site banner
PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   3327 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 17, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

6
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

So I've been logging my vehicle trips to plan for a new car. Turns out 90% of them are 2-4 mile hops on 20-35mph roads, and it also turns out there's a federal category of "low speed vehicle" or "neighborhood electric vehicle" that would cover most of my mileage, allowing me to buy an old pickup for the rest of it.

How silly is this? I'm really tempted to build one myself, because I could do it from an old golf cart frame and wire the battery/charger unit to provide backup power to my house...

My school club in grade school actually built our own electric carts for parades, so I've even got relevant experience lol.

Is this how most golf carts are registered?

Sounds like a good idea to me. Better than a bike for cargo, and maybe you’d dodge the stigma of a “DUI guy.” How’s the climate where you live? Is A/C optional?

Most golf carts don't have the little extras required (seat belts, mirrors, etc), but many of the more expensive "campus security vehicles" are road legal, like the ones Google uses.

Funny anecdote actually: my college made it very clear that the new gold-plated camp sec golf carts hit the dollar threshold for Grand Theft Auto if you, say, got shitfaced and stole one to do donuts on the baseball diamond.
They were the road-legal upgrade package so they could use the public side roads instead of being limited to campus paths.

As for climate, I'd want some zip-up canvas doors or something to keep the winter rain off, and probably need to build a garage + heated batt box for charging lithium batteries in cold weather.

I recently spoke to a cute med student on the dating apps, same med school as my younger brother.

She tells me she knows my brother. I mean, who doesn't? He's a looker, all the girls and a good quarter of the guys want to know him, in the biblical sense, but she wasn't so crass. All good.

She she says she knows my dad. Okay.. But I've heard worse.

She goes on to say that not only are our parents colleagues, they're from the same med school. What a coincidence!

I ask my brother about her. You know, due diligence. He gives me a look, and tells me to keep my filthy paws off her if I know what's good for me. Huh. That's new. I swear he's never had that particular reaction before, and I wanted to know why, but he just shook his head, asked me to confirm her surname, and wandered off.

Then she says that hey, your dad was visiting our place just a month or so back, how's he doing? Quite well, thank you for asking. What field of medicine are your parents in? Gynecologists themselves?

I matched into psychiatry. Then I found out, after a very reasonable amount of flirting, that I had matched with my psychiatrist's daughter on a dating app. I told her that I had literally called him a month back to share the good news. The former, the latter was nothing but bad.

My dad delivered her by c-sec. He does that to a lot of people, it's not a very exclusive club, after all, how could it be, when I'm a member?

My fucking brother, he was laughing his ass off in the next room, the walls, while thick, weren't nearly enough to hide the chortles or my beet red face. Then the asshole goes on to tell my parents about her, and I limp back home from work, only to have my dad ask me if I want to marry her.

I chuckle and throw my employee ID card somewhere it won't be missed. Then I take a good look. He's not joking. This is the opposite of good, but what am I good at except brushing off commitment?

No? Then stop fucking around, SMH (he's also shaking his head, and I mine). She's a Good Girl™, studious, from a respectable family. You want to get married? I can call her dad right now. He's not kidding either. I thought I was dead inside, but apparently it's always possible to make room for desert and to make what's already dead roll over and die again.

I assure him that as someone about to move countries and stay in Scotland for 3 years and change, marrying an Indian med student only halfway through her course is the ABSOLUTE LAST THING I want to be doing.

Ah, but they're well off enough, and so are we. We could fly her out every six months or so to see you.

-_-

My mom was in the room and giggling her ass off. Thank you for the moral support mom.

I tell my dad that I don't think a healthy marriage involves the newly weds living a continent away, seeing each other every blue moon. He doesn't seem all that fussed, and I realized that roughly summed up the first few years of his marriage, given how he was on the sigma grindset. I suppose there's a reason they had their honeymoon when I was three years old. No, I tell him, given that if there's ever going to be a shotgun wedding, her dad will be the one wielding one, only to keep me at bay. He's my fucking shrink, he knows things. He'd need a shrink himself if he let me anywhere near his cute and nerdy daughter, and I'm not licensed yet.

At this point, my mom asks me if I care to examine the latest batch of single ladies lovingly handpicked out for me by my aunt in London. I've well and truly had enough, I stomp out of there with steam, tinted pink with dying brain tissue, hissing out of my ears.

My life is a farce. Joke's on me. So are the drinks, but only because I'm going to be downing a lot of them.

I see absolutely nothing wrong with any of this. Go get yourself a wife, I highly recommend it.

(I don't know if you knew this, but with a wife, you can get babies, and babies are pretty great, especially when they're yours).

She sounds like a catch.

On one hand, the leverage your close family and personal connections you have with this young woman is a little disconcerting. On the other hand, you're hitting it off and you seem to both like each other.

I understand your worry and considerations, but long distance is doable if you are both looking for a long term relationship. My fiancée and I did long distance for a long time (over 5 years!) before I got myself in order and moved to be closer to her. I regret nothing, and we remained committed to each other for the entire time even if we couldn't see each other more than once every few months.

Now, this forum would probably press the statistical improbability of this being successful, but I laugh at the face of statistics. Be the outliar!

Life is short, go for it!

On one hand, the leverage your close family and personal connections you have with this young woman is a little disconcerting. On the other hand, you're hitting it off and you seem to both like each other.

Please don't assume that she's going to be forced into a marriage with me against her wishes. At most, my dad could ask her dad if he'd be okay with it, and have it taken seriously, including being presented to her for her consideration. But if she said no, I'm confident they'd respect her wishes.

I'm hardly a bad catch, and we evidently saw something in each other when we matched, so I have no idea how she'd react. I just don't consider myself remotely ready.

I applaud your ability to make an LDR work, but I sincerely doubt they're for me. As it stands, I'm giving myself like 3 to 5 years to find someone on my own terms before I feel tempted to lean back on such options.

Sorry, I never meant to insinuate that you'd considering you flex your familial connections to force someone into a decision (I'll admit I'm not too familiar with arranged marriages). I'm glad it sounds everyone would have a level head about the whole situation.

I understand your fear of marriage, especially one with so little time to figure out if you really have a connection and are worried about the feasibility of a relationship working over long distance. Are you worried that you'll find greener grass? Or is it your internal monologue when you see women?

I guess the question I would have is, what the hell are you waiting for, and what are you afraid of missing?

The hardest part is, given your situation, that chances are one of you will have to give up or compromise your career for the other to some extent. That will be one of those things that can be very difficult for couples to navigate, but it's doable if both people are willing to work for each other instead of their onw goals and is an inevitable part of almost every relationship.

I understand your fear of marriage, especially one with so little time to figure out if you really have a connection and are worried about the feasibility of a relationship working over long distance.

I'm not afraid of marriage. I easily see myself happily married, but after a modest number of years, spent mostly in unchecked hedonism. If, in the middle, I did find another person I could genuinely see myself settling down with, I'd have few qualms about cutting that phase of my life short.

Are you worried that you'll find greener grass? Or is it your internal monologue when you see women?

I'd prefer grass that's just on my side of a very wide field really. It makes mowing the lawn significantly easier, all the myriad acts of love and general maintenance that makes a relationship work are eased through proximity. I can't go so far as to say that LDRs are impossible, I know plenty of existence proofs out there, not just you, but I expect them to fail far more often than not, when the number of years till you see each other again on a regular basis can be as many as 4 or more.

From a more practical perspective, I'd prefer to marry a woman who's already settled into her career and supplementing our income.

The hardest part is, given your situation, that chances are one of you will have to give up or compromise your career for the other to some extent. That will be one of those things that can be very difficult for couples to navigate, but it's doable if both people are willing to work for each other instead of their onw goals and is an inevitable part of almost every relationship.

I've done that before, to my detriment, and it was wasted in the end, both the time and the money.

I'm in the UK for a minimum of 3 years. I could see 5 being ideal, since that's how long it would take to get Indefinite Leave to Remain. 6? Then I'd be a full consultant by UK standards (a mere 3 is enough for the majority of the globe), and that's also how long it would take for full citizenship.

After that? I'm going where the money and the lifestyle is. If avenues closed to me right now open up, it could well be the US, or maybe Australia. If they remain shut, I'll likely make a great deal more money in the Middle East, not that I want to live there for anything but the money.

I'm not entirely averse to settling down in the UK, especially with a partner who makes a comparable sum, but it's plan B for now. Maybe even C.

He's my fucking shrink, he knows things. He'd need a shrink himself if he let me anywhere near his cute and nerdy daughter, and I'm not licensed yet

He has seen into the abyss and with that you are still a viable candidate. That speaks about both the alternatives he is aware of and likely his calculus of what the baseline mental state of the educated Indian male of your social stature. If his daughter is hot go for it, and rub it in your brothers face that you overcame adversity.

my mom asks me if I care to examine the latest batch of single ladies lovingly handpicked out for me by my aunt in London.

