flabaduba
3mo ago
Small correction, that bald guy reaction image was used to cover up the actual image, which is also actually just someone eating popcorn, but the second one does trigger an instant account ban.
flabaduba
4mo ago
What's the Malthusian limit on arable land owned by Amish communities? How often do they buy more?
Well, it's not an actual majority position, just a sizeable minority. To the extent that there was a 90+% turnout referendum in 1995 that came out to a 50.6/49.4% split for stay/leave. It's lower than that now. You can get a lot more concessions by threatening to leave than actually doing it.
flabaduba
5mo ago
In pretty much every region and religion, more women identify as religious than men (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2016/03/22/the-gender-gap-in-religion-around-the-world/). In the U.S. that's something like 60% to 47% for women and men respectively, according to Pew. More women believe in things like healing crystals, astrology, soulmates, etc. Even ignoring things like specific personality traits, I'd expect women to be more common in cults than men.
flabaduba
5mo ago
This rests on the assumption that the women are young and attractive. Not even MtFs bother trying to muscle in on middle aged women's book clubs and knitting circles.
flabaduba
5mo ago
For one thing, epilepsy is NOT a psychiatric disorder, and surgery is not the first line of treatment for it. Considering seizures in themselves cause brain damage, and in the most extreme cases can be deadly, that is an extreme far cry from shoving a metal spike into your daughter's eye so you can make her tractable and retarded.
flabaduba
6mo ago
I remember reading that paper and thinking that 1) it made the IDF sound far too cool 2) you could almost feel the seething of dead left-wing intellectuals' theories being used to conduct urban warfare in the West Bank
So what actually happened? They just didn't do a background check? Historical illiteracy? Aide who hates his job let him through for a giggle?
For added hilarity, it was on Yom Kippur.
flabaduba
7mo ago
There is definitely a class of memes along the lines of "Skyrim NPCs start looking nervous when you pull out your weapons and quick save", and torturing your sims to death via removing the pool ladder is considered a rite of passage. I think these behaviours come more from attempting to explore the limits of game worlds than anything else. Once people realize that sims can die, they want to know in what scenarios that can happen. Once they realize that fighting city guards in TES games isn't really balanced to be "fun", they want to see if their character can hack it. And of course, eventually the illusion of humanity in NPCs disappears with experience, and you see them for the automatons they are.
flabaduba
8mo ago
Most thirty year olds (male) at this point grew up playing games, and see no reason to drop them in favour of watching tv for hours like their boomer parents.
flabaduba
8mo ago
Where do you think the desire to eat comes from? The aether? It comes from your experience of the discomfort of hunger, and the feeling of reward from eating, created in the brain, exactly the same as intellect, neuroticism, conscientiousness, violence, etc.
flabaduba
8mo ago
Amazing how a simple series of semaglutide injections boosts one's willpower into the stratosphere.
flabaduba
9mo ago
There's a difference between writing struggle and tragedy, and what reads as gleeful ragebaiting, which Spiderman seems disproportionately affected by (though of course it touches every superhero eventually).
flabaduba
9mo ago
You have to understand, Spiderman's writers absolutely hate Spiderman. If he isn't suffering horrifically, they're not interested. He's now on his second or third non-meme usage cuck arc, and that's not counting all the other gratuitous shit they do to make him suffer. So long as Miles isn't actually, literally cuckolding Peter Parker (and he hasn't yet, to my knowledge), Spiderman fans have much bigger targets to hate.
flabaduba
9mo ago
I can't see it. Increases in average lifespan haven't translated into increases in maximum lifespan (Aeschylus lived to 92 in ~400 B.C., that's still longer than most American men today). It seems to be no low hanging fruit. Diseases that were easily treatable are becoming more and more resistant to antibiotics, and development of new ones has slowed down. Maybe that will pick up again, maybe it won't. More than immortality, dying of a hyper-MRSA infection after a difficult surgery in late middle age seems a likely outcome to me. Of course, I'm not a doctor or a biologist.
