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				Friday Fun Thread for August 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yeah, that page's examples are much more reasonable - great article, by the way, currently reading it - although insofar as @erwgv3g34 was half-joking, I'd emphasize his intent as the serious half, deliberately showing a cheesy and extreme example of his point.


First section I clicked on before deciding to go back and read the whole article straight through was the curves-neoteny tension, and yeah, that is immediately the money section for me, and specifically this paragraph:




The two most fundamental elements of attractiveness are curves and neoteny (a juvenile appearance). Though these are sometimes in conflict, it's best to have both to the extent possible. That said, the less you have of one, the more important the other becomes. That means more neoteny helps to excuse a lack of curves. And similarly, more pronounced curves reduce your dependence on youth. Tall, curveless women are at the highest risk of suffering from low sex appeal, because it's hard for them to exploit either.




Yeah, it works the opposite way for me. I don't hate curves per se, but I'm not especially interested in them; my priority is neoteny, and I consider curves an anti-neotenous trait, so their presence demands extra neoteny to compensate, and there's only so far that that can go (artists who are specifically aiming for a paradoxical neoteny-curve combination, the oppai loli thing, just look absurd to me). So I guess that puts me in the article writer's disreputable one in ~thirty.


Some other bits that stand out to me (this turned extremely long ha ha):




Second, the demand for larger sizes [of breasts] is much greater than the supply. The average male already prefers a size rarely found in nature, and the gap between supply and demand increases with size, without any practical limit.




I often hear other men wishing that the average woman had larger breasts (even much larger), but this is an alien desire to me even in its moderate form. My closest equivalent is wishing for a cure to aging, which is obviously an approximately universal human wish, although I would generally prefer that it be cured erring on the younger side for women, relative to others' preferences.


I know my perspective is far from unbiased, so don't take this too seriously, but the section where she advises cosmetic surgery like breast implants viscerally disgusts me. Pretty young women getting breast implants hits my brain... basically exactly the same way as pretty young women getting breast reductions, as a delusional act that ruins the body in an attempt to improve it. I don't have the same degree of visceral repulsion to makeup that a lot of guys do, but cosmetic surgery definitely pushes some bad buttons for me. I realize his her actual take is more nuanced than a "you should do it", anyway, but still.


Re: the section on runway models, I do generally find runway models unappealing, but this is down to their being tall (and, as the author pointed out earlier, thin in a way exaggerated to absurdity by the height), not particularly neotenous, and frankly mannish (and, as the article goes on to point out later, deliberately unattractive for the sake of it, like postmodern art that's deliberately bad). They can still be a bit of a breath of fresh air for me from the more broadly popular superstimuli just on novelty value, in the same way that a random young woman I pass on the street might be a breath of fresh air. And sometimes one will even be genuinely attractive to me, which probably comes down to the gay fashion designer focusing more on the "teenage" part than the "boy" part.


Actually, I might as well stop and address the elephant in the room here, which is the question of how straight I am. And the answer is a lot less so than I'd like, but a lot moreso than the cultural left would like. I think when people try to armchair-psychoanalyze me and suggest I'm attracted to young girls because I'm a repressed homosexual and they look relatively close to young boys, they've got the cause and effect backwards; the attraction to young girls is the fundamental, and that unfortunately presents me with a neural pathway to being attracted to young boys too, because boys and girls do look similar, much as girls and women look similar. I think you could broadly separate humanity into six groups around a hexagon between birth and death: infants, boys, men, the elderly, women, and girls. Infants and the elderly are sexually inert, so we can just look at the other four as a box. Men and girls, in my psychology anyway, are the sexually charged poles, one to be and one to desire, and boys and women are their lesser converses, boys not yet having grown into men and women having declined from girlhood. I'm getting a similar distance from my comfort zone looking at a crossdressing boy or an overage woman - both, after all, are likely pretending to be a girl - it's just that both religious morality and the Darwinian practicalities of biological reproduction tell me that the latter is the correct choice of the two.




Some men fail to pass through the stage of personal growth that resolves this conflict. So they remain stuck with one foot in what the media taught them, and another in what their instincts tell them.




I could potentially see something vaguely like this being true for me, but it's hopelessly confounded by my primary attitude towards "what the media [and dominant culture] taught [me]" being one of rebellion; I can't fully process whatever weak instinctual feelings I might have in favor of curves as long as I'm still completely filled up on resentment that I feel like I'm being lied to about, like, 12-to-13-year-old Ariana Richards in Jurassic Park being quite optimally attractive. So it's easy for me to nod along when feminists rattle on about, say, breasts being overrated, even as I know both that I'm not normal and that they're reciting another lie.