Having spent more time examining the London offerings, I would say that if the girls are below 27 it is ok to see. Barely out of university so they haven't had time to adjust their own presentation to match local white standards, old enough to not be blind waifs ignorant of basic functions, amenable enough to listen to their mothers and will get scolded by their own parents if they go against the man. Finding white girls to date in Scotland is all well and good, but do recall my earlier points about mass distribution curves, and also be wary of their extremely low tolerance of UV radiation.

He has seen into the abyss and with that you are still a viable candidate. That speaks about both the alternatives he is aware of and likely his calculus of what the baseline mental state of the educated Indian male of your social stature. If his daughter is hot go for it, and rub it in your brothers face that you overcame adversity.

To the best of my knowledge, her dad doesn't know, and I'm immensely grateful. I asked her if he'd ever mentioned me as a patient, and was suitably impressed that he'd never brought it up at all, not even when my dad was around. A far more respectable psychiatrist than I am (even when I do finish my degree), he seems to take client confidentiality seriously while I just file off the serial numbers enough not to get into trouble with my governing body.

I'd have preferred to keep my parents blissfully ignorant, but my brother had other ideas. The sheer ingratitude, when I was the one taking Ritalin to coax and prod him through his finals? (Said Ritalin prescribed by the girl's dad. Sigh.)

Eh, while I'd be lying if I said I didn't think with my dick, it only holds a rotating seat in the Insecurity Council, though of course wielding a veto. But right now, marry a med student with 3 years to go who would then have to worry about her own UK licensing exams? Bruh. I can flex on my own brother in other ways, not that I don't love the cheeky little shit.

If I had to guess, I do think her dad would be open to the suggestion. I haven't really done anything awful, he just happens to know I was pretty depressed at one point and have ADHD. No real skeletons in my closet, just the overflow of my mom's sarees.

Besides, it's rare for girls to get married off while still med students. The only odd case or three I can recall, they were Muslim, from conservative backgrounds. Most Indian parents, the Hindu ones, at least, are kind enough to wait till you're out of med school before the real nagging about the pitter patter of little feet begins. They'd be happy enough to have an informal engagement, all the more so if the couple to be had genuine interest, but the formalities can wait.

Having spent more time examining the London offerings, I would say that if the girls are below 27 it is ok to see. Barely out of university so they haven't had time to adjust their own presentation to match local white standards, old enough to not be blind waifs ignorant of basic functions, amenable enough to listen to their mothers and will get scolded by their own parents if they go against the man. Finding white girls to date in Scotland is all well and good, but do recall my earlier points about mass distribution curves, and also be wary of their extremely low tolerance of UV radiation.

I'm listening. I'm learning. I even look at some of the girls sent my way, not that anyone has convinced me to take them seriously quite yet.

At least my long stint in Oncology means I can tell a melanoma when I see one! I bring a lot to the table 💪

You had me at cute. Do it.

You need to change your username my guy. It's far too easy to mistake that for asexual, and I might be a horny bastard but I'm not quite that far gone yet haha.

No way! Why should I change? They’re the ones who suck!

And the sound track kicks in so loud you can hear the long curly hair, "Wheeeen aaa maaaaaaan loooooves a womaaaan...

He has seen into the abyss and with that you are still a viable candidate. That speaks about both the alternatives he is aware of and likely his calculus of what the baseline mental state of the educated Indian male of your social stature. If his daughter is hot go for it, and rub it in your brothers face that you overcame adversity.

Absolutely. Reject modernity, embrace tradition, take the arranged-marriage-pill. Your family knows what's best for you @self_made_human, listen to them.

My life is a farce.

Tell you what, if ever you stumble into Southern Germany, the drinks will be on me and we can have a dick-measuring contest on whose life is more farcical.

Your family cares about you. Be glad.

Apart from all that, what is your family's opinion on you moving to Scotland?

I sense a tale waiting to be told. Sure, Germany is far too close for comfort for the British, ancestral memory and all that. I suppose you can subsidize the alcoholism and I'll get the sauerkraut. I think both of us could use the drink, if not the wiener.

Your family cares about you. Be glad.

Oh I certainly am touched, my family is great, not that it stops me from muttering about the way their care and concern manifests on occasion. I'm only mildly exasperated; I'm no lemon or old beater that I need an enthusiastic salesperson or a dozen trying to sell me off to the highest bidder, but eh, enough stress might bring about the male pattern baldness earlier than expected and it's always good to have a backup.

Apart from all that, what is your family's opinion on you moving to Scotland?

My parents never wanted me to move abroad, and were vocal about it. To them, an ideal ending would be me taking up my dad's reins as a surgeon, or at least marrying a woman just regaining her sanity after a gyne MS, so that his massive clientele and skills can be handed down to someone who needs them for more than writing the odd examination or two. Well, they've got my younger brother still in the oven, and while I doubt he's insane enough to take up gyne either, I'd bet decent money he'll be getting married off eventually, preferably to a surgeon. He's far more handsome, but simply doesn't give a single fuck about the fairer sex. Not gay either, he ignores the horny fucks sliding into his DMs, and those include one of his male professors from med school. I suppose he'll just shrug and bear it. I'm deeply jealous, that's a level of sanity that I can never aspire to.

But that's all the ill I can speak about my parents. They've been supportive of my own ambitions, even if it means I'm flying the coop. The worst they've done is occasionally argue and try and dangle carrots before me, never the stick. They have valid arguments, both emotional and practical, but so do I. I don't think I'd ever be happy in India, I fit in much better abroad.

Right now, they're feeling the same melancholic, bittersweet happiness that I do. Parting is such sweet sorrow, but they're proud that their son is getting around to adding more alphabet soup behind his name, and a degree in the UK still gets their peers nodding appreciatively, so they can't complain. A postgrad degree is what everyone is dying to acquire post MBBS, while doctors might seem interchangeable to a layman beyond knowing their age and specialization, the lack of the latter doesn't get you very far in the eyes of your peers or your career.

I certainly wouldn't be getting so many marriage offers if I hadn't proven that I have some degree of academic competence, at least not from the parents of other doctors, though that's partly because until you've got that locked in, the rest of your life looks an interminable grind getting there.

Cheers to you, not that I can drink on duty. I can use a continental vacation at some point, and a beer, dearly.

How does a non-binary samurai kill their enemies?

They/them

In Northern Ireland that punchline would be..uhh interesting. As we call that a stroke. Hence why Londonderry/Derry (Londonderry if you are Protestant, Derry if you are Catholic) is nicknamed Stroke city.

Wait, do you pronounce the punctuation?

I’ve never heard anybody say anything but “theythem”. Sample size is pretty damn small, though.

I don't, but I also don't pronounce periods and slashes in URLs.

Yes.

ChatGPT has gotten a lot better at finding me studies about topics. It is giving me actual, relevant studies, whereas it used to literally provide fictitious study names. This is going to be so fun to play around with.

Which version are you using?

Just the chat.openai version. I think that’s 4.0?

The free version uses GPT-3.5, with some limited GPT-4o access. The paid version is entirely GPT-4.

When you read your culture’s “sacred texts” you might find metaphorical language involving lords, sowing, shepherds, servants. But these metaphors were not sacred or otherworldly when they were written. They were everyday things common to everyone, the building blocks of a person’s cognition. Everyone dealt with lords and knew how shepherds worked etc. Were these religions penned today, the metaphors they would use would involve phones, recharging, guns, internet access, and homework, as these are the new cognitive blocks common to mankind. “The Lord comes with a sword of justice” is fantastical to us, but the modern equivalent would be “the President and his congress of angels comes with an assault rifle of justice”.

Like that George Carlin bit, that if Jesus was born 40 years ago in the US, Christians would be wearing tiny electric chairs around their necks.

We're already there.

A lot has been said about QAnon, but it is definitely religious in nature: parables, eschatology, cryptic sacred text, prophecy involving Trump triumphing in the last days… indeed that it is called “Q” anon always made me think this was conscious: academic scholars believe that the gospel was preceded by a “Q” document of sayings, which were then disseminated and interpreted by the anon posters apostles

My favorite part of that image is the eagle firing a drum mag smg.

Not the Amy Coney Barrett .50?

That is an AA-12 fully automatic 12 gauge shotgun, actually.

The laser-guided bomb of justice you mean.

Also, are these my culture's sacred text? I feel the only text I consider somehow sacred are Nick Land's writing and I have thankfully read only very few of them, thus preserving the little I have of my sanity.

I've never felt kinship with my nation or ethnic group. The only group I've ever felt I belonged to was my boy scout troop, before the good years there ended.

They recruited a couple untrustworthy people and I spent years scratching my head why we didn't kick the guy who would reply not instantly, like every other scout, but with a 300 ms delay. I didn't trust him from the start because of that and eventually that was proven right a couple years later.

