Random Thought of the Day

[Nyctophilia]

Who's coming to America to escape competition? I came to America to compete and work with the best. Why else would you even come here?

What is this Pokemon? There are many reasons to potentially move there the landscape and weather depending on where you move (and if you live somewhere with [BEEP] weather like the UK,) for starters.

Also as French symbolist author Rachilde once said:

I always regretted not being a man, not so much because I value the other half of mankind but because, since I was forced by duty or by taste to live like a man, to carry alone the heavy burden of life during my childhood, it would have been preferable to have had at least the privileges if not the appearances.[1

But replace man with American seeing as everyone online is constantly exposed to US news and politics. British YouTube channels I watch will use Americanisms so Americans understand what they are saying and talk about the US election and politics more than the UK, people automatically translate their dialect of English for Americans. And basically the entire Internet really is functionally American... Except the South Korean and Japanese parts.

I had more thoughts about Vivek's comments though actually:

"Normalcy" doesn't cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we'll have our asses handed to us by China

I know this is scary (and controversial,) because of the power and influence tech has but unless you import China into the US (which is already your current plan more or less,) in my opinion you are never going to win this competition:

You say "A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers."

I say "A culture that celebrates engineers over artists or power over morality will not produce the best people."

Yes about artists...

Name a great Chinese band, or TV show, or film, or video game. I can think of like one film. It's not just because it's non Western because I could give a bunch of answers for Japan.

Possibly because of the extreme rigidity and conservatism and obsession with narrow forms of success.

China's controlled society, with lack of freedom of speech and expression, propaganda and censorship, together with an education system that emphasises rote learning and memorisation have been judged to limit creativity and the development of new ideas.

"Most Chinese start-ups are not founded by designers or artists, but by engineers who don't have the creativity to think of new ideas or designs," argues Jason Lim, an editor at the website TechNode. Others blame the government for the unprecedented scale of its failure to protect intellectual property rights.

Very intelligent/high achieving and large population... Where is any new form of creative output really?

Why are there so few Chinese musicians/artists that get mentioned?

I feel like a country with 1.4 billion people would've had some hits or maybe I'm mistaken?

I can imagine a couple things, first off there's a language barrier, so already there's a disadvantage.

Really?

I have a playlist full of hundreds of Japanese songs also probably like 30+ South Korean songs. I've seen two (I think?) Japanese bands live in the UK. Lots of other non English music too. Some in entirely made up languages, some that are unintelligible by design.

I can think of three Icelandic bands/musicians off the top of my head (and there may be more I've forgotten.) Despite the population size of that country being just slightly larger than my town. Of course the most famous (Bjork obviously,) sings in English but the other two (Solstafir, Sigur Ros) sing in Icelandic and a made up fictional language 'Hopelandic'

China has like a billion people and I can't think of a single Chinese music track except that one Chinese rapper who blew up on social media because he was telling foreigners to [BEEP] off and leave China or something hahaha. And it was a bad track. It was not good.

Because again:

1. The culture appears to discourage creativity

2. Whatever they do create is either censored or can't be distributed easily. Obviously their citizens are officially blocked from using most Western websites where people generally go to discover music.

Look this guy is even looking for music from mainland China and is struggling:

Trying to find mainland Chinese music

I've been trying to find/listen to mainland Chinese music because I've heard a couple mainland Chinese songs before and I want to listen to more. I have seen YouTube and Spotify playlists, but they're always made in Hong Kong or Taiwan. I've even downloaded QQ Music, the Chinese equivalent of Spotify, but I still cannot find anything in mainland china. Please help?

It seems that European success has always come from sporadic genius, often creative. It requires you to be both intelligent and have a certain set of personality traits (like a guy who is performing well in school due to high intelligence but drops out ignoring what everyone around him tells him and does something else.) Actually while searching I found an anecodote coincidentally of the personality combination I'm talking about lol:

Let's begin with an example. Some 20 years ago, when I was still working for an optics company in California, we ran into a little challenge, we wanted to make a mechanical part that responded to surrounding temperature based on coefficient of expansion. I'm not getting into details, so long story short, we want this part to be able to offset, along with other parts, to a desirable degree, errors introduced to the system due to temperature. Now 100μm of difference may sound completely insignificant to you but if we are talking about lasers devised to work miles or even hundreds of miles away, it's a major difference.

At first we thought we need outside help on this one. We even tried to hit up a company in Hamburg. The thing was, if we sub this job to somebody else, the budget would have to go up, which means diminished profits, but if we don't do that, no one at our company, or so at least we believed then, would be able to produce it. So one day we had a tech dropped in on our discussion. He proposed that he was going to try to get one done. None of us took him seriously, but since we thought it couldn't hurt for him to just try, we explained to him what we tried to accomplish, and what the problems were.

A week later, he came to us saying that he might have figured out a way to do it and made a component to our specs. Again, nobody took him seriously but nevertheless since he presented us his work, we took it to the labs and run the tests.

It was no good. No surprise there. But what really, really amazed us was that all the properties came pretty close, like, inhumanly close to our requirements. We didn't have the equipment to get that close, so how did he do it? Turned out he rang one of his favorite highschool teacher, did all the calculation, and went for the kill. The project was eventually dead but I took a keen interest on this individual. I befriended him and over a course of several years I discovered that he was a high school dropout, his father was a radio operator or something in the navy and mother was Mexican and a full time housewife. In other words, he had no background in hard science, nor did he in manufacturing, CNC etc, other than several years of hands on experience and personal interest.

That could never happen in China.

I wrote an entire book about how both Black and very many white Americans have obvious cultural pathologies - just check the homicide, suicide, OD, and OnlyFans participation rates - that hamper academic performance. Virtually this entire page agreed.

We can't now pretend that's NOT true because an Asian guy said it, bluntly.

^ I think this does come at the cost of some pretty 'maladaptive' you could say behaviour like aggression, violence, economic failure, drug use and so on in the same population when individuals are less intelligent or less prosocial and just have similar personality traits (exists everywhere but rate will vary,) creativity can exist in art and also in criminality (see the state of Florida)..

Yeah I linked too many of these screenshots but there's a bunch of entertaining ones:











This guy literally showed the police a mixtape of his rap music instead of his license LOL:





Florida Man (tm) is prolific:

https://www.boredpanda.com/hilarious...-man-headings/

Probably because of the increased high risk/high reward tendencies. If you try and force cultures that are descendant populations like this to perform like China I think there's a strong possibility they will fail without genetic engineering.

He seems to think it's purely cultural I don't really but there's not a clear conclusion to that debate. It seems obvious that personality is genetically heritable though to some degree at least:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-018-0263-6

Human personality is 30-60% heritable according to twin and adoption studies. Hundreds of genetic variants are expected to influence its complex development, but few have been identified.

Which will alter group averages in performance and productivity. Conscientiousness is important for a lot of jobs but some aspects of that personality trait get in the way of creativity:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15647135/

https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/c...xt=psychfacpub

Comparisons on personality traits were made on 3 sets of samples: scientists versus nonscientists, more creative versus less creative scientists, and artists versus nonartists. In general, creative people are more open to new experiences, less conventional and less conscientious, more self-confident, self-accepting, driven, ambitious, dominant, hostile, and impulsive. Out of these, the largest effect sizes were on openness, conscientiousness, self-acceptance, hostility, and impulsivity. Further, there appears to be temporal stability of these distinguishing personality dimensions of creative people. Dispositions important to creative behavior are parsed into social, cognitive, motivational, and affective dimensions. Creativity like most complex behaviors requires an intra- as well as interdisciplinary view and thereby mitigates the historically disciplinocentric attitudes of personality and social psychologists.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...92656610000061

The positive relationship between conscientiousness and job performance appears to be robust for individuals and groups across most contexts. This research examined the possibility that this positive relationship might reverse in groups engaged in a creative task. In Study 1 (N = 55 four-person groups), a significant negative relationship was observed between group conscientiousness and group performance. To test our hypothesis that this effect is driven by the activation of maladaptive or adaptive behaviors for high vs. low conscientiousness groups (respectively), in Study 2 (N = 59 four-person groups), we manipulated task instructions to make the approach to the task appear more "flexible" or "structured." Task instructions interacted with group conscientiousness, and provide support for this theoretical explanation.

The literature on creativity highlights the incompatibility between systematic and structured approaches to creative tasks and creative output. For example, Taggar (2002) maintains that creative tasks require a more nimble thought process, the ability to take new perspectives, and flexibility in the approach to problem solving "carried out via discovery rather than via a predetermined step-by-step procedure" (p. 315). Similarly, Simonton (2003) notes that creative outcomes are more likely to occur when a certain amount of chance, randomness, or unpredictability are infused in the process. Low conscientiousness individuals and groups might adopt less planful and systematic approaches to creative tasks, which, ironically, might result in better task performance.

Conscientiousness and Creativity: An Uneasy Relationship.

In general, creativity isn't strongly linked to conscientiousness. This makes intuitive sense because creative people rely more on spontaneity, which isn't exactly one of conscientiousness's strongest points. Surely creative people have to think outside the box (for want of a less jingoistic term) and break the rules, not blindly obey instructions and colour within the lines? Openness is the trait choice for the creative type; the desire to explore and experiment, daydream and engage in deep and meaningful dialogue.

That said, surely creative people are still hardworking and persistent? After all, you don't become a published writer without doggedly sending that award-winning manuscript to every publisher in the Writers and Artists Yearbook. Vincent van Gogh is said to have created nine-hundred paintings and over a thousand drawings and sketches. When we take into account that he only ever sold one painting in his entire lifetime, it's difficult for us to accuse him of not being a persistent fellow.

And this is pretty much what the research has discovered. Creative people tend to score highly on the achievement component of conscientiousness but low on the dependable component; they are equally hard working and reliable, they just don't like to be tied down by rules and regulations. It would, therefore, appear that skills like academic buoyancy are perhaps more closely related to a particular component of conscientiousness rather than the entire trait.

So this kind of insane thing where you do something like this obsessively over and over again despite not getting any money for it is very discouraged in Chinese culture I believe, and a lot of non Western cultures really because you are expected to be economically productive, and guilted into making a certain amount of money in a certain job to do that (imagine a Westernised parent looking down on astrophysics. It's hard to picture,) and not off doing eccentric things and wasting time.

Today I started reading a Star Trek fanfic it's very good - like 'perhaps this person is a published writer' good (a lot of fanfics aren't that good,) and this person is just publishing this and many other fanfics online for free (lots of people obviously do. Economics are so removed from their brain and they like the universe so much they're just uploading free fiction) and most fanfics on AO3 etc are written by Western people tbh and white people on top of that. This gets people complaining about like the lack of diversity in fanfiction writers and their work and how the demographics of being mostly white women reflects the Western publishing industry (do you really want other people to be doing free labour though lol? There's another side to this story...)

But honestly the barrier to entry is so low unlike the publishing industry. You just upload a story to a website and I guess make sure none of the topics conflict with terms of service of the website (but I don't think there are many rules on AO3. They even allow real person fanfiction.) The lack of other demographics writing/reading is really more about I guess interest in the things being written about and other personality/cultural stuff. I mean when I was at school it was quite an uncool thing to do and the few occasions it came up people would act like reading fanfiction was really weird. I stumbled on it online randomly as a teenager and started reading and sometimes writing stuff then (before AO3 so on fanfiction.net and livejournal and other sites and forums that had fanfiction sections etc.)

So again you get all these obsessive fans that just fixate on and write about whatever fandom they are into. Without thinking about money.

Living like a boxcar hobo with lettuce in your hair maybe:



The line just popped into my head lol.

"Lemon what tragedy happened in your life that you insist upon punishing yourself with all this mediocrity?"

"What because I'm eating a turkey sub?"

"The turkey sub, your clothes, the fact that a woman of your resources and position lives like some boxcar hobo. Or maybe it's the fact that while I'm saying all this you have a piece of lettuce stuck in your hair."

Western people like creativity a lot more because of their personalites I think, and consequently this sort of thing sometimes happens which would be completely unheard of in China I'm sure:

Van Gogh's paintings sold poorly during his lifetime, and he only sold one painting for $109. His brother had to finance most of his career.

The most comprehensive primary source on Van Gogh is his correspondence with his younger brother, Theo. Their lifelong friendship, and most of what is known of Vincent's thoughts and theories of art, are recorded in the hundreds of letters they exchanged from 1872 until 1890.[8] Theo van Gogh was an art dealer and provided his brother with financial and emotional support as well as access to influential people on the contemporary art scene.[9]

He moved to Antwerp that November and rented a room above a paint dealer's shop in the rue des Images (Lange Beeldekensstraat).[98] He lived in poverty and ate poorly, preferring to spend the money Theo sent on painting materials and models. Bread, coffee and tobacco became his staple diet. In February 1886, he wrote to Theo that he could only remember eating six hot meals since the previous May. His teeth became loose and painful.[99] In Antwerp he applied himself to the study of colour theory and spent time in museums--particularly studying the work of Peter Paul Rubens--and broadened his palette to include carmine, cobalt blue and emerald green. Van Gogh bought Japanese ukiyo-e woodcuts in the docklands, later incorporating elements of their style into the background of some of his paintings.[100] He was drinking heavily again,[101] and was hospitalised between February and March 1886,[102] when he was possibly also treated for syphilis.[103][note 7]

It is true that when Van Gogh was a preacher in the coal-mining area of the Borinage he lived a life of miserable poverty. But once Vincent set out to become an artist, his brother Theo supported him with a regular financial allowance. In Arles, for instance, he received around 2,500 francs (?100) in his first year. Vincent was not poor, but the problem was that he was terrible at managing money.

There was never any guarantee of this paying off btw.

As I said this isn't enough on it's own to really get anywhere you also need to be pretty intelligent I think, but the same personality in someone who does not have the other prerequisites will generally end up experimenting more in other areas of life including drug use and sexual stuff (people who are very succesful often do too but are still successful.) If you then try and force someone who is like this to perform within a system they'll just come to resent the system, and then write a famous song about that one day or alternatively not suceed at all because of (again) personality:



I sit in the state of a daydream
With all of your words flying over my head
Even more time gets wasted
In a daze

Maybe I'm just too damn lazy
Or maybe I was just brainwashed to think that way
And all of your time gets wasted
In my daze

It's very clear.

As is the psychedelic art doodles student at 49 minutes into this video:



"Being around that many white kids that was new and moreover this was my first experience with white poverty. I knew white poverty was a thing of course but I hadn't engaged with kids who were legit living in trailers, whose parents were meth heads, who suffered under late capitalism just like the black kids I had taught."

"I had this one kid who was brilliant. He was a type of kid that would sleep through your entire class, wake up and then get 100 on your quiz. I would hand him instructions for an assignment and at the end of the class instead of handing me the assignment he would hand me back instructions with psychadelic art doodles all over it.

"I made enough of an impression on this kid that years later he looked me up on facebook. Instead of being in college being brilliant he had got into landscaping or something and it was cool we had a chat or two. He was one of many students that I kept contact with from that school and I'm pretty sure he was the second to commit suicide. In my ten years of teaching I've lost maybe a dozen students either during school like while they were in school or in the preceeding years. And around half of that number is from this one year that I taught at this white school. The black students I've lost have been to accidents, one was murdered, one did complete suicide after committing a felony. But most of that 12 - white kids - white boys in particular - almost all of them suicides with an overdose or 2 mixed in. This experience has always haunted me. I don't blame myself per se cause I was only there for a year but I just can't imagine how so many kids from one school could be gone before 25 from self harm. I've talked and worked with some black boys and men in the most dire of conditions, coming from the most toxic environments and I had a solid understanding of what that looked like, and how that worked and what to do but for these boys I just didn't get it, still don't get it.