Minority tastes usually involve exaggerations of commonly appreciated traits. The main minority tastes are shown above: neotenous, bottom-heavy, and top-heavy. While not universally loved, real women at these rare extremes would have no shortage of enthusiastic suitors, and it would be a mistake for them to strive for a different look.




It should almost go without saying that the image shown on the left here is among the very most attractive images in the article to me, although still quite suboptimal, because, oh, it's a fucking sex doll. (Also I get baited basically every time she refers to images she found and then refuses to show them for age-related reasons.)




Some men who don’t share common male tastes refuse to accept that those tastes are indeed common. They wish to feel normal, and they fear that being in the minority makes them less manly. But that doesn’t follow. There’s no reason everyone should share identical preferences, and nothing wrong with being a minority. And by the same token, there's nothing wrong with appealing to men who have uncommon tastes.




Yeah, this is definitely something I've struggled with at times, although I feel like it's kind of double-edged where I'm also risking my psychological integrity if I exaggerate the degree to which I'm weird and normal people feel differently from me.


In the butts section:




So men who like butts more tend to want them bigger, whereas men who fantasize about women with small butts tend to be relatively less interested in them. This suggests that small butts aren't usually a main attraction in themselves, but nevertheless appeal to some men as part of an overall figure, such as petite or top-heavy.




Yeah, this rings really true, as does this slightly earlier quote:




Men broadly agree about the best butt shape, but disagree about the best size. This is the case for leg volume in general as well.




The tail end of this one, though, seems inverted for me:




That men disagree about the best butt size might seem surprising, especially in light of the fact that a large butt more clearly distinguishes an adult female rear from a male one. The conflict between curves and neoteny mentioned earlier is once again a plausible reason tastes vary. Men are more willing to sacrifice butt size for a petite and girlish look than breast size, so butt-size preferences are more evenly distributed.




By which I mean that the butt has an obvious purpose in directing sexual attention and the tradeoff with neoteny doesn't quite so clearly favor neoteny, IMO, as it does with boobs (though it does still favor neoteny in the end). Of course, then again, given that she himself herself admits that shape is more important than size here, I wonder if some of his her attempts to illustrate that big butts are better than smaller ones might just be him her contrasting a well-shaped large butt with an oddly-shaped small one. Certainly in this set of images intended to contrast a small and large butt, that's just two nice butts, one in a tasteful neutral position (on an overall preferable figure) and one being sexually thrust at the camera.


I was excited to get to the section on the indifference effect since she mentioned it earlier, because it was immediately obvious what she meant (in generalities) and it's extremely relatable - I think it's maybe like half of the reason I tolerate curves at all (because they can be compensated for in other ways and they're the preference of other men putting deliberately attractive women in the public eye), with the other half being some combination of latent instincts and careful thought about likely fertility. And it was fascinating to see him her flip that on its head, too, with his her suggesting that the indifference effect is responsible for some of the cultural value on youth, although I kind of think she might be optimistically exaggerating that. In any case my interpretation is a bit off the mark from what she was actually going for, in that I'm someone with unusual tastes being forced to settle with the tastes of everyone else, not someone with unusual tastes forcing everyone else's tastes to settle with me.


Ooh, the section where she uses harem anime to do negative theology on female beauty is great. I think all four of the clearly unattractive traits she draws out can be compensated for to some extent or another, but they are definitely real boundaries. The least relatable one to me is "flat-chested women who appear to be over twenty", because I already consider "please appear to be under twenty" a basic near-minimum standard here. "Short hair", on the other hand (here defined as "short at least to the point of androgyny", not just "short for a woman"), has always stood out to me as something that women really underrate the unattractiveness of; it's a fashion choice that can work as countersignaling occasionally in extremely weird circumstances that are hopefully understood as temporary. It's kind of in the same genre of feature as tattoos and piercings (although those are more extreme and likelier permanent), and come to think of it I'm surprised that the author didn't include them in this particular section; I guess tattoos and piercings are still more desirable than very short hair for the novelty-hungry men.