They recruited a couple untrustworthy people and I spent years scratching my head why we didn't kick the guy who would reply not instantly, like every other scout, but with a 300 ms delay. I didn't trust him from the start because of that and eventually that was proven right a couple years later.

Can you speak more about this feature? Is it some indication of psychopathology?

It's an indication someone is thinking before speaking. Unless you give someone an actual question that requires thinking through, it's very unusual to be like that and it instantly makes me suspicious.

The guy did it constantly.

Maybe he was just slow?

He wasn't mentally retarded or incompetent.

(I don't have the heart to kick my son out of my home office, all of this is written in jest)

We all know that Paw Patrol is libertarian propaganda for kids, it's even on Wikipedia: the heroes of the day are the privatized emergency services, every single time, while elected officials are not.

But what I've realized is that it's also a different kind of propaganda. Mayor Goodway is a proud woman of color, and she's so profoundly incompetent that she couldn't have won a fair election against literally anyone unless the party nominated her as a token diversity candidate and let her run practically unopposed. Yes, Mayor Humdinger of Foggy Bottom is an evil old white male, but he is at least competent enough to manage his own team of cat minions and come up with underhanded schemes. Goodway in comparison is worse than useless. Is the show teaching the kids that women of color are incompetent figureheads at best?

The problem with a lot of material targeted at kids is how sanitized it all is. Whether it's superheroes or robot-animals or what not, the solution is always some magic or techno-magic, never an actual practical skill that kid-behaving-like-adults would develop.

You'll never learn how to gut a fish or dress a deer by reading an 'adventure in the woods' type of book. You'll never learn how to make bombs or makeshift weapons or how to bribe an official. You can watch 1000s of hours of pirate cartoons and barely learn any strategy or tactics.

This is why Blippi is the best. Actually educational and teaches really good things like industrial processes and heavy engineering, all in a positive learning environment and adult respect for kids. Don't be surprised if the daddy kink of 20 year old girls in 10 years time involved orange glasses and suspenders.

Russian Smeshariki(that were for some reason renamed kikoriki in English release) are mainly story focused in the main series, but I think at least a third of russian-speaking zoomers know what mortgage, string theory or DNA is from one of the spin-offs.

Some of them have also wondered why the penguinball speaks with a German accent and is a talented scientist.

After watching Blippi for 2 minutes I'll never look at the Aged Wheels channel the same again, he's like Blippi's fatter and less flamboyant cousin.

In the two minutes of Paw Patrol footage I watched in response to this comment, it feels more like propaganda for Apple or Tesla than anything. Every single problem no matter how minor was solved by deploying a neat technological gadget.

Its a toy selling cartoon. A lot of the architectural and vehicle design decisions look like they were made to be scaled down into tiny model versions. Main example is the giant outdoor slide on the paw patrol tower.

All right, all right, I'll quit lurking and register lol.

Anyhow, while it's true that Goodway is ineffectual in virtually all her appearances, it's a kid show with kid (dog) heroes; adults being near-universally silly and unable to solve their own problems is a necessary plot element. Consider Captain Turbot and his French cousin, both white males - whenever they're on screen together, it's virtually guaranteed that they'll make a bunch of stupid decisions and end up needing rescue.

The media doesn’t seem to have an issue depicting women of color as incompetent leaders per se. Consider Abbott Elementary, which is probably the most successful network sitcom to come out of the US in recent years, set at an inner-city school in Philadelphia. The principal, a black woman, is depicted as fundamentally incompetent, lazy, poorly educated and self-serving, having obtained her position solely by blackmailing the district superintendent about an affair. The other teachers, white and black, constantly complain about her.

The show is written and created by a black woman. I think a lot of complaints about woke in media are fair, but the claim that PoC are never depicted negatively is not; most minority media creators do not seem to have issues portraying non-white people as venal, stupid, lazy and so on where it serves the story.

An example that immediately came to mind was Mindy Kaling's first role being writing and portraying Kelly Kapoor as a narcissist, egoist idiot mess.

What is this show and where can I buy the boxed set before it gets memory holed?

It is everywhere in kids stores. Small town mayor basically outsourced all civic functions to a kid and his dogs that have a variety of public services available 'on demand'. Child labor, animal exploitation, privatization of public services... all that is missing is guns drugs and prostitution, then it'll be true libertarian paradise.

It's not actually libertarian propaganda, it's a pretty crappy show that was built just to sell toys.

My kid was pretty into it for maybe 6 months and then even he thinks it's pretty lowbrow at this point.

It's probably the most beloved or second most beloved kids show today (running with Bluey).

So I've been watching X-Men '97 and started wondering what opinions here would be on how to deal with mutants if those kinds of powers started to show up in random people. Would you support registration? Something more serious? Nothing at all? Is it really ok to let someone with the destructive capabilities of a nuclear bomb just walk around, or board a plane, etc.?

…have you read Worm? I’d call it the definitive web fiction for superpowers.

For anyone who hasn’t—the setting has trauma-derived powers. Some small fraction of people are, upon having the worst day of their lives, handed a figurative gun. Depending on how poorly the next interaction goes, getting pressganged into the police is perhaps their best outcome.

Most Marvel-style laws would be unenforceable. A state monopoly on violence is right out. Plurality is possible, but slipping. Regions which can’t manage that devolve into warlordism and chaos.

Worm is the absolute best at working out what it would take to see lots of the standard superpower tropes. Why is there a central hero organization? How’d it end up looking like the Justice League instead of a military junta? How is there still a balance of power between criminals and the state? What’s Superman been doing all this time, and why is he in tights?

All these and more are addressed somewhere in this monstrosity of a story. It’s great.

It would depend on how many people get these powers, how powerful these powers are, and what are the mechanisms for getting these powers.

This post makes me really miss the Heroes TV show. The Boys kind of scratched that more gritty superhero show vibe but it's just become too overt in-your-face in its political stances, at least seasons 1 and 2 were more nuanced about it.

Also, obligatory SMBC Superman comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-13

So…Worm? You’ve probably already seen it, but if not, you’re in luck.

I haven't but my goodness nearly 1.6 million words? Thanks for the recommendation.

You expressed interest in non-political or nuanced storytelling, in gritty superhero vibes, and in analysis of the consequences of superpowers' numbers/magnitude/mechanisms, for all of which you got a perfect recommendation. If you'd said you wanted brevity, on the other hand...

I don't think I'd be here if brevity was something really important to me lol.

The way I see it, if it's good and the more there is to consume, the better.

I read the whole thing in about a week, and then had a pretty significant narrative hangover by the end.

The recommendations you're getting are correct. It is an amazingly effective story.

Ohhh, you’re in for a treat. It’s so good. Best justifications for so many superpower tropes. And just viciously violent.

Well, I do write a hard scifi novel set in the wake of an abortive singularity where people start getting superpowers for Plot Reasons™, so I suppose I've given it some thought. Or at least I had governments and polities would react.

It depends on how dangerous said power is. For someone who is no more threat than a random dude with a knife, you really don't have to bother. When they're the modestly dangerous, thorough surveillance and mandatory psychiatric followup. If they're incredibly powerful, they're usually conscripted into the military. And if they're both powerful and act up, then time for their brain to be put in a jar, or tamper proofed (fail deadly) high explosives embedded in their occipital protuberance.

Anyone who falls in between, they get a full time slap drone assigned to them, a concept happily ripped off from Banks. Something constantly hovering over their shoulder, ready to call for backup if sedatives, neurotoxins, or a bullet fails.

Some powers, such as telepathy or mind control, are severely restricted on pain of death. Non-consensual mind control is a capital crime, at least if you're not on a leash by a state. Technomancers are absolutely not supposed to mess about with AGI, on pain of having their heads exploded.

Of course, some people are simply too powerful to be handled in such a manner, but the governments of the globe devote a great deal of effort in having contingencies for their contingencies, and if you get really out of hand they'll have someone teleport you into the sun, or maybe a black hole. Not that even that can put down the equivalent of Superman.

If you want a more in depth explanation, well, I guess I wrote the book on it? But you can achieve a lot by playing them off each other, and mostly normalizing the strict monitoring and regulation of the lot. Which is how I'd expect it would go down.

Non-consensual mind control is a capital crime, at least if you're not on a leash by a state.

So, uh, asking for a friend (that friend is the Culture War Thread)

What are your thoughts on social media and porn?

Porn? I think it's harmless, potentially mildly positive and at least net neutral. I've already discussed in the past how it's associated with decreased rates of sexual assault. Of course some dudes do get addicted, but the overwhelming majority just jerk off and move on.

Social media? Relatively robust link to anxiety and depression. Most like causation and not correlation.

Sadly, I consume both, though the latter only because women are spooked if you don't have an Instagram profile. That does diminish the porn consumption, though I did say I don't think it's bad for you.

women are spooked if you don't have an Instagram profile

Instagram specifically, these days?