Kids like this are one of the personality groups who do incredibly poorly within the education system especially if they're less intelligent (which it seems potentially this kid wasn't since he suggests he'd get decent grades despite sleeping in class etc,) since they can't focus and it tends to have a detrimental effect on their entire life but being more neurotic on average (correlates with artistic creativity eg: the doodling,) mental health issues are a risk anyway.

When the school system crushes creativity (which it does) it makes it harder for people like this to succeed even though it's incredibly hard to do so in the first place regardless but they can't easily do anything else.

Meanwhile if you remove most of the low skilled jobs that don't require much education by automation, a lot of people will have nothing to do and will not turn into tech experts, doctors lawyers etc.

And the kind of spiritual nihilism we have is causing lots of problems too regarding existential apathy, mental health issues and so on.

I think part of the cultural creative decline in Western countries also stems from increasing risk aversion and self censorship plus promotion of STEM jobs over the past few decades (I know it was a big thing to promote tech jobs and the importance of tech and higher education when I was growing up in the 2000s.) In the UK. I imagine the US probably has shifted in a similar direction.

And the US still (probably) won't beat China in STEM.

I'd personally like it if art doesn't die out globally in the same way femininity has been devalued in the West because everyone decided STEM (and masculinity,) was the only important thing in the universe but thats just me.

That being said it's possible to have an East Asian culture that creates decent art because Japan exists but I'm guessing they reached that goal of creating the best animation and amazing video games like Final Fantasy VII in their own way. The education system and culture is still very different there from the West though.

In saying that... They have a lot of things like Chindogu:

Chindogu (珍道具) is the practice of inventing ingenious everyday gadgets that seem to be ideal solutions to particular problems, but which may cause more problems than they solve. The term is of Japanese origin.[1]

Literally translated, chindōgu means unusual (珍, chin) tool (道具, dōgu). The term was coined by Kenji Kawakami, a former editor and contributor to the Japanese home-shopping magazine Mail Order Life. In the magazine, Kawakami used his spare pages to showcase several bizarre prototypes for products. He named these gadgets "chindōgu"; Kawakami himself said that a more appropriate translation than "unusual tool" is "weird tool". This special category of inventions subsequently became familiar to the Japanese people.

This is quite silly, not very serious. They also have a lot of bizarre eccentric TV shows. There's lots of stuff that seems to encourage random eccentricity despite being a confucian culture.



Why? And to do this you obviously have to not care about seeming weird/silly.

I'm not sure how they blended these things together culturally...

https://magazine.wsu.edu/2014/04/29/...-modern-japan/

The Aesthetics of Strangeness: Eccentricity and Madness in Early Modern Japan

Eccentricity and odd artistic behavior in the Edo period of Japan (1600?1868) proliferated as an aesthetic subculture that both resisted the rigidity of the Tokugawa realm and served as a source of moral and cultural values.

Consider the story of Striped Kanjuro. A "harmless oddball" immortalized in the annals of strangeness from the Edo period, his home was painted entirely in stripes, he only wore striped clothing, and he even cut his food into stripes. But rather than being just a deviant, Brecher points out that Kanjuro's idiosyncrasies fit with important writers and artists of the time as they became part of the mental landscape of Japanese society.

https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/the...-modern-japan/

Eccentric artists are "the vagaries of humanity" that inhabit the deviant underside of Japanese society: This was the conclusion drawn by pre?World War II commentators on most early modern Japanese artists. Postwar scholarship, as it searched for evidence of Japan's modern roots, concluded the opposite: The eccentric, mad, and strange are moral exemplars, paragons of virtue, and shining hallmarks of modern consciousness. In recent years, the pendulum has swung again, this time in favor of viewing these oddballs as failures and dropouts without lasting cultural significance. This work corrects the disciplinary (and exclusionary) nature of such interpretations by reconsidering the sudden and dramatic emergence of aesthetic eccentricity during the Edo period (1600?1868). It explains how, throughout the period, eccentricity (ki) and madness (kyō) developed and proliferated as subcultural aesthetics. By excavating several generations of early modern Japan?s eccentric artists, it demonstrates that individualism and strangeness carried considerable moral and cultural value. Indeed, Edo society fetishized various marginal personae--the recluse, the loser, the depraved, the outsider, the saint, the mad genius--as local heroes and paragons of moral virtue. This book concludes that a confluence of intellectual, aesthetic, and social conditions enabled multiple concurrent heterodoxies to crystallize around strangeness as a prominent cultural force in Japanese society.

Interesting. I'm sure I could spend a long time researching this lol but not going to. But obviously the potential for that was there and showed up throughout history.

There's a 'cat island' (I stumbled on two documentaries about Japan on Amazon prime days ago about Japan and cats lol, one was created by a YouTuber abroadinjapan who I watched some videos from a decade ago and seems to have become a lot more popular in recent years):



^ This is not the island I was thinking of. There are cat islands lol. I was thinking of Tashirojima. There were some cat themed houses built there but the manga artist died before he could move in.

The island is also known as Manga Island, as mangaka Shotaro Ishinomori planned to move to the island shortly before his death. There are manga-themed lodges on the island, resembling cats.[5]

There's something interesting about people who really like cats:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeands...e-a-cat-person

The social psychologist Samuel D Gosling of the University of Texas has studied the personality traits of self-identified "dog people" and "cat people". He found that cat lovers score higher on neuroticism and openness to experiences, whereas dog people are more extroverted, agreeable and conscientious. "I wasn?t surprised by the findings," he says. "If you think about the role that dogs and cats play, they afford different types of interaction. If you like to go walking and get out and about, a dog is a more obvious choice. But if you are more introverted and like to sit in a chair and spend time at home, cats demand less social interaction."

But this is not to say that cat owners aren't interested in the world around them. Far from it. Rather, they contemplate nature?s ineffable mysteries not on a muddy trudge through the park, but from the comfort of their own homes. ?Openness,? says Gosling, ?is about ideas and intellect. People who are high on openness tend to be more abstract thinkers, and more creative and imaginative and philosophical.? Not for nothing is the philosopher with a cat on their lap a beloved internet meme.

I don't know if this is a side effect of toxoplasmosis at all or not but either way this seems to correlate with what I'm noticing. Though a lot of these studies are only carried out in 'WEIRD' populations. So Western.

Perhaps populations who love cats tend to be more creative then? It would explain ancient Egypt and myths about cats being aliens who taught Humans how to do things - I may have invented that in my head but I'm going to pretend it's true in the spirit of this post.

But Vivek brought up China because they excel at certain things he cares about.

China is also a leader in agricultural, plant, and animal sciences, mathematics, and information science. However, China is behind other countries in clinical medicine, astronomy, and astrophysics.

This study by Brecher, an assistant professor of Japanese language at Washington State University, delves into the complex role of oddballs and eccentrics as sources of artistic innovation and eventually as an influence on Japanese society.

This is funny because I was just reading a post on the china subreddit about someone who's parents had disuaded them from getting a job as an astrophysicist:

And that's one of the saddest things to me here. I know a kid who is absolutely thrilled about the prospect of becoming an astrophysicist (and is fucking brilliant and could likely do it without question), but his parents refuse and are forcing him to study business (which he deplores...as do I, despite my degrees and career to the contrary).

By the way, good on you for following your dreams of photography. It's been a lifelong passion of mine and I absolutely love it (though, I recently made the costly mistake of getting into underwater photography...fuck me that shits expensive).

Those things are important but reducing US culture to '5 random 90s TV shows' is... Ridiculous really. Like the cultural problems were created by watching Friends, cartoons, some kids shows I've never heard of despite growing up mostly watching US TV, and hanging out with friends. Nonsense really (I don't think he has to worry about kids hanging out with friends these days either lol, they don't hang out with friends irl so much these days, or have friends at all in a bunch of cases.)

I actually think that 'prom queens' and jocks and people like that have been greatly devalued in entertainment and storytelling in recent decades and often framed antagonistically mostly because creative people who write TV shows etc, while not being nerds, never fit in with that crowd either back in school. So that seems irrelevant.

The idea that the US has to be the best at everything or better at China at everything is kind of insane. But it demonstatably is better than China at many things already but this comes from a kind of awareness that people are not cooperating well in a globalised economy etc. It's not really a healthy form of competition it's like:

"We have to be the best at this because if we're not China will gain more power and then oppress us with AI and evil robots."

I think there's a far more deep rooted problem here and it's not that the US population aren't amazing at tech and hypercompetitive.

Well don't take my word for it:



Well, at least before then they won't invent artificial wombs first, probably:

Germany

The world's first artificial womb facility, EctoLife, was launched in Berlin in December 2022.

I wonder if Germany will be the first to create a working artifical womb?

The team hope to have a working prototype of their artificial womb ready for use in clinics within five years - meaning it could be a world first. The funding has come from the Horizon 2020 EU programme.

According to the charity Tommy's, babies born before 22 weeks have almost no chance of survival, while at 22 weeks the chance is only around 10%. But just two weeks later, survival rates rise to about 60%. Oei said that at present, about 1 million babies worldwide die due to prematurity, while those that survive are at risk of a range of disabilities.

[Nyctophilia]

That being said it's possible to have an East Asian culture that creates decent art because Japan exists but I'm guessing they reached that goal of creating the best animation and amazing video games like Final Fantasy VII in their own way. The education system and culture is still very different there from the West though.

I'm not sure how they blended these things together culturally...

Reading another thread about this lol:

Why does Japan produce so much creativity compared to China when its society is even more rigid?

As someone who is HK Chinese, I'm intensely curious and amazed at how creative Japanese are even though their society and culture seem incredibly rigid. With China and to a lesser extent Hong Kong, the lack of creativity is often attributed to cultural norms like the pressure-packed education system and the adherence to authority and the reluctant to stick out. But Japan apparently has similar attributes, maybe even more extreme. For example, Japanese really stick to social conventions like punctuality and following rules and even archaic norms concerning women while in China, anything goes (I say this as someone who spent a few years living in Beijing). So why is it that Japan can be so creative with manga, anime, videogames, and technology etc?

Because Japan never murdered its entire creative class and euthanised its historical culture in the 60's and 70's.

And didn't a lot of those targeted Chinese creative types take refuge in Japan?

Oh right duh. That wouldn't have helped either.

My kids to go school in Japan. It's true that the school system teaches children "manners", they have a book that tell the children various behaviors/actions, like how you should listen to what other people are saying until the end, never to interrupt, or - I kid you not - how loud your voice should be when you're talking to others who are separated from you by 1 meter, 3m, 5m, and so on.

But, arts & crafts is never suppressed, in fact school encourages arts & crafts. During the summer holidays, they're required to create at least 2 arts and crafts, whatever they like. They're required to read books and to be able to explain what the story was about in their own words. Almost all the homework involve some kind of "thinking for yourself" concept.

I'm a Chinese decent, when I was growing up, parents never encourage arts, I remember clearly what they said, "arts don't make you rich, be a doctor, or an engineer, if not, open a shop, sell something and be your own boss". It's safe to say, my friends' parents all had the same idea.

This is the sort of perspective I was trying to get with Japan. In Hong Kong, we have that same type of mentality towards education from parents and as a result, you get tons of people doing business, finance and law and not enough artists, developers, engineers and so on.

Most of this is anecdotal. Still interesting though.

I think Cixin Liu's recent Hugo win is a real recognition of Chinese sci-fi literature. More of these- where Chinese works win on a real global stage, would help refute the narrative that China is not creative.

Oh lol I forgot about that! Yeah that's the 'banana bones' book series I was posting about before. I haven't read it though but people came away with the perception that it was curiously criticising male feminisation:

Cheng Xin stared. The individuals AA indicated had smooth, lovely faces; long hair that draped over their shoulders; slender, soft bodies -- as if their bones were made of bananas. Their movements were graceful and gentle, and their voies, carried to her by the breeze, were sweet and tender....

Back in her century, these people would have been considered ultra-feminine.

Understanding danwed on her after a moment. The trend had been obvious even earlier. The decade of the 1980s was probably the last time when masculinity, as traditionally defined, was considered an ideal. After that, society and fashion preferred men who displayed traditionally feminine qualities. She recalled the Asian male pop stars of her own time who she had thought looked like pretty girls at first

"Most men from the Common Era tried to, consciously or otherwise, feminize their appearance and personality to adjust to the new feminine society"

Yes, the Asia Forcefemmization/Twinkification Panic is a real conspiracy theory accepted in national and nationalized media.

Basically Chinese conservatives think America is using [BEEP] and Korean idol culture to emasculate all Asians, in order to drive them away from manly Chinese culture

All of this to say I think Liu has some points to make about the differences between men and women, and that men should not become femboys because we might allow the solar system to be destroyed or something.

The world in which the men become more feminine is in many ways utopian - highly technologically advanced, wealthy, and peaceful. In such a world, Liu implies, the need for traditionally masculine traits diminishes and people tend towards becoming more androgynous (which for men would mean becoming more feminine). We see this happening today as well and to some extent in other utopian sci-if like Star Trek. I didn't think Liu implied it was necessarily a bad thing.

This is very related to my interests. But not enough to actually read all those books. I don't imagine masculinity (castration?) anxiety is a major plot point.

Anyway you're still talking about exceptions.

[Nyctophilia]

This is like some unfinished post. I have more thoughts about stuff but I have to go out lol.

nothing is more hysterical to me than the continual transbianification of all the men straight trans women date

I've heard a lot of people talk about this happening actually. I think part of the issue is that a lot of trans women are attracted to femboys or other androgynous guys so there's a higher rate in those cases but also even when they're attracted to masculine guys this often happens like Kat Blaque talked about this a bunch in her YouTube videos and she also always says she's attracted to masculine guys.

There was a research paper that showed that 41% of cis men who are attracted to trans women are also aroused by the idea of being a woman. So not all of that group will want to transistion obviously, but it would definitely be a higher rate than average, and that's basically some percentage of 50% of men who trans women can date potentially in that case. It is only one research paper afaik though.

Maybe it's mentioned in this study? I can't remember and I can't go to sci-hub right now to check the whole thing cause it's paywalled like most science.....................

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26498424/

Results: GAMP men had arousal patterns similar to those of heterosexual men and different from those of homosexual men. However, compared to heterosexual men, GAMP men were relatively more aroused by GAM erotic stimuli than by female erotic stimuli. GAMP men also scored higher than both heterosexual and homosexual men on a measure of autogynephilia.

Conclusions: Results provide clear evidence that GAMP men are not homosexual. They also indicate that GAMP men are especially likely to eroticize the idea of being a woman.

Honestly i dont understand why straight trans women dont date more trans men... your problem is you keep picking conscripts over a fucking volunteer

Tbf I read this post earlier lol which would be an issue for many:

This has been a big part of my experience too. I used to feel exactly like you. Topping was extremely dysphoric, and I kept encountering the expectation in Trans Men too. It can be disappointing to have a cute little man suddenly want to be your bitch. I got over it though because I really like and want to be with Trans Men, so I'll top them now. [BEEP] men are by far my favorite romantic partner, so a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do.