It isn't exactly the same line of thought, but his her thoughts on how men tend to prefer similar faces (similar to what being idiosyncratic to the particular man) reminds me of my long-standing rage at feminist complaints about "sameface" in animated female characters, which is blatantly just them being resentful that the animation is trying to portray female characters attractively. Although these days you're starting to see the same sorts of complaints coming from the online right, which is baffling to me; they call it some kind of leftist Bauhaus subversion of beauty or whatever, while frankly my id at least would be just delighted if a third of the programming on the television was cartoons with tween protagonists who look like this. (We can give the other two thirds of the airtime to the Japanese to see what they do with it. I guess my id would theoretically want some live-action stuff too, except that I have basically zero trust in the entertainment industry to not just use those as a laundering mechanism for child sex trafficking, thanks to Dan Schneider and friends.)


Tangent: there was actually a study going around recently about what faces people find attractive, but I tried it last night and I was generally unimpressed with it because age effects dominated and there weren't many younger-looking pictures, even with the question at the beginning about age preferences. Here are my results anyway; at some point maybe I should actually try sorting through a wider corpus of faces I find more attractive and making a compilation of them.




The most powerfully attractive expression contains a mixture of pleasure, painful longing, and fear, and is very far from a smile. [...] The most balanced and complete example is shown at center. I call it the "killshot expression" on account of its unique impact. The others vary the levels of pleasure, painful longing, and fear to achieve different effects. That fearful expressions can be sexually potent is a strange but real quirk of human psychology.




This whole section on smiles and the way that people erroneously exaggerate their attractiveness is great. I do enjoy smiles, but they're hardly the only attractive expression, and fear and painful longing definitely activate my latent sadistic tendencies, though granted that happiness is the desired stable state. This guy gets it. lmao (As in an earlier section, it's tempting for me to cheer on boomers pissing off feminists by telling them to smile more so they'll be prettier, but in this case it's really too ridiculous of a view for me to fully get behind; it's about context.)




Three Youtubers and the books they're reviewing. The huge number of positive reviews prove a significant number of women enjoy reading about age gaps that would be considered scandalous in polite society. The third book was banned from Amazon and only reinstated after the (female) author rewrote it to meet censors' demands. Shown at the far right are faces of some of the 7,003 women who gave it a five-star review.




I'm only faintly aware of this literary world, but hearing about that Amazon censorship here made me steaming mad. (I looked up the specifics, and apparently the protagonist was aged up a year from initially-fifteen to initially-sixteen, keeping the overall taboo age gap but paying tribute to Amazon's stupid complaint.) These cultural gatekeepers really need to be removed.




The expected value of racehorses diverges as a race goes on, giving late leaders higher value than early favorites and late trailers lower value than they had to start. This explains why most men lose value with age but the highest-value men are older.




PAIN. Kind of a truthnuke but still, PAIN. This whole section on agegaps is fascinating anyway. I cracked up at the Mars FAQ.




The highest goal of technology isn't flying cars or terraforming Mars. It's making sure we all stay twenty-one (and thirty-four) forever.




Yeah, like I said earlier, my vote for the former would be around thirteen.


Oh, I love the "Illusion of Dominance" article she links, which she also wrote. The basic premise sums up a lot of my own thoughts on that genre of caddish self-consciously misogynistic manosphere content, which is always distinctly offputting for me to read, because like, okay, let's grant that you're right and women really are all like that - you're saying you still want one (or more, doing the promiscuous serial monogamy thing)? Like that? And you're okay with putting yourself in that miserable box to get it? It's like they're noticing a real problem but their fix is half-assed duct tape shit. (Maybe it's extra clear to me because I do want deep down to be sexually dominant, and so, as she says, the falsity of the performance the redpillers describe sticks out, the way they're trying to appease a woman who's leading from behind. I don't want to pass the shit-test with flying colors by feigning a set of opinions and beliefs and preferences unrelated to my own; testing people like that is something that bosses do to subordinates. Like, really shitty bosses. I'm theoretically supposed to be the boss here; that's a major point of traditional gender roles. Of course I'm willing to go to some lengths if need-be to be more attractive, but not selling my soul, and of course I'm eager to have a subordinate give me feedback on that, but not if it's advanced in bad faith.) I don't find his her counter-evopsych claim that monogamy was typical in the ancestral environment convincing though; there are certainly advantages to monogamy, but the redpillers do have a real point that it seems to be a pretty recent feature of our species.


...wait, holy shit, the writer is a woman? Are you fucking kidding me? That's incredible. I had a kind of asterisk over my head this whole time reading all of this, thinking "yeah this mostly sounds true and based and insightful, but it is still very horny-sounding writing on sex and romance by a man that I'm reading as a man, so I should probably take it with a grain of salt", and I guess I was fucking wrong about that! Well that reframes everything; even sort of lends some credence to points I'd previously silently rolled my eyes at. I've been reading this for hours at this point so I should probably break it off soon and just post this and return to it later.