But I get the spooking. I set up a Facebook account when it first came out, didn't find it interesting, and didn't think about it in connection to dating because I was in an LTR at the time; a few years later another (somewhat younger) girl I dated found that abandoned profile and seemed genuinely weirded out by my not having Friended every person in my life, like I had the profile of a serial killer. I hadn't realized that Facebook had succeeded in growing from "More pretentious Myspace ripoff" to "Indispensable credential of social proof" in just a few years. Back in the before times we had to wait for a new SO to introduce us to friends and family, but apparently now if a man doesn't at least have a sort of "pre-introductory portfolio" in that regard girls worry that they might get the "it puts the lotion on its skin" treatment.

I eventually met my wife on OkCupid, back when dating sites were new and weird, but also deep and suggestive of a more positive future. Then Match bought it out, and swiping-without-depth apps beat it out, and now if you start to type "dating las vegas" into Google then autocomplete will helpfully suggest "dating last chopper out of nam" instead.

I believe the cool kids are primarily on Snapchat, but insta hasn't turned into an old age home quite yet.

A large bit of it is that women love snooping on profiles. It helps them get a lay of the land, though it's not like guys don't do that, but that's for altogether different terrain.

Does the guy know how to dress? Has some semblance of a social life? Does he have anything interesting going on that isn't just drinking beer, playing football on a PS4 and so on? Useful things to know. While the utter absence of a social media presence isn't necessarily a deal breaker, it's a big deal to the kind of women who haunt dating apps. And what am I, if not obliging? And what are my two dogs, if not incredibly photogenic? All I have to do is stick my face in the frame and they'll do the heavy lifting.

I've already said that you were incredibly lucky to be using dating apps before they were turned into glorified gacha games, and that too, meeting someone you could spend the rest of your life with there. Well, it's been long enough since that was the case that the two of you must be having a nice, comfortable old time. Don't mind me, not jealous in the least.

Back in the before times we had to wait for a new SO to introduce us to friends and family, but apparently now if a man doesn't at least have a sort of "pre-introductory portfolio" in that regard girls worry that they might get the "it puts the lotion on its skin" treatment.

That sure stirred up some thoughts. In rough chronological order order:

  • Boy, am I glad to already be married...

and now if you start to type "dating las vegas" into Google then autocomplete will helpfully suggest "dating last chopper out of nam" instead.

Oh lol, I guess I'm not the only one.

  • We need a total and complete shutdown on America until we figure out what the hell is going on.

  • Butlerian Jihad when?

The scenario I find most difficult to solve is exactly mind control, since it's a crime that leaves no evidence. Further, just by the existence of such power, every actual criminal could start using "a psychic mind controlled me to do it" as a defense. I just don't see how society could continue to function. (Also, will be sure to add your novel to my backlog.)

I disagree that it leaves no evidence. Certainly not if you have a surveillance state with a panopticon, let alone if you have other mind readers, preferably sanctioned by the state, who can check for themselves.

That makes such accusations largely moot, because every psychic is being constantly monitored 24/7, and their capabilities and limitations noted, so the government would know they were fucking with you well before even you did.

Note that while this is a near future setting, I'm pretty sure that the sudden appearance of superpowers would absolutely remove any qualms nations today have about omnipresent surveillance.

I do write a hard scifi novel

Do you? I keep checking the page every other day, and keep getting disappointed.

Kidding. I genuinely enjoyed the novel so far, I'm grateful for each chapter. I thoroughly recommend it to everyone here.

The reviews crack me up each time I take a look. "Pretty cool" - 3.5 stars, on a webzone with rating system where in practice 5 stars means 'readable, MAYBE'.

This? After I wrote a whopping 2 chapters in as many months? 🤨

Life got in the way. Though for good reasons, like running myself ragged with immigration paperwork and NHS bureaucracy. Rest assured the fic is alive and kicking, with even more nuggets of psychiatric bullshit when I know better.

The reviews crack me up each time I take a look. "Pretty cool" - 3.5 stars, on a webzone with rating system where in practice 5 stars means 'readable, MAYBE'.

I know precisely the one you mean. Wow, good book! Eh, clicking far to the right is taxing.

Now good sir, in the amount of time it took you to write this comment, you could have left a glowing review right there yourself. Ignore if you already have, but as an incredibly niche novel, it could use all the ones it could get, especially from the odd person who enjoys it.

Life got in the way

Honestly, I'm impressed you manage to be so productive, considering all you mention.

you could have left a glowing review right there yourself

I did a while ago, recommended to a friend too. "I'll take a look" - never did, flaky bastard.

Honestly, I'm impressed you manage to be so productive, considering all you mention.

I write the most when I'm drowning in work and responsibilities, it's a pleasant form of procrastination. But in this case, I have a legit fire under my ass, I can't afford to fuck up the one good thing I've got going haha.

I did a while ago, recommended to a friend too. "I'll take a look" - never did, flaky bastard

Why, thank you. If I had a Patreon, I'd bump you up to cameo in novel tier, but since I don't, I'll just hand that to you for free. If you do actually want a character to show up, just let me know and I'll make it happen.

That’s why I’ve always thought that the X-Men was a bad metaphor for prejudice. Say what you will about any particular ethnic/social/sexual group, a single one of them can’t usually annihilate an entire city block unaided.

In some ways, that difference can make it a better metaphor, especially for conversations in the 1990s and early-00s. Questions like whether you can treat sexual minorities with additional caution because of an infectious disease (or even protect them from themselves, as defenders of the Cuban concentration camps sanatorios argue even today), or ethnicities with suspicion because a co-religionist drove a plane into a building are still relevant, even if they're not the central case. Rogue killing someone with a casual touch, or Cyclops blowing up a city block with a blink, are exaggerations, but there are answers to these questions that also answer all the closer ones.

I'm a fan of bringing up trans stuff and gun stuff... well, partly because it makes both sides very uncomfortable, but also because the question of whether a dick gun makes a rapist murderer drives a lot of disagreement. Not all, especially outside of the TERF border, but a decent amount. And one reasonable response is that ability alone does not make for a deadly act: it takes either decision or negligence.

It's just that this ended up not being where the broader progressive movement actually went. There had always been a fraction insistent that prejudgement was fine for even things far smaller than leveling an skyscraper, it was just being pointed the wrong direction, and they won. Once you've decided that the possibility was enough, you're pretty quickly going to find yourself just haggling over the price. At the risk of pointing to metafictional example:

Huntington's disease was a hereditary degenerative disease with cognitive and psychiatric symptoms, one of which was psychosis. Huntington's was seen in perhaps one in eight thousand people, and psychosis was seen in perhaps one in ten of those. If a randomly selected human of Superman's apparent age were to obtain Superman's pwoers, there would be in a one in eight thousand chance that they would both have Huntington's disease and the symptoms of psychosis, the result of which would probably be casualties that would dwarf the Great War by a large margin...

When these probabilities were multiplied together, the final very rough estimate was that Superman had a one in ten chance of bringing about a global scale human catastrophe of some kind in the next thirty years. Even if the odds had been one in a hundred, Lex would have taken a similarly extreme course of action.

Same in Dragon Age with mages as an example of a discriminated against/enslaved caste.

Yeah, Blockbuster's mutant power to collapse local property values was a little on the nose.

It might be one of the earliest examples of existing franchises cramming left wing politics in for critical acclaim and foundation funding at the cost of becoming incoherent. Supposedly the mutant adventures thing was floundering before they decided to become a civil rights comic.

It's also somewhat interesting that X-Men is very (US) liberal coded. In contrast to typical US liberal positions favoring collective safety over individual freedom (stronger support for lockdowns, gun control), X-Men is rather explicitly opposed to government infringement on the liberties of mutants to use their powers freely. Ideas like the Mutant Registration Act or mutant power suppressive collars are often cast in a strongly negative light. All while Cyclops sneezing hard enough to drop his glasses is more dangerous than any gun.

I think it’s fairly popular to think about evolutionary biology in these parts. Here’s a few things about food that come to my mind.

  1. The most fulfilling meals (to me but I think it’s common) are some combination of carb and meat. Hamburger, tacos, pasta, rice with various dishes. Why do humans have such a preference for mixed foods? Basically why do we cook instead of being equally satisfied with having a piece of meat and then some carbs later. All of human taste seems to be far more complex than what is necessary for encouraging me to eat the foods I need to be healthy.

  2. Why does my body have such a desire to store fat but when we look at potential mates we want the thin one. It seems like those preferences should be the same. Fatter mates would have more survivability in a famine. What’s good for my health should be good for the health of the person I want to have sex with. (Obviously being fat isn’t health maximizing in modern days but it was health maximizing in other environments).

I think the excessive fat storage is because your metabolism has been broken by industrialized food. If you were to repair it, your experience would be different.