flabaduba
9mo ago
I acknowledge that it is theoretically possible, but it's also been "30 years away" for much longer than that. I don't think anyone on this forum will be living past 2150. And yes, being able to accept the truth with equanimity would be better than self-delusion, but our powers of self-delusion are very strong, so we may as well get some use out of them.
flabaduba
9mo ago
It's the ultimate sour grapes. We can never have it, so we must convince ourselves that we don't really want it. I do believe sour grapes is a perfectly rational and healthy response to impossible desires, however.
flabaduba
9mo ago
I had one. It's hard to say how much I believed in it. Do four year olds really believe in anything other than the omnipotence and omniscience of their parents, and their own worthiness of infinite candy? I suspect it was just a form of pretend, much like the time I spent insisting I was a dinosaur. I don't know when it stopped, but I would bet starting school was near the tail end of it.
flabaduba
9mo ago
The concept was culturally salient enough for Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends to be a cartoon people could understand the premise of (an orphanage for imaginary friends once children stop believing in them). I had one, but I've never mentioned it to anyone I know, because who the hell cares about a non-existent character I talked to from ages 3-6(?)
flabaduba
10mo ago
There are very very few trans people. The fact that any can be clocked in public is evidence that a decent portion of them do not pass. The Canadian census says they are only 0.3% of people age 15 and up (closer to 0.1% for those over 50). And that's including nonbinary (aka trend chasers). You are three times more likely to meet a schizophrenic than a trans person. If you are seeing enough to notice they don't pass, the fact that you're noticing them at all is proof that a large portion of them do not pass. I've been on /lgbt/, I've seen the photos on trans subreddits, profile pictures on twitter, and from lesbian dating apps. These are not cherrypicked sources, they are as close to the modal trans person as you can get. There is a sea of obvious men in dresses, and a few who are young enough/got enough surgery and drugs that they can fool someone, at least in a photo. This mythical mass of unclockable transwomen going about their lives incognito simply does not exist. This becomes even easier in certain male-dominated spaces. 100% of "female" doom modders and professional foreigner starcraft players are transgender. I wouldn't be surprised if 70-90% of "female" speedrunners are transgender. Certainly they outnumber ciswomen massively.
Have you not heard stories of straight men flipping out once they’re told the woman they’re attracted to/slept with is trans? E.g. this story of a teen flirting with a trans woman, them going to his hotel room, then going back to hers and violently beating her once she says she’s trans, because he had no idea and felt humiliated.
"Straight" being the operative word. I have about as much confidence in their straightness as that French spy who somehow didn't notice the Chinese spy he had sex with for years was a man (intact, even!) More likely they are deeply closeted gays, got drunk/high enough that they took a transwoman to bed after their inhibitions were lowered, then the cognitive dissonance became overwhelming, and they lashed out because they have deep emotional problems. Chasers claim they're straight too, doesn't make it true.
flabaduba
10mo ago
Tell me: why should I believe a single rumour from a guy who has been predicting Kathleen Kennedy's ouster every year for the past 5 (at least)? In fact, I've never heard of him being right about anything.
flabaduba
11mo ago
I'm also a non-royals understander, and what I've gathered is that Kate Middleton has a long history of being extremely consistent with and open about her public role and the paparazzi, to the extent of standing for pictures less than a full day after giving birth to each of her children. It's now been several months since her last public appearance, which is apparently extremely not-normal. To add to the confusion, the only explanation has been a vague "abdominal surgery", despite the King Himself openly talking about his enlarged prostate. What could she have undergone that she and the family would want to keep it more under wraps than the state of the King's prostate? And now this strange seemingly AI-genned image purporting to be a recent photo. It makes it look like they have tried and failed to make things look normal when they're not, which just further fuels the rumor mill that she's dying or getting divorced.
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