It isn't about that. For me any way. It was a matter of priorities though. I felt like I was ultimately being too selfish, and expecting princess treatment. I just want to have fun and love people. I get the dysphoria, but getting past it let's me love interesting people. I want a man, but I am mostly dissatisfied with cismen.

I posted this before lol but removed most of that post but yeah uh I like the idea of topping but I wouldn't be her type because I haven't medically transistioned and I'm non-binary. Like I can picture the kind of person she's attracted to and I wouldn't fit that especially atm probably because of my hair.

I think there are a bunch of trans guys who like to bottom. I can't say what percentage. There are subreddits devoted to certain kinks involving D/s stuff, feminisation, including misgendering stuff sometimes (obviously this is a bit different and more extreme than just topping but a lot of that involves bottoming obviously,) and I've also seen people on Tumblr who are into the same kind of kinks but with trans women instead of cis men (the version with cis men seems more common though.) It's really not my thing especially with the cis guy version to the point where I don't want to go there and look at how many people are on the subreddit. The number wouldn't help either since most of them could just be cis people who have conversion fetishes.

I don't really have any reason to believe this percentage is lower for trans men than cis men based on what I've seen.

I have weird double standards about it where I can't consume stuff like that if it's a trans guy but I'm into it if it's a cis guy (like feminisation related stuff or just guys bottoming in general.)

It's something to do with cis men though really because I don't mind reading the people on tumblr who are into the same kind of kinks even with misgendering stuff sometimes but it's only trans women. 🤷*♂️ <--- OK this forum has really messed up that emoji that's not what it was supposed to look like lol.

I think it's because I know most cis guys are transphobic and don't respect trans guys and it's not reciprocal? And that makes me cringe. I just see them all as like masculine conservative men in my head but even when trans women are 'pretending to be men' in some of those role play blogs it's like sometimes they're pretending to be femboys or I don't see them as being categorically part of that group basically.

Anyway it's still not really my thing (I mean I like some femdom stuff and I'm kind of switchy, don't know if I'd enjoy it irl, but specifically the misgendering aspect and certain power dynamics aren't my thing,) but it doesn't bother me reading those blogs at all from what I remember (cause I stumbled on a bunch a few months ago and was curious and reading through them.)

On the other hand there's this far right guy on twitter who said that most (but he assumed all) trans guys want to bottom for a cis guy and be 'converted' basically and I was just thinking 'I'm going to throw up in your face.' Like that scene in Team America where the puppet keeps throwing up. So I can see why most of those blogs on tumblr are like 'cis guys [BEEP] off' basically. I forget exactly what he said now though but something like that and he also commented on trans women.

Anyway someone also said this:

Maybe it depends on where you are from, ive definitely noticed that most men in europe prefer their trans partners to be bottoms, in the USA ive noticed most hope they kind of top too

I don't know if this is true in general since obviously this is just an anecdote. It did occur to me before that homosexual behaviour was very common in Saudi Arabia - I read a news article about this. Because there are a lot of rules about heterosexual dating/sex etc there are a lot of guys will have sex with men like they do in prison and consequently most of those guys are tops. I didn't really expect this to be the case elsewhere (seems like a ton of guys who are into trans women are looking for a femdom who will top them and that dynamic is what appeals to them,) but maybe it's more of an American thing to want to bottom, or only limited to certain countries.

When they say Europe they also probably don't mean the UK anyway lol, since few people do. They usually just say 'the UK.' I consider myself European though. It would be interesting if there was research on that preference honestly to see if it varied in different countries.

I've never met or come across any guys who have spoken about this from the UK at least (cis or trans.) Most people discussing these topics online are from the US. There are very few trans or non-binary people in the UK in the first place.

I think I've come across 3 online one non-binary person on another site I was on, and two other people who didn't even live in the UK anymore and were YouTubers. I think they were both also non-binary but like one I think was a non-binary trans woman and one a non-binary trans man so they had both of those identities. Oh and then there's another YouTuber who's a genderfluid trans guy who also hasn't medically transistioned who I sometimes watch in his 40s now. Now I'm remembering a few people lol there's also a trans woman who I don't watch but her YouTube content is the most famous maybe (Philosophy Tube,) and F1nn is genderfluid and there's another trans guy who's pretty popular on YouTube. So I think that's 7 online (off the top of my head,) and two no longer live in the UK. One lives in Slovenia and the other lives in France.

It's a pretty different and older I think kind of group compared to the Americans probably because our culture is more transphobic than the more liberal parts of the US (though I wouldn't say more transphobic than the more conservative parts of the US.) These are the numbers according to a recent census (this is out of a population of 68.35 million) kind of surreal actually:

Trans men: 48,000 people (0.1%) identified as trans men
Trans women: 48,000 people (0.1%) identified as trans women
Non-binary: 30,000 people (0.06%) identified as non-binary
Other: 18,000 people wrote in a different gender identity

So in real life I've only ever met one trans woman who was in the process of transistioning, and another person who came out as non-binary after I knew them, and another person who came out as a trans woman (I think,) after I knew them. As far as I know anyway, obviously a bunch of people especially trans men just live stealth so I'd never know either way.

It's not a lot of people though, and the numbers are probably lower than those shown because they think that given the distribution of where these people lived, and the high rate of Muslim respondants and people from certain minority groups, a bunch of people probably didn't understand the question and might not speak English well.

[Nyctophilia]

Haven't started watching this video lol once again just reading comments. Also I see this is part of an omegaverse series that she's doing which I haven't been watching but yeah since Star Trek is being brought up (I'm sure she'll probably cover this in the video if I actually just finish watching it lol....) I think a big part of that orginated from Star Trek because of like Vulcan pon farr probably other sci-fi stuff with similar concepts too like 'Sex Pollen' as a trope, but combined with like petplay fetish stuff (Edit: no not petplay... I dunno specific labels but animal sexual roleplay, predator/prey roleplay) and mpreg. Before that all got combined together I read some mpreg stuff as a teenager so it was around before and also a lot of the other stuff was around in fanfics with werewolves and anthropomorphic stuff. I read a series about some gay werewolves which I also think had mpreg in in the 2000s but I'm not very into werewolves. I was much less picky back then though. So it's like 'eh this is here, I'll read it until I find something better.' I'm only really into humanoid cats and bunnies and they have to look very Human besides like ears and tail maybe but just have the behaviour of bunnies and cats. I'm not super keen on the way omegaverse mixed all these things together personally either, but I've read a few things that are part of that genre out of curiosity really. I still find it hilarious that manosphere guys adopted that language too.

Edit: to be clear I brought werewolves up because omegaverse is very clearly based mostly off like canine biology stuff and fits into werewolf stuff loosely which I'm not into. Werewolves are one of the few speculative fiction 'races' I'm not really into (I've read a few stories I thought were pretty OK in my life but I just don't really like werewolves,) and I prefer feline (really just cats tbh,) and bunny people as I said.

Why? I don't know it's interesting isn't it? But the species of Humanoid animal hybrid is very important to me.

Just as every crustacean inevitably becomes a crab, every gay fanfic is derived from Star Trek

It's funny because all the Star Trek fanfiction I've read (and I have read a bunch) has been about heterosexual relationships lol (at least the primary relationships in those works, sometimes there are gay ones as well going on with background characters.) Involving Vulcans and Humans.

I read tons of m/m and slash fanfiction and original works as a teenager though, but then since I strated reading Star Trek fanfics in my 20s when I was reading more heterosexual stuff I read more of that.

None of the femslash pairings I want to read ever exist (or they barely exist.) Which is one frustrating thing about fanfiction and the only slash fanfiction I've read in the past four years (longer but I can't be asked thinking so four plus years,) has been Spencer Reid (Criminal Minds,) and Langley (Lone Gunmen) as a pairing.

A couple of people have worked together to create like 20 odd fanfics over the past several years. The way they're written is not terrible but a bit off putting in ways I can't remember now. Like some stuff isn't described well or? I dunno. But there was something about the way it was written that I was struggling with.
Also after maybe the 5th or so fanfic they enter a poly relationship with another male character who is from some webseries detective thing or something I forget. But I've never read it and I wasn't that into that pairing... I stopped reading before that point though anyway but might go back one day.

The thing that really sucked is I was like 'oh that is a great idea for a pairing' and then obviously since they're from different universes and it's completly random nobody else has had this idea and the people working on that series are the only people who are writing that pairing lol. This happens to me a lot now too I'll think of some pairing and then there will just be no fanfics. Because as I've gotten older my thinking is more idiosyncratic.

I also used to get into new fandoms and pairings often like at least every year or two and maybe have a couple I was into at one time but usually one dominated and would move on from one and then not go back when I was younger which doesn't happen now. Like since my 20s I've gone back to Star Trek and Loki (from Marvel, not exclusively MCU some stuff based on comics but like often MCU and sometimes people mix the two,) and some other stuff a few times. Think I've read Elder Scrolls and Warcraft fanfiction on/off a few times. And LoTR. Also Pride and Prejudice. For a period of several years I was only reading Loki fanfiction mostly cause I was watching less films and TV etc and was just less interested in new fandoms. And there are tens of thousands of fanfics about Loki.

I'm way pickier about slash stuff these days. In my 20s most of the slash stuff I read was real person fic which I generally avoid because I think it's a bit questionable to read stuff about real people but I kind of 'slipped up' multiple times in my early to mid 20s. Then read one fanfic a year ago as well because the tags were really great, but it wasn't that well written honestly.

Oh wait... There was a few other random fanfics and pairings too that are sort of gay except people are sometimes robots or debateably androgynous or the son of God... Also morally questionable xD I read Jesus/Satan fanfiction for a while and then also AM/Ted from I Have no Mouth But I Must Scream. Yeah....

I mean Marvel Loki is based on a Norse God anyway. And then, there the God Loki (not Marvel) also appeared in one fanfic with Jesus and Satan. Maybe a couple. Yeah a couple.

I always forget something because I've read so much stuff lol. I've edited this post many times. I'm not even going into all the stuff I read as a teenager plus there was a lot of original stuff that people had posted for free online that I read too, and some stuff I bought. Also I was only listing stuff I've gone back to multiple times over the years not everything I've read. I read a bunch of House fanfiction at one point but that was just for a certain time period and didn't go back to it again (also didn't finish the TV show,) and also stuff from horror films probably well I was like 19/20 then (many other things which is why I'm not listing all the stuff I read a few fanfics about or read for a few months at one point.) Also probably forgetting some stuff. Can't remember if I read Hannibal fanfiction multiple times or not.

Real person fanfics are basically always gay though and this is partly because that's all people write for some reason. Like all fanfics about real people are gay lol so you don't have a choice but that's also fine. It often makes the most sense especially if it's like guys who are mostly hanging out with guys in a band or something. Unless you're creating a fictional person to ship them with, which I did see before in my early teens but seems rare in most real person fandoms from what I've noticed. I've only ever read real person fanfiction about guys in bands also. Because I've rarely been attracted to actors only on a few occasions and they're always playing characters I'm more into and can read fanfics about so you know the temptation's not really there but even then I'm mostly only attracted to famous musicians and fictional characters.

Unless you count this video:



And the other one where I think there were more fanfics about them at some point but I can't remember (I watched it like once):



I've not looked but I would actually read something about fictional characters who are heavily based on them (like some alternative liberal woman and then a conservative closeted woman or something,) because that's the kind of a dynamic I would find interesting in fiction LOL. But I don't want to read fanfics about them that would be even weirder than reading about famous musicians for me lol. Obviously the fanfics she's reading are joke ones which I feel are kind of different because it's more like a parody then.

It would be like this (even though I don't know her that's kind of how YouTube parasocial relationships feel so yeah.)



I'm reading a fanfic atm about an original vulcan and Human character although the original vulcan character is Spock's cousin. It's pretty good, fairly depressing though but like really well written and immersive. In that sense probably the best fanfic I've read in years. Star Trek fanfics tend to be better quality sometimes though. I think actual legit writers sometimes write them so probably why.

I wonder if it really did start with Star Trek though. I don't think it did. I feel like there were some older gay ships. I suppose that was the time where it kind of became 'established' incredibly nerdy lol.

edit: 17:10 into the video and a bit before yeah the dark implications don't phase me much. Everything I read or have read slash or not is mostly for voyeuristic reasons. Sometimes I'm attracted to one or more of the characters but I'm engaging in it voyeuristically. And then obviously on top of that a bunch of it is sadistic but honestly it's not the most sadistic stuff I read. Like the actual porn I read like mindcontrol fiction and stuff like that was always more sadistic than most of the fanfiction I read. But yeah, I'm somewhat sexually sadistic so I like sadistic stuff.

I find there's an attempt to try and cover that side of things up a lot, along with the fact a bunch of people are just trans or non-binary, and a lot of people are sexually fluid in some sense. "No you see - they're all straight cisgender women and it's a feminist thing and nobody is sadistic or massochistic at all." I don't know why but whatever. I mean I find the need to explain everything women do using a feminist lens incredibly annoying and limiting in the first place.

Honestly around the time I started questioning my gender I started consuming slash stuff less often which is probably a coincidence but kind of interesting. I guess I still read a lot of m/m fetish stuff that was purely pornographic though for the purpose of getting off after that time (the exact gender ratios has varied over time,) but not general romance/sexual fanfiction stuff. I can't really get off using fanfiction, I'm not sure whether anyone does. Probably some people but not most people who read it I imagine. For about 2 years now though I've been mostly just using audio porn for that purpose though.

I did that because I wanted to try and self insert more and it helped a small amount sometimes I guess but I can tell my brain still defaults to voyeurism often. Reading in 2nd person doesn't help with that either btw. There are loads of fanfics people have written in 2nd person "you did this, you did that" etc. So the person reading it can self insert more and I just imagine a character who isn't me when I read that.

Quoting from video (rest of this is a bit graphic for 13+ paragraphs and problematic):

"It analyses another story where Hannibal and Will are both adult alphas however Hannibal who desires Will to be his omega gives him hormone replacement without his knowledge or consent to slowly turn him into an omega which is honestly not that far from the plot of the original series.. So of course Hannibal A/B/O would be bonkers."

(I haven't watched more than like an episode of the Hannibal TV show and now I'm really wondering what the hell happens on that show lol.)

Lol yeah it's... Kind of like stuff I get off to theme wise (without the omegaverse framework,) as over the years I've read a lot of stuff with like sexuality conversion straight > gay and feminisation etc but usually using mindcontrol as a way to get from A to B. As I said I'm rarely reading anything now though.

So atm I listen to a lot of stuff and a bunch of that stuff that probably is most 'effective' is femdom audio which involve a woman (someone specific who records these,) and a submissive guy (supposed to be the listener but I don't self insert into everything like I say,) and then she sometimes involves other guys as sex toys to use or she has a dick herself... Also lots of general msub stuff recorded by guys sometimes with strap on stuff, and other stuff with women and other stuff in general less often. Some of the other stuff has mind controlish elements to it and it generally works better if it does feature some kind of gradual psychological transformation but it's kind of uncommon in audio stuff (honestly think I'm just really bad/lazy about searching for stuff too though.)