No, it's because he eats too much.

Getting used to eating huge portions isn't the same as 'having your metabolism broken'.

Why do humans have such a preference for mixed foods?

Mixing different foods ensures a more balanced diet, providing essential nutrients, vitamins, antioxidants, fiber and minerals. Certain food combinations can enhance the nutritional value or bioavailability of individual ingredients. For example, pairing vitamin C-rich foods with iron-rich foods can increase iron absorption.

Also, there's probably a connection between salty/sweet/spicy foods and the abilities of (pure) sugar, salt and capsaicin to slow food spoilage by inhibiting bacterial growth.

Most carbs require some kind of processing for it to be edible. For grains, you have to grind it or boil it. Cooking can soften really tough pieces of meat to the point where you can chew and digest it. Cooking is probably what allowed humans to obtain enough calories to become, well humans instead of becoming just another low-intelligence primate. Things like salt and sugar are vital for biological function so we evolved to find those tastes pleasant, especially because they were so rare to find. So we evolved to find things that helped us survive taste better. Nowadays, we've gotten so good at extracting resources that many of these things that taste good are bad for us because we get way more than the body needs.

There really wouldn't be much, if any, "fat" people for our ancestors because our ancestors were much more active and food much more difficult to come by. Not only is procuring food labor intensive, but even basic home tasks such as making and washing clothes took a tremendous amount of energy. Bodies store fat because food was not something that was constantly available, especially during winter, but it wouldn't mean people were being fat to the level they are today. There is a theory that the reason Native Americans have such a high obesity rate is that since native Americans were not as reliant on agriculture, their bodies are better at storing fat for times of food scarcity compared to Europeans, where agriculture has been a part of their way of life for thousands of years.

There is also a social-cultural element of beauty, and there is a theory that plump women were considered beautiful by middle age Europeans. It could do with finding the upper class more attractive because it signals a higher social class rather than something that is purely physical based. It's like how more tanned skin is considered attractive in the West (because it's the rich that have time to go out to the beach and get a tan and the poor work low-level office or service jobs) while in the east lighter skin are considered more attractive (because much more of the poor work out in the field in the sun).

For 1, I'm skeptical about that. I think it's very common in the US at least due to the scientific and social influence of the I think 70s-era belief in the "food pyramid", that lots of carbs and some meat were the height of healthiness and all fats were bad. The perception and trend wears on even as we've discovered that that isn't really true and nutrition is far more complex. I think any feeling of fulfillment is more due to some combination of it being what people are used to and perception of social approval.

For 2, I think it's about the overall state of society, which means that perceptions of what is attractive are more malleable than most people think. If getting any food at all is expensive and hard work, then being fat signals that you are a high-status person who has access to plenty of food, therefore you are attractive, for both men and women. In our current society where food is incredibly plentiful and much of it is not great for your health, being fat is nothing special as far as status in society, and instead being thin is a better signal that you have plenty of resources and status, in the form of time and energy to find and purchase higher-quality food and eat it in measured quantities. It also tends to signal that you have the free time and energy to exercise for fun.

I feel like food and these questions are sort of like Pre-Keynes in economics. We did not have good explanations for the Depression at the time. And while Keynes I think got a lot wrong (I’ve read his books) he was also origional and got some conversations started on how to manage a modern nation state economy. Now after Bernanke’s central bank we can basically achieve the end of recessions (and inflation though woke got in the way of good policy in 2020-2022).

Nutrition feels like it’s in a place where we don’t even have great models or great explanatory text. It’s probably almost as important as economics.

On (2) it feels correct to me that attraction is more malleable. While people are saying men are more attracted to hourglasses and it does seem like the middle tier pin-up girl fits this; I would argue for the very rich/high status the preference would be for the 5’10 super model look. If the choice is between Giselle or peak Britney Spears the high status person will prefer Giselle. Though Bezos seems to have gone with the Spears type.

Now after Bernanke’s central bank we can basically achieve the end of recessions (and inflation

What? how?

The Fed learned how to operate at the 0 lower bound. The only thing that ended the 2008 expansion was Covid and that was a choice by policymakers to cause a recession. Without getting super long winded because the subject matter is a PhD thesis the evidence seems strong as we have gone thru a 14 year expansion which also included planning a short recession and rapid recovery.

Don't know much about economics (had to google "0 lower bound"). Got any reading suggestions for understanding what you mean by operating under that condition?

Maybe I worded it wrong. 0 as in the end of humanity so you can no longer rebuild. It’s a complete loss.

Even if you took a bet where 30 humans survived in probably 10-20k years they would have restarted civilization. Which is a small amount of time compared to the useful life of earth. SBF was willing to take bets of complete loss which means things can’t regrow.

I think you thought I was asking about a different comment of yours? I was referring to this comment:

The Fed learned how to operate at the 0 lower bound. The only thing that ended the 2008 expansion was Covid and that was a choice by policymakers to cause a recession. Without getting super long winded because the subject matter is a PhD thesis the evidence seems strong as we have gone thru a 14 year expansion which also included planning a short recession and rapid recovery.

The 0 lower bound is when interest rates hit zero. The Fed has traditionally eased or tightened monetary policy by changing interest rates.

They now have policy frameworks to use when they can no longer ease by cutting rates lower since rates are already 0.

but when we look at potential mates we want the thin one

Not the thin one. The curvy one..

Link goes to one of the most stunning examples of 'autism' out there, and it's making everyone from arch-hater 0hp Lovecraft to bog standard SJWs and boomers mad.

Wow, the statistics about penis length just straight up destroyed me mentally. I had gone my whole life thinking "14-15cm is average, I'm a bit above average so I don't have to worry about this nonsense."
Seeing women expect 20-22cm though... Wow, that is just brutal.

“Why are women so bad at judging distance?”

Gesture with thumb and forefinger.

“They’ve spent half their lives being told that this is six inches.”

One of the funnier episodes of my life where the funniest outcome didn't happen was when the class bully - well, he wasn't really bullying anyone as far as I know, he was just swaggering and an asshole - tried to make me insecure about my dick size. I had no idea and probably said as much. If only had I cared then. If only. That'd have been extremely funny.

Seeing women expect 20-22cm though... Wow, that is just brutal.

They really don't. They might say it but actually 20 cm, which is 8 inches is vanishingly rare.

20 cm is 99th percentile. Or 98th. They rarely see it unless they're extra promiscuous.

Also, that long a dick size can actually hurt a typical woman bc the guy might hit her cervix during athletic sex. And even tear it, requiring a visit to ER.

The horror stories of guys getting really insecure usually involve 4 inches and under.

The relevant tiktok video..

The message I took out of that was more like "no one can be truly completely satisfied", which just feels like common sense unless you're too stuck in a romantic's mentality.

I got into a debate with some fat acceptance types on Substack, who were arguing that dating fat people is "stigmatised" i.e. there are lots of people who find fat people very attractive and would very much like to date them, but choose not to because dating fat people is seen as low-status.

I thought this was, frankly, a load of hogwash: fat people have a harder time getting a date because, all things being equal, people find fat people less attractive. I was trying to find this exact article to illustrate my point - the body types that RealDolls are manufactured in are practically the ultimate revealed preference. But I couldn't for the life of me remember what the article was called.

There's some men who find fat people attractive - I mean, genuinely fat, not the fat but 'built like a brick shithouse' body type that is attractive to maybe half men even if the BMI is firmly in the 'overweight' range. (the girl in picture is actually obese, BMI wise, weighing 90 kg at 1.68m).

But it's a small amount of men, very small. Impossible to gauge how small really, as none of the porn databases are well marked. I believe it's even smaller than the % of homosexual men. Nevertheless, they exist.

I remember being stunned a decade ago seeing a guy bring his huge girlfriend or maybe wife to a cyclist restaurant right at the city limit. They drove there ofc. She was at least twice as heavy as he was and wearing tight fitting clothing.

/images/1716038666871458.webp

It cracks me up how chicks nowadays just instinctively turn to tilt their ass at the camera when one comes out.

Not sure if we can judge by her - she's been selling erotic, non nude photos for pocket money for years.

I remember being stunned a decade ago seeing a guy bring his huge girlfriend or maybe wife to a cyclist restaurant right at the city limit. They drove there ofc. She was at least twice as heavy as he was and wearing tight fitting clothing.

/images/1716038666871458.webp

She's very lucky not to have a fat face (or at least her makeup is extremely flattering).

She started out with a narrow face, though make up is doing some work. Although, it's possible she had fat remove from under the jaw. Women do that these days.

They're also apparently getting fat transfers into boobs, though that's very expensive compared to implants, and a bit riskier.

No argument here. I'm not saying that men who like big girls don't exist (the BBW category on PornHub exists for a reason), I just doubt that they exist in sufficient numbers to significantly move the needle on the rate of loneliness/singledom/inceldom among fat women. Even if dating fat women was effectively "destigmatized", I can't imagine this would have any more than a marginal impact.

