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After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
<3
User ID: 355
Yeah, I don't care about these considerations. Whether or not they are a majority is a question that remains hard to judge, but I would maintain that at the very least they are unevenly distributed - I think I have an abundance of data on male preferences in my immediate environment, including both real targets and fictional characters, and the alleged tendency just isn't there. Would you want to posit that everything ranging from the crushes of German school boys to gacha-playing waifu collector degenerate whaling is preference falsification due to a desire to signal a common notion of high status?
To be clear, I don't doubt that there are significant subcultures/subcommunities of people where the majority preference is as stated in the blog. It's just that I suspect that those subcultures select on something that correlates with that preference, and/or induce that preference in their members. As a matter of fact, in the context of gacha communities, they like making their presence known - among others, a favourite pastime of theirs is to develop and use mods that give characters balloon tits and skimpy outfits, which they then post screenshots of in discussion threads without comment. It is evident that the message of the screenshot posting is intended to be somewhere between "I'm sticking it to Chinese censors" and "everyone actually thinks this is hotter, and I am getting to enjoy good things while you cucks are not", but even on 4chan (hardly a land of prosocial preference falsification), a majority of posters appears to find them obnoxious and have little interest in the mods.
For whatever reason, the "tit men" always seem to be desperate to assure themselves that everyone secretly shares their preferences, and they are just the only ones being honest about it, as opposed to them having a niche interest - there does not seem to be a counterpart to this among the "tit-indifferent men". This reminds me a little of the old AROOO lesbian separatist belief that women actually do not naturally enjoy sex with men, and the ones who do have just been brainwashed into it by society or the patriarchy, so I wonder if this is just a natural shape of cope that emerges among people with socially shunned sexual preferences.
That the median man would prefer C- or D-cups to the blog's and the swimsuit models' much larger sizes (even if we assumed anime levels of sci-fi connective tissue), (edit) but either way, that the median man's preferences do not put nearly as much weight on cup size as the blog and some of the parent posts make the out to.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
3d ago
I looked for pictures of both, and neither seems to be anywhere near the swimsuit models or the original blog's purported ideal in terms of size? Eyeballing from the photos I found and a reference chart, they look like maybe D-cups to me.
In any case, are we trying to argue that Keira Knightley, poor thing, has more attractive boobs than a
What a strange choice of topic to break the rule against consensus-building on! Are you asking about my opinion or what I think the general population's opinion is? I genuinely don't have strong preferences (and thus apparently have something wrong with me in your estimation?), but maybe very weakly, in the sense of how I would set sliders in an MMO character designer where I have to express an opinion, they are about equal degrees of too small and too large respectively. If I had to guess the general public's preferences, I would guess they would prefer the swimsuit models, but only because they have less tolerance for the almost completely flat, which is not actually what the thesis is about - if you compared someone with genuinely average or somewhat-below-average cup size, like, idk, Liv Tyler?, I would expect the results to be much more of a wash, and if I weren't on my phone in public I would find pictures of some C-cup swimsuit model I would expect to win.
People are very performative about this, to the point that any public statement about it should be just ignored.
Sure they are, but your sample having to ignore peer pressure is also a confounder. I'm not saying "AI art goes against the tastes of most", but "those who engage positively with AI art are not representative", which is a subtle but important distinction. It's entirely consistent (and similar in shape to what I think is most likely to be the real state of affairs) if: (1) AI art would get an objective average rating of 5/10 from the general population; (2) there is peer pressure to pretend AI art is 1/10 and you are a crass rube if you disagree; (3) 10% of people don't care about being considered crass rubes; (4) those 10% love big tits and to them AI art 9/10 on average because it is an infinite wellspring of them.
pixiv ranking
Funny enough, right now the top 2 pictures are gacha game characters that are completely flat-chested (Genshin's Furina, Blue Archive's shupogaki duo). The third one is also huge, #4 is medium... looking further down the list, similar ratio to my danbooru check. Yeah, I think some cherries were being picked.