Okay, back to the main "Dispelling Beauty Lies" article - re: the section on hotness versus beauty, this is basically irrelevant to what she's saying, but insofar as I draw a distinction between hotness and beauty - which I don't always, sometimes I just casually use it in the conventional way to mean "I find that attractive", as I basically have been in this conversation, but sometimes I disprefer the term "hot" because it's ambiguous - I use "hot" to refer to the literal Keynesian beauty contest, the things I think most people would straightforwardly agree are generally sexually attractive. I contrast that with "cute", which is what I personally find attractive. I'm pretty sure my capacity for lust is thoroughly tied in with what people call "cuteness aggression", like it's the overlap between what instinctually inspires caring protectiveness and what instinctually inspires sadistic possessiveness. So in terms of the emotional landscape of my head, seeing some conventionally attractive woman pass by on the street and thinking "huh, nice boobs, I even kinda like them, she's probably pretty popular" is just completely swamped by watching some girl walk by with her parents and thinking "okay, unrealistic wishlist, I need a mansion with her tied up in it stat". In a sense my central fantasy is in fact to become the central female fantasy that Sanilac describes, of the hot all-knowing all-powerful rapist, it's just that I'm both obviously well-aware that trying it is a terrible idea in terms of both practical and moral risk, and also, even if it weren't, even if I had the resources and status to make it practically viable and the confident intuition to do it morally, the women fantasizing about it are generally too old to inspire the want to do it. Man, though, those girls figuring it all out for the first time writing Wattpad smut everyone cracks jokes about, about their favorite male celebrities kidnapping them and making them into sex slaves, they really bring a tear to one's eye, that there's always beauty in the world. (This time it's me "half-joking", by which I mean I'm just saying my actual repulsive thoughts in a deliberately silly way. I guess I'm going on increasingly embarrassing tangents now.)




Due to extensive censorship and blacklisting, she'll never find this site by chance.




Man, I'm not sure whether this is marketing patter or just literally true, but I'd believe it.


Okay, I've been reading this article nearly all day and I'm apparently at the halfway mark, so I guess I'll pick it up next time with "Reality-Based Beauty Tips". Pretty sure I'll have a lot to say about the second half too.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for August 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
While the apparent life-or-death stakes do certainly confound matters - the most obvious alternative path the film presents us with is Bear sacrificing his own life to undo the wish, although he still could have tried going to a priest or something, digging a little harder - I do think it meaningfully condemns Bear that he repeatedly tries to get Nikki to be loving-but-not-crazy after he has realized that the wish has subverted her free will.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for August 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
But I don't want a prostitute, I want a virgin wife who ~can't leave.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for August 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Maybe at some point I will, but for the moment I don't feel it would be ethical to get involved with a woman if I don't have a coherent plan for taking care of her, which would involve not living paycheck to paycheck, and I'm just not that functional of a person, and by the time I get all that sorted out (if the world hasn't already ended by then) I'd probably be chasing women like half my age or something, so it kind of feels vain to even assert it as a possibility.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for August 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Extreme implausibly-sized boobs like that completely fail as a superstimulus for me - they stop hitting my eye as humans, let alone as especially attractive women - although this is presumably related to boobs in general doing less than they're supposed to for me. It's certainly not that I'm immune to superstimulus - I've followed the anime waifu trail long enough to know how that goes. But the superstimuli that hit for me are maybe a bit more abstract, more about idealized appearance and behavior, and not about specific body parts exaggerated beyond a human level (or even pushed to the upper limit of the real human range).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yes, and I feel like that rather poisoned the well for that type of criticism, as Roald Dahl is indeed a great children's author, but also, Willy Wonka is just about a perfect movie.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for August 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
On the unflattering side for my psychology (actually I'm pretty sure these are all unflattering sides for my psychology), there's definitely an artificial cliff where my mind exaggerates the significance of age 18, just in the opposite of the direction it's "supposed" to, like crossing that threshold, despite doing nothing biologically whatsoever, transmutes a woman into socially-endorsed safe-horny that makes me feel like a cuck if I pay too much attention to it. And of course I'm not stupid, so I know that a girl who's 17 and 364 days is barely any different from that, and at that point we're kind of playing the unexpected hanging paradox until my interest gradually fades back in somewhere earlier.


But on the, uh, other unflattering side for my psychology, the center of my attention is definitely "hebepilled", with girls generally getting less interesting to me the further they get away from that. Again, not completely uninteresting, just less interesting, but it is a palpable difference. In middle school my crushes were generally age-appropriate, sometimes even older than me, although I'd occasionally really creep people out by expressing interest in, like, someone's nine-year-old sister or something. For the first half of high school they remained age-appropriate but the average trended younger relative to me (and I chafed as social pressure tried to do the reverse), but for the back half of high school the objects of my affections were all in middle school (no I never got anywhere with them, I was a big gawky weirdo), and after graduating, now that I don't have adolescent hormones raging and I don't spend my time in a prison for minors, I kind of gradually passively gave up on a sexual life and just ruminate too much about it instead.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for August 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My personal interpretation is that the One Wish Willow cared more about screwing over Bear than Ian, because he had more to work with psychologically, but also it knew that Ian was doomed anyway because he'd wander into Bear's house minutes later. But it wouldn't be in-character for the One Wish Willow to kill Ian by dropping money on his head, anyway, because it's demonic, it cares about corrupting the soul; if it's going to corrupt a wish for money, it's going to do it by provoking further doubling-down on avarice.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for August 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is the same bullshit way of thinking about the movie that your opponents use; they dismiss One Wish Willow as an agentic force that deserves part of the blame for the film's events because it's "just an allegory for" men controlling women. You've gotta handle stories at least a little bit literally.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for August 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
For many reasons, I'm inclined to say that Barker is simply lying about this, which is unfortunate because it's a great movie; fortunately, the lie doesn’t survive contact with the film itself. It's a classic be-careful-what-you-wish-for story, and also a classic deal-with-the-devil story; these archetypes classically go together and the film telegraphs both of them hard. Bear makes an evil wish and it is granted by an evil power; its interpretation of his wish is malicious, but the whole point of that malice is to damn him, and it can't do that with a cheap trick unrelated to his intent in making the wish. So Nikki is possessed by another personality (a demon, because this is basically the devil granting the wish) because Bear wouldn’t actually mind his wish being granted that way in principle; that personality is fucking crazy because that's the level of intensity Bear initially envisioned. And the Willow made its way into Bear's hands in the first place because he was the sort of person to do that, because he was the sort of person to wander into a random shady New Age magic shop and pick up some tacky shit with purported magic powers.


TBH I think a large part of Barker's motivation in making these implausible claims about his film is just that he's scared of Hollywood reading it as religious. Which gets lost in a lot of the normie social media discourse on it, which thinks of demonic possession as a stock horror movie trope like vampires or zombies and not as a phenomenon a lot of the world believes in as part of their faith.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for August 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I'd personally put the peak a little later than you (16 rather than 13, to give more time for breasts and hips to develop,




Yeah, it really says something freakish and unsavory about me that I don't see "breasts and hips" as that much of a draw. Like, at best I'll aesthetically appreciate them but I know it's not to nearly the normal extent, like I'll go "oh, nice, those are neat" and maybe if I'm really smitten I'll start thinking objectively about their practical utility in motherhood. And at worst they're immediately uglifying and I'm left thinking "wow, she kind of looks old and fat and like her mom now, she was way cuter a few months ago before those grew in", which is a position I've only fully found myself in once but it still left me feeling like enough of a creep for a lifetime and then some. But it mostly just doesn’t enter into consideration for me; my cluster of prioritized traits looks more like "short, thin, neotenous, healthy, happy, vulnerable, innocent".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for August 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yes, agreed. The "broken world" bit was more about the public conversation on all of this being confused by taboo/signaling/etc concerns than about any particular outcome for me personally.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The classic case is Emmet Till. He was accused of raping a white woman but didn’t.




That's not my understanding of that specific case; my understanding is that he was accused of sexually harassing a white woman and it's disputed whether he did or not (some claim that the accuser admitted years later to making it up, but this claim itself seems to have been fabricated) but it doesn't matter much because it's not an offense that anyone sane thinks merits capital punishment.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't think he intends it as hyperbole.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I usually try to say 'LLMs' or 'bots' because I don't think the systems we're currently talking about are 'artificial intelligence'. Unfortunately 'AI' is the term that the companies themselves use and which the media seems to have accepted, but from where I'm standing, calling these systems 'AI' is a kind of marketing gimmick. I think I would reserve the term 'AI' for something that's genuinely intelligent.




This is an inane but weirdly popular talking point that would have been a lot fairer (if lower-stakes and off-puttingly pedantic to normies) to bring up literal decades ago when "AI" was commonly being used to refer to simple single-purpose algorithms in charge of a vaguely anthropomorphic object, like "enemy AI" in a video game. I think it would have been fair to object that those aren't actually AI. But at this point, with the LLMs, people trying to invoke the same argument are dealing with an increasingly clear invisible-unicorn-in-the-garage situation, where the actual underlying belief is that they can't be AI because AI is inherently impossible, but they often know on some level that that's silly because materialism, so they try to launder it through asserting that actually, the essence of real intelligence is the ability to pass whatever specific tests we haven't managed to get the AI up to human level performance at yet.


Like, people know that par-human capability in everything wasn't ever how people defined AI, right? That's closer to a definition of ASI.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This doesn't strike me as a serious argument at all; I simply think better of China's psyop capabilities than to expect that they'd get distracted blatantly signaling that it's them by tying in their personal shoulder chips.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
We might as well drop your framing here and note that the thing you're suggesting they "should" be doing is bribing various local power players to discourage them from raising a stink. That isn't even ineffective altruism, it's just classic old corruption.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


by opponents to get supporters to claim weakman arguments




This is a dynamic people don't pay nearly enough attention to, yeah. People are plenty capable of being stupid on their own, but there are also a million different actors playing the pied piper strategy in miniature, thinking of it as anything from a satirical social experiment to a well-oiled psyop.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for August 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Are you asking if I consider myself one? (Yes.) Because I don't think that really provides any more information than what I already said. I'm not completely unattracted to adult women, although I think the incel concept of the wall is misplaced and has really already started to hit by the time they're adults; the more attractive ones look more childlike. I think my ideal life path would have been marrying well and young, but at this point I'm sort of content as a foreveralone.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Surely the mark of a successful astroturf campaign is getting normies on the bandwagon.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for August 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Okay, just further expounding upon the grim point I made about myself in a comment below:


Whenever I'm considering the relative attractiveness of actresses in movies and shows, I always like to check their dates of birth and when the project was actually filmed. It's like my equivalent of checking the early life section. It doesn't always turn out how I expect when I think to look it up, but it certainly does most of the time.


And of course most people know that 22-year-old Megan Fox in Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen mogs all subsequent Megan Fox. But IMO, she is herself mogged by 19-to-20-year-old Megan Fox in the first live-action Transformers, who is in turn super mogged by 14-to-15-year-old Megan Fox in Holiday In The Sun. She's maybe slightly mogged by the slightly younger 14-to-15-year-old Olsen twins in the same movie, but the three of them are all super mogged by 12-to-13-year-old Emma Watson in Prisoner Of Azkaban. Is she mogged by her 11-to-12-year-old self in Chamber Of Secrets? Maybe, I would need to go refresh my memory to say, but I think I've dug myself deep enough at this point.


And sure, a significant contingent of the world's entire male population got a celebrity crush on Emma Watson growing up because she was put in the spotlight, and I'll readily admit that she was above-average attractive. But not that far above average! Not top percentile, maybe not even top decile. If she'd been a bit closer to my age and gone to my school, she'd have just been another physically attractive girl, somewhere towards the upper end of a vaguely-sorted pool that included basically every girl who didn’t have something extremely wrong with her. Because at the end of the day, I don't really intuitively believe in Helens of Troy. I just don't think there are girls all that much more beautiful than a normal baseline girl's lifetime peak, which is around puberty. Now, I'm aware that my personal opinion is both deeply socially unacceptable and not representative of the typical man, but - you see how those two things pull in opposite directions, right? Like, you've seen all those studies where men list what age of women they're attracted to and the graph mysteriously starts at 18 and immediately plummets? Really broken world we've got here.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for August 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


normie-straight-male-bait named Madison Beer




Simulation confirmed.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
How bad exactly does the state of AI need to get before you start reading "don't worry, we can totally handle it" as the dishonest part and not "now, we'll need to be careful because this is really dangerous"?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I wouldn’t consider those to be "fans".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for August 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
At the time I would have spouted off some not-particularly-self-aware shit trying to hype up the importance of the physical presence, the personal familiarity, the chance at a relationship, blah blah blah, but with the dubious benefit of hindsight, NEET years, introspection, etc, I feel comfortable saying that no, actually the "younger" part was basically sufficient. Which is a much more troubling thought now than it was then, when it could be charitably/optimistically phrased as "an age peer".