Yeah… although I’m sure there’s a non-zero amount of men into the BBW or feeder fetish, most of men claiming they’re into “thicc” girls is just euphemistic cope for them being unable to pull slim chicks.

Lot of people are lying now, especially in the US, but if you look at the original link "slim" isn't what you'd describe the typical sexy ancient sculpture, nor the most popular images in large databases.

0HP is still doing his "she could lose weight" gag?

What's the gag?

He replies "she could lose some weight" or "you could lose some weight" to any picture of a woman he comes across, with the exception of actually anorexic or very thin ones where he'll say "you should gain some weight".

I'd say the only constant is that it makes women mad.

That link just highly autistically presents what any socially adjusted woman already knows, which is that men like big tits on a ‘slim thick’ hourglass shape with long hair.

I don’t think any straight women are unaware of this fact. That high fashion involves rail thin, very tall (for women) models doesn’t mean that the average woman believes that’s most attractive to men; they’re used because using women with more curves makes those curves, not the clothes, the immediate impression of the model on the runway, which defeats the point and distracts from the art, and because a substantial percentage of men involved in fashion are gay and so not looking to maximize sexiness. No woman buys a $4000 Saint Laurent dress over something slutty from fashion nova or shein because she thinks the former is going to make her more attractive to men.

When normal women are dressing to be attractive to men, say for a college Halloween party, they naturally employ almost all of the tools that the article’s author claims modern women don’t understand. The author also appears to believe that there’s a widespread issue with women who have a perfect body dieting to become unnecessarily skinny at the expense of their curves; there isn’t lol. Most women focused on staying rail thin for looks have square/plank/apple shaped bodies which he acknowledges only look good at very low body fat because accumulated weight goes to the belly rather than thighs, breasts or ass.

I have shared this exact article with my girlfriend years ago when she was having a bit of a crisis about her body and it was quite a revelation to her. Sample of one of course

I don’t think any straight women are unaware of this fact

It's not aimed at men.

Yeah it seems to be aimed at women which is why it’s strange, because most women know all this.

Yeah it seems to be aimed at women which is why it’s strange, because most women know all this.

I dunno how to tell you this without offending you but I think you're wrong and possibly living inside a bubble. There are a huge number of women around me who seem to legitimately have no idea what men actually want. I base this on their clothes, their makeup and their idea of what "fit/fat" means.
Their behaviour seems to be very much based on social/cultural cues rather than objective truth. And I've even had experiences where I very gently suggested something along the lines of "nono, you should do X instead" and got a very harsh lecture or hate-filled glare in return.

I think your mistake here is conflating straight women's goal of "trying to attract men" with "trying to maximally arouse men."

While I have various issues with that Aella Good At Sex/what-women-want blog series, one useful concept she established was the idea of "werewolfing" as a state of goal-driven, uncontrolled male arousal that many women find a little scary and unpleasant. A woman would have to live under a rock not to realize that men want big tits in the sense that they'll werewolf and pant and slaver over them; this is a literal cartoon meme. But most women are not sure how to channel that kind of raw animal attention to produce the social and romantic benefits they themselves might actually want, like having the guy attend to their needs, listen to their ideas, praise and admire them, stay intimate even after orgasm, etc. In some cases arousal actually seems to work against romance, in that men seem disproportionately likely to demean the intellectual capacity of extremely voluptuous women, something I'd love to see properly explained from the male end.

I suspect that when young women try to appear sexy in ways that seem puzzlingly suboptimal to straight dudes, a big part of this may be trying to refine or control the type and level of sexual attention they receive, trying to keep men interested enough to be solicitous and respectful, but not fully pushing them over into werewolf mode. If what you did was helpfully point out that they could evoke a bigger boner if they just [X], my guess is it was interpreted as "Since respectful and moderate male attention isn't a thing and women are only good for werewolfing over, here's what my inner werewolf would want." Frankly, I'd respond with a hate-filled glare too.

Is there any paper where women opine on male preferences ? I'm sure there is.

Yes, but no men take them seriously (and that is fair).

So we agree women are just clueless about male preferences, and likely to believe stuff such as that men find women like Kate Moss on average as sexually attractive as women of the type of say, Bellucci or Hayek ?

We agree that some women give bad and self-serving advice to men just like some men give bad and self-serving advice to women. Nevertheless, just like most men know implicitly that women prefer tall, handsome, successful men, most women know implicitly that men prefer slim thick women with big naturals. I’m unsure about the confusion.

I think you're typical minding. You're not a median woman, very far from it, furthermore you're old enough to have used your vastly superior mental tools to get a whole lot of experience.

What does a median 18-22 woman know about these things? Women are conformist, they 'read the room'. If media and society keep putting out a message "being chubby is bad etc" a young woman might have spent years as deluded about male preferences as some guys are deluded about female ones (the so called 'nice guy' ). Sure that's not very applicable now with the obesity epidemic, nevertheless..

Also, there's a whole bunch of research that found women don't really know what men want, body shape wise.

Unless my memory is playing tricks on me, yes.

And on the internets!!!

My attempts at intervention for eating-disordered girls high on thinspiration leads me to observe that being attractive to men doesn't even register on why they are deadset on seeing their wristbones. Inclusion into strangely discriminatory female spaces or attaining self control over ones body were the biggest root reasons, nothing to do with trying to get dudes.

Inclusion into strangely discriminatory female spaces

Something like this?

"Having been both a student and teacher at MIT, my personal explanation for men going into science is the following: 1. young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group; 2. men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question 'is this peer group worth impressing?'"

Young men, like most young people, are self centered idiots. The train of thought is 'I am impressed by people who are good at X so if I am good at X people will be impressed by me'. That other people are in fact individuals with their own preferences takes time to learn: kids still insist that I love cocomelon as much as they do, despite repeated attempts to convince them of the contrary.

It's worth noting that while some of the impetus for anorexia may come from social and cultural expectations and so on, it is very, very much a mental illness and has dysmorphic components. You can't easily reason your way out of it especially if people "feel" fat (while objectively being thin, it's somewhat of a psychotic process). "Yeah yeah if I was really skinny you might be right but I just have to shed these last few pounds to be normal" is a bizarre sounding but reasonable in their own mind response.

The only two anorexics I ever knew in real life were my grandmother in her final years and a boy I went to school with. The meme when I was growing up was that teenage girls caught anorexia from reading fashion magazines. It jarred so much with my own experience that I always figured there must be more to to disease than 'I wanna be skinny so boys will like me'.

Having had more than one close friend who struggled with anorexia, this jibes with my experience. At no point did "slimming down in order to become more attractive to men" ever enter into it.

Yeah, it’s mainly about intra-gender competition which may have at its root some relationship to what men find attractive but which has long since transcended that basis. Same is true for ‘bigorexia’ / body dysmorphia among gym bros, they don’t really think that looking like a roided out human pit bull is attractive to women, they just want to be the biggest guy in the powerlifting gym.

One of the observations about anorexia is that before modernity it also existed but those women claimed they were fasting for religious reasons. There might even be a saint who starved herself to death rather than suffer some indignity like forced marriage. (not sure)-

It looks more like something broken and the sufferers confabulating reasons for wanting to be that way.

And the same with makeup. Women keep hearing from men that the best-looking makeup is "NMM", but intra-gender competition pushes them towards heavier and more explicit warpaints to show off their proficiency.

As the old saying goes, "Remove one piece of jewelry". Unfortunately, that's hard to do with makeup.

Back in my Peace Corps days, I was in Southern Africa. One curious compliment to a woman there (crude, to my way of thinking)° was O morago o motona which means "You have a big ass." Generally I believe the anthropological thinking is when a culture is in lean times, the big folks are attractive because that signals access to the eats. In the bountiful era, a slender frame rather suggests you have the resources to push away from the plate of Twinkies because you know there will be more if you want them, whenever.

°I also once heard a man say to a colleague of mine, a young woman new to the school: O mabele o montle, tla ke anye which means "You have nice tits, let me suck them." Of course this was a big dude and he could and did say whatever the hell he wanted most of the time in that world where brute strength ruled pretty much everything.

I don't know how accurate any of this is in terms of human psychology but it makes a certain amount of sense.

Africa is the exception, really. Sub-Saharan Africa has several attested cultures where being fat was seen as attractive, such also existed in Arab countries at times.

Even today, bigger body size is seen as desirable in US black culture, at least if we go by this NYT opinion piece where a woman is complaining how black men don't want them to lose weight..

Black Americans have a distinct sexual dimorphism around weight that isn’t found in other racial groups. The men have approximately the same obesity rate as men of other races (black men actually have very slightly lower obesity rates than white men on some charts, but the difference is negligible), but black women are much more obese than women of other races.