There are some people whose voices I like and so go back to a bunch. Some of their work is less effective because there are elements I'm not into or less into etc, but I still listen to it because I like their voice and maybe some elements of it. There's one guy who has some stuff where he bottoms but mostly tops - I mean that in the sex act sense - he mostly creates msub stuff consequently it works less for me. The last thing of his I liked really only worked to the point where I didn't need something else because:

1. It had been a while since I listened to him and I do like his voice

2. I was thinking about another recording he made which involved him Spoiler: being drugged with some aphrodisiac and forced to perform for a camera

3. in this audio he was also a bunny (this is the second time he's done this and I wonder if someone is requesting this or it's his idea now lol I think it was someone else's script but can't remember,) and I skipped through it a bit but towards the end he gave off the impression that he couldn't control himself or stop because:



That word was actually used.

Rabbits obviously. So I also imagined that I had control over both him and the woman who was technically supposed to be the listener but like I say I just won't self insert most of the time. So I just imagined that while listening to him.

Because I'm messed up yes.

There's a woman who mostly makes femdom stuff and I like her voice/accent (I'd never thought Northern English accents were attractive before as a thing for me but hers really works for me for some reason?) But it doesn't really work but I really like her voice lol. It's the same thing with looking at photos though I guess that wouldn't work either. Just stitching things together.

But the weird thing is I can't 'use it' if it's with characters I know and such as in fanfiction. Like I enjoy reading romance fiction and other stuff about them but the way it's written and the fact I know the characters obstructs what I'm doing. Perhaps I can't objectify them enough? Who knows. I think it's some kind of madonna/whore complex thing. I mean I look at images and gifs of guys I find attractive who I know while doing other things and that's no issue but there's a difference between appearence and the rest or something. Again though it's also just how stuff is often written that's probably different or something.

Well, the more ethical you try to be, and the less like porn you try to make your writing to include other themes/purposes the less it will work as porn of course. (Depending on what you are into but most fetishes are based on various taboo things.) Common sense.

OK the graphic stuff stops here:

"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 their supposedly stand ins for marginalised bodies because is that not a way of erasing those actual marginalised identities?

I think that so far this video has made it clear that that is often the exact appeal for women and [BEEP] people writing these stories. They are writing that on purpose to sort of unpack their issues with a sort of sideways glance.

Well yeah. I sort of mentioned this in my previous post coincidentally when I said I'm into certain kink stuff with cis men in but don't like it with trans men. But I suppose it's a form of role reversal in a sense because these experiences are not ones cis men generally have.

Then she talks about race which I understand is annoying for various people but yeah people are more attracted to some races than others, especially in that particular fandom area. Like the women who are into slash are usually into white guys followed by East Asian guys. It's a bit different I think in other circles of women where black guys are more popular, but that's what I've noticed on Tumblr and in famdom spaces and stuff like that. It's like white and East Asian people.

But I think it's because the kind of characters that people in those spaces like are rarely non-white and especially rarely black. I'm not sure I can think of anyone off the top of my head who is a black guy. She argues this has been changing in mainstream media but I'm not sure it has with the particular types of personalities...

So maybe Ambrose who I thought replaced Salem in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina but now I'm not sure the specifics there since I haven't read the comics, who is a pansexual guy (there are about 3900~ fanfics for that fandom but a greater amount than usual are femslash and I can't really find him easily in tags there mostly because I forgot his name and was searching for Salem because I'm r*tarded. There are 903 fanfics with him in, but I don't think he's a main character in most of those.)

There are a bunch of fanfics with him and Prudence, also a bunch of fanfics with Prudence and Sabrina. I feel like more of the fandom are attracted to Prudence though. I think there are more femslash ships on that show than most. I thought Lilith was the most attractive while watching it though.

and Louis probably from the new Interview with the Vampire which I haven't watched. I didn't watch the film either. It's the most popular pairing for the TV show fandom on AO3.. But that might be because it's an iconic pairing anyway and perhaps everyone prefers Lestat I have no idea because I haven't paid that close attention since I'll probaly watch it eventually. I read the book a very long time ago as a teenager.

"There's Marvel characters"

No come on Strange you know that Sam Wilson isn't hot by most of fandoms standards. He's not quirky at all and too normie. At best he could be shipped with someone else like how people use Thor and Iron Man with Loki (the 'hot one',) but I haven't seen anything where he's a central chracter so don't know what potential there might be there.

That being said there are a bunch of fanfics with him in still but obviously he won't be the most popular.

Tbh I think my black male characters are more interesting than anything I can think of anyway. One who dates back initially to my early 20s is a kind of inventor typically in various cyberpunk and sci-fi futures who is in his mid 30s. He's always wearing a pair of goggles on his head and has long dreadlocks. He usually works with an apprentace who is about 20-21 and who he saves from various situations when she's a teenager so she basically travels with him. Generally her parents are dead but in the most recent head story they're alive but she was replaced with a 'clone' by fairy slavers in a kind of cyberpunk world because I like changeling stories. The apprentace is always half black and half East Asian with bright orange dyed hair.

It's not inspired by this at all (was probably inspired somewhat by the Star Trek universe, and Fallout 3 actually at the time with maybe some other things mixed in,) but I think this fits some aesthetics a bit:



I still haven't watched Hardware lol. The creator got sued right?

Hardware is a 1990 science fiction horror film written and directed by Richard Stanley, in his feature directorial debut. It stars Dylan McDermott and Stacey Travis, and also features cameo appearances by musicians Carl McCoy, Iggy Pop and Lemmy. An example of the cyberpunk subgenre,[6] the plot of Hardware follows a self-repairing robot that goes on a rampage in a post-apocalyptic slum.

Fleetway Comics successfully sued the filmmakers of Hardware for plagiarism, due to similarities between the screenplay and a short story entitled "SHOK!" that appeared in 1980 in the Judge Dredd Annual 1981, a spin-off publication of the popular British weekly anthology comic 2000 AD; credit was added to later releases of the film. Since its release, Hardware has become a cult film.

I feel like I'd find it aesthetically cool if I actually watched it lol. Based on things I've seen.

There's also his cousin in the latest story who is also a dark skinned black guy but he's also part dragon I think (like transhumanism exists,) so has some scales on parts of his skin and also long braided hair with beads etc in (the aesthetics tbh were inspired by a story I read as a teenager in some ways,) and he works as some kind of crime boss who I think is probably more morally grey. But the other guy ends up taking her on so she can get out of that lifestyle.

Initially when she was taken by the slavers (I wrote about this before in another post I think lol.) She was forced to work in this factory kind of environment but then a bunch of kids escaped and so later ended up working with the dragon-Humanoid guy.

Then there's another guy who is a uni student who is bisexual and studies literature he also pops up in various different stories but initially was a character in a fantasy story I started writing in my early 20s (there was another humanoid dragon character in that story too but that is not the same one as above really and I don't remember what race he was but it also wasn't entirely relevant to the story and he wasn't from Earth either but some other fantasy realm,) and he has long hair again because I'm allergic to short haired male characters. I do have a few though lol.

Of course these characters don't matter because they just sit around in my head lol due to chronic motivation issues especially regarding writing. Well besides some stuff I wrote in my early 20s but that didn't include two of these so yeah.

[Otherside]

Today, it is apparently controversial to suggest that you should stay home from work if you have Norovirus, and this is the new covid.

Like, you all know what Norovirus is, right? Comes out of both ends quite violently, if you've got norovirus you're can't really go anywhere without there being a toliet nearby. If I went into the office and was throwing up all the time and had uncontrollable explosive diarrhoea I would 100% be sent home, pretty much any employer is going to do that, that's not really new medical advice there.

Noro isn't even new, I had it 4 years ago, rate it a 0 of 10. Would much rather have Covid again than Noro, it was just traumatic.

[Otherside]

Honestly, I understand Thanos quite a bit. As slightly twisted as it all is, If I was stuck in the squid games, I'd probably also want to be high in order to somehow avoid trauma of it all.

Player 100 though, Im Jeong-dae, he's just pure evil, happy to kill however many for the prize money. I hope he dies in Series 3.

[Nyctophilia]

"They picked the wrong vehicle for a terrorist attack"

You're using this as an opportunity to advertise your car....?

Also this story is weird but at the same time isn't because there have been a bunch of weird incidents over the past couple of years in the US. Like one of the guys who shot Trump who had strange political opinions and was conservative but he was bullied which is common if it's the same guy I know there were a couple in a short space of time and I didn't pay too close attention also there was another guy who tried but didn't get far enough to actually shoot who was from the UK. A lot of people are mentally ill and a bunch of people have political opinions that can change radically over time as well (I think that was the case for that guy who shot Trump too from what I remember.)

Actually he's talking about the one I remember in the video later on just realised. Yeah sounded like a weird guy.

The 20-year-old from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, was a registered Republican who donated to a progressive Super Pac

Allegedly.

"I don't know if it's a psyop or if people are just unwell."

That's me any time I'm on twitter and when considering 90% of Nick Fuentes audience and Nick Fuentes.



Ex-military? Oh current military. You know I probably removed this from my previous post when discussing militaries did I.... I guess I removed some stuff but yeah I still quoted something related. A lot of people go into the military or police force specifically so they can trigger warning Spoiler: die without doing it themselves so at baseline you already have elevated mental health issues in this population then of course being in the military doesn't help with that at all.

Oh two shootings by military guys since the new year? I didn't even know about this before making my previous post. But there have been many cases like this before anyway.

"Livelsberger is this a joke? We're not a serious country man we're a deeply unserious nation"

I thought that after I found out one of the trans guy mass shooters was called Aiden. Literally the stereotype name.

"Let me put on the conspiracy music"

Nah Occam's razor - it's the thing in the spoiler tag.

"Everything that I'm saying is made up."

Obviously but ignoring elephant in the room for some reason.

[Nyctophilia]

Lol that's my height.

[Nyctophilia]

Men have to understand that women are just wired this way and act accordingly.

Millennial Hollywood incel media where the quirky girl makes the first move has done incalculable cultural damage.

I'll drop every hint possible but I physically cannot make the first move. I've literally tried but my feminine soul stops me.

women are already quite vulnerable, why should we go even further and make the first move? dropping very obvious hints is the furthest I usually dare to go... men are strong, courageous and capable of making the first move, are they not?

Look I have social anxiety disorder and still have somehow managed to not be this pathetic. At the very least stop blaming it on being a woman. Nonsense.

Edit:I mean wtf does she think sapphic women do? They've also been socialised to make themselves small and not cause offence and put others' needs above their own. But women who get what they want (including straight women,) are disregarding this nonsense and doing what they want.

You can see this later in this post. Much more extreme examples too - this woman I can tell has no desire to [BEEP] a guy in the [BEEP] or be sexually dominant and is simply talking about getting on a date with a guy.

Lol in a world where women are attempting to turn their boyfriend's into crossdressing catboys (but not Grimes unfortunately eh she got him to change his avatars to anime stuff when he said he's not that into it around 2018 and one time he joked about being a catgirl while posting an image of a foxgirl so I guess I'm too harsh on her. Its important research into the potential of cis male flexibility,) you can ask a guy out for coffee or something and still be feminine to guys who arent complete psychos in the tradwife movement like Lauren Southern's ex husband who you should avoid anyway. Don't worry. You can even do it in a cute voice.

You are not adapting and I get it's hard as I said I have social anxiety disorder but that is your problem. If you can't ask guys out that you like this is your problem.

We're constantly told that women are more adaptable, sexually fluid etc. Unlike men and that's why men can't do domestic tasks, hate kids, and just play video games.

This is used to argue how women are endlessly malleable to dismiss female preferences - its used to argue things that prioritise male preferences and desire for control over women. Those same guys will argue 'women are just wired to be submissive' when it suits them.

Stop playing into this.



Consider weaponising it to your own advantage.

Also this film and the actors in particular are like the blueprint of what he's talking about lol (the first quote I mean about the quirky girl movies):



This exact energy too. I haven't been in this exact conversation but it feels familiar enough that I feel like I have.

"Do you have any interest in having sex with me?"
"NONONONOOOO!! NOOO!! AAAHHHG THIS IS NOT HOW IT WAS SUPPOSED TO GO!!"

xD



All his roles are so entertaining.

Modern day hints are women looking at you for more than 3 seconds.

If men dropped hints they would be postcards that read "Hello miss I find you hot. I would like to take you on dates, figure out if your worthy of being my wife, marry you, and procreate copiously"

I just stopped at I find you attractive personally. Still in cringe ways sometimes and one time multiple times.... More cringe. Nothing could come of those two cases I'm thinking of. Less sexually aggressive though.

Not sure how you meant this, but "worthy of being my wife" rubs me the wrong way. A husband and wife find each other because it is their God-given vocation to love and cherish one another. None of us are worthy of anything. Anything we receive in this life, is a blessing from God. We are all sinners undeserving of God's grace, but he gives it to us freely.<3

Jfc, this is so gay. No wonder there’s a fertility crisis.

Lol. It made me cringe too ftr.

Only weak and desperate men approach women.

Once you make the first move, you communicate covertly that she's more valuable than you, and from that point, the man--whether he realises it or not--starts playing a losing game.

Value attracts. Attract, don't chase.

I think it doesn't matter if the woman has been very attracted for a while but if she's never really thought about you it will be ruined by doing that yeah so no point in that case. I mean maybe in the past but I don't think it really fits the zeitgeist presently. Consequently it does make more sense for women to approach men but they don't tend to, and generally have increased anxiety about it and lower self confidence.

Lots of people complaining that this never works. There are a minority of attractive guys who will get approached by women. Obviously most men can't rely on that though.

This happened to me plenty of times, I can relate.

for all of human history men have chased women. that's how the world works. if you think women should chase men you are a fa**ot!

Women are rarely attracted to most men and so often find it offputting when men approach them (this goes doubly for younger women these days it seems,) I get this because I've never been attracted to a guy who approached me first. Either I let them know I was attracted to them or other people intervened one time. Obviously those relationships didn't work out but the cases where the guy approached me and expressed interest first I wasn't into at all.

So, obviously the person who is less attracted to other people should approach people first yeah. But this won't happen because lots of women find approaching other people too uncomfortable. If they are conventionally attractive they won't have to try that potentially because presumably they'll get approached sooner or later by someone they're attracted to. I still think you can sometimes get better options if you do though since guys don't exactly want to approach women especially these days (which is what these tradfem types are complaining about I guess.)

I suppose a lot of women who are more traditional also expect that because expressing any trad gender roles is important to them.

It's hard to say because it might just be that every guy who approached me (and there haven't been that many) just wasn't my type. But as an avoidant person I definitely relate to the idea that when someone expresses strong interest or especially sexual intent to me, especially if it's someone I wasn't into beforehand or they've come out of nowhere, I won't give them a chance.

So this will only potentially apply about 20% of the time I guess (I think that's an estimate of how many people in the population have that attachment style of course that's not an estimate of women with it.) The people responding like "this is the dumbest thing I've ever read" clearly hasn't met anyone like that.

OK 25% maybe:

Avoidant attachment is common. Some estimate that about 50% of people have a secure attachment style, 20% anxious attachment style, 25% avoidant attachment style, and 5% fearful/ambivalent/disorganized attachment style. That means about 1 in 4 people you meet might have an avoidant attachment style.

I cba finding something to quote but especially in the case of dismissive avoidants (because there are fearful and dismissive avoidants,) they tend to value independence a lot and so instinctively look down on people as weak for expressing any kind of desperation, attatchment anxiety or maybe emotional requirements of the avoidant person. Avoidants also will avoid opening up or expressing vulnerability. (It's not healthy/ideal no it's just a common attatchment styles because of poor parenting + possibly genetics.)