All the anime pictures I saw with a cursory look were AI-generated, though. You could make a more persuasive argument that people looking at anime-style erotic art in general have somewhat representative preferences in that department (though even there I would not be sure), but AI art is definitively only appreciated by a niche subgroup, with the modal anime erotica enjoyer being highly dismissive of it.
edit: I performed the most basic of experiments and searched danbooru with tags 1girl standing. The first page had several images that clearly belonged to series depicting the same character by the same artist, but the second page were all singletons. Of the 20 images there, 7 looked to be in the blog's "E cup or above" category, with the remaining ranging from flat to what looks like a realistic average.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
4d ago
Yes, how dare Estonia... attempt to inspect a tanker, possibly one traveling in its territorial waters?
Well, was it in its territorial waters or not? This seems like it's the deciding question, since ostensibly all actors involved more or less agree on the underlying conventions. There is a corridor of international waters along the centreline of the Finnish Gulf. The version I've read suggests that the tanker was following it (indeed, why would it not?), though some insinuate that it might have veered narrowly into Estonian waters at some point during the incident? It's pretty hard to discern the facts in a conflict where so many consider it their patriotic duty to lie if it makes their side look better.
I don't see anything wrong with Estonia attempting to enforce the sanctions the West has imposed on Russia, and trusting in its alliance with the West to then back it up when it attempts to enforce them.
Well, it all depends on what in fact happened, and what the sanctions really say. Are they in fact an explicit guarantee to participating state that amounts to "we will give you military cover to seize Russian ships in international waters"? Are they ambiguous, or in fact explicitly not saying that much? It's known that the Estonian state has a white-glowing hatred for Russia, and if they could press a button that made the US and Western Europe fight a hot war against it, they probably would (regardless of how the would-be belligerents feel about it). I could easily imagine a situation where whoever formulated the sanctions did not anticipate such a situation, but left enough ambiguity and lack of clear public information that Estonia saw something that to them looked like the aforementioned button and decided to press it.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
4d ago
Why would you assume that the customer base of online sex doll retailers or the set of AI slop producers is at all representative of "average guys"? It's easy to come up with a model where both strongly select on a criterion that could be glossed as "preference for quantity over quality".
In general, that whole blog seems to be in the old genre of "everyone who disagrees with my tastes is falsifying their preferences or a degenerate, and here is some cherrypicked evidence".
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
5d ago
Well, that's how much the supervisor takes home - what are salary overheads in the UK like? Continental European countries tend to have between 1.5x and 2.5x.
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After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
6d ago
At a not so provincial (but still(?) southern, which tracks at least with my internal stereotypes of the different German folkways) German university back in the noughties, the CS orientation event had them line the students up and do a mod-3 count (like go from left to right saying 1,2,3,1,2,3,...), and then they said that statistically speaking those who said 2 or 3 would drop out before finishing.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
7d ago
It is still one hour per group and week, plus whatever time you need for preparation (tutors do set and grade homework, to anchor the session and give the student feedback). For a large class this amounts to several full-time staff - and you also need a lot of small rooms, which tend to be scarce at universities. (Some supervisions wind up being held at random locations like local coffeeshops, or in the supervisor's private accommodation!)
I really don't think they have the manpower now. Whether they would have the money (and talent pool) to hire that sort of manpower is another question - I think the answer would probably be yes, at least on the margin. (Manifestly, while Oxbridge primarily draw from their pool of active staff and graduate students, they do have a number of external full-time supervisors who can make a comfortable living off what they are paid (on the order of £20-30 an hour, back in the days, I think?), who in the instances I knew were local grad school dropouts.)