For example white men and white women have an obesity rate of 38%. Black men have an obesity rate of 37%, while black women have an obesity rate of 55%. This also likely explains why black American men date interracially more than black American women.

This kind of dimorphism is also found in Turkey and Azerbaijan.

Yeah I meant in the US, sorry for not clarifying; it’s not uncommon in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, although strangely it isn’t universal even there (some Bantu populations seem to have much more even obesity rates). I’d also add that there might be a difference between societies in which women are more obese (perhaps because they’re more sedentary) but in which the ‘beauty ideal’ is still relatively skinny and societies in which men’s preference is actually for overweight women.

From what I know about Azeris, they do prefer dump truck bottoms.

Same is thought to be true in Arab countries. They like large butts at least.

Interestingly, and this is something I'd research if I ever got better executive function, fatness might have been seen as sexually attractive in the eastern med area between at least 1000 to 1900. There's complaints of imams dated to cca 1200 that 'rich Egyptian women eat bread after dinner to get fatter, and some are so fat they pray sitting down, not kneeling'.

Two Czechs went on a car ride in 1932 to Kandahar, through Turkey. It's an interesting book- interior of Turkey was basically middle ages still, they went in a sports, not all-terrain car. However, they mention approvingly, as an aside, that fatness was just coming out of vogue in coastal Turkish cities. ???

Also heard from a friendly jewish extremists that he talks to bedouins in his area and they seem to like the 'mattress' body type - large & soft and less likely to wander around.

  1. It's faster, maybe? Though it's not really that strange for someone to have something like steak and potatoes and eat the steak and then the potatoes or vice versa. Or maybe it's just preferring more flavoring to less. I don't know how you'd measure that though. Is grilled chicken in a tortilla more or less flavorful than fried chicken?

Don’t know. I think it’s a curious question that no one has written a book on. I mean even the food pyramid seems heavily disagreed with and no one really has a solution on a healthy diet.

Why do people myself included strongly prefer a Chick-fil-a chicken sandwich to a pop-eyes chicken sandwich? I don’t see any fairly evident evolutionary advantage to having that strong of preference but people will drive quite far to get Chick-fil-a versus Popeyes.

It does not seem to me that degree of optimization in our genes makes any sense.

A lot of food adds a status or ritualistic element that has some explanatory power. Like Miami is considered a bad food city but their prices are high and they combine a bit of night club in a lot of them.

This is a good example

https://www.thepoke.com/2024/05/17/1000-dollar-steak-crazy-clip/

But that’s showing your date you have such a degree of resources you can pay 20 other humans to present your food to them.

Purely speculative answers:

  1. Most food items don't individually have everything we need for survival, so a preference to have something high in protein/fat with something high in carbs makes sense. Having them at the same time probably has to do with hunger being a relatively non-specific signal (it usually doesn't induce cravings for foods high in specific nutrients), so someone who gorges on carbs in the afternoon without meat won't necessarily achieve the same balance throughout the day as someone who preferred their carbs with meat. There's no easily evolutionarily available mechanism to make the former crave compensatory meat when they're next hungry.

  2. Excess fat simply wasn't a factor, since food scarcity was the natural state. Therefore, there were no pressures affecting our preferences for degree of optional adiposity (no one really had any).

  1. Does feel somewhat explainable. We want them both so eating both at once triggers both sensors. I feel like most will agree we have a preference for carbs and protein in one bite since every street/comfort food I can think of every where does that. Taste for spices and variety of food still seems a bit confusing. Like I get more pleasure out of eating different foods every day but they’re basically the same thing protein, carb, some sauce/seasoning. Like tacos, hamburgers, pizza. All three of those probably even have tomato and onions in them.

  2. Perhaps no one had it is the answer. But why is there a fat girl is bad programming now. Where did that come from.

Again speculative:

  1. I can't seem to remember the source, but very recently I saw a journal article speculating that our desire for spices had to do with anti-microbial properties? For example, I know historically salt and pepper were used for their preservative properties in addition to their flavor profile. Another possible explanation for seeking variety is that before food safety standards, every specific food item had some levels of particular toxins. By varying diet, an organism could avoid building up too much of any one toxin. The fact that we can now make a variety of flavors and textures with the same ingredients using modern culinary knowledge could just be a workaround for what was a crude byproduct of certain organisms never eating enough of the same thing to hit LD50's in the past.

  2. My guess here would be that our ancestors were selected for finding the set [not emaciated] attractive. Since there was no one obese in the past, preferences gradient descended into the most common body type that fell into that set, which would be close to what we might today call a "healthy weight". The reason for finding obesity less attractive would just be its distance from that body type (albeit, in the opposite direction).

Our preference for salt is much easier to explain. Sodium is an essential mineral, and getting enough of it is important for all terrestrial animals that are not obligate carnivores.

Funny, short video from the province of Airstrip one. Savage in that breathtaking way only those people are capable of.

So far, season 2 of Smiling Friends is living up to the hype. The Gwimbly episode was probably the best episode in the show (The CEO is maybe the best one off character so far). Mr. President episode was full of those deep dank references and jokes that I really like (a great one is Mr Frog's economic plan). Smiling Friends is probably my favorite show that's on right now.

Reminder: Squiggly Miggly didn't kill himself.

Interestingly, the president Jimble episode is really disliked on the smiling friends subreddit. But the trailer for episode 3, Alan's Adventure, has a really funny bit where he argues with the store worker.

subreddit

Figures, reddit is a hellhole after all.

Having a lot of fun with meme stocks since yesterday. First time I'm dipping into this crazy water. FFIE in particular is rocketing. It was 95% shorted and attracted a lot of hype.

Only wish I had bought more, and at an earlier point. I didn't have access to pre-market trading so had to wait until open.

And now FFIE is down 40% on the day.

All part of the plan! This is good for FFIE!

Putting new consumer loans on it now.

Currently trading at 2.73 which is up 65% today but down about 98% in the last 12 months. 52 week range 0.04–117.36. Insane.

I wonder what would happen if they let bankrupt companies keep their tickers? Like BBBY was still allowed to trade with literally no assets except the ticker. And their prospectus said something like "We owe creditors 5 billion dollars. If you buy our stock we will issue shares and use them to pay our creditors. This stock has no value". And then people bid it up to crazy heights.

If you were to write your ideal daily/morning mindset into a prayer, what would it be? (ie, putting to words the important unconscious cognition.) Were you to devise one daily prayer for all of humanity, what would it be?

non nobis domine, sed nomini tuo da gloriam

There's a silly trend on X/Twitter of asking LLMs simple questions, while framing the question as a riddle. The AI then twists itself into knots seeking a 4d chess answer. These are cracking me up.

I remember seeing this and not understanding the aim of such posts, spending ages trying to work out what the trick part of the question was.

Try slipping the words "prisoner" and "dilemma" into a Rabbit and Stag game, and see how many humans can get it right. Or say "Monty Hall" but don't describe how the host chooses which door to reveal. Or "blue eyes" without establishing any common knowledge.

I got a good laugh at the man ping ponging across the river after dropping off the goat.

Odd stuff I find interesting in the Swedish legal system:

  • We have something called "free sifting of evidence". This means courts can use evidence no matter how it was gathered; even if the police themselves commit crimes or had no reasonable suspicion whatsoever this is a separate matter and won't get the evidence "thrown out" or the like.

  • The Swedish "jury" (in district courts) consists of three lay judges appointed by the political parties (generally old people with nothing better to do). They can acquit the accused person if two of them disagree with the real judge, and convict if all three disagree. This almost never happens, so there's a longstanding debate to get rid of the entire system. It mostly results in somewhat regular scandals where the jury acquits people for really flimsy reasons when two of them happen to be ideologues or confused oddballs that never should have been appointed in the first place.

  • Defamation cases do not take the truth into account. It is e.g. illegal to write that somebody is a murderer if you're doing it to damage his reputation; that he actually happens to be recently convicted of first-degree murder is irrelevant. This absolutely gets weaponized by both the left and right; there's organizations on both sides of the culture war (e.g. "Näthatsgranskaren", "Förtalsombudsmannen"...) that specialize in more or less mass-reporting their enemies to the police when they see potentially "defamatory" stuff on the internet. It also had a pretty significant chilling effect around the time of the #metoo stuff, as women who wrote online about their experiences were slapped with significant fines if the person they wrote about was identifiable, regardless of the truth of the accusation.

  • Except for cases concerning freedom of expression, the government violating the constitution is not actually a crime and there is no official mechanism like having the supreme court address violations. The citizens are simply supposed to punish the government in the next general election.

I'd characterize this less as "interesting" and more as "proof that Sweden is a third world country."

Defamation cases do not take the truth into account. It is e.g. illegal to write that somebody is a murderer if you're doing it to damage his reputation; that he actually happens to be recently convicted of first-degree murder is irrelevant.