This other guy has written a long essay lol (I'm not quoting all of it here just a significant chunk):

How does the bible, for example, portray women? As horny animals, basically, who have nothing on their mind other than seducing good and virtuous men. The Bible even contains pretty straight forward instruction on how to seduce a man: Feed him, get him drunk, then when he lies down, you dash for the crotch! All yours baby. (Genesis 19:32) The bible is full of stories of (usually wicked) women using various seduction techniques to lure and entice men. Men do not ever "seduce" in the bible. At most, they rape.

I haven't read the whole of the bible but that seems like an oddly pornographic thing to be in it.... Wouldn't put it past it though after all there was the 'get thee behind me Satan' thing.

I don't think I'd go to the bible for sex advice anyway.



You can corrupt/sexualise anything though.

The idea of the bible being a self help guide for sexually submissive guys is very amusing to me though. New headcannon acquired. Not really new I guess.

"There's no one more thin and vulnerable than Jesus Christ. And he's bleeding too - that's very clever of them." - Simon Amstell.

To our modern sensibilities, we can rationalize such things as it being archaic and misogynist or whatever, because modern Evolutionary Psychology tells us that it's men who are the sex obsessed braindead idiots, and women are gentle angels who do not want to get intimate with anyone except for their true love (i.e. hypergamy, the highest status guy they can get their hands on) Now if that’s not science, I don’t know what science is!

Oh sure that stereotype changed sometime around the 1800s I think?

The concept of the "receptive" female and the "proactive" male stems from Charles Darwin himself. In his book, 1871s "The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex", he presents male-female relations as universally one of female receptiveness, and male proactiveness. He emphasizes that men stand in competition with each other, where basically the biggest monkey then claims the most beautiful wife (or wives), whereas women do not compete at all because they want to invest all of their energy into their offspring and let the men do the selection, based on health and fertility.

Maybe it started there yeah not sure entirely.

Of course, the view of women as horny animals, constantly and actively trying seduce men, is not just incidental, but essentially universal before darwin. It is the view in Islam, where "denying a wife sex" is considered a punishment. It is the view of ancient greece, where in comedic plays such as Lysistrata where the idea of women withholding sex is held as comically absurd, and in the play "Thesmophoriazusae" (take THAT, spell checker) discusses how women use seduction to gain political power. And a cursory glance at even vedic and chinese texts see "seduction" as something that a woman does, not a man.

I don't think that's what that was getting at. Women have often withheld sex to punish men. Also arguably a lot of the way men wrote about women as incredibly horny femme fatals was wish fulfilment and projection.

The anomaly is the modern west

Globally and historically speaking, it seems to be our modern west, who is the outlier, who believes that men are the sexually proactive ones.

Figuring out definitely whether our modern culture has got it wrong, or the ancient texts, has led me to a lot of field testing, and I can say with absolute certainty: The bible was right on this one. Women are obsessed with sex in ways men can't even fathom. And seduction, the mating dance, is 100% led by the woman.

So why am I telling you all of this? To tell you that not only is the way most people think about the human courtship behavior is wrong, I am also telling you why people believe in this wrong thing, specifically, where this belief comes from. We've subscribed to Darwins view of sexually passive women, and in doing so, have completely lost track how the human mating dance actually works.
MEN, DON'T HIT ON WOMEN

If your brainspace is very crowded and you can only remember one thing, this should be it:

MEN, DO NOT APPROACH WOMEN.

I know that's what the pick-up artists tell you, or maybe your dad or your mom or your friendzoned ladyfriends, but you have to stop this. Do not hit on women. Do not approach them. Let them approach you. In the human mating dance, initiating contact is the job of the woman. Hammer this into your brain.

Conversely, if you are a woman looking for "seduction advice", that's going to be a different article. I'm not a woman and I have very little practical experience seducing men. Which is part of the reason why I've been hesitant for 15 years to write this.

But to put it simple: Women are the proactive gender when it comes to the mating dance. Women do the approaching. Women do the initiations, women do the escalations. The job of a man in the context of the mating dance is to reject or reciprocate.

It is women who are built to do the contact initiation. They are small, cute, have childlike voices, not threatening. People like being approached by a woman. Contrastingly, being approached by a man, means being approached by a 8 tall foot human bulldozer, bred for millions of years of evolution to be the most efficient killer around. That is a physical threat! At least from the perspective of the average woman.

It makes sense to me but not for the reasons given. Women aren't really that horny or into most men but that's why they should approach guys. I mean if you're not that into guys I think it's just easier if you get into a sadistic predator state of mind to have some interest in men. Not sure how much control there is about that though especially when your sex drive is lower... But, as I said, a lot of traditional women will judge men as less masculine if they don't approach them and be turned off and even more women are too anxious and so will just avoid bothering even if men approaching them turns them off. It seems somewhat related to attatchment style too.

And there’s more evidence to back up that women are the ones supposed to initiate contact. Sociologists who filmed test subjects in a party setting recorded who approached whom. They found that women approaching men had orders of magnitude better success rates than vice versa, had much better chances of going home with a man they successfully approached than vice versa. Interestingly though, when interviewed in the debrief, a significant portion of the newly formed couples would still argue that it was the man who initiated contact, despite video evidence to the contrary. This is how deeply ingrained this faulty expectation of the male initiating contact is. Even when it literally happens to them, they don't see it, and defer to the cultural expectation of the initiating man.

Yeah. That is stupid.

So what happens when, instead, a male is initiating contact with a woman? An "Ick" reaction. Because this is a violation of the mating dance. That's the biological instinct telling you somethings wrong. Women describe guys who hit on a lot of women as "creepy" for that reason. They are creepy and icky because they are doing the mating dance wrong. If you are one of those guys who uses the "Shotgun approach", all you've achieved is giving a lot of chicks the ick.

The fact that people are incredibly polarised about this and that it shifts over time culturally suggests that people have more than one mating strategy and attatchment patterns as I've said.

But I think the real reason that's a turn off is it suggests the guy is only looking for sex and most women are looking for guys who will commit/help with kids/have high standards (makes them seem higher status) etc. A lot of guys overdo this and come off as arrogant instead though (see: Pride and Prejudice) so it's a fine line.

Failures

Men initiating/escalating aggressively leads to the woman feeling under attack rather than aroused. Luckily, a slew of laws and cultural attitudes in the west prevent this for the most part, so men are actually quite unlikely to make this mistake these days. The #1 mistake is you hiding in the basement, not exposing yourself to women who might take a liking to you and approach you.

Women remaining passive however is the most common mistake. When it comes to the game of seduction, men are the prey, women are the hunters. As a woman on the prowl, you should never be passive. Wear gaudy clothes. Chat up people. Touch them if they might be comfortable with it. Escalate softly for both to remain inside their comfort zone.

Conversely, stop shaming other women for being sexually aggressive. They're women, they don't have much else going on! Have you seen womens magazines? They're all gossip about who else has sex, how to get sex, how to dress to get sex, and who has sex the most. Don't subject them to reading this trite crap, just let them have sex instead.

This did happen with me but tbf I never really felt like escalating anything to the point of anything sexual most of the time. I think you have to consider what kind of dynamic you will end up with if you do that though.

This is great (but not so much for him and not so much for most guys):

"...she hides my robe and leaves her dresses but it's getting colder and I can't find my robe..."

Is this robe the only item of clothing you possess?

im very neat and tidy and put all my clothes away immediately

Just adorable.

From a distance that really worked for me. I've re-read this many times now. More Context:

my gf [20F] wants me [28M] to be a "catboy" [NSFW]

I met my gf Sara (fake name) 2.5 years ago on a discord for a certain popular video game. We were long distance for the first six months, but I was able to take a business trip in her area to meet her and it was one of the best days of my life. Sara ended up coming to NY for college and we spent nearly every weekend together. When Covid hit, she didn't want to return home so she's stayed with me and has been for the last ~9 months. Through all this stress, Sara has really been my rock and in spite of everything the last 9 months have been better than ever expected for a worldwide pandemic. She's perfect for me, or so I thought.

[....]

I really adore her, but lately she has become really aggressive about me participating in her TikTok niche "community/interest" (idek if that's the best word) too. Turns out some of these interests were sexual? Our sex life is pretty normal, vanilla and semi-frequent but she's recently seemed a little bored during it/less enthused. That's when I found out that her TikTok interests were more risque. She has been telling me she wishes I was like the young men she watches on TikTok who wear cat ears and little dresses. I think her asks are kind of extreme and possibly immoral (I'm Catholic). I was raised to think men should be a certain way and already struggle with how gangly and un-masculine I look. In addition to talking about dresses and cat ears she keeps talking about pegging and is obsessed with taking my 'virginity' (yes the one you're thinking of). I want to make her happy, but I'm afraid it's too much and people will find out about it. Sara can sometimes lack a filter and will inappropriately gush about how good I am In bed. I'm worried that since she's really active on other social media--she doesn't know I know her handle and also joined the discords--and I've seen some of her posts about having a submissive boyfriend who does what she wants. She's been talking about how uninterested and unfulfilled during sex with me because all she wants is to try and 'top' me.

I think some of her catboy interests have been manifesting already. Sometimes she'll watch over me cleaning and tell me to redo a spot in a forceful way. It was cute and funny at first but then I realized she wasn?t joking and I found it strange. She spilt a glass of orange juice yesterday while looking me in the eyes and then said "Get to work". Again, strange. She?s tried to be a bit more aggressive in bed, and I was taken back by it and caught off-guard which she may have interpreted as uninterested. Sometimes after sex she will ask for a snack or something and when we go to the kitchen to make it I'm usually in just my underwear or robe. Lately she has been hiding my robe but leaving out her dresses and suggested I try wearing that instead. I usually reject that but it?s getting colder and I can?t find my robe. Even while making a meal she?ll be more aggressive/demanding comments and sometimes she makes me feed her? The other day when she was in the bathroom

I saw she was had tabs on looking for cat ears and maid outfits, at first I thought it was hot and got excited but then I noticed it was a size large, so for me. We haven't discussed this at all and I'm not really sure what to do next. What should I do? I don't hate the idea and I want to make her happy but I haven't been into the more aggressive aspects she's put up over the last couple of months. I also don?t want to do these things if she's going to tell her discord friends about our sex life and I'm afraid that it will compromise my faith. I want to make her happy but I don't know what to do. Advice?

I said this before but she shouldn't really do this without some kind of conversation because it's basically soft bdsm.

This next quote by someone else in the same thread kind of annoyed me I mean because there's a thing some guy's will do where they're not into something and so they have to insist that the woman isn't either because the woman must be into what they are into.

It's not just guys who do this but as guys tend to be more dominant and most people aren't very introspective. So this group will do this with full sincerity and belief in this and you can do it with some self awareness about it too if you're more dominant and treat it like a game where you know deep down you are incompatible (coping as the kids say ) but yeah they don't. They convince themselves. This is also how guys misread situations and think women are into them when they're not as well.

As they can't fulfil this particular wish irl these women instead write copious amounts of fiction. Usually about gay men.

(oh he said he believes this because people were saying it was fake but she doesn't seem that fake to me except in the sense that she had the self confidence to do that but the interests are pretty common in certain circles):

I don't want to disclose too much personal info but I 100% believe it. I'm 23, had this 18 year old girl aggressively pursue be (we shared a hobby and worked together so I's spend roughly 15 hours a week with her anyway). I didn't like the age gap and had other options, but she made a really really nice gesture for my (23rd) birthday once and I decided to give her a shot after discussing with other people how immoral the age difference was.

This girl claims she isn't on tik tok, but she also shares the same desire of feminizing me and pegging me. I kind of call her bluff on this because this seems to be the new norm along 18/19 year old girls. I don't know what it comes from, it's definitely dominant on the Twitter sphere and tik-tok and etc, but it really is strange to me.

I'm dominant in bed and can talk about these subjects without much discomfort, but I'm really not too sure she could even handle "domming" me as she claims to want to do. She doesn't understand that pegging isn't just getting a big strap on and going right in, especially since she's never used lube before, never considered fingering a guys ass, or knows nothing about cleaning done there. For a lot of other reasons I'll spare you I think the idea is romanticized in her head, but I don't think it would be fulfilling for either party, and would instead be entirely awkward. I think it has something to do with current trends and a weird new reverse misogyny of "putting men in their place".

Don't really know what to make of any of this, it's all really new and honestly just weird to me, but I'm wondering if other people are noticing this too.

So I guess it depends on how normie and vanilla you are. The guy who wrote that twitter thread saying you shouldn't shame women for being sexually aggressive wrote a other thread aimed at women that was a lot more removed from my own experiences and was basically just like 'be aggressive but also normie sexuality wise.' And try to seduce every man you see. With a focus on piv. Then argued other women will hate you for that but 'you should just share the guide with them'

2 problems here:

1. Some women dont want to do piv, bottom during sex etc. Maybe they're quote sadistic. Most men aren't going to appreciate the kind of stuff they're into


And contrariwise some women are highly massochistic which puts some men off who don't want to have aggressive sex with choking (on the other hand some guy's have started doing that without asking and just assuming which is insane seeing as you can die. More insane than the catboy thing I quoted. This is why everyone is obsessed with consent now.)

2. Men also judge women for being promiscuous or overly sexual when it comes to long term relationships unfortunately. So that's a risk too and also why its better to make guys wait to screen out those guys.

Most women are not just looking for sex and those magazines he talks about are usually focused on relationships really.

I like discussing sex (well moreso niche fetishes,) and sexology but I've found that to be a minority thing more associated with some (dont shoot me,) [BEEP] people (regardless of gender,) and I have little desire to engage in it irl anyway due to my lack of attraction to most people, incompatibility, risk aversion (stds etc,) too much effort etc. Also current living arrangements.

A lot of women, especially young women are annoyed by how sexual media is and how often it comes up. Bisexual women have a greater interest in sex (not just the behaviour but arousal, sexual motivation etc,) but pointing that out (research shows this ) is considered biphobic. I get it though you don't want guys to approach and harass you in response to learning that most of the time

Women read tons and tons of romance books where the characters end up in long term relationships or are soul mates etc.

So like I say he's projecting a bit. Though he gives accurate advice for getting vanilla sex from guys who aren't too shy (so put off by aggression themselves often,) but you know relationships are more complicated. As is having minority sexual/romantic preferences

[Nyctophilia]

So its flooding in the UK again. That's not weird it happens here all the time. But it's interesting how far reaching the effect of that assassin in America who shot the health insurance CEO is. And bleak really. Like violence is constantly demonstrated to be the only way to get people's attention and make people think...

Although a cynical view would be "the only way to get people to virtue signal and change nothing."

The CEO of an insurance company in Thurmaston, Leicestershire, has been telling our BBC colleagues about the impact of floodwaters at his business, which resulted in staff being sent home.

"Never seen anything like it in 10 years," Troy Stevens tells 5 Live Breakfast .

"Arriving to work yesterday was literally like a river coming down the road, in to the car park, flowing through the doors of our office."

"We've probably not got a lot of sympathy being an insurance firm going through something like this, but it's put us in the mindset of anybody needing to make a claim in the future."

I don't know what form of insurance it is and I've never insured anything (as far as I remember. Technically maybe post I've sent or something) so have no idea how making a claim works in the UK. He's still obviously referencing that event and the response to it though.
Because he's a CEO.

I guess there is some irony here since they're going to have to make a claim now.

[Nyctophilia]

Some people were discussing antisemitic graffiti in Australia and questioning why that kind of thing keeps happening in Australia (I don't know if it's more common there personally, or what they mean exactly since stuff like that seems to happen everywhere. I don't pay tons of attention to Australia though.)

I had a lot of thoughts because I keep running into two sentiments from people like: 'why is x group targeted by so many people?' And also 'It's weird that diverse areas are so racist.' But neither are really weird. (People tend to prefer people who are similar to them so in a diverse community there will be more opportunities for clashes of course.) I don't know if people are genuinely confused or if they're just kind of expressing confusion as a way to say 'this is bad.'

Well I grew up in Sydney and moved to Cali as a teen (forever ago) since my father is originally from San Francisco. Australian cities are very multicultural and as such there is plenty of racism which blows my mind since most kids are exposed to a rich and diverse set of cultures and taught to appreciate the diversity (at least that was my experience).

Per capita, Australia has one of the highest Jewish populations but, Jewish culture is no way near as mainstream as it is in the US.

To answer your question I think Jews just been kinda flying under the radar in Australia until recently and it's makes me feel ill to see these headlines. Note also that Australians in general, seem to have a kind of inferiority complex where they want to shine brighter on the world stage. So when it becomes fashionable, acceptable and even celebrated to be a hater and an antisemite (oops sorry 'antizionist') I am not surprised by this image.

I am glad I am in the US let's just put it that way :/

It's usually the most multicultural environments where people have the most issues with other groups. And it goes in every direction too even within specific races. Many people have a simplistic view of this and tend to only think of tensions between white people and certain minority groups - that's absolutely a thing my dad is fairly racist - but it's actually very common (as one example) for Hindu and Muslim people to be attacking each other over here (in the UK I mean.) Eg this event in 2022 (but not limited to this, this just became a noticeable enough incident to gain media attention):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Leicester_unrest

In August and September 2022, Leicester, England, saw a period of religious and ethnic tension between predominately British Hindus and British Muslims of South Asian origin. The unrest saw rioting, protest marches, sloganeering and ethnic violence between the two populations. It was also preceded by social media campaigning, misinformation and hate propaganda. Muslim apprehensions of what they alleged as "Hindutva fascism" entering their neighbourhoods was evidently the main driver behind the unrest.[1][2] Community leaders and analysts point to the Indian celebrations following the India?Pakistan 2022 Asia Cup match on 28 August as a catalyst, which saw a reaction from Pakistani fans.[5]

Like most British cities, Leicester has significant and growing South Asian British populations. Leicester is known for its ethnic diversity, and is one of three cities in England where the White British population are a minority. Since the end of the Second World War, the city has seen successive waves of migration, with immigrants from the Indian sub-continent arriving in the 1960s, followed by South Asians arriving from Kenya and Uganda in the early 1970s.[6] By 2021, Leicester's population was 33% Muslim and 25% Hindu.[7]

Britain's Muslim press tended to describe the BJP as "fascist" to varying degrees,[15][16][17] a language actively adopted by Leicester Muslims.

I mean it is a far right government.

The British party politics is seen to have caused polarisation between the two communities, with Muslims siding with the Labour Party and Hindus siding with the Conservative Party. The 2019 general election was not only a "Brexit and NHS election", but also a "Kashmir election" according to The Guardian columnist Sunny Hundal. This was a reference to the Modi Government's decisive action in the complete integration of Kashmir into India in 2019, and the corresponding backlash in Pakistan. These developments had reactions in British Hindu and Muslim communities.[21] Rutgers University's Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), which has investigated the online trends between 2019 and 2022, noted a wide dispersion of anti-Hindu and anti-India slurs and tropes during this period.[22]

At least one major incident of communitarian violence has been reported from May, where it was alleged that a Muslim man was surrounded by around 25?30 masked men, and beaten with bats and poles to such an extent that he was hospitalised. The incident was reported to the police, but the Muslim community felt that the police were failing to act, with the result that the perpetrators were still at large and continuing to harass the Muslim community. The Muslim community labelled these perpetrators "Hindutva RSS thugs" and believed that they were from among the recent arrivals from India.[29][30][note 3] According to Majid Freeman, a self described "former aid worker and a key social media influencer", who has been previously known to make false allegations of Quran burning[32] and for supporting the terrorist group ISIL[33] on online forums, "Muslims had made their presence known in the streets" by August and the "troublemakers had disappeared".[34]

A bunch of localised gang violence too (an ongoing issue,) where mostly teenagers and young adult men just act in a very territorial way. Part of that is economic - selling drugs etc - and part of that is just the problem of undiluted 'masculinity.' I suppose it's also boredom. One plus point is they mostly just attack each other so if you're not part of one of these minority groups + in a gang you're generally safe.

Many Muslim people notably have issues with Jewish people too but there are basically people of all backgrounds who join in with that for both different and similar reasons (the similar reason is generally envy but sometimes other weird things get packaged in too like religious conflict that doesn't always apply.)

I grew up in a very diverse town (actually one of the three minority-majority areas mentioned above but it's not a city it's a town,) and it's become more so over the years. When you walk around you can find people speaking in a variety of different languages and not often English. Sometimes it's hard to communicate with people because they don't speak English well or because of their accents (I've had this issue,) and it also interferes with working environments too sometimes as well. My mum struggled to communicate with certain people she worked with. This bothers people especially in jobs where it creates risks.

I didn't notice many problems growing up really but there have been a lot of background issues over the past few decades that escalated and kind of peaked in the 2010s.

These areas usually have higher rates of poverty too and people are more neurotic and prone to emotional volatility. Lots of mental health issues. Lots of resentful people. Lots of people with [BEEP] lives etc.

I think people who don't live in an area like that often exaggerate things in one way or the other. Like politically correct people who treat it as taboo to even discuss, but also the people who think people can't live there without getting raped and stabbed is also nonsense. Tbf locals will lean into that too to be edgy or because they're bitter.

There's a huge class problem in the UK of course too.

I learning stuff about judaism and I never got why people hate jews so much it seem like there just history punching bag

Well I don't know if this has always been the case but for a long time Jewish people have tended to be very succesful as a group in whichever country they live in. They've also spread out a lot more than most groups globally. Which leads to them being targeted more because there's nothing low status racist people from a majority group hate more than minority groups being more succesful than them.

Jewish people tend to annoy anti-semitic white people because they look white but don't tend to identify as white so they can't like vicariously 'win' any competitions through Jewish people's success. Seeing as they fully identify with being white and all of their identity points were put into that category. I've paid a lot of attention to them on social media and they often complain 'they don't see themselves as white' 'they're not white.' So I know this bothers them.

On top of that most of those white people are conservative and have weird ideas about Jewish people pushing liberalism, feminism, LGBT+ rights (you know cool stuff,) etc because of their success/influence. Because they hate Western culture and they blame Jewish people for Western culture which is liberalish. Some of those guys want to live in a culture like fundametalist Islam which is a bit awkward because obviously.

It goes without saying that Jewish people are not the only group blamed for this most of these guys just blame white liberal women (tm,) but the anti-semitic minority who are like 'stop blaming white women it's really the Jews' they do it for the same reason they've just headcannoned different villains.

I've said white people but that part isn't that important they're just the most obvious/highlighted by media. There are plenty of black men who are conservative and have all the same issues with Jewish people.

Other groups basically have an issue with Israel that they end up projecting onto or taking out on Jewish people sometimes - those people are more likely left wing. There's a component of class frustration and envy again as well. They don't however give a [BEEP] about all the 'oh no degeneracy' crap that the right wing anti-semitic people do. Due to a higher tolerance for chaos.

The left identifies with low status groups unless the group includes white men.

Edit: Sorry that needs further clarification. They don't like conservative/patriarchal white men even if they're low status/poor (non patriarchal white guys are generally OK) but this varies a lot depending on what subset of the left you're talking about anyway. Some people have no opinions about race and gender at all. Generally though, they ignore other groups displaying this behaviour because they don't see them as a big enough threat yet or they're not personally impacted by that behaviour.

I will say in terms of democrats vs republicans in the US there's a lot of criticism of black guys (which is why they're not voting democrat as much these days haha,) from black women (who vote democrat more than any other group i think.) Which goes to show it depends on context a lot.

I need to quote this hilarious twitter convo. It was brought up in a Hasan Abi video. I mentioned this before but deleted the post:

"perfect Bushwick party at 11pm on Sunday is joints being passed around a room of only white guys and Asian girls."

"Nb erasure once again"

"Arghh I'm sorry I should have written white femmes"

THAT'S the part you see an issue with??

So as I said before lol:

Honestly if you're going down that route you might wonder about why everyone is a white guy and Asian woman in the first place. Her response makes it even worse lol like all non-binary people are femme to you? And she had to emphasise white again. No Asian or masc non-binary people allowed. No Asian men. No other races in general.

That basically became a copypasta I think too.

Another layer to this is people sometimes use nb to mean non-black.

I love that just wtf. It has a surreal AI like quality to it like someone asked a not so great AI to pretend to be progressive hahaha. This is all I know about Bushwick btw:



Bitches be in Bushwick, they all live in Bushwick
They all love Bushwick but I say "fuck that shit"

Yes as usual my knowledge comes from music.

I'm just reading the responses now because I found the og tweet lol:

This is not a party this is a hostage situation

the dream of scott pilgrim is still alive

i'm glad hipsters are finally being overtly racist instead of hiding it

I am in your walls

Imagine gentrifying an entire city just to have the most annoying parties humanly possible

Another highlight from that video was Elon Musk tweeting this:

"Super rich ex wives who hate their former spouse" should filed be listed among "reasons that Western civilization died."

A bunch of Muslim people have some weird ongoing religious issue with Jewish people I'm far from an expert on so can't really comment on that, but most Western Muslims are very low status (the groups that immigrate to the UK from Pakistan and Bangladesh tend to be at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder,) so I'm sure envy plays into it too in some sense.

Now we get to one of the kookiest groups. The Evangelicals (Christans) 'support' Israel because it's important to their doomsday cult story...

My understanding might be wrong but essentially they seem to support Israel because during the 'end times' (tm) when Satan attempts to take God's throne and everything is in chaos they believe Jesus will return and everyone will either convert to being Christians or perish and Jesus will rule Israel.

There's just one small problem:



No not that problem. Jewish people don't follow/believe in Jesus lol...

This video has the same effect on me as seeing an American who just acts like a cowboy. It's such a stereotype it just seems fake like a scene from a comedy film:



So I'm not going to watch the whole of this video but let me just skim some quick quotes from skipping through.

"Give them the determination and resources to utterly destroy the enemies that have risen up against the kingdom of God."

"Socialist teachers unions are brainwashing your children with the madness that they can become a transsexual person."

I love how people can't talk about anything without transsexuals (tm) making an appearence.

Transsexual only refers to transgender people (identity) who medically transistion I guess. Because most people who go on hrt but identify as cis still don't call themselves transsexual ime. I guess a few do. Non-binary people don't necessarily call themselves transsexual either even if they go on hrt. Transsexual is used in a kind of isolationist sense by transmed people a lot and reduces a psychological/neurological phenomenon to a medical decision. So some people avoid it for that reason and also because it has the word sexual in and went out of fashion in the past. It's also kind of a spectrum eg you can go on a small amount:

A short thread on how testosterone therapy dramatically improved my quality of life as a 40 yo cis woman. I've been slacking on blogging about this for a while -- if this post gets 1k+ likes I'll write it. 🧵

I started TRT 9 months ago because my sex drive had tanked and other stuff wasn't helping. I had no expectations around other benefits, though a pamphlet I read while waiting to see the doctor made me realize I had other signs of low T, which blood tests confirmed.

Testosterone reversed a lot of cognitive decline I'd chalked up to aging--and I do mean reversed. I feel sharper now than I did at 30 & much more confident. My memory is much better, anxiety is much lower. Brain fog is gone. I have an extra 30-60 minutes of high productivity/day.

It also increased my nightly sleep by ~1h, the majority of that REM/deep sleep. It gave me the energy I needed to start exercising regularly, which I?d tried and failed to do many times. I now get 3-5h of real exercise/week, vs. 0 for ~the last decade.

As a result, while staying the same weight, I've lost 6% body fat in 9 months and my heart health is much, much better. I was in incredibly bad shape before; being regularly physically active feels like a miracle.

Side effects have been mild -- irritability is the biggest one, and I've had to learn to adjust my reactions to compensate. But I would accept pretty severe side effects for the benefits -- it would need to be worse than smoking to not be worth it, I think.

It's apparently the norm for women's testosterone to plummet in their late 30s/early 40s, and I have friends who are going through the same cognitive arc. One started TRT a month ago, and though it's early, she seems pretty happy with it, too.

Kind of envious honestly. In the UK they don't bother to check for anything physiological if you see them about anything that might appear psychological. Well I know other people have had other experiences where they present with anxiety issues and get tested for various hormonal stuff etc (like my male friend,) but that's not been my experience which is very annoying.

Also Grimes and Aella responded to/retweeted that. That whole social circle of like tech-adj women want to go on testosterone.

This was hilariously wrong:

hormone optimization goes crazy.

the ratio of experiential impact to risk is wild. and you can just do things, no one is stopping you from experimenting

I feel like there's an entire medical establishment set up to stop people experimenting?

Yes. I'd like to live in that world but it's not the one I live in. Often have to go with the grey/black market or jump through many loopholes.

"Israel is God's prophetic clock. When the Jewish people are in Israel the clock is running. When the Jewish people are out of Israel the clock is stopped."

Then he quotes this (talking about Jewish people):

For your are a holy people to the LORD your God; the LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for Himself, a special treasure above all the peoples on the face of the Earth.

Then he turns into a comedian:

"Headlines will be screaming millions are missing. Christians have disappeared from the Earth. There will be an instant economic crash. Why? Because all the Christians are gone. We're the only ones paying taxes these days."

Edit: Is it 2063 when this is happening? I'm gonna be like "damn it the Vulcans came and took all the Christians and I'm stuck here. I'm never going to have a space elf romance now."

If I'm still alive which is probably banking on a lot.

"Hello America choose you this day whom you will serve either Jesus Christ the prince of peace or the coming antichrist."

"You will either be a servant to Jesus Christ or a slave to sin and Satan."

Well you can make an argument that they're the same entity via the character of Lucifer. They're both called morning star like Venus and Inanna/Ishtar (probably many others.) So... Awkward...

"Iran is the head of the snake in the middle east."

There are five different crowns you can get when you go to heaven.

This is wild lol. Like Runescape party hats?

"You can look at that person's crown and tell what they did and how well they did it just like a military uniform."

"On one day the bible says God will release the angels over the Earth to kill 1/3rd of the Earth's population. That's one day."

Then he goes on a bit about all the ways God is going to torture people while being the good guy. And China are apparently involved now:

"Then We come to the place of Armaggedon where China marches up the Euphrates river. with an army of 200 men and from the West comes the Anti-Christ who will lead the armies of Europe and probably the United States right there there will be the most bloody battle ever recorded in the history of the world. The battle field of armeggedon is about 200 miles in length."

Oh good Europe's involved now too.

I feel fairly sure China wasn't in the bible. I don't think 200 men is going to cut it lol.

These are people who are coming against Israel and God is going to wipe them out. Then there will be a thousand years of perfect peace. No presidental elections, no fake news, none of all this nonsense we go through with. There's going to be one king, one leader. I will be Jesus Christ son of God. There will be one law - it will be his law.

"Your child can play in a [can't make it out] nest that's what we would call rattle snakes. Your child can play with poisonous snakes you have no worry because the child will not be hurt. That is what you call total peace.

Oh that's what peace is lol. When snakes don't attack you anymore. Just think all of this elaborate nonsense was created just to make snakes peaceful.



(They obviously think the cucumbers are snakes.)

Snakes are venomous, not poisonous btw.

After 1000 years Satan is released and he goes into the world and to deceive many. Why? Because there are people born who never had the opportunity to choose or reject Jesus and Satan is going get them to follow him in one last battle against God's chosen Jesus Christ. He gets wiped out and cast into hell. And that's when eternity beings.





Jesus can always reject his father
but he cannot escape his mother's blood.
He'll scream and try to wash it off of his fingers
but he'll never escape what he's made up of.

I can't speak for DMT, but I did a peyote ceremony with the Navajo in 2014. Just like McKenna says about DMT, i literally felt like I was pushed through a membrane of sorts into a rave like dimension. A machine elf greeted me singing and welcoming me exactly as people describe them. Everything felt right, so I thought in my head what's your name not knowing this thing could read my mind and it said "Baphomet". At first the phrase meant nothing to me, but a soon as I realized what was said I very quickly thought of Christ and was launched violently Into an infinite black ocean of some kind. I was drowning in a pitch black ocean with no sky above the surface only unspeakable lengths of what looked like ropes with bugs crawling on them in the air. This was a devastating experience

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]

According to a Gnostic text called the Reality of the Rulers, the archons "have bodies that are both female and male, and faces that are the faces of beasts."[2] Thus, they're not truly male nor female, nor human nor animal. The ancients found this kind of boundary-crossing to be deeply threatening, and this description of the archons implied that they were forces of chaos, so "mixed up" as to be "the farthest that a created being could be from God."[3]

Your brain doesn't like rigid belief systems generally when on hallucinogens. As funny as that anecdote is I don't think it actually had anything to do with Jesus but more the fact that the belief system is rigid.

This seems cooler:

Well I got in contact with some elves/pixies/faeries/spirits (hard to say what they were exactly) in my 2nd ceremony. They seemed to be 2D light creatures with robotic body parts, some had vehicles for bodies. They were very friendly at first, they were making objects out of ideas/language/light and they wanted me to give them something. I didn't know what they wanted and they started to get annoyed. Eventually, I understood they wanted me to show them what I know. So I gave them philosophical ideas that I had read but then they eventually wanted me to give them something original, one of my ideas and I had no ideas of my own or at least that's what I had thought and communicated with them. They became angry and went inside my body and eventually came out with this object and told me "this, this is your inner wisdom, your original work" They gave me back this object but took everything else.

I was very confused by the situation, I thought I was just mugged and had lost something really important.

I later understood how necessary this step was in my journey. I could no longer lean on the words, opinions, ideas of other people. There is infinitely more value in understanding than there is in memorizing other people's work.

Tbh though, people talk about the 'machine elves' too much. The weird emotionally cold mantid creatures that perform surgery on you and try to steal your emotions etc seem weirder in some ways. I would like to know if the stories about aliens came from doing this drug (and similar drugs,) or if the stories about aliens have influenced what people see while doing these drugs like chicken/egg:

I've seen them a few times. Most notably the first time I used dmt. I was expecting machines, elves, the usual stuff you hear Terrance McKenna describe.

instead as I blasted through the tunnel of light I found myself having the sensation of being wheeled through a hallway (I was laying flat on my couch) into some sort of operating room where I was "scanned" with a colorful beam of energy that went straight into my forehead. From what I could tell there were shadow figures looking down on me and the mantids were in the background overseeing everything and had a shimmering iridexcent quality to them. I wasn't afraid, it wasn't "good" or "bad" in terms of feeling. Honestly they seemed pretty chill and more curious than anything. No other experiences with preying mantises other than thinking they were cool looking bugs as a kid.

Sounds nuts but that's DMT for you. Note I don't think I was actually interdimensionally abducted by aliens but it lines up with a lot of others experience.

i had the mantis / lizard entity scan me in a operating room. there was 1 major mantis in front of me and then several around me which were morphing in and out of each other. after the scan I believe I was given the floor to pour out my trauma. I felt so at peace and filled with love after my trip. I had so much clarity of what I needed to do to grow as a person. I had to calm myself from being [BEEP] faced scared during the trip as I did not expect it to happen at all lol but thats what you get when you smoke dmt

Someone was asking about this quote recently (which I guess is from the bible?):

[5] Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. [6] That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. [7] Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again.

My personal interpretation would be something like water is... I mean this isn't mine I can already think of several works which have similar ideas. You know like in the Constantine movie where she asks 'so water and hell?' and he responds 'water is the universal conduit that lubricates the transistion between one plane and another.' And then the A Perfect Circle song Passive starts playing lol. No that's just that one music video cause the song is used in the movie:



But yeah anyway my personal interpretation is that water is fluid and the sea also kind of represents the underworld. Also water can exist as a solid, liquid and gas

Water can also exist as all three states at the same time, which is called the Triple Point of Water. This happens at a temperature just above freezing (0.1?C) and a pressure of 0.006 atmospheres.

Nick Land wrote this short story about mermaids once (this isn't the whole thing) it kind of stuck with me:

Why were mermaids so horrible? She felt the answer through powerful but indistinct intuition. Fluid boundaries were essential to it. A rocky sea-shore at twilight was darkly suggestive enough. It whispered of mermaids without needing to show them. Ambiguous transformations thrashed the coast of sleep.
"Do mermaids scare you, too, mommy?"
She'd wanted to say 'no' of course, but the word caught in her throat. She'd actually coughed - almost choked. "I don't think about them much," she'd managed, eventually. "They are kind of creepy, I guess."
"Super-creepy," Katy said.
"Why is that, do you think?" It was, perhaps, an incautious question, but Claudia couldn't help herself.
"The join is the scariest part."
"Where fish begins?"
"Or girl," Katy said.
"Imagine being able to swim so well, though," Claudia suggested, with unconvincing cheerfulness.
"That makes it worse, because you might want it."

I think this is probably a bit of a more common interpretation of the water thing which I find a bit mundane hahaha:

Some commentators suggest that "water" is a reference to the amniotic fluid that signals the onset of physical birth, and they therefore believe Jesus was describing two distinct births in verse 5 -- physical birth ("water"), and spiritual birth ("the Spirit")..

Yeah anyway I got distracted but the idea is that everyone has to believe in/follow Jesus or perish which ultimately includes Jewish people ironically.

Part of the reason it's mostly men though is that men aren't considered to have inherit worth so if they don't succeed economically as the best in whatever dumb economic competition is happening they feel a great deal of resentment. But women sometimes go along with it too as a kind of benevolent sexism fetish or something. White nationalism makes them the centre of attention so they might like that. Or because they are overly masculine but low status in the same way.

It's pretty but the people are crass and rather ignorant and very fucking racist.... The way they talked about aboriginals, horrid.. That was at least my experience.

The sky news channel in Australia is very conservative leaning for some weird reason. It's not as much in the UK (or wasn't whenever I last paid attention.)

Yeah so there you go:

The channel was originally a joint venture between British broadcaster BSkyB (thus making it a spin-off of the Sky News channel in the United Kingdom), Seven Media Group, and Nine Entertainment Co., as Australian News Channel Pty Ltd. The company was acquired by News Corp Australia in 2016.[5] With the subsequent sale of Murdoch's remaining shares in Sky UK to Comcast,[6] Sky News Australia no longer has any direct ties to its UK counterpart, but continues to use the Sky News branding under license from Comcast. The channel is currently exploring options to rebrand into an Australian channel of the American Fox News brand once the current legacy branding agreement comes to an end in 2026.[7]

Especially since the acquisition of the channel by News Corp Australia, Sky News Australia has faced scrutiny from the press over its increased focus on opinion programming. Comparisons were drawn to Rupert Murdoch's American news channel Fox News, and there have been accusations that the channel's opinion programming has promoted misinformation and conspiracy theories.[8][9]

The bolded is important.

I was mostly wondering about the descrepency in content some years ago because every Australian video that was suggested on YT or whereever was like the usual Fox news kinda thing and I don't really remember what was on British sky stuff but it wasn't that lol.

[Otherside]

Twitter has been amusing the last few days, so -

- King Charles can't "dissolve parliament" and "call an election." Second he tries that he gets slapped right back down and parliament and it will be the end of the monarchy not long after.
- Andrew Tate can't "run for Prime Minister" because you can't "run for Prime Minister." You win by way of your party getting 325+ seats. He'd have to stand as an MP and given that he is a) currently resident in Romania and b) facing criminal charges that mean he's likely to spend more than a year in prison, so he's likely going to be completely barred from being an MP to begin with by the next election. If he's not still in prison come next election.
-- Even if he does run, his party is not getting 325+ seats, period, a new party is not going to get 325+ seats, those are the numbers that the big two Labour and Conservative get.
- Keir Starmer won an election with a massive majority less than a year ago, hence he is prime minister. I'm sorry that some people don't seem to understand that there preferred candidate lost, but that how's elections here work, the party with 325+ seats wins and there leader becomes Prime Minister. Starmer has 412. Much as I don't agree with everything Starmer is doing, he has a mandate, he is going nowhere soon.
- Tommy Robinson is not going to become Prime Minister either - he is flat out barred from running as an MP because he is a) currently bankrupt due to gambling debts/being sued/unpaid taxes, and b) his very, very extensive criminal history over the years ranging from assault to mortgage fraud to attempting to enter the US illegally.
-- Generally the "peaceful protests" he organises are a bunch of football hooligans travelling into London, getting drunk and snorting coke, starting fights with the police, and then urinating over the city because they can't hold it in. And then wondering why they are being arrested, because generally, if you pick fights with the police, you will get arrested. But, to be fair, might have been too drunk to remember the fighting the police part.

[Nyctophilia]

There's a thread about the audience of Sky News Australia. A lot of people seem to think it's mostly right wing Americans watching but some people mentioned their Australian parents too and uh once again I'm confused by how they find this surprising lol:

My father who used to be a super chilled out, progressive Buddhist who lost his job during covid and became extremely disenfranchised does 😭 He wouldn't even turn it off for his grandsons first Christmas morning. It's a nightmare, he's turned into an absolute cooker

Christ and he used to be a Buddhist? How does someone go from Buddhism to cookerism? Wild

Oh it's really not that weird at all for there to be people like this who turn into right wing cranks. Just look at Russel Brand. The Nazi's themselves decided to use the swastika which was a symbol often used in buddhism and Hinduism. Also Savitri Devi created a fusion religion of Nazism with Hinduism:

Savitri was a proponent of a synthesis of Hinduism and Nazism, proclaiming Adolf Hitler to have been an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu.[5] She depicted Hitler as a sacrifice for humanity that would lead to the end of the worst World Age, the Kali Yuga, which she believed was induced by the Jews, whom she saw as the powers of evil.[3]

There's a tangentially related phenomenon which is sometimes called 'granola fascism'

https://gnet-research.org/2023/03/22...the-far-right/

Granola Nazis and the Folkish Movement

At the heart of the Granola Nazis are a racist neo-pagan group known as the Folkish Movement. A small group, the Folkish Movement have a significant large influence on white supremacist mythology and conspiracy discourses. Their styles, myths and language now circulate online in a wider white supremacist 'digital traditionalism' - the broader adaptation of a 'granola' or 'crunchy' style associated with hippies, nature, or organic farming to convey a white supremacist, anti-modern politics as online counterculture. These groups, especially after COVID-19, are building connections to broader far-right environmentalist, health and wellness movements, thus increasing their online presence. This section provides an introduction to the different groups within the Folkish Movement operating online today, the Granola Nazis whose styles and ideals support the broader movement of digital traditionalism.

"Folkish" refers to white supremacist pagans as opposed to other members of the cultic milieu like neo-druids, Wiccans, or "universalist" pagans. The Folkish or neo-volkish Movement is where northern European naturalist religions merge to become the spiritual basis for white male supremacism. Folkish, also called Odinist, Asatru, Wotanist, heathen or pagan, creates a white religion from Nordic or Germanic tribal culture and blends these with German volkish racial ideology, Norse mythology and Nazi mysticism to create a pan-Aryan religion.

This isn't what Ronald Jenkees meant when he said Stay Crunchy:



Or maybe it is. I mean I don't know his life. He has 3-4 songs I listened to in my early 20s so they're in my brain playlist:





All my fun is disorganised.

This music is a lot better than fascism.

I've posted about the femboy nazis before too. That goes back even further than the current internet memes. Like this guy:

Let's talk about Elisar von Kupffer. Who is he? What's he famous for?

So Elisar von Kupffer is a- It's funny. I'm actually looking for the right noun, right? I don't know whether to call him an artist or religious leader, an activist, a fascist. He's all the above.

But he's a man who lives between 1872 and 1942. He's born in what is now present-day Estonia, as part of the class of Baltic German overlords there, and throughout the course of his life, he assembles the first ever anthology of gay literature, which is called The Love of Favourites and Friendly Love in World Literature, which is published in Berlin in 1900.3 He creates a new religion called Klarismus or Clearism, which combines medievalist and Christian iconography with ideas about that kind of universal, transcendent spiritual androgyny that he gets out of readings and misreadings of Persian literature and of the classical era. He creates a series of artistic works culminating in the 30-metre cyclorama painting called The Clear World of the Blessed,4 which depicts the Claristic utopia in which many naked androgynes - all of which bear either his face, the face of his life partner Eduard von Mayer, or the face of a favourite local model, "Gino" Luigi Taricco - are depicted.

His work throughout his entire career is informed by a biological racism that understands human cultural output as being rooted entirely in climate and race, which are understood to be linked. For this reason, for example, he settles in Italian Switzerland because he understands it as being a bisexual climate: there's the Mediterranean homosexual climate and race type, and in the German Alpine, heterosexual climate and race type.5 And so, he's found in Ticino6 a bisexual climate. That's maybe a more humorous example of this biological determinism. But this also leads him to subscribe to antisemitic conspiracy theories, to be described by Nazi officials as a devoted hater of the Jews, and to several attempts to collaborate with Nazi politicians in order to secure state support and funding for this artwork and for this religious project. He fails, but not for lack of trying, including several extremely warm letters written to Adolf Hitler at the end of Kupffer's life, where he really praises Hitler, his political project and identifies them as political allies.7

So Kupffer is a really complex, controversial and strange figure. I hope very much that this article is being published alongside some images of his artwork as well, because you really do need to see this art to believe it. It is, I like to joke, mercifully inimitable. It's really something.

Some people kind of become fascistic when they do aphetamines that's another thing especially if they're quite creative/fluid in personality.

Also the first fascist movement in Britain was founded by a gender non-conforming alcoholic woman:

Rotha Beryl Lintorn Lintorn-Orman (born Rotha Beryl Lintorn Orman, 7 February 1895 - 10 March 1935) was a British political activist and World War I veteran who founded the British Fascisti, the first avowedly fascist movement to appear in British politics.

Lintorn-Orman was essentially a Tory by inclination but was driven by a strong anti-communism and attached herself to fascism largely because of her admiration for Benito Mussolini and what she saw as his action-based style of politics.

Lintorn-Orman was among the few girls seeking entry into scouting organizations; along with her friend Nesta Maude, in 1908, Lintorn-Orman had registered as a Scout troop, using initials rather than forenames.

Lintorn-Orman died of an alcohol-related illness at the age of 40 on 10 March 1935 at Santa Brigida, Las Palmas, in the Canary Islands. By then her organisation was all but defunct. She was buried at the English Cemetery in Las Palmas.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/...with-knobs-on/

She drifted without much direction, began drinking heavily, and began to abuse drugs. Eventually, she moved to a dairy farm in Somerset, but she missed active duty with a physical pain and kept her connection to those years by cropping her hair daringly short, wearing shirts and ties, and displaying her medals proudly on the peaked lapels of her jackets. Contemporaries found her androgyny highly odd; the phrase mannish woman was used frequently. Not that Lintorn-Orman much cared about the judgments of the mainstream. To her, civilian life seemed agonizingly dull, both predictable and aimless; a continuous, stretchless yawn.  For five years she waited for a beginning or an end. 

Reminds me of her:

"Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex."
-- Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto

I prefer 'corrupting' the male sex myself. Destroying is a bit much.

You've heard of shower thoughts now get ready for... Garden thoughts:

It was Mussolini who offered the chance for reinvention. In October 1922, he was invited to form a government by King Victor Emmanuel III, effectively ending Italy's experiment with democracy. Seven months later Lintorn-Orman formed her own fascist movement, inspired not just by Il Duce's audacity but an unusual epiphany. As she always told it, she was digging her garden in the spring of 1923 when the realization hit her that Britain was being ruined by foreigners and communists who could only be stopped by the decisive actions of brave patriots prepared to descry the shibboleths of liberal democracy. On the spot, she began the British Fascisti, an ultraconservative paramilitary organization that saw itself as a sort of middle-England minutemen.

It's a hell of a thing to just think about while you're doing some gardening (I feel like she failed the assignment.)

This is less cool than both Poison Ivy, and the androgynous humanoid plant elves I had many sexual fantasies/wrote about as a teenager who were loosely based on Poison Ivy.

I bet that's why I'm so well adjusted now.

I like cacti now - not sexually. Ouch.

The British Fascisti afforded Lintorn-Orman some control over a world in which she felt a powerless misfit, punished by the fact of her sex and her unconventionality. Indeed, she was one of a number of British women who came to this early incarnation of fascism in part because of a sense of self that could be neither expunged nor accepted by polite society. .

Astrology could have saved her. (not really hence this entire post. But she is kind of boring occult wise.)

Valerie Arkell-Smith, born in the same year as Lintorn-Orman, also served in the war, signing up for the Voluntary Aid Detachment in 1914. In 1926, she joined the National Fascisti, a splinter group of Lintorn-Orman's organization, but did so as a man. Arkell-Smith, as she was, had been a mother of two young children until 1923, the year she left the man she was living with and married Elfrida Haward under the new identity of Colonel Victor Barker. In its invective against complacent elites, and its veneration of the unthinkable and the unspeakable, this radical new creed--yet to accrete the horrors of the thirties and forties--offered the hope of refuge to at least some of those on the fringes

You mean he was a trans guy right?

Victor Barker, born Lillias Irma Valerie Barker (27 August 1895 - 18 February 1960) and called Valerie Arkell-Smith after marriage and who also went by the pseudonyms John Hill and Geoffrey Norton, was a transgender man who is notable for having married a woman. He was an officer of the National Fascisti, as well as a bankrupt and a convicted criminal.

In Female Masculinity (1998), Jack Halberstam writes that Barker represented "the beginning of the emergence of a transsexual identity."[14]

Not really.

The fascism-lite approach meant that within a couple of years of its founding, the British Fascists began to be outflanked by other fascist organizations, especially the one run by Arthur Leese, an ideological anti-Semite who lambasted just about every other British extremist for not being adequately exercised about the international Jewish conspiracy. [...] Trenchantly xenophobic though she may have been, Lintorn-Orman could never out-fascist a thoroughbred crackpot like Leese, who explicitly advocated [..]

Leese had been an early member of the BF, but quickly became disillusioned with its tepidness; "conservatism with knobs on," to use his words. He was also one of its many members who criticized Lintorn-Orman for being chaotic, vacillating, and divisive. From the testimony of other members, it does seem that she had a rare ability to rub people the wrong way, and was the sort of impassioned politico who could start a stand-up row alone in the confession booth. But the same could easily be said of Leese, and in a man they may well have been qualities he admired. What probably underpinned his dislike of Lintorn-Orman was her commitment to protecting female participation in the leadership of the organization she created and bankrolled. The BF had female-only paramilitary units, and to encourage the involvement of mothers it created the Fascist Children's Club. At one of the club's Christmas parties, Lintorn-Orman dressed up as Father Christmas, dispensed presents, and bounced toddlers on her knee. The BF also had several women on its executive committee who ensured their voices were heard. Around the time of the General Strike in 1926, a proposal was tabled to integrate the BF with another far-right group in order to combine resources and to more effectively act against the trade unions. But Lintorn-Orman and the other women at the top of the BF voted it down. They were determined not to lose the BF's independence and with it a place of prominence for women in the nation?s burgeoning fascist movement.

I see these same kind of gender arguments from the far right on social media.

None of which is to say that she should be raised up as a feminist pathbreaker. As the historian Julie Gottlieb has argued, her cause was to earn women the right to serve the state, rather than to secure full civil and voting rights. It may be that Lintorn-Orman, a woman frequently referred to as a "fascist feminist," falls short of either designation, although several other women of her generation could lay claim to both. Mary Richardson, a suffragette best remembered for defacing Velasquez's Rokeby Venus during a "Votes for Women" protest in 1914, became one of Mosley's Blackshirts in the thirties, as did her friend, the Hitlerian fanatic Mary Allen, who traveled Europe investigating the workings of fascist regimes.

Of course you did.

It's important to note she didn't just deface it she stabbed it several times.

If a writer came up with that I would think it was a great example of symbolism or something.

Oh this happened at the Victoria and Albert museum. Edit: Oh no the national gallery I think the other museum was worried about attacks too though so some link I was reading mentioned that. I actually went there again recently. In the theatre and peformance section they had a bunch of PJ Harvey stuff (among other stuff) like notes from one of her albums and a dress she wore for the cover art of White Chalk. Oh one of them there are a few.

and (I've said this before) there's a cactus on the piano (also this is another one of those dresses):



(I know that's not her piano lol but yeah.)

Twenty years earlier, Allen and her lesbian partner had overseen Britain's first division of female police officers, and before that had been active members of Emmeline Pankhurst's Women's Social and Political Union. "I was first attracted to the Blackshirts," she explained, "because I saw in them the courage, the action, the loyalty, the gift of service, the ability to serve which I had known in the suffragette movement." She also admired the fascists' use of political violence, something the suffragettes had employed to protect themselves against assaults from men. Seeing that "the Blackshirts were attacked for no visible cause or reason," Allen wrote of her decision to join the party, "I admired them the more when they hit back, and hit hard."

But fascists generally love war. After all:

War is to man what maternity is to a woman. - Mussolini

I'm non-binary.

Found some other site talking about her and a few others:

https://indianatseresin.wordpress.co...n-terf-island/

Mary Sophia Allen--easily my least favorite of these lesbian fascists--was another militant suffragette whose feminist politics, beyond the vote, were entirely limited to extinguishing prostitution and so-called "white slavery" (work that is a direct antecedent of the contemporary anti-trafficking movement). Following enthusiastic participation in WWI, Allen returned home and began LARPing as a police officer, wearing a Metropolitan Police uniform and engaging in aggressive unpaid surveillance of communists. During the 1930s she met Mussolini and Hitler (with whom she discussed the issue of "women police"), and in 1939 joined Oswald Moseley's British Union of Fascists. Known as Robert to friends, Allen's life is documented in a three-volume autobiography, The Pioneering Policewoman, A Woman at the Crossroads, and Lady in Blue.

Was she the one who stabbed the painting? Oh no I see that was her friend.

LARPing as a police officer xD

"I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs. Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history. Justice is an element of beauty as much as colour and outline on canvas [?]"

I won't pretend there haven't been times in my life when I, too, might have been tempted to commit aesthetic terrorism on behalf of a woman I considered to be "the most beautiful character in modern history." But that's only part of the story: Richardson later explained, in radio interviews decades after the event, that she couldn't stand that men "gawped" at the painting and that she "thought it sensuous."

No shit.

But to me, Richardson's attack evokes a quite different political tradition. Examining the damage, it's hard not to notice that every single one of her blows landed directly on Venus' body:

Looking at this image, I think about the argument, commonly made by SWERFs, that sex work, porn, and even the visual presence of nude women in general is a kind of symbolic violence against civilian women--indeed, that it is the primary form of violence sex work engenders.

In a book that features the word "lesbian" only once (in a footnote), it is hard not to read the extremely vague phrase "her preference for women in uniform"--which could refer to transmasculine inclinations, lesbian eroticism, or a general fervor for patriotic conformity--as deliberate obscuration. Nonetheless, the image conjured is as clear and painful as it needs to be: a person whose existence was so restricted and whose choices were so misguided that one of the few places they felt able to express their gender identity was a Fascist Children's Club Christmas party.

Despite an insightful and still-expanding body of thought on the question, I still think we haven't fully resolved why UK feminism is so transphobic and (at times) so fascistic. Personally I suspect that the answer partly lies in a distinctly British aversion to pleasure, freedom, and self-actualization. The commitment to misery, to being a "bloody difficult woman," is one of the main affective drives of the stubborn British insistence on an anti-trans and anti-sex work position even as the rest of the world moves on. At the same time, the historical roots of fascistic feminism are still, it seems, underexplored. As much as the "gender critical" movement is primarily driven by straight women, the involvement of lesbians is a sad reality, and TERF ideology is significantly grounded in a misguided saviour complex regarding butch/lesbian identities. Recuperating lesbian fascism might seem like a weird impulse, but it's a history that, in all its bitterness, might help us better understand this sinister landscape we're in.

'The rest of the world' seems like an overstatement. Maybe the rest of the West (outside of the more conservative US states.)

*I just want to add quickly that in talking about "lesbian fascism," I don't want to definitively claim these figures were lesbian rather than trans. Part of what I'm trying to show is that the nonconsensual imposition of the category of womanhood--which seems to have been unwanted in at least some of these figures' lives--appears to have been one of the driving forces behind their turn toward fascist ideology. Although they may have called themselves women (it's striking that the words "woman" or "lady" appear in the title of every single volume of Allen?s autobiography), there is no doubt that Lintorn-Orman and Allen also occupy a complex position within trans history.

I don't think what they wrote really has enough evidence to suggest that's what they were tying to show or that they did. At most they just revealed a bunch of them were ambiguously [BEEP] (which is obvious from everything else written about these figures.) It's certainly possible because tons of fascists are repressing something. Even then though, there was a trans guy in their party anyway.

It's notable that Gluck who was Jewish, and like Lintorn-Orman also from a wealthy family, and lived in the UK during a similar period of time (they were born in the same year,) managed to find other stuff to do:

Gluck (born Hannah Gluckstein; 13 August 1895 -- 10 January 1978) was a British painter, who rejected any forename or honorific (such as "Miss" or "Mr"), also using the names Peter and Hig. Gluck joined the Lamorna artists' colony near Penzance, and was noted for portraits and floral paintings, as well as a new design of picture-frame. Gluck's relationships with a number of women included one with Nesta Obermer: the artist's joint self-portrait with Obermer (Medallion) is viewed as an iconic lesbian statement.

In the artistic community of Lamorna, Gluck began to adopt a masculine appearance and to defy fashion and gender norms.[1] In 1916, Alfred Munnings painted Gluck smoking a pipe.[1] Gluck insisted on being known only by that mononym, "no prefix, suffix, or quotes",[6] and when an art society of which Gluck was vice president identified Gluck as "Miss Gluck" on its letterhead, Gluck resigned. In 1923 Romaine Brooks painted Gluck as Peter, a Young English Girl.[1] Gluck identified with no artistic school or movement and showed work only in solo exhibitions.

In the 1950s, Gluck became dissatisfied with the paints available for artists and began a "paint war" to improve their quality. Gluck felt that some paints were grainy in consistency, or looked 'dead' on the canvas. Gluck also said that some paints changed their apparent colour according to the direction of the brushstroke, and that some took too long to dry.

Ultimately, Gluck persuaded the British Standards Institution to create a new standard for oil paints. However, the campaign consumed Gluck's time and energy to the exclusion of painting for more than a decade. During this time, Gluck and Edith acquired their second home at Dolphin Cottage, in Lamorna.[12]

"You have two wolves inside of you." Etc.

The story of the Two Wolves is a memetic legend of unknown origin, commonly attributed to Cherokee or other indigenous American peoples in popular retelling. The legend is usually framed as a grandfather or elder passing wisdom to a young listener; the elder describes a battle between two wolves within one?s self, using the battle as a metaphor for inner conflict. When the listener asks which wolf wins, the grandfather answers "whichever one you feed".

While many variations of the story exist (replacing wolves with dogs, changing the nature of the conflict, etc.) the usual conflict uses imagery of white versus black and good versus evil. As its origins cannot be credibly traced to authentic indigenous sources, the "Two Wolves" story is considered an example of fakelore.

You've heard of fakenews now get ready for fakelore. It's still true though.





"Other Ron" is one of my favourite characters on the show lol and it's made even better by how he just kind of exists and that pisses off Ron. He should have had more scenes.

You can tell the actor is amused during the part where he brings up astrological signs too lol.

This is also why I shitpost that Jesus and Satan are the same character.

I watched this film or parts of it I think as a child and this is 100% the only thing I remember and it's stuck in my head ever since:



I don't even remember what it's about:

Kelly's Heroes is a 1970 World War II comedy drama heist film, directed by Brian G. Hutton, about a motley crew of American GIs who go AWOL in order to rob a French bank, located behind German lines, of its stored Nazi gold bars.

The film stars Clint Eastwood and Telly Savalas, and co-stars Don Rickles, Carroll O'Connor, and Donald Sutherland providing the comic absurdity, with secondary, comedic roles by Harry Dean Stanton, Gavin MacLeod, Karl-Otto Alberty, and Stuart Margolin. The screenplay was written by British film and television writer Troy Kennedy Martin. The film was a US-Yugoslav co-production, filmed mainly in the Croatian village of Vi?inada on the Istria peninsula.

OK. Makes sense.

I'm also talking about fascism a lot here because it's the most common example. Also many buddhists are conservative etc as well in the first place though he said his dad was progressive.

Though it sounds like that guy's dad's story is more boring than that and more because he became unemployed.

All unemployed people suffer from anomie of some kind (same with most self employed people at least if they work online,) and also external judgement but when you suddenly lose your job you don't have any antibodies at all because you were previously following the rules/mainstream ideology/life plan etc and you were never forced to gradually build an identity seperate to that. The timing of it being during covid which was a particularly insane moment on social media would have made it worse. Obviously personality factors in too.

It's funny because I started a YouTube channel during covid (nothing to do with politics,) which was one of the few positive developments I'd had since I left uni.

[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?