On the other hand, US colleges are famously stingy even with adjuncts, who are hired in far smaller numbers and teach at a greater ratio. I was not under the impression that they are massively profitable businesses, either - whatever money they take in from tuition clearly gets used up in other ways. How much of those other ways could/should be slashed is a whole thread's discussion under itself, but my impression was that discussions around it tend to have the same nature as discussions about government spending, where everyone has a different notion of what are the important things that should absolutely not be cut while everything else can go.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
7d ago
Other places don't generally have the manpower to copy it, since Oxbridge tutorials/supervisions are one-on-1~3. US universities also already heavily rely on undergraduate TAs to keep up their scale, which is not allowed and would probably not be adequate in the Oxbridge model since a good supervisor needs to have more command of the material than a US TA checking against a grading rubric or drip-feeding model solutions.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
7d ago
I was a PhD student heavily involved in TAing at a US university until a few years ago, and I could see the in-class assessment solution getting beaten out of us in real time. It started with greater and greater fractions of students demanding special arrangements (extra time, open-notes, retries (with new questions that we had to design) if they didn't like the outcome) with the backing of the disability office, and culminated around the COVID years with students sending us open letters with change.org petitions attached to them about how [blob of slick therapy-speak] meant that in-person exams were discriminatory and inequitable. I recall a multiple-evening all-hands emergency session where the TAs helped our beleaguered principal instructor thread the needle and craft a response that minimised the likelihood of him getting dragged through the town square following the spirit of the times, and around then the remaining holdouts I knew of gave up and switched to homework-only scoring. Many academics, especially at the high-profile US schools, like teaching; few of them like it so much that they would jeopardise their research career to take a stand on how it is done.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
9d ago
I suspect you may be letting your feelings about transwomen ("gross, obviously masculine"?) cloud your understanding of the word. If you search for combinations like "work emasculating", you will see an abundance of discussions where people consider as "emasculating" things that include being called "cute" by older female coworkers, doing any desk work at all, being involved in childcare and having your wife earn more than you. I have also seen discussions of children's propensity to insult less assertive peers as "gay" as emasculation. Surely putting on a dress and trying to speak in a high-pitched voice on a regular basis is more of whatever is common to all those scenarios; and if your understanding is that being considered cool and imposing by women, doing physical labor, leaving housekeeping tasks to women and being a dominant provider who is definitively not at all gay is bad, then being far removed from those ought to be a good thing.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
9d ago
I meant it in the figurative sense (a man turned transwoman does not present as traditionally masculine anymore), not in the sense of actual amputation.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
9d ago
Isn't the "sneer faction" simply the faction of devout progressives, which has the moral foundation that the impulses and desires of men as traditionally conceived are bad? Polyamory is a way for men to have multiple women sexual partners simultaneously, which is understood to satisfy the masculine impulse - especially since the most salient cases of rationalist polyamory look like hypermasculine alpha nerds having a harem of impressionable and psychologically troubled groupies - and therefore bad. (I would be mildly surprised if the sneerclubbers took any issue with more progressive-coded free love communes, which are hardly different from poly group houses.) Transsexuality (MtF, because hardly anyone actually cares about the other direction) directly emasculates one man, and makes others uncomfortable, and is therefore good.
You could counter that the moral foundation I impute to progressives above is uncharitable and most of them would dispute having it, but neither progressives nor their opponents respect the structural implications of their stated beliefs in other cases (Transsexualism vs. transracialism? Respect for merit, authority and tradition when those are on the side of the outgroup?) either. Taking anyone at their word is only a recipe to be confused more.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
9d ago
I think that at some point in the early 2000s, the EDM genre might have bifurcated into a much more mainstream subgenre ("Anthem Trance"?) and a myriad of niche ones that you couldn't really play at a club or beach party without scaring the hoes or whatever they call it these days.
Is your issue with the remix the specific choice of orchestration, or just that it seems all around more busy? I wouldn't call either version of the song you linked "not repetitive", insofar as there always has been trance/EDM with a more pronounced dramatic arc. There are a number of newer songs that I would consider to have similar vibes to yours: Christian Fischer - Watch the Dog (original mix), So Inagawa - Selfless State, or on the busy end of the spectrum, NAYUTA - Weisse Messer.
Some other trance songs I enjoy: busy with mainstreamish orchestration: Plutian - Sonagi, lawy - forget me not, marginal to the genre: Hooverphonic - Battersea. There is in fact a wealth of great trance songs with vocals, but I figured you might not be looking for those.
I think it's rather more common with younger generations, in all countries, though I do actually have a Japanese woman friend in her 40s who is a fairly dedicated competitive Splatoon player. I don't think I would have found out without several coincidences aligning, either, even though I had known her for a long time, given the Japanese thing where compartmentalising your life and following a default don't-ask-don't-tell policy about other compartments comes very easily.
(One of the coincidences resulted in meeting some of her Splatoon buddies in real life, and their commitment to not prying behind the online masks of their compartment was notable. I figure this might actually help with the gender ratio, considering the rude and awkward behaviour I've seen in Western online gaming communities towards even those merely suspected of being girls.)
You seem to be accepting the predominantly American framing of Hitler ("he was bad because he genocided the Jews, and then I guess there was also that whole WWII thing") as default truth, whereas in much of Europe it has been closer to "he was bad because he wanted German supremacy and started WWII, and then I guess there was also the whole Holocaust thing" all along. (The difference makes sense, since Europe bore the brunt of the WWII part of Hitler's record, while the Americans are under the heel of all various kinds of Zionists.) Where does the UK land between those poles?
Being anti-Hitler and pro-Hamas looks a lot more coherent in the latter frame. In fact, I think that, for example, in Germany, an interpretation like "Hitler would be pro-Israel in 2025" would catch on easily were it not for constant effort exerted by Transatlanticists and other establishment types to keep the blood debt alive and salient.
(See also the question whether Ukraine could be run by "Nazis" - reactions ranging from Americans seeing a Jewish-heritage president and concluding obviously no, to Russians seeing swastikas, German steel and people who want to violently move the Western European cultural sphere closer to Russia and concluding obviously yes)
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
13d ago
So, does this somewhat surprising choice of an American pope count as another instance of successful meme magic?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
15d ago
We also have to take into account that none of the accounts of Jesus we have are even claimed to be first-hand accounts - even granting that the person in fact existed and the general story of Jesus-the-religious-leader is broadly accurate, the Gospels are the product of several iterations of sanewashing (by followers who did not need to believe anything more outlandish than the common sense of the era) and selection (as we now know of Christian writings that were nixed such as the fanfic-tier Infancy gospels).
In my own estimation, the likelihood that a historical Jesus actually existed seems pretty low, and the apparent scientific consensus for it fake - looking at the main arguments commonly cited (..."we don't have more evidence about other historical figures considered uncontroversial"? "Some Roman guy writing centuries later recounted Jesus's execution as a fact"?), they seem to be borne of desperation to latch onto anything that will allow the consensus-supporter to dissociate themselves from cringe (internet atheists and professional skeptics?) and potential professional repercussions (would a prominent "Jesus was fictional" proponent have an easy time, e.g., socialising at relevant research conferences or asking to access the Vatican archives?).
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
17d ago
At the risk of contributing to a subthread that could have come straight from Reddit save for the edge, there's also Make Eastern Europe Soviet Again...
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
18d ago
At this point, only some sort of wunderwaffe like AI-powered FPVs
Is this such a far-fetched wunderwaffe to be holding out for at this point? Between the ChatGPT-plays-geoguessr posts, the circumstance that Ukraine already gets the vast majority of its kills with superior FPV tech (currently still using human operators), and them having access to much more infrastructure that would enable the technology's deployment once it is created (unsanctioned supply chains, Starlink), the bet that these will happen in the next 2 years and will be a significant game-changer seems at least as good to me as the "Russia will run out of missiles any moment now" cope of the early months of the war.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
18d ago
I suspect part of the issue here is that Trump actually has a pretty good carrot for Putin to end the war – sanctions, and frozen assets.
Weren't the vast majority of the frozen assets held by the Europeans, who didn't seem to be keen on playing along with any Trump-brokered deal?
Sweden did do a soft lockdown in the sense that businesses had reduced hours/density or encouraged people to work from home, and restricted the occupancy of certain public facilities like swimming pools. That, and I got the subjective sense that they have much less of a contingent of people who are young and severely unhealthy even compared to countries like Germany.
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