How do they determine intent? In a ‘MeToo’ case the line between the primary intent being trying to damage someone’s reputation and to report on an unpleasant experience is surely fine.

Presumably if one could have reported the experience without naming the perpetrator (or making it obvious who it was), but chose not to.

This is a very interesting write up and I thank you for it.

Regarding the evidence standards in the first point - how is this not constantly abused by police?

Regarding the last point (which kind of answers my first question) - Again, it's just this insane reality that even the wealthiest European's (Scandi's) have long ago decided that at high standard of living is worth the wholesale trade of fundamental liberty.

We have something called "free sifting of evidence". This means courts can use evidence no matter how it was gathered; even if the police themselves commit crimes or had no reasonable suspicion whatsoever this is a separate matter and won't get the evidence "thrown out" or the like.

It is the US that is the outlier with its strong exclusionary rule (so the rights of guilty criminals are well-protected) and strong qualified immunity (so the rights of innocent people are not). Most civil law countries have no exclusionary rule and no qualified immunity at all. Most Commonwealth countries have weaker exclusionary rules - for example Canada only excludes illegally-obtained evidence if admitting it would bring the administration of justice into disrepute.

Regarding the evidence standards in the first point - how is this not constantly abused by police?

If a policeman commits a crime when looking for evidence he'll potentially be charged with misconduct (in addition to whatever else he did, like battery or burglary). A particularly egregious case from the top of my head was this one where the policeman was later convicted, fined, and fired.

the wholesale trade of fundamental liberty.

I think the idea here is that if the government ignores the constitution, then any law you have to address it can just be ignored as well and it's up to the citizens to fix it by whatever means are necessary. The important thing here is if this actually works, or in practice results in constant low-level constitutional violations that people ignore; personally I don't think so. I helps a bit that the Swedish constitution isn't as hairy as the American one – the exception being freedom of expression where boundaries can be unclear / debated, which is indeed the parts that do have legal systems in place to decide that.

(Another fun legal thing I forgot to mention is that the king (or regent) is immune from prosecution. This question comes up from time to time as the king pretty frequently gets caught speeding and potentially drunk driving, but the police always has to just let him go.)

Things I did for fun this past week - GTA Vice City (with the Extended mod), Franchise Cricket, Fights, below is my description of these three.

I played a ton of GTA Vice City extended. It's called extended due to the game-altering mod that updates the graphics, adds a ton of gameplay tweaks etc and I do not like it. I play the game and feel that it is mundane and I should be working instead. Regardless I still liked it more than surfing Instagram. I played Vice City for the first time as a 5 year old and 19 years later, I can finally grasp the story and how overly sexual it is lol. The game back then was a breath of fresh air on fat monitors where you could live out all your vile fantasies of violence and vehicle-based activities in Miami straight out of Miami Vice.

The game's protagonist is Tommy Vercetti who spent 15 years in Jail for his mafia family. Upon getting out, he is sent from the North to Florida for a drug deal that goes wrong and in order to repay back his family, he starts making money with local druglords, to the point where he takes over. It has a star cast featuring Tim Burton, Trejo, even people from Miami Vice. The game is no doubt primitive 22 years after its release though still quite fun.

Miami and the amazing radio that you listen to in the game are two really really important things. They make it come alive, the tune still hold up and Miami is one place I want to visit once my startup fetches me some money. The neon lights, girls in bikinis, tropical weather and distinct architecture with a ton of water in a North American metropolis sounds fucking amazing. That place must be super fucking fun if you have a little money lol.

The other source of my daily entertainment has also started feeling a little drab. You have franchise cricket in the summer, so clubs based out of cities similar to how sports are done in North America. My grandad watches it every day so I watch parts of it daily with him. My hometown's team did qualify for the playoffs despite losing like 4-5 in a row recently, though I am quite neutral about cricket, still a good way to kill time.

This weekend, Tommy Fury fights Usyk, IMO usyk wins a decision given Fury is probably washed now. I won't watch MMA this weekend since I just don't feel like it. The other day I realised that I had been watching MMA for over 8 years and have only learnt it for a few months so feel a sense of dread watching it as I could have actually acquired the skills I see on TV somewhat had I trained all that time instead of just watching fights and checking news or betting lines and analysis of various fights. That kinda attention should only go to ones day job or some serious hobby.

Spending time with these activities also made me want to go back to reading books again. Things I read for fun somehow ended up influencing me in a good way. I like the person I am when I read instead of when I am up till 3 am flying an RC helicopter for a game mission or looking at different betting odds for MMA. I have been wanting to read Faust and Ramayana, started both but left them for god knows what reason.

My brother cannot stop sending me hype articles about GTA6. Vice City is such a compelling setting compared to "New York" and "LA" in my opinion.

Light culture war fodder - I have to imagine Rockstar has considered and discarded Atlanta as a template multiple times. Other cities can make a claim as to multi-ethnic criminals all over the place, whereas ATL's strengths and weaknesses come from it's very tangible blackness.

If they botch GTA6 then I will completely lose any faith in western civilisation. It started with a relative passing me a CD of GTA3 when I was 4 and it always symbolised the total superiority of American cultural production for me.

I wanted to correct you, but I suppose the very fact that a Scottish game series symbolizes American superiority in your mind reinforces your point, if in a different way than intended.

Scottish game series

walter_collapse.gif

GTA could never have been made by Americans, it’s inherently a pastiche of America by foreigners. Also, while it’s made in Scotland, it’s written by Englishmen.

This is a world history shattering fact for me

Also I dont think atlanata would be as good because it does not have access to the ocean which IMO is an important part of a GTA game. Having the ability to traverse land, water and the sky is what made vice city a game worth playing.

Atlanta is just too hip hop from my completely skewed lens. Miami Vice or 90s New York or LA are far far more appealing settings because. Miami in particular since you do see it in pop culture but not as much as the other two and the retrowave aesthetic seals it for me. A hip hop inspired inner city game happened and that was san andreas, Atlanta based GTA game would be worse.

lol at atlanta or chicago. Miami is a far far better setting IMO, something about tropical weather, large coastline and whatnot.

I may have another commercial. Have I mentioned I am sometimes in commercials? I am. This is no big deal because if they need a foreigner and you are available, cha ching. Early on I was in mostly web CMs (as they are called here) and overdubbed. Yes that's me, fuck it. It was 11 yrs ago.

Anyway the new one is a bank/credit card so maybe they'll drop the cash. Will update. My burgeoning celebrity continues... /s

You got step 1 and step 2 down.

Somehow, you look precisely like I would expect a George E. Hale to look.

Are you speaking in English or Japanese in the commercial? I can’t figure it out! That sounds fun. It seems kind of ridiculous to hire a Japanese speaking foreigner sit on a chair and describe the product only to dub it over with Japanese, but it’s a strange place.

As you suspect I am speaking English and it's dubbed in Japanese. There is (or was) a version with just English but I won't search for it for two reasons:

a) They assured me only the dubbed one would be released

b) I just spoke the exact words as written, complete with grammatical errors, so I'm speaking shitty English.

Yes it is a strange place.

Is everyone on this board handsome?

I know with certainty the answer is no.

Nope.

I'm not. Once went on a hot/not site and got a rating of precisely 5/10 from girls. I certainly don't look like any of these stereotypically 'handsome' guys of present day like e.g. George here, or Lomez (the recently outed 'far-right' Jew ).

Looked up my face on image search, a very close match is this guy:

/images/1716208236704693.webp

Though I've a bigger forehead and darker hair.

And our children all above average.

Yes that's me, fuck it. It was 11 yrs ago.

That's hilarious -- now I kind of want one of those cases, so you are worth the money I guess!

Truth be told I've never owned an Iphone.

Work gave me one, and I'm kind of cavalier with it -- you have the 'bending over and spilling your shirt pocket' move down pat. Kind of a nice Mike Patton look going on in that segment!

Yes I am very proud of that move. I am realizing I resemble a lot of people I didn't know were out there. I am about Patton's age apparently.

The cutesy Kansai goofball overdub is so incongruous with your appearance (and my mental image of your character) that the effect is really quite strange. Was this a common persona for video ads in Japan at the time or should I parse this as a light instance of minstrelry (as in this is how they figured a middle-aged Westerner would act)?

Foreigner = Act goofy . In one audition I was told repeatedly to "overreact" to everything. I ended up getting that job (for a laundry detergent) but had to play myself as a gameshow host, a voluptuous woman (my one-time cross-dressing experience) and an old bald man. I have turned down work because it's too stupid. I don't know why this is so, though I can hazard guesses. White/black males at least must always look slightly idiotic in their behavior. (Unless it's George Clooney or similar of course. And even then...

Do people ever confuse you for Will Forte?

I would need to look him up. Not so far no.

That is awesome.

You looked great on the motorcycle!

Who was the jackass holding the phone case?

Ha, exactly. I get to ride for once on film and they pollute the ad with some douchebag.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats