55 years old.

I also really hate how people emphasise cost and economic factors whenever discussing anything and health and people dying is basically an after thought...

In the last five years, opinions has begun to shift following large-scale epidemiological studies which have shown that the US and other countries have not actually seen the feared increase in shingles cases over the last three decades. One UK study even estimated that the supposed immunity boosting effect of adults exposed to infected children might be less impactful than previously thought.

It's important to know how many people in those countries have been vaccinated against shingles too though. You'd have to assume they'd factor that in but I don't really trust a planet of people who's descisions are made predominantly based on cost. At any rate it will only have a potentially negative effect on people who were born after the vaccine became available so a few generations at most. Except for the people who refuse to vaccinate their kids maybe... It's an incredibly contagious virus so you'd need a pretty high degree of people to be immune I'd guess. A the article mentions people are still dying from chickenpox in small numbers in the US:

Such complications are more common than many realise, particularly in adults who never built up immunity through experiencing chickenpox as a child. One epidemiological survey in France found that severe chickenpox-related complications occurred in 3% of under 15s, and 6% of over 15s. In total, 65 people of all ages died from chickenpox in the UK between 2015 and 2020, while even in the US, where vaccination is common, there are still around 30 deaths from chickenpox every year. The World Health Organization (WHO) has previously estimated that there are approximately 4.2 million cases of severe chickenpox-related complications around the world each year, and 4,200 related deaths.

For Bunce-Mason, the news comes with mixed feelings. While she is pleased that the vaccine is finally being recommended in the UK, she feels that the excessive caution surrounding its introduction has resulted in preventable harm. She cannot help but think of how it might have prevented the tragic loss of her daughter, which still impacts her family on a daily basis.

"The impact of Elana's death on our family has been horrendous," says Bunce-Mason. "Her brother Reuben still feels extreme guilt and believes that he is responsible for Elana contracting chickenpox and her death," she says. "As parents, we were robbed of our daughter. Our family life has never been the same. Last year was Reuben's 21st, our 20th wedding anniversary and it would have been Elana's 18th birthday. As parents to young children, we had always said we would have a big family celebration when this time came, but once Elana died there wasn't the joy to celebrate it anymore."

[Nyctophilia]

Lol I love how people were claiming Trump was going to be the anti war candidate.

"The border of Canada is an artificially drawn line."

"We have to take over Greenland and won't rule out using force."

*ignores article 5 apparently.*

So not only are you oligarchical but also imperalistic? And it's been 5 minutes. Technically it hasn't been 5 minutes. It's not even the 20th of January yet.

Also love how delusional and narcissistic Trump's fanboys are.

And why is his son going to Greenland? He's not even acting as a president imo. It's as I said in my previous post when I compared him to the Collins family. Rich narcissistic elitist assholes think they can just buy everything.

Also reminds me of the Collins family who just wanted to basically buy the Isle of Man but then just got trolled by an undercover guy working for a charity lol (I really don't like this family but I cba going into why. I have watched a bunch of their YouTube videos they are elitists really. I mean they admit that themselves):

The voting rights of citizens of the city-state would be linked to their value to society, according to the Collinses' presentation. The proposed city-state government would have "incentive systems that grant more voting power to creators of economically productive agents? and would be run by a single "executor" - which the proposal also called a "dictator" - with full control of the government's laws and operational structure. The executor would be replaced every four years by three "wards", according to the slide deck. Wards would be elected by previous executors.

It may appear that the Collinses' views are so far outside the mainstream that one could shrug off pronouncements as eccentric and alarmist. But the Collinses are part of a movement they call the "new right", which rejects some aspects of traditional conservatism and bills itself as pragmatic, family-oriented and anti-bureaucratic. They staunchly support the Republican ticket, Donald Trump and JD Vance, and billionaire Elon Musk.

Last year, Malcolm Collins said he thought the Isle of Man would be the best place to begin.

"I actually think that's the most viable place to do it. You're near the center of Europe, you're in a rapidly depopulating area, you can tell them look, this will obviously bring a lot of technology and investment to your country. But the great thing about a proposal like this is even if they turn it down, you can take it to other countries," Malcolm told the man purporting to be an investor at the time.

The funding never materialized and the proposal was never pitched to the Isle of Man, a British crown dependency located in the Irish Sea, because the man who claimed to be a wealthy investor was actually an undercover researcher with Hope Not Hate, a UK-based anti-racism group. It shared video recordings of the encounters with the Collinses - and a copy of their presentation - with the Guardian.

Asked about the slide deck in an interview with the Guardian last week in their home in Audubon, Pennsylvania, Simone and Malcolm, who work together and appear rarely to be apart, acknowledged that their proposal "wasn't supposed to be public". But Simone Collins nevertheless said she stood by its core tenets "100%", including the idea of mass-producing embryos, and of giving people who they deem to be less productive members of society less voting power.

"If you are draining resources, you should have less influence," she said.

Asked about how it felt to be the subject of undercover research, Malcolm Collins said: "The experience was quite validating for both us and our movement." He added: "Now I think it is pretty clear that despite us not socially isolating people with toxic views, the worst views we actually have are being slightly elitist and weird eccentrics (which isn?t exactly surprising to anyone)."

The couple say their ideas were meant to be experimental and fit for a city-state, not a democracy such as the US. But the views are not dissimilar to ones expressed by one of Simone and Malcolm?s political heroes, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance. In a July 2021 speech, Vance said parents should be given "an advantage" and "more power" in the voting process than those who don?t have children.

I support Greenland's right to autonomy from Denmark if they want that but the imperialists in the US can in general [BEEP] off.

You already have the 4th biggest country landwise afaik. The audacity.

if 100,000 people in Greenland (oh wow I read the population was 100,000 somewhere but that person was misinformed it's like half that lol, 56,865~) want to be part of the US they can move there that's what I think and at least a few don't since they've commented on this and it doesn't seem like the prime minister of Greenland is super thrilled with the idea either.

COPENHAGEN, Jan 8 (Reuters) - Greenland may become independent if its residents want, but is unlikely to become a U.S. state, Denmark's foreign minister said on Wednesday after U.S. President-elect Donald Trump refused to rule out force to take control of the Arctic island.

Greenland's leader met with the Danish king in Copenhagen on Wednesday, a day after Trump's remarks thrust the fate of the mineral-rich and strategically important island, which is under Danish rule, to the top of world headlines.

If it became completely independent I don't think it would be part of NATO anymore? So the US could more easily take it.

It's beyond me why people respect authority so much. In my view all leaders who start wars should be fired, if that doesn't work assasinated (imprisonment also works.) The next person who comes in if they play the same game, same thing. The only reason this doesn't work is because people respect r*tarded authority. Nobody should be defending these individuals. Remove all of them and it will improve the gene pool too.

You don't need them they are not scientific geniuses. There's no difference between these guys and Charles Manson.

I know the US president needs the approval of congress to start a war (depending on how many obsessed fanboys are in the military) but that's more of a general global statement and at any rate the US congress could be full of people who agree in which case they would have to also be removed.

Basically everytime someone agrees to war they should be removed from power. Everywhere. This shouldn't be impossible, most (all?) Countries have laws against murder. Hell a bunch of authoritarian countries including the UK have laws against implying you're going to murder someone (which are policed in a very inconsistent manner seemingly to create a chilling effect and self censorship.)

People should also refuse to fight stupid bs wars more often but it seems weirdly common for people to propagandise men in particular. On that note people who shame men for not going to war should actually be locked in prison.

I would also destroy all nuclear weapons simultaneously. Anyone caught building one is again going to prison for life.

Building an army that isn't connected to a nation? Prison for you before it even gets to that level. If it doesn't seem to be effective because the local population is too r*tarded then more extreme measures will be taken.

Everyone who is disatisfied with the amount of land their country has and grumbling about it, will be forced by law again to devote the rest of their life to the development of space travel and terraforming inhospitable environments instead as there are lots of seemingly uninhabited rocks. It's illegal to declare this space for specific nations but as God emperor I'll have to put more thought into how I solve the potential issue of interplanetary war or (if even possible,) intergalactic war.

I guess I'll be kind and offer them the alternative opportunity to kill each other by rounding up all the people who are obsessed with fighting and who can't function otherwise and then they can just have a battle like in Battle Royale or Squid Game. They can choose to fight alone or in teams. Only one winner/team can survive. They can then reapply. If they extend the fighting outside of the agreed upon area with fencing then they are arrested again.

This is what I'd do if I was dictator of the planet with some kind of robot army.



"You're building a nuclear bomb - right to jail."

I think that's fair tbh.

"We have the most peaceful Humans on Earth. Because of jail." (and also the only Humans since I'm dictator.)

I'm also curious about whether removing nuclear weapons might increase the birth rate. I'm not desperate for it to increase in general it's just interesting to hypothetically ponder on things that stop people wanting to reproduce. You know like pandas. I think that could be one of the many things but no way to prove it until I'm dictator.



I wish this was as worse as people get.

"With the government shut down who's going to stop Al Qaeda?"

Do I have a solution for you.

Mildly amazing to remember that the entirety of Star Trek takes place in just one galaxy

Of course, the Milky Way.

And just think: by the latest estimates, there's at least two trillion galaxies in the observable universe.

I know Tom Paris travelled to an unknown number of galaxies during his Warp 10 shenanigans in the episode 'Threshold'. But still.

I was wondering tbh. I thought maybe some species lived in other galaxies but I know a lot of them off the top of my head are in this galaxy but tbh the galaxy is so huge that you'd take a long time to explore it all and the time frame of when Humans in Star Trek had begun space travel to whatever year it is is just centuries I think + it's mostly from Humanities pov.

The Star Trek timeline also includes World War 3, which began in 2026 and left Earth in ruins.

Oh.

I hope that's wrong then.

So they will hold an election to determine if Greenland wants to join the US, tech guru Musk will hack the polls and Greenland will become the 51st state in the US.

My advice to Greenland: use paper ballots!

Tbh there aren't enough people there for it to survive as a state after most if not everyone leaves. So ultimately it would become more like a US base. I'm assuming he wants the resources anyway.

edit: interesting point:

His want of Greenland is an acknowledgement that climate change is real regardless of what conservatives say.
As now Greenland (and Canada) will be highly influential in natural resources and shipping lanes as the glaciers recede.

This is bs between Russia, China and the US as well who are all highly imperialistic - that nobody else should have to deal with.

You think you're amazing and can fix the Russia/Ukraine war so why would you need Greenland for national security?



Re: "do you think colonialism was this stupid back in the medieval period"

People were pretty stupid back then and during the dark ages so possibly, but at various other points in time no not exactly. I mean the general public maybe but people used to be more intelligent and eloquent you can tell from writing etc. Basically what I'm saying is in Western Europe Trump wouldn't have existed during most of history post 1500 until very recently. I imagine in ancient Greece some people might have been like him and this inspired Plato's Republic etc. Also Americans (since that country existed,) have always had different personas in their leaders and different preferences in personas but probably not this ridiculous.

Also the video thumbnail lol. Trump has always had an issue with windmills I think. I think from what I vaguely one of his top 10 incoherent rants I listened to was about that or partly about that. I vaguely remember watching a video once and was amazed that in a period of about 20 minutes he didn't say anything that remotely made sense. It was all nonsense. I'm sure part of it was about windmills.

When I say nonsense I mean that crazy apocalypse rapture pastor video I posted yesterday (?) made more sense.

Also another thing he likes to rant about a bunch of water and washing machines lol.

That Steve guy he invites on seems super nervous for some reason. After he just went on about how great he was at negotiating and I... Strongly doubt that if that's how he comes across to people. Realistically.

If Trump actually acquires Canada, the Panama Canal, and Greenland, what would stop Putin and Xi from doing the same with their neighboring countries? If the USA takes such actions, it would become a worldwide concern.

I can't see him aquiring Canada despite his idiotic statement. I think he's definitely going to try with Greenland and the Panama Canal. China is definitely going to try and take Taiwan at some point.

Japan has a bunch of laws involving the development of a military (more stupidly biased global laws, more proof that we need to globally ban militaries,) and is dependent on the US, so I can't see them doing much so will basically depend on US and South Korea if they feel like defending Taiwan. I haven't looked into that enough to know if that's likely but I'm 80% sure China are going to try at some point.

Greenland must hold a popular referendum allowing the people to decide their destiny and giving President Trump the opportunity to make the case directly to the people for joining the U.S.

It's extremely important for the security of the U.S., Greenland, and global stability.

Each state in USA much hold a referendum allowing the people to decide their destiny and giving foreign leaders the opportunity to make the case directly to the people for joining another country.

Vermont would be a nice addition to Denmark.

Perhaps Norway wants North Dakota?

I guess if they're going to set this Precedent sure. Would be hilarious if half the US seeks independence. Honestly I'd be surprised if it doesn't happen long term.

I think these two should become seperate countries (haven't decided on the rest) but the Western US block should have a freedom of movement agreement with British Columbia or British Columbia could join that country and Hawaii should prob be part of that block too:



The Western part should make a little alien face their logo. Because of Roswell.

Kind of wanted to make New York and New Jersey seperate countries for the lols but whatever. I didn't put a lot of effort into this mostly just wanted a cool country that has alien land (New Mexico,) Nevada, the desert area, and the pacific South/North West states. Some of that region is fairly politically unified. Arizona was just kind of awkwardly there and part of the landscape + inbetween NM and NV so would be awkward to seperate it.

Maybe the Eastern block of the US could join the Eastern part of Canada then they can get free healthcare etc. Scotland can leave the UK and then can join Nova Scotia as an independent country. Lol I figured:

Scotland could join Canada, but should it? Your responses

The great Scottish poet Robert Burns once wrote that "the best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley."

Or, as they say in Canada, "The best laid schemes of mice and men go often askew".

Perhaps that explains how, in the midst of Brexit negotiations and as Scotland weighs a second referendum on independence, an obscure Canadian writer was able to capture people's imagination with his unconventional proposal: Scotland could quit the UK and join Canada instead.

I'm sure I knew this and forgot.

The prarie provinces seem to like the conservative areas and politics of the US so they can join together and the UK should join Japan and just have free travel between the two countries not because I live in one of them but they both like tea and they're island countries. So basically the same. We'll have to ignore how bad that would be for the environment when everyone's like 'woo free holiday.' (Vacation if you're from Alien country.)

I'd also like to be part of Alien country.

Also I am dictator of the world atm and I solved the problem of war globally and everyone gets free mermaid pillows with a celebrity of their choice's face on and 3 marshmallows each. Except vegetarians and vegans who get three tiny mushrooms or maybe vegan marshmallows but they probably still have to be mushroom flavoured. Mushroom burgers are really good so I feel like this logic must extend to all substitutions of this kind. Also mushroommallow sounds cute. Honestly the fact that nobody has proposed free universal marshmallows before. I mean it's disgusting. So I can give myself citizenship of three countries. As a treat. But Alien country only counts as one (it's just called Alien country now it's official,) since Japan and UK are just going to be one country anyway according to the real new world order.

I would not be able to trust the results of such a referendum honestly. One way or another he's going to engineer things so the US takes Greenland imo.

Americans are so stupid. You don't even know that this place is Europe. It's a danish territory

Do you know the difference between America and France? France will always talk about what we in Europe should do, while the United States will act. Even I am Chinese and I know this, the French want to exclude the Americans from Europe, but France does not have that ability.

USA are our ennemies since the last election. We have here a clue of what is going to happen in a few weeks. 🙄

Come fight us then😂😂 qu*er

Your president will lead the world to a nightmare.

Yours already did😂 we're just trying to clean y'all?s mess up. Cry about it dumb liberal

😂 we'll see?

You sir will soon need an American passport to enter Greenland

I don't think this guy realises that Greenland isn't part of the Schengen area and that guy is posting from France.... I also don't think he understands how passports work since most of the time you can only get one from a country you're a citizen of but sometimes you can get one as a national as well. Why would your passport be American? And how are they going to have tourists from outside US if they do that? Is Greenland going to become North Korea 2.0 where the US is like their China?

[Nyctophilia]

I have four kids the two oldest are girls. My oldest son had a chicken when he was somewhere around 5 to 8. No one could catch it but it would always come to him if he lifted his arms up for it. It lived outside in the backyard but would run inside now and then and sleep in his lap. One day our dog killed it. Instead of burying it I told him that it would be a waste. We cooked it. That was sort of his introduction to death.

This reminds me too much of Hannibal Lecter's origin story to ever think that's a good idea. Especially at that age. So many people (myself included) can trace weird fetishes to that period of life. Now for me it's worked out OK.. But still. Jeffrey Dahmer.... Not so much. (By worked out OK I mean I didn't become a criminal + my primary fetish is too abstract really.)

[Nyctophilia]

Lol this guy leaving out the big part:

Yikes! The trolls on this forum!

Holy cow, I just wanted to brag about my new child but there are some vile people in this world and they all hate large families it appears.

Thank you to everyone who said something positive. I promise you that all of the children are well cared for and healthy.

We are not rich but we do have a robust family support network with active grandparents and aunts and uncles. We do live in something or a community of family all very close and that makes every thing so much easier.

Anyway, ignore the trolls. They're just miserable people with an axe to grind. My adult children are all close to the family and starting families of their own now. This lifestyle can definitely produce happy, healthy generations of close knit families.

Your coyness in pretending getting that exact response was not your purpose is almost as adorable as that baby.

"and based on your comment history, how many wives do you have"

Many of us support having large families, but not at any cost.

Oof, when people say they are a blended family, I think of The Brady Bunch, not Sister Wives...

I have an ex-wife, a baby momma and one current wife. I'm shockingly mainstream.

So you're not raising all these kids, it's not even possible. You're creating a lot of broken homes.

I am raising all of these kids. Certainly not the way I would have preferred with six of them but I was still present in their lives and paid my support and fathered as best I could from a separate household. It's not ideal but it's doable. Although it is much easier when they're in the house. There was only one who wasn't born into a monogamous, legal marriage.

I want to hear the black sheep of your children tell it. Not the spin they give you to support your ego but the [BEEP] they tell their spouses.

Broken maybe, but still alive! Adversity makes for strong people. And it sounds like OP is trying his best.

From OP's responses, it sounds like 6 or 7 kids don't live in his household (probably the kids from his ex-wife), and he subscribes to a sub that believes in Biblical polygyny and absolute patriarchal authority, that literally wants people to structure their family lives like Old Testament figures like Abraham and Jacob.

OP's trying his best but to do what, exactly?

I guess context will make me eat my words.

Oh. You know why you're getting hate lol.

He posted this too (he's not been paying attention):

How come there seems to be no polyamorous atheist pronatalists?

Or polygamous, or polyandrous, or other types of poly. Like, I'm surprised Elon opted to donate his sperm to multiple baby mommies who live far apart instead of moving everyone together like old school Mormons. I'm sure some of the moms would agree to that. 🤔

Even when they were in a relationship of some sort Elon couldn't live with Grimes because she's messy and likes anime (that was the reasons given in an interview.) But it didn't seem like they were exclusive anyway and she kept calling him bro. She had to sue him to get access to her kids so it's going well. His first ex wife seems to hate him. I don't know about the employee (the one he had kids with without telling Grimes.) I don't think they were ever together so probably no desire to live with him.

I think Elon identifies as a pronatalist though, it's just that most people don't want to be around him for long.

This is one of Elon's daughters. You can see why some people might have some concerns (she really does hate him):



Because he's such a bad dad he's devoted himself to destroying the 'woke mind virus' cause he can never go back and be a good dad.

After Grimes said she supports his daughter (who is trans) he unfollowed her. Tbf he seems to do that a lot. Then follow her again. Peculiar.

Anyway. Treating him as a poster child of poly relationships is a real disservice to poly people.

Dating advice as a single woman

Alright folks... I have been trying to date in this environment for over 2 decades. I am now 42 and likely out of child bearing age which is a total bummer. I have never been married and I have no children.

I haven't been unable to find any man or couple that seems to take this idea seriously. It all turns into a sex conversation after the first few interactions which is incredibly annoying or people just spontaneously ghost. Also, especially early on, there doesn't seem to be much care taken from the established couples towards me as a single woman coming in to an already established relationship. I find that my needs aren't necessarily considered and I am not treated like a potential first wife would be treated during the courting stage. Additionally, there are so few people living this lifestyle for the right reasons and it seems that more than the majority are just doing it for sex. It is really disheartening.

I have tried numerous dating apps and I've got nothing. Any advice?

What' wrong with being primarily interested in sex? As long as it's honest then that's not an illegitimate reason to establish a relationship. And you can't expect to be treated the way a "first wife" was treated in her courtship. You're not a first wife. You're going to have to accept being treated the way a subsequent wife is treated.

Actually what's happened to her is pretty tragic. Most established couples who are looking for a third are unicorn hunters. They won't respect you. They want you to be their sexual plaything.



A lot of people know this especially in the [BEEP] community but she's posting on a biblical poly subreddit so seems to have figured that out later than most (and yet those ones aren't safe at all either see the video above.) I don't know why she's deadset on this though. 2 decades is a long time to keep trying that if she was actively trying all that time and not taking breaks.

I didn't even bother with online dating lol such is my level of risk aversion. I was never even looking for a poly relationship either but the whole thing is a minefield. But by then I'd also set up a ton of requierments and loopholes for myself to jump through before I started dating again so didn't happen.

...I would rather have sex with his wife than him too (related to couple in video.) Really though I wouldn't want to with either of them because what they're doing is so gross but yes she is more attractive. Conservative men are never really attractive imo (I mean it really is my opinion I'm very picky and obviously others like them,) unless they're weird right wing Nick Fuentes femboy or androgynous fanboys or something on twitter I guess. Like him (video unrelated to politics just unhinged):



"If you found out enough about me you probably wouldn't like me either. But I am cute, you can't lie I am cute."

It's very funny and true.

Conservative women are often attractive though. Like Abby Shapiro (she has another name now since she's married but I'll never remember it,) and her:



Tragic again really.

Is this even a real response? I'm pretty confident that it's a very low percentage of relationships based on sex that last long-term. If you want to have a sex based surface relationship, then knock yourself out. I'm looking for something that's deeper, more genuine, and long-lasting.

Your comment about not treating your 1st wife as an equal to your 2nd wife couldn't more embody exactly what I'm describing above. You're literally the embodiment of all things stereotypical in this sector. Lol! If you're not treating your wives as equals, then you're doing it wrong. Good luck.

Well said here, while there is some difference in how you go about dating a potential 2nd wife or whichever number it is.

Biblically, the benefits afforded the first wife should not decrease, which means the 2nd wife should not be coming in to a relationship and getting less than equal treatment.

First wife gets the house, 2nd gets the shed, third gets the doghouse? Where does it end if we take this attitude towards our families?

What? The first wife's benefits shouldn't decrease so the second wife should get exactly what the first wife has? That statement isn't logically coherent.

He tried to walk it back later:

I'm sorry Lauren but you're mistaken. You can base a relationship on anything if both sides are committed to seeing it through. I've known couples who bonded around their love of walking. If someone wanted to marry a ballroom dance partner you wouldn't blink at that. Sex is as legitimate as anything else as long as the end result is a lifelong bond. I should add here that I believe sex is the last thing that should happen in a relationship, once sex occurs the relationship should last a lifetime. I'm not advocating for free movement or swinging.

Also, you pulled a little bait and switch there. I didn't say that the wives wouldn't be equal, I said that they weren't the same. I don't treat my second son the same way I treat my oldest son but they're equal. I think you might be thinking of polygyny as getting half a man, or a man half the time. That's one way to do it for sure, but probably the hardest way to do it.

None of you n---as was wifey material
None of you n---as was worth all the drama (Ah)
None of you n---as was hittin' it raw
And mad I'm not one of your baby mamas

😉 (the wink in the video is important)



Personally I came across a few biblical poly people on twitter before. I posted about one of them before. He kept posting about lesbians and was trying to break up this lesbian couple he knew and claimed both of them wanted to be with him but 'the one who he saw as the leader' was threatened by him while the other wanted him but deep down they both wanted him. He was very homophobic. And was delusional in general about his attractiveness. He would just try to get random women into the idea by talking about how it can save on housework too cause he wanted bangmaids really.

[Nyctophilia]

Do you like how British people treat black cats?

In some countries they see black cats as evil, something associated with demons, witches, I don't want to name countries. But what I love is how 99% of British people don't believe in that type of myth and treat black cats with love, compassion etc. I know it sounds silly but yeah

That's because black cats are considered good luck in the UK. Though I assume because of the Americanisation of most Anglosphere cultures that will change a bit. Like you watch US TV shows and adopt those beliefs.

"I don't want to name countries"

OK I will lol.

You can see that in the comments on the thread:

Brit here, my mum always said that if a black cat crosses the road in front of you from left to right it means you'll have 5 years of good luck! She passed it down from her mum!

"Brit here"

The subreddit is called 'Ask UK' 😓

That's interesting, because my mum and here mum used to tell me that it was bad luck. I wonder how the story changed up the path.

American media.

My grandmother used to tell me that if you see a black cat walk under a ladder that it was bad luck 🤣

Lol she mixed two superstitions together.

Apparently they get adopted less which is sad. They're my favourite along with ginger cats.

Lol I've never heard of void cats before:

One of my neighbours has a small black cat that's just a ball of fluff, it keeps its distance but watches and will eventually come over and sometimes I'll catch it on top of a garage or fence watching me, following slowly, only it's eyes visible. I refer to it as the Void and it is beautiful

I absolutely have to agree, void cats have been some of the best cat's I've ever had the pleasure of sharing my life with. So much character it's unreal...

Love a voidy boi, mesmerising little doofuses

There's a subreddit lol:

VoidCats

Void Cats, not to be confused with r/BlackCats Void cats are cats that have an indistinguishable shape, they are usually black cats that at a distance look like an ambiguous blob of cat. AKA, the Where's Waldo of cats

I don't dislike all of US cultural trends coming over btw. Halloween was a much bigger deal over there and has gradually become slightly more prominent here and that's cool. Halloween is the coolest holiday really. Depends on whether it suits my aesthetic and cultural preferences.

From what I remember the American tendency to see black cats as evil comes from Germany? Maybe just mainland Europe in general. I thought it had something to do with the black plague but that wouldn't really make sense since the UK was still effected.

https://www.history.com/news/black-cats-superstitions

Obviously they became tied with the occult in many places and then opinions on that were further mixed:

Written records link black cats to the occult as far back as the 13th century when an official church document called*"Vox in Rama"*was issued by Pope Gregory IX on June 13, 1233. ?In it, black cats were declared an incarnation of Satan,? says Layla Morgan Wilde, author of*Black Cats Tell: True Tales And Inspiring Images. ?The decree marked the beginning of the inquisition and church-sanctioned heretic and/or witch hunts. Initially it was designed to squash the growing cult of Luciferians in Germany, but quickly spread across Europe."

In addition to their early association with Satan, cats also became inextricably linked to*witches*in medieval Europe. According to*Cerridwen Fallingstar, Wiccan priestess and author of*Broth from the Cauldron: A Wisdom Journey through Everyday Magic,*witches were the pre-Christian pagan practitioners of Europe.

Although the early Christian church in Europe coexisted with witches, as the church gained power, she says that they saw witches as their direct competition in gaining the hearts and minds of the people. That's when the church began hunting, persecuting, torturing and killing witches in vast numbers, she explains.

"Witches honored the natural world, having deep respect for plants and animals," says Fallingstar. "Affection between human and animal therefore began to be seen as 'diabolical', or devilish, and the old lady with her cats became seen as suspect."

But it wasn't only the connection they fabricated between witches, cats, and the devil that the early Christians feared: they also saw them both as threats. "Cats, like the women accused of witchcraft, tend to exhibit a healthy disrespect of authority," she notes. "They don't fawn, like dogs, upon even the unworthy. In the church, neither independent women, nor independent animals, were to be tolerated."

The early population of the US was made up of some of the most religious and Conservative Europeans so it sort of makes sense that they took that belief with them.

I think it's an evolutionary thing. They want women to reproduce and witches were often women who didn't or refused but sometimes also disagreeable women in general. They liked cats - who weren't even Human so were devoting emotional labour outside the tribe (the species even.) Instead of helping instill the traditions of the group in younger children, they were often eccentric or disagreed with the mainstream culture.

A lot of the victims of the witch trials were actually teens girls but older women were sometimes attacked since older women are expected to help with childcare and such after their own kids are grown up (evo-psych explanation for menopause actually.)

Current Western culture doesn't push that expectation as much and the result is a lower birth rate since boomers regardless of gender aren't really willing to help their kids out with grandkids or families live far away in the first place. People are instinctively put off the idea knowing there's less support. Especially if they can't afford to pay for support.

I'm not judging them for that I'm just stating a fact that the lack of intergenerational community is one thing contributing to the lower birth rates.

Often younger people prefer to be independent anyway so it goes both ways. People are deeply uncomfortable spending time with their partner's family generally. The historical tradition of marriage focused more on the idea of uniting two families than modern relationships do. If you don't get married or have kids you could potentially avoid meeting family indefinitely.

At some point, the pairing of witches with cats narrowed to black cats, although Fallingstar says that it?s not entirely clear why that happened. "The relationship between witches and black cats, in particular, is probably imaginary, but it is possible that black cats make better mousers, since they cannot be seen at night and therefore have a hunting advantage," she explains. "Witches do tend towards the practical."

Eventually, the fear surrounding black cats and their association with witchcraft made its way across the Atlantic, courtesy of Puritan colonists, says Daniel Compora, associate professor of English language and literature at The University of Toledo. "The idea that witches could turn into their familiar likely evolved from those accused of witchcraft having cats as pets," he explains.

'Witches do tend towards the practical' Lol.

Black in general has certain symbolic associations in Western culture that are probably related. It might also be connected to spirit animal/therian type beliefs that have exisisted in many cultures throughout the world.

The history of Europe has always been a kind of war or negotiatian (at best) between Christianity and older pagan beliefs. Gnosticism incorporated this too with the archons who resemble older polytheistic deities and are considered evil leaders of the material realm keeping Huma s trapped in matter:

Archons (Greek: ἄρχων, romanized: rchōn, plural: ἄρχοντες,*?rchontes), in*Gnosticism*and religions closely related to it, are the builders of the physical universe. Among the Archontics, Ophites, Sethians and in the writings of*Nag Hammadi library, the archons are rulers, each related to one of*seven planets; they prevent souls from leaving the material realm. The political connotation of their name reflects rejection of the governmental system, as flawed without chance of true salvation.[1] In Manichaeism, the archons are the rulers of a realm within the "Kingdom of Darkness", who together make up the Prince of Darkness. In*The Hypostasis of the Archons, the physical appearance of Archons is described as hermaphroditic, with their faces being those of beasts.[2][3][4]

They blend together genders and non-Human animal with Human its all very contemporary and eternal. You find all the same groups today. It's inspired art and music a lot of course (not necessarily directly) especially in the UK?:

He's wearing a red dress and a fox mask lol:



IAMX has also incorporated both androgyny and animal themes into his work and aesthetics:



He was wearing a cat mask during some performances and maybe im one video... Think I just found a photo with some bunny ears. Can't embed them right now though. Most are encrypted images or too big and fixing that is too annoying on phone.



I love the black gloves with clawed nails. They're kind of scaled too and seem kind of dragon like. I like stuff like that I looked up the ones he's wearing too since clearly he'd bought a bunch of stuff from this one acquaintance that he's plugging lol at the time. But way too expensive for me.

His videos often look like they belong in an art museum tbh. But the best part (that bothers some people,) is he just mixes sexuality in like in this video at one point he has a butt plug (the effect of this mixing aesthetically doesn't always work equally well imo and sometimes is overly messy like in The Surrender video which is also more basic depends on what he was going for though I guess and it seems he might not always enjoy making videos anyway. I'm very into music videos but a lot of people see them as pointless or a distraction or taking away from the music):



Aeons are considered manifestations of the 'real God' in Gnosticism.

I assume he knows this because I remember in interviews from like 2016 etc he was reading books on alchemy etc and has an album called Metanoia:

The transition from immaterial to material, from noumenal to sensible, is created by a flaw, passion, or sin in an Aeon. According to*Basilides, it is a flaw in the last sonship; according to others the sin of the Great Archon, or Aeon-Creator, of the Universe; according to others it is the passion of the female Aeon*Sophia, who emanates without her partner Aeon, resulting in the Demiurge (Δημιουργός),[1] a creature that should never have been. This creature does not belong to Pleroma, and the One emanates two savior Aeons,*Christ*and*the*Holy Spirit, to save humanity from the Demiurge. Christ then took a human form (Jesus), to teach humanity how to achieve*Gnosis. The ultimate end of all Gnosis is*metanoia (μετάνοια), or repentance?undoing the sin of material existence and returning to Pleroma.

Aeons bear a number of similarities to Judaeo-Christian angels, including roles as servants and emanations of God, and existing as beings of light. In fact, certain Gnostic Angels, such as Armozel, are also Aeons. The Gnostic Gospel of Judas, found in 2006, purchased, held, and translated by the*National Geographic Society, also mentions Aeons.[2]

I like the addendum to that album that he released later too. It has a few good songs.



In this heat, I believe there is no future
Control and fear killing queers, Santa Claus, dictators
I was God, I was love, now I?m bleeding
Oh alchemy, alchemy can?t help me when
Everything is burning

You can see the reference.

But back to cats:

During the Middle Ages, it wasn't uncommon for cats to be killed, given their association with evil, Compora says. Some people even went as far as blaming cats for spreading the Bubonic plague and used that as another reason to get rid of them. However, their ill-conceived plan backfired.

"In a particularly bizarre piece of irony, the killing of the cats helped fuel the spread of the plague," Compora explains. "With the reduced number of cats to control the rodent population, the disease spread rapidly."

Yeah this is what I heard before about the plague.

In the UK there's some kind of tradition (though I think this is either rare or location specific because I've never known anyone to do this,) where its considered good luck to give a bride a black cat on her wedding day.

A very friendly black cat walked home with me on Christmas a few years ago. It rubbed up against me then walked ahead and kept stopping and looking back to wait for me to catch up then started walking again. Very cute.

Another cat which I think might have also been black though I don't remember now walked to school with me once as well.

There's a Scottish folklore cat too:

The cat-sith (Scottish Gaelic: [kʰaʰt̪*ˈʃiː], plural cait-sh?th), in Irish cat si (Irish:[kat̪ˠˈʃiː]), is a fairy creature from Celtic mythology, said to resemble a large black cat with a white spot on its chest. Legend has it that the spectral cat haunts the Scottish Highlands. The legends surrounding this creature are more common in Scottish folklore, but a few occur in Irish. Some common folklore suggested that the cat-s?th was not a fairy, but a witch that could transform into a cat nine times.[1][2][3]

Funnily enough the first time I encountered this though was in Final Fantasy VII because there's a character based on that story.

Apparently black cats are good luck in Japan.

[Nyctophilia]

This is a pretty extreme example I'm about to mention but there was an early example of this who was the guy who wrote that racist book I forget the name of who after his first wife divorced him kept marrying women from Eastern Europe (mostly Hungary I think,) and they all would leave him after moving to the US after a few years. Except the last one because he died but after his death she said he was condescending and that she was miserable living with him.

Couldn't remember his name it's William Luther Pierce and he wrote The Turner Diaries. Considering the time period, being married 5 times is really indicative of how highly disagreeable he was:

Pierce was married five times. His first marriage was to Patricia Jones, a mathematician whom he met while he was attending the California Institute of Technology. They were married in 1957 and had twin sons, Kelvin and Erik, born in 1960. Kelvin was an aerospace engineer, while Erik is a computer scientist.[5] According to Kelvin Pierce, his father had been emotionally and physically abusive.[43] In 2020, Kelvin coauthored Sins of My Father: Growing Up with America's Most Dangerous White Supremacist, which chronicled his experiences with his father.[44]

William Luther Pierce's marriage with Patricia Jones ended in divorce in 1982.[45] The same year, Pierce married Elizabeth Prostel whom he met in the National Alliance office in Arlington. The marriage ended in 1985 and Pierce moved his headquarters to southern West Virginia.[14] Preferring immigrant women from Eastern Europe,[13] in 1986 Pierce married a Hungarian woman named Olga Skerlecz. She is a relative of Iv?n Skerlecz, Governor of Croatia-Slavonia; the marriage lasted until 1990. Olga moved to California after their divorce.[45] Pierce then married another Hungarian woman named Zsuzsannah in early 1991. They met through an advertisement that Pierce placed in a Hungarian women's magazine aimed at arranging international marriages. Leaving him in the summer of 1996, Zsuzsannah moved to Florida. His last marriage in 1997, which lasted until his death, was to another Hungarian woman, known under the pseudonym "Irena". The marriage between Irena and Pierce was troubled, as he was reportedly "sharp and condescending" leaving her miserable living with him.[13]

I think personality wise passport bros are the same genre of man with or without the excessive racism (though there's a reason there's a sterotype of white nationalists marrying East Asian women.) They're very disagreeable, domineering, and often not so intelligent. Leading to some bad choices. Not very attractive either obviously so they can't find Western women to go along with it all. I've seen a lot of mixed race people online who have a white dad and Asian mum complain about this relationship dynamic too.

How come every man who wants a traditional wife doesn't wanna be traditional himself and provide for her. "I shouldn't pay her to be a mother" you are her husband, her provider, under the logic of tradition, you should be giving her money. These men ain't shit.

Exactly. He takes her from a developing country, moves her to the US, they have multiple children, he wants her to stay at home full time to do domestic labor.

He also wants her to work and make enough money to support herself. What type of job is she going to get while also caring for 3 kids and not being 100% fluent in English?

Wow this sounds even worse/more dumb than I thought. Guess I should watch the actual video.

0.47 seconds in:

"The problem is men are not being men and women are being men."

*Expects his wife to work while taking on all childcare apparently.*

So some masculine stereotypes are fine then lol?

Americans looking for love are getting killed by gangs in Colombia

U.S Embassy warns tourists after eight men died in Medellin in two months, often after meeing women on dating apps

Honestly I'm not surprised. I'm not saying this is good but I was just about to say if they continue acting like this people in these countries are going to start avoiding Western men and perhaps Westerners in general.

"It only took two years literally to the day for my Filipino wife to become Americanised, hate literally everything about me and what I provide and decide to leave."

Why is every woman on the planet the problem but not you?

Is it me that's the problem? No it's the mere 2 years she spent in America...

Think about it. There are actually (very rarely tbf) men who stay married their entire life you know. Even today there are a lot of people who stay married for 20-50 years easily.

The reddit posts she included:

I've stayed in Thailand for almost 2 months. I couldn't find any cute girl.

Title. I'm introverted and also anxious. 5'6", white, work out 6 days a week. So I'm pretty jacked. Tried thaifriendly, tinder, badoo. Also tried beer bars and gogo bars (rip off), on tf the girls were not attractive (at least 95% of them) Also tried approaching freelancers on walking street. All I got from it is being cheated by a ladyboy who told me he was a "100% lady" and some of them - you can't tell. Soo.. yeah it's over. i'm not the most social guy i the world. But I shouldn't struggle this hard. I also met a toxic arrogant freelancer girl on thaifriendly. So it's getting worse. Or there's something wrong with me on a very deep level. It's not like [...]

They don't want you and some just know you're willing to give them money and you're desperate. They need money. Also if you find 95% of women there unattrative and are seemingly only attracted to trans women then you might just consider getting over that hangup and dating trans women. Or on second thought don't...

Bros-ISO

ISO countries that have beautiful, fit, feminine blonde women?

Nordic countries are the gold standard

They are not feminine in Nordic countries. Sweden is the epicenter of feminist.

Best countries for blonde and feminine are Eastern European countries and some Baltic countries.

Lol. Can't wait for someone to use this guy for a greencard.

Cause American guys are not bossy and not chauvinist not like European countries and what not. We really want partners in our relationship but if his wife's trying to be a girlboss all the time and run the show that is very degrading to his morale. What I experience with filipinas is they're always very good for my ego. I always feel like a man around a filipina.

Oh... Don't say that in front of your wife. Come on bro.

Also I don't know what European countries he's talking about but either way most the most annoying sexism online is coming from American men though of course most of what you hear in general online is coming from Americans.

Half of this is just signalling that you find most women intimidating to your ego which isn't a brilliant thing to do for obvious reasons. Then the whole 'I love being a man' thing doesn't really work on most people unless they have a masculinisation fetish, and most of those 5 people are into trans guys for obvious reasons.

Like..

They will sneer at you as their boot tightens on your throat and they repeat to themselves - as mantra - how God wills it. Preabsolved of their torment of you.

Then react with the utmost shock when you slice their heel and in a fit of spite bring hell to Earth.

The Christian cries out as he strikes you for being trans, gay, a woman, someone he simply disagrees with.

"You would only be on that side if you were always of the enemy."

Birthing their own foes.

in 2025 we're gothmoding. we're hauntologymaxxing

Trans men proving transphobes wrong by publishing the kind of painfully edgy power fantasy prose that only men can write

It was pretty good, I thought it could have been better. The right direction I guess.

They aren?t actually transforming it, is the thing. Too many are tempted by patriarchal power. It sucks

i think its pretty clear that this is a profoundly feminist text, i dont know how you can argue otherwise unless youre just asserting that maleness itself is antifeminist

The article is mostly correct, and the author and several trans men may behave in accordance with these goals, but we've both seen how the majority don't, how power within transness can fall within the patriarchal lines

There are a shocking number of tboy incels, as well as soft lib transmascs who use sj language to call trans women icky and shove them to the margins at every chance.

Trans men are raiding the dying fire, but many don't understand this and will work with the expectation of keeping the fire going, it isn't wise to plan on people to voluntarily give up power

He's not expecting anyone to voluntarily give up power, he makes a parallel claim to the blackpaper that trans men introduce negentropy into the continuation of the same. its the same argument that n1x makes but cleverly inverted

I understand that transmasculinity's existence fragments patriarchal power and threatens it to a certain degree, but they are very much capable of coexisting, and we see the efforts of trans men to uphold it.

I think masculine power can exist outside the bounds of patriarchal hierarchy and that's what Satan is. Or a serial killer. Or a vampire. But that's not necessarily reassuring because toxic power is still toxic power.

This is the best response to that text:

lol

Speaking of lol (continuation of the previous quote before the lol one):

I don't understand how manhood could survive g/acc on any level but the most extremely superficial, and at that point cultural forces would just dissolve it. I don't really disagree with the article, but necromanhood will have a shelf life.

Necromanhood will have a shelf life as a force behind transmasculinity, I mean. Once a critical mass of transmasculine influence on masculinity is reached, something new will have to happen

ok so will transfemininity. trans womanhood and trans manhood both die with the gender binary. let a thousand sexes bloom

No. That is repulsive and there is a desire of efficiency which will disallow it. Multiply, and be divided by categorization.

This is why a post-gender society is impossible. Technocapital, the desires that direct humanity, want efficiency. Each gender requires additional cognition. We are all mascs, femmes, and neutrals, like it or not.

G/acc outlines how technocapital pushes things in the femme direction. This will go, and people will adapt, until the differences between the few generalized categories become nothing. At which point, further demand for efficiency creates monogender society.

what do you think the "accelerationism" in gender accelerationism is? autoproduction at its most gigantic scale. you think the gender binary survives human beings being rendered for biomass to fuel whatever comes after?

No, I do not. I think "man" dies. "Woman" does not. Perhaps some people's reductive definition of "woman" will, but "woman" will not, because "man" is dependent on "woman", but "woman" is not dependent on "man".

oomfie what

g/acc is gender abolitionist oomfie

[screenshot of some text]

When I read that, I see different words to mean the same thing. All becomes woman, and at the same time, because all is woman, all is "genderless", because much of the baggage of gender loses meaning when there's only one. But there is still a core womanhood.

Tbh it can't die while sexuality exists because androphilia exists. Supply and demand. It's even relevant to why some trans men exist...

If there are infinite combinations that are then flattened for 'efficiency' obviously that would be 'Human' or 'cyborg' in the future. Not 'woman.' If something like a 'core womanhood' continues to exist than some form of core other to it will exist because 'the other' will always reform itself in reaction. Even if in a shadow like fashion.

It's kind of ridiculous to say that the reductive definition of woman will die but core womanhood will not, as though there isn't also a reductive definition of manhood. Why do you think there are trans men who don't medically transistion and appear almost identical to women? Why are there femboys? You can't dissolve something without 100% agreement.

You can ignore it - like a shadow. But the shadow remains.

So this seems to be the answer: the framework for transmasculine identity is that of existing as a shadow. It is banishment from any existing framework, giving trans men two options: either pass and assimilate so seamlessly that you uphold cis manhood in your attempts to achieve it, or be swept away and disposed of so you don't pose a threat. [...] This framework, however, is collapsing. As more and more trans men assert ourselves and our manhood, it becomes more difficult to deny alternative ways of being a man. Patriarchy and manhood cannot maintain themselves without adapting to the loss of chromosomal and reproductive markers of manhood, leaving trans masculinity as the only way out. The realization of the shadow is assured; you cannot declare something imaginary forever.

😏

"That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die"

Also of course g/acc isn't synonmous with cyberfeminism but since she brought up feminism and some aspects of this were inspired by cyberfeminism... A lot of cyberfeminism (I prefer to say cyborg feminism because of Mary Harrington's hilarious complaints I saw a while back) is about choosing androgyny ironically. Trying to find this one quote and struggling... Maybe I imagined it lol.. It's going to bug me that I can't find this quote. Sure it had something to do with cyborgs.

Here's something though:h

Donna Haraway was the inspiration and genesis for cyberfeminism with her 1985 essay "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century", which was later reprinted in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991).[19] Haraway's essay states that cyborgs are able to transcend the public and private spheres, but they do not have the ability to identify with their origins or with nature in order to develop a sense of understanding through differences between self and others. Haraway had ideals based on making individuals androgynous, and wanted society to move beyond biology by improving technology.[20]

G/acc DLC just dropped.

Sighs?.

Can we go back to before Land

never

You have to kill deleuze it's the only way

Not an option we destroy Britain

Yessss that too

Boo. Just because we (probably) invented all the goths (from fiction to music to whatever the hell this is.)

I hate this as much as I hate Nyx.

N1x did it better putting my foot down

I hate her so bad

She did really.

This is probably the neatest theory related thing to transmasculinity I've seen and yet is kinda more of an argument for why transfemininity is inherently vampiric if anything

I thought Nyx's take on Lilith sounded more non-binary anyway tbf but then was like 'no androgyny is really female' OK. Well.

Why does it have to be?

Oh context. They're talking about that text I posted about days ago:

https://cybercommedia.neocities.org/...d/necromanhood

Never mind I couldn't find an example I felt worked well enough and got distracted.

I have a weird craving today to try nachos (not sure I ever have.)

[Nyctophilia]

My internet browser froze kind of inbetween autoplaying a new video so it kept the title from the other video with pretty hilarious results:

[Nyctophilia]

PYLONS

I know this project probably doesn’t have anything to do with the preachers daughter story but when I heard the first half “nearer to my god thee” I think of Ethel’s mother sitting in a dark room after the death of Ethel singing this it’s purely nightmare fuel and I fucking love it

It's just giving me Fallout vibes. Followed by post apocalyptic aliens.

Edit:

Omg I can't believe I forgot about this (while linking songs below) that's what the intro is like:





This is an unofficial music video but yeah:



Not really the same but yeah:





Feels aesthetically similar.

But musically I guess it's more like Apex Twin and Coil a bit.

[Nyctophilia]

lol Hasan just stays streaming while picking people he knows up from the LA wildfires:



"When we were initially evacuating I said OK hurry up because everyone's going to be trying to go so only bring what's important and this motherfucker grabbed his Pokemon cards."

Well sure gotta grab the Pokemon cards.

"Man LA is really being pissed on right now."

No I think the problem is it's not being pissed on.



The DEI argument in this context doesn't really make sense (for firefighters in general,) because there isn't a exclusive limited number of jobs in theory in an area with a lot of work. Basically I doubt anyone who wants the job and is remotely qualified is really being turned away in the first place as it's a job most people don't want to do due to the high risk...

Also lesbians often work in masculine fields. It's funny that they fixated on that part and not that she's a woman.

Up next: It's suspicious that gay men are in the fashion industry.

God damn gay men taking jobs and concert tickets from straight women.

I was wondering which pop diva to go with when I said concert tickets. Can't think of anyone current that's that hyped tbh (specifically with gay men.) Not Taylor.

Although this is even more nonsense:

Like especially on ATRL, there's this myth that gets perpetuated around that people who like Ariana, Beyonce, Gaga and then Taylor gets inserted, are most likely the girls and gays...



... When a big BIG portion of her fanbase and the major reason she's pulling 800k-1M debuts is because of her extremely loyal straight male demographic that supports her physical releases. That fanbase will be the same that'll go and buy an AC/DC vinyl + a folklore vinyl along with the middle aged female fans she has.



Taylor has never been the gayest popstar, she hardly has ever been, it doesn't mean she isn't an ally and gay-friendly but her image has never been closely associated with camp and gayness the way Ariana or Beyonce do it. She's always been pop-rock adjacent and she's a lyricist (she markets herself as that) and its what makes her appeal strongly to the straight demographic.

Sure, we the girls and gays love Taylor especially RED-now but her OG and a bulk of her commercial success is owed to the straight male country-rock base that goes hard for her. I just went onto Reddit and a lot of the Taylor Swift fans on the subreddit also seem to be Iron Maiden, U2 and FOB fans (which is like the str8st base there is). You'll never get that with any other MPG. Here in Cali a lot of my straight male friends love Speak Now and Fearless, back home in the Philippines via Facebook so many of my straight friends think RED is a banger and folklore is amazing!

No I don't think that's a major part of her fanbase lol. It's reddit so whatever the question it will be mostly men. I've seen polls turn out that a majority of Doja Cat's fans are straight men and I know that's not true.

I also don't think the same people who listen to AC/DC would be fans of Taylor... In general obviously I'm sure there are some.

Anyway maybe her or?:



Obviously there are older people. I'm just thinking of people in like the last 5 years or something.

Me seeing this thumbnail (parts of this video are kind of graphic in a violent way btw):



'That's queerbaiting j/k'

*reads comments*

the kiss,the outfits,the plot ,omg I think we've found ourselves a winner you guys

I manifested this with my God mind you know.

Also I love chainsaws as weapons (this track always reminds me of them lol)



Not irl of course.

Taylor Swift concert tickets are insane though especially in the US they seem to go for thousands or something. Glad I have no interest in seeing her live honestly (and I don't live in the US,) would be a real pain. Some people worked it out that it would be slightly cheaper to travel to Sweden to see her live than in the US.

I like how Jenna Ortega is the new Aubrey Plaza that's just a thing now. I mean it was sort of before with like Fairuza Balk and Winona Ryder but not exactly.

Listening to my 'witch house and similar' playlist now. Xiu Xiu are so good:



His (Jaime's) voice is like 10/10.

Actually he kind of sounds like Shannon Funchess a bit but like creepier:



I was trying to find his vocal range. I don't think that will be illuminating though. I think he mostly just has a really weird vocal style. Like I was wondering if he was a contralto (unlikely though really,) but I think it's sort of like how Christina Aguilera is a soprano but everyone thinks she's a mezzo:



I think Shannon Funchess is a contralto?

Xiu Xiu. I really don't like Jamie's voice.

jamie's voice is like one of my favorite things about xiu xiu this is wild to me

Yeah.

[Nyctophilia]

All my posts are trash but this one is more trash than most haha.

I like the part where she's being arrested and looks kinda crazy:

I refuse to believe that ppl actually watch the music videos

But that's where 98% of the hot people are... Also sometimes they're very aesthetically cool. People just don't appreciate the art form.

Also:

Me seeing this thumbnail (parts of this video are kind of graphic in a violent way btw):



'That's queerbaiting j/k'

*reads comments*

the kiss,the outfits,the plot ,omg I think we've found ourselves a winner you guys

I manifested this with my God mind you know.

I'm actively not reading Wednesday/Enid fanfiction from the Wednesday TV show because they're both teenagers but I like the dynamic and said I wanted something similar with adults before. I guess the Sabrina + Jenna Ortega music video is the second best thing. (Not exactly that but in the vague area.)

I appreciate the attempt universe.

I feel like it was inspired by Death Becomes Her?

Yep.

Wait what?





Oh cool, but I already headcannoned young Geddy Lee for the librarian role:



You're right though universe libraries are hot.

[Nyctophilia]

Watching more of this video because I didn't finish it before:



"Why is my tumblr queen dating a tech billionaire."

Lol it was at that point that I was like we're living in a simulation and it's broken.

"They bonded over AI"

Oh they didn't just bond over the AI thing the specific in joke references a thing that started on lesswrong.com. Though that joke was popularised by the TV show Silicon Valley already. But it's like a community that they're probably both adj to and kind of culty. I talked to some people from that community before for a few years on discord and everyone who's adj to it or part of it (including people I talked to) is like 3 degrees seperated online at least. I started talking to them before the whole Grimes thing and also liked some of her music before then going back to Visions and Genesis (first song I heard,) and she was a indie musician who most people outside certain circles had never heard of so that just made it more surreal later.

"A lot of time adults who have no connection to the community or the political cause that LGBT people are faced with. A lot of time parents having a child who is [BEEP] draws parents into the fold. [...] but He talked about having a trans daughter it radicalised him in the opposite direction."

Oh no that's still common especially with trans kids/teens. Especially if the kid is afab but even if not sometimes. Transphobic parents are all over the place.

Elon's (and his biographer I guess?) version of the story with his trans daughter where he claims he didn't care about his daughter's transistion until after she came out as a communist really just makes it worse if anything. It just seems like he's overly controlling and cares more about his work and punishing anyone that goes against him or disagrees with his economic philosophy.

"Elon Musk officially takes the red pill"

Oh is that the one where he responds to someone's tweet and then one the Wachoswki's was like '[BEEP] both of you' that was a great response lol.

Oh yeah I remembered it wrong he tweeted and Ivanka responds to him. Yeah.

"This is my favourite response in the history of twitter.com"

It was great yeah.

"We all want something to be remembered for. We all want to be liked. We all want purpose in the world."

At this point it would be good to earn enough that I can start living a normal (relatively speaking I guess lol) life. I'm already known by thousands of people which is surreal (I need to stop using that word lol,) which I doubt I would have ever imagined as a kid or whatever (especially the reason why.) So, I've already kind of exceeded fame expectations really. The rest of my life is disapointing by anyone's standards but more difficult to manage/change for a variety of reasons.

[Nyctophilia]

There's a reason birth rates are an increasingly prominent feature in discourse and policymaking today. Population ageing and decline is one of the most powerful forces in the world, shaping everything from economics to politics and the environment.

But a weakness to the debate - perhaps even the term 'birth rates' itself - is that it implies the goal is the same today as it was in the past: finding ways to encourage couples to have more children. A closer look at the data suggests a whole new challenge.

Take the US as an example. Between 1960 and 1980, the average number of children born to a woman halved from almost four to two, even as the share of women in married couples edged only modestly lower. There were still plenty of couples in happy, stable relationships. They were just electing to have smaller families.

But in recent years most of the fall is coming not from the decisions made by couples, but from a marked fall in the number of couples. Had*US rates of marriage and cohabitation*remained constant over the past decade, America's total fertility rate would be higher today than it was then.

I'm surprised to hear this (and doubtful) because my understanding is that at least for women the number not having kids by the end of their reproductive life has remained stable (approx 20%) with only slight variation. I'm sure I saw some evidence genetically that this number goes back a long way too. Bleak if you want them or if it correlates with not finding a compatible partner but seemingly predictable.

The change is that women are having children later but still having them, so they have less children and smaller families. So in that sense the change is the smaller families.

Trying to get the 20% to have kids seems like it would be even more difficult because they/we never did (I assume I'm part of that group - too mentally ill and [BEEP] lol. Don't want to give birth, too many issues I think to be a good enough parent in the short reproductive window and hell life window we have on this planet. Too many to even try to get a relationship imo let alone a kid.) Might require technological revolution and acceptance/promotion of single parenting with support of robot helpers. I could see that encouraging people to have kids who cant find Human partners. Some of the percentage would just make bad parents though and we have to accept that and that there are probably pros and cons to population collapse. Depending on who reproduces.

The central demographic story of modern times is not just declining rates of childbearing but rising rates of singledom: a much more fundamental shift in the nature of modern societies.

Relationships are not just becoming less common, but increasingly fragile. In egalitarian Finland, it is now more*common for couples who move in together to split up*than to have a child, a sharp reversal of the historical norm.

When pictured as a rise in happily childless Dinks (dual income, no kids couples) with plenty of disposable income, the social trends accompanying falling birth rates seem benign.

I think people are [BEEP] scared of having a huge group of people wandering around with nothing to lose lol.

Meh they probably should be. A lot of people are very pissed off.

But the rise of singledom and relationship dissolution is a less rosy story, especially considering the drop in relationship formation is steepest among*the poorest. Of course, many people are happily single. The freedom to choose how to spend one?s life and who with (or without) is to be celebrated. But the wider data on*loneliness*and*dating frustrations*suggests not all is well.

The trend is global. From the US, Finland and South Korea to Turkey, Tunisia and Thailand,*falling birth rates*are increasingly downstream of a relationship recession among young adults.*Baby bonuses*put the cart before the horse when a growing share of people are without a partner. Even in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, similar trends may be under way.

Why an almost worldwide decline, and why now? The fact that this is happening almost everywhere all at once points more to broad changes acting across borders than country-specific factors.

The proliferation of smartphones and social media has been one such exogenous shock. Geographical differences in the rise of singledom broadly track mobile internet usage, particularly among women, whose calculus in weighing up potential partners is changing. This is consistent with*research*showing social media facilitates the spread of liberal values (notably only among women) and boosts female empowerment.

You don't need a smart phone but if you spend a lot of time online on even a desktop computer you'll see the worst people imaginable (right wing American men. Lol I mean thats most of who you'll find on twitter,) posting bs so it makes sense that you'd be cautious of taking the risk of getting into a relationship if your norm is so skewed.

I do think this is probably a lazy answer though at this point (hiding the problems of a hypercompetitive culture) and missing some stuff.

But apparently women who are in all female environment are less likely to focus on marriage and more on career (resource aquisition,) makes sense so you can artificially trigger that too via the internet I guess (but university too depending on what you study and since less men these fays go to uni. But this is ironic to me since almost everyone I hung out with when I was at uni was a guy. Many of them were quite picky and judgmental too let me tell you and more on that later in this post):

https://www.bps.org.uk/research-dige...s-career-focus

How does availability of men in the environment affect women's career focus?

There are at least two explanations for why this effect exists. One is that sex ratio shapes the labour market, fewer men entailing more employment opportunities for women. The second is that sex ratio shapes a mating market, making finding a partner harder and thus encouraging a different strategy for life security. To differentiate between these, another experiment replicated the previous one using a similar exposure technique and also asked the 58 participants to rate how difficult it would be to acquire a good job or to find a mate (phrased in terms of marriage and dating prospects). Those participants exposed to a high-female ratio were more likely to see mate-finding as tough, but their expectations for the ease of finding a job were similar to their counterparts. Pulling the data into a model, the researchers demonstrated that putting career first was mediated not by their expectations that good work would be easier to find, but that a good mate would be harder to find.

I think this must just apply to straight women.

I dislike how research ignores that people very clearly have multiple mating strategies.

Back to competition though there are a lot of people who think even making friends is pointless and treat it like networking. I saw a post about this yesterday (the relevant part is later in the quote just providing background context):

Lol my time has come. Not really though I'm non-binary so can't date lesbian women really (this post was on a lesbians over 25 subreddit) since I identify as a man partly and all that:

Shy traumatized dweebs who don't go outside, please touch grass so I can meet you


Seriously, please, I just want to talk to someone I relate with. Y'all don't need a reality check, but please just physically be in a location where I can at least make friends with you.


Everyone here who actually goes to big events is a hiking/sports (or business/travel) lesbian who has not touched a book that's not self-help in the past 10 years, doesn't do crafty or art stuff, only engages with very mass-market media, and has not played a video game other than maybe a vague memory of Pokemon when they were 6. They just roller derby, camp, go to soccer games, or somehow fly to other countries on a whim because they're way into stonks. I know, I was there, I asked them. They're lovely people but it's kind of hard to contribute to group conversations. I end up just talking with the chill married 50+ lesbians who are like 10/10 cool but not a dating pool ;_;


This is a cry for help, an SOS. I'm literally begging. We will never meet each other if you don't go outside. I hit shy dweeb escape velocity and now I'm a slightly-less-shy dweeb who goes outside. Just go to lesbian board game nights, arts and crafts body doubling, dweeby sci-fi sapphic reading groups, webcomic fangirl coffee shop meetups, anything, please.

You don't have to agonize about how to cold approach and flirt with random girls at the bar, it's like insanely unlikely to work and even worse if you don't just want to hook up anyway. Its best use is practicing being okay with rejection, not getting a girlfriend.

I dunno I was daydreaming I was another person where I could just not be an anxious mess and make out with someone at a bar or something. You know normal Human stuff.

That's how I found this I was curious if women ever hooked up in bars like straight couples do (or did, though even that was uncommon,) or if that's essentially impossible. A guy I hung out with in the early 2010s made out with a woman in a bar once.

With sex I mostly worry about stds though. Wish they didn't exist.

I find it so infinitely interesting that so many lesbians in these so called "welcoming cities" in countries that are supposed to be way more progressive in terms of LGBT matters have trouble finding [BEEP] friends.


I literally live in a conservative 3rd world country. We have ZERO laws that protect us here as gays, and yet the [BEEP] community is alive and kicking. I am 34 and I am still making new [BEEP] friends at least every other month.


I don't think this is a lesbian issue. I think it's a cultural issue. I used to live in the west for several years (US and Europe) and westerners are just so difficult to make friends with. Compared to southeast Asians, you guys are just so closed off and suspicious of people. I always felt like I had to prove my worth to be friends.

Yeah I agree and I think everyone in Western countries is very polarised now on top of the general coldness and the internet encourages that.


I've heard someone from the US on YT (a pronatalist guy actually with 4 kids so far so this is ironic) straight up argue he only talks to people who he can network with or who are influential basically because he doesn't see the point of friends because that's what his wife is for.


I've met many people (guys mostly) who clearly operated in a similar way but didn't say so. Which I assume is why men are lonely (and apparently most people with a close friend are friends with women) but the problems extend to everyone really.

The fall in coupling is deepest in extremely-online Europe, east Asia and Latin America, followed by the Middle East and then Africa. Singledom remains rare in south Asia, where*women?s web access is*more limited.

This is not to overstate the role of social media. Other cultural differences between countries and regions mediate both the spread of liberal ideals and people?s ability to act on them.*Caste and honour systems encourage high rates of marriage, irrespective of media access, and female education, income and employment differ markedly between regions.

Most people want to have kids under ideal circumstances but there's nothing more disgusting to a woman than having this framed as an obligation or the desperation of male conservatives.

Meanwhile lots of men do not want kids and in the past women sometimes forced them into it (still do, but I think at a lower rate,) and also people accidentally had kids they didn't want in the same way but the former thing - men being lied to about contraception etc - is not a conversation anyone wants to have.

Conservatives complain about abortion but don't question if some people might be better off not having kids because their kids won't thrive in the nightmare world.

I've seen this pointed out by many men but we do not have conversations about male ambivalence only female for some insane reason. A lot of men do not really care about having kids or relationships they are doing other stuff instead.

They're busy getting killed by gangs of men in columbia who are pissed off about sex tourism or finding a South East Asian woman to divorce them after getting a green card lol no. It's video games mostly.

Men and women want different things from a relationship. Men want submissive feminine women who boost their ego and talk about how masculine they are all day while doing all the housework, maybe have kids, and wear cat ears (cat girls) and women want submissive feminine men who boost their ego and do all the housework (maidboys,) wear cat ears (catboys,) and carry and give birth to children (omegaverse,) let them have strap on sex oh wait. They want the same things xD

Lol no shitposting is fun though. There is some truth to it always. Just not the whole picture.



Love the part where she's finished with one half of the BORING academic explanations/justifications and just plays the credits but then carries on.

I'm still not 100% satisfied with any analysis I've seen on this topic because it always has to portray women as victims to some degree. It's a denial of sadism to some extent.

Men engage in that more than anyone. 'It's just a revenge fantasy no women would really enjoy being sadistic... They're all submissive massochists, unlike men who are just monsters by nature.'

I always get that vibe.

I think it's wishful thinking.

MRAs do the complete opposite "all women are evil" it's better but still wrong.

"Despite all of the potential of omegaverse it is still, most often, a universe where cis white men experience misogyny and oppression. It's still about characters who look like the typical everyman who has always been the protagoist of media. Some have argued that the potential subversive power of slash and omegaverse will always be limited so long as they continue to centre white male bodies. Even if they're supposedly stand ins for marginalised bodies because is that not a way of erasing those actual marginalised identities?

As I said I haven't engaged with that universe much but I do enjoy some cis male misogyny/objectification in other similar stuff. I'm no better than most men.

I'm the most reasonable one. I just want a 1970s rock star with long hair.



I found this gif again while looking for the omegaverse video quote from a previous post I made lol.

I mean he can work in a library if he owns a pet rabbit I think. My standards for women actually seem to be much higher. *thinks about Sabrina Carpenter* Usually.. Unless they're trans. I can offend everyone I think. What a superpower.

I say 'can' but no you should be in a library ideally I think. Its like an urban forest. Because of all the paper. It's also kind of like a church which again works well from a corruption pov. Also like how Aella had sex with a woman on top of a church once. Taboo. I think most libraries are more like places you go to use computers or print stuff now which is unfortunate because its harder to eroticise. Not impossible but just different. I mean eroticising technology and robots isn't too hard but you know libraries and books go together better.

Unless you're Sabrina. I know this is controversial but I think she might be too hot for libraries to work for her in this way, but it's hard to say. I think she looks better being arrested on the beach and being kind of manic. Like she could play Loki or something that kind of vibe. She's not wearing glasses so that factors in too. I dunno there's much to consider about body language and vibe etc imo.

I mean Emma Watson played Hermione so.

I like older women sometimes if they're yelling (specific gif.) Or Lilith. I actually only like people in gifs and music videos or playing music live lol. Mostly guys. But there are less guys I stumble on these days unless they're a weird Nick Fuentes fan I guess. Not a musician just a long haired skinny guy. /shallow

Cause I don't meet people irl but even when I did it didn't work out with guys.

Not 100% sure on this but I think North East Asian people are a lot more cautious and that's why they have the lowest rates. They have lower rates of other impulsive behaviours I think too.

But while the specific mechanisms are up for debate, the proliferation of singledom and its role in cratering birth rates shows that while financial incentives and other policy tweaks*can nudge birth rates higher, they are labouring against much stronger sociocultural forces.

Policies aimed at facilitating relationship formation might be more effective than those aimed at helping couples have babies.

A world of rising singledom*is not necessarily any better or worse than one filled with couples and families, but it is fundamentally different to what has come before, with major*social, economic and*political*implications. We are faced with a conundrum: is this what people really want? If not, what needs to change?

Anything to stop the upper class having to do anything about the ever widening economic inequality eh?

It should be pointed out that, in this context, "single" means not "unmarried" but "neither married nor cohabitating". People aren't more reluctant to marry their partners but less likely to even have a partner to marry.

I appreciate the clarification. One thing I hate about these statistics is that they usually just mean whether someone is married. I'd also like to know how many people are truly single like not even dating someone and for how long and so on but finding this info is suspiciously hard a bit like how they obfuscate employment statistics.

It feels intentional sometimes especially with employment stuff if it comes from official sources. I don't know.

There's a big political divide between men and women. Men want conservative women and women want men that affirm their freedoms. This contributes

My ex literally said this to me "you're like my therapist and slave.”m" He tried to deny it but I heard it clear as day.

Edit: he confessed after driving me somewhere dark and secluded some of the most disgusting things to me including cheating on me while I was pregnant.

Jesus.

Also not the same commenter as above it is insane how many women I've seen talk about this next quote. Unfortunately it's because a bunch of women actually are into that but most women hate it and guys get the wrong idea:

I gave up on dating for a lot of reasons, but the big one was the last few guys I dated putting their hands around my neck when going for a FIRST kiss. Over it. It’s easier and safer to be alone.

Hearing this stuff also contributes obviously. There are articles about it too. Like just engaging in hardcore bdsm without conversation...

I'm trying to be vague here too as that comment isn't conveying the worst of it.

I didn't like being kissed without consent let alone this.

How is any guy this r*tarded? it blows my mind.

Obviously some guy's are predators but one woman said she freaked out when a guy did that and then when the guy realised 'oh this is a fucked up thing to do out of the blue' he broke down and started crying and apologising. I suppose you could cynically assume its an act but she didnt seem to think so. A lot of people are not OK.

Is already hard enough to find someone compatible, with no vices, healthy, humourous, good looking and a good cook, let alone a good [BEEP]!

Women can be all those things you described if they have enough incentives to. Men in the west do have it harder when it comes to providing those incentives.

No actually. Everyone has vices so that's unrealistic and its telling that they assumed that they were talking about women. Who doesn't want someone who can cook, is good looking and really humour is more attractive to women than men tbh so....

Let’s say that billionaires are decently confident that they will have radical life extension sometime in the next 20 years.

Let’s also say that they know they can’t keep it from the masses.

Wouldn’t you also try to engineer a society where the birth rate fell so low that we’re in no danger of people live 200, 300 years or longer?

Isn’t the easiest way to do this through the dating app hellscape, insanely high housing prices, low relative wages, since so many people feel like they need to “make it” before settling down…

As well as whatever the hell is going on with Gen Z and relationships.

Just food for thought…

No they know medical science is no where near achieving that. Elon who is the most tech-bro one afaik doesn't seem that into the idea either. Its mostly being pushed by wealthy transhumanist and Sillicon Valley folks who are wealthy but not billionaire level.

Elon only supports pronatalism to get more workers for Mars. He doesn't have the social skills to hide his intentions well. He literally posted that lol before he started posting about the topic regularly. He really only cares about his own ego and his personal projects (space exploration being the main one.)

Dating app hellscapes, high housing costs, and low wages have one simple thing in common... corporate greed

I always assume incompetence and self-interest over complicated long-term plans. The billionaires aren't as smart as everyone thinks

They look out for their own interests as much as everyone else. They just have the power and resources to have a bigger negative impact when they do so.

They have long term plans too they just don't all agree on those long term plans

The life insurance industry in the US is hands down the best example of corporate greed. So I'm not surprised by recent events given people's increasing desperation. It's an industry that maximises profits at basically all costs and the cost is literally Human lives in the most direct way. Most industries just passively kill people indirectly with what's the term 'plausible deniability' that's it. Those guys literally decide if people should live or die to make more money.

"We don't kill them. It's illegal for hospitals not to treat them. We just give them the choice between crippling debt and poverty (which we know leads to a lower life expectancy especially in the US and UK because its worse in countries with greater inequality between the richest and poorest,) instead of the service they've been paying for for years"

This is why CEOs with children get assassinated.

It's a problem with nationalised health care too. If they think something isn't economically viable they can avoid it which can lead to death again. Like in the UK with the chickenpox vaccine although thankfully the risk was very low.

Another issue is choosing not to fund health care in the first place. Or a lack of experts in the field leading to poor care.

Even then when you consider results and cost nationalised systems are cheaper for better results overall. But not perfect.

[Nyctophilia]

Also I am dictator of the world atm and I solved the problem of war globally and everyone gets free mermaid pillows with a celebrity of their choice's face on and 3 marshmallows each. Except vegetarians and vegans who get three tiny mushrooms or maybe vegan marshmallows but they probably still have to be mushroom flavoured. Mushroom burgers are really good so I feel like this logic must extend to all substitutions of this kind. Also mushroommallow sounds cute. Honestly the fact that nobody has proposed free universal marshmallows before. I mean it's disgusting. So I can give myself citizenship of three countries. As a treat. But Alien country only counts as one (it's just called Alien country now it's official,) since Japan and UK are just going to be one country anyway according to the real new world order.

You know it's funny because my brother decided to talk to me today about marshmallows and apparently there's a whole bunch of lore involving them. I was just being dumb with this post though. Like they used to be made of a plant called marshmallow but aren't anymore in their commercialised form and manafacturers replaced that with gelatin.

The word "marshmallow" comes from the mallow plant species (Althaea officinalis), a wetland weed native to parts of Europe, North Africa, and Asia that grows in marshes and other damp areas. The plant's stem and leaves are fleshy, and its white flower has five petals. It is not known exactly when marshmallows were invented, but their history goes back as early as 2000 BCE. Ancient Egyptians were said to be the first to make and use the root of the plant to soothe coughs and sore throats and to heal wounds. The first marshmallows were prepared by boiling pieces of root pulp with honey until thick. Once thickened, the mixture was strained, cooled, then used as intended.[3][4][5]

Whether used for candy or medicine, the manufacture of marshmallows was limited to a small scale. In the early to mid 19th century, the marshmallow had made its way to France, where confectioners augmented the plant's traditional medicinal value. Owners of small confectionary stores would whip the sap from the mallow root into a fluffy candy mold. This candy, called P?te de Guimauve, was a spongy-soft dessert made from whipping dried marshmallow roots with sugar, water, and egg whites.[6][7] It was sold in bar form as a lozenge. Drying and preparation of the marshmallow took one to two days before the final product was produced.[8] In the late 19th century, candy makers started looking for a new process and discovered the starch mogul system, in which trays of modified corn starch had a mold firmly pushed down in them to create cavities within the starch. The cavities were then filled with the whipped marshmallow sap mixture and allowed to cool or harden.[9] At the same time, candy makers began to replace the mallow root with gelatin, which created a stable form of marshmallow.[4]

My brother also said something else about them I've already forgotten and might not have been any of that info from wikipedia.

Anyway my post was mostly inspired by the fact that I like the word marshmallow and the fact that people often cite the Standford Marshmallow experiment when making grand claims about genetics, culture and Western civilisation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanfo...low_experiment

The Stanford marshmallow experiment was a study on delayed gratification in 1970 led by psychologist Walter Mischel, a professor at Stanford University.[1] In this study, a child was offered a choice between one small but immediate reward, or two small rewards if they waited for a period of time. During this time, the researcher left the child in a room with a single marshmallow for about 15 minutes and then returned. If they did not eat the marshmallow, the reward was either another marshmallow or pretzel stick, depending on the child's preference. In follow-up studies, the researchers found that children who were able to wait longer for the preferred rewards tended to have better life outcomes, as measured by SAT scores,[2] educational attainment,[3] body mass index (BMI),[4] and other life measures.[5] A replication attempt with a sample from a more diverse population, over 10 times larger than the original study, showed only half the effect of the original study. The replication suggested that economic background, rather than willpower, explained the other half.[6][7] The predictive power of the marshmallow test was challenged in a 2020 study.[8][9] Work done in 2018 and 2024 found that the Marshmallow Test "does not reliably predict adult functioning".[10]

My brother was like "I know something that just seems like fluffy pillows has this entire backstory. Now you are burderned with this knowledge too." Lol but I already was aware of another dimension unfortunately.

I just find the idea that something as simple and silly as marshmallows is involved in such dramatic, serious discussions kind of amusing.

But given their origin I guess it's kind of fitting. 🤔

[Nyctophilia]

My friend was talking about this video he saw that was on the 'Runescape housing crash' and he was like 'what's going on in Runescape that this video exists?' So I told him about the other similar videos I've come across in like Habbo etc and that it's sort of a genre then started talking about this one channel I'd stumbled on years ago that had a video on the number of employed people in Whiterun in Skyrim which I loved and then he brought up some of that guys more recent videos. (Also he has a bunch of the employment rate in different games.)

So it seems he now has a video of himself in the videos wearing tons of hairclips and has more videos along those lines. I really love this:



I asked my friend about the hairstyle in case he knew (since this isn't the only video where he has that hairstyle) but he said he's not sure if it's personal style or just the persona for the videos which is even better.

This is one I saw before that's great (he has a bunch more like this one too):



Kind of envy that I didn't come up with this random stuff myself.

Also my friend mentioned he has investigated certain things but cannot reveal his findings. We will all have to wait for this important news. I will try to remember this post later but will probably forget by that time lol.

[Nyctophilia]

Yeah aside from the healthcare issue in the US the increasing degradation of creative works has been the most bleak and ironic for me. Like even the stuff they exploit as distractions is just getting worse and worse in quality because of greed. The Sims 4 being a very obvious example. They're not going to create the sims 5 so you just get game breaking bugs that they don't fix since last summer that they're aware of and still haven't fixed for some reason (probably the endless focus on releasing new packs.)

A billionaire, a regular worker and an immigrant are sitting at a table. 100 Cookies get served. The billionaire takes 99 and says to the worker. Look the immigrant wants your cookie.

In the US some of the billionaires (I'd prefer another ideological term seeing as it's not just billionaires who use this ideology,) say that the immigrant is more skilled and Americans (or just white working class Americans,) are lazy:







You know Elon is probably actually doing this to distract from what he's doing to America since he has more control of the US government via Trump.

This is interesting (this is from the US I think but there are similar trends elsewhere):

Women's contact with the criminal justice system has trended upward over the last several decades, while comparable figures for men have trended downward.

This includes higher arrest rates for women (41% higher in 2019 than in 1980) and higher rates of jail incarceration for females (12% higher in 2019 than in 2010).

The share of female arrests is up in part due to trends in arrest rates for violent and drug crimes. In 2019, the women's arrest rate was 63% higher for violent crimes and 317% higher for drug crimes than in 1980.

The women's prison population is aging; 2022 imprisonment rates were 83% higher than in 2007 for older women (ages 60 to 64) and 62% lower for younger women (ages 20 to 24).

In 2016, 58% of the women in state and federal prisons were parents to minor children, compared to less than half of the men (47%).

Racial disparities in female imprisonment rates narrowed from 2000 to 2022. In 2022, the imprisonment rate was 69% lower for Black females, 18% lower for Hispanic females, and 18% higher for White females than in 2000.

Females released from state prison systems were less likely to recidivate than their male counterparts. By 2017, 63% of females released from 34 state prison systems in 2012 had been rearrested, compared to 72% of males.

(and apparently prison does more for women than men. Or they were just less criminally inclined in the first place. Can't really get a control group for that one lol. I mean it's a majority of both that reoffend anyway.)

I don't just mean the bolded part is interesting the whole quote is but I highlighted that to post the song.