domain:rifters.com
It's hardly more shameful to be in a relationship with a machine than an e-whore. Neither is something people are likely to admit.
I think the ability to pretend to oneself that it’s really the girl on the other side puts a floor on demand for the “real” thing. If anything I think OF girls using AI to talk for them will generally outcompete AI chatbots alone.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
4d ago
I'm kind of stunned we've been able to erect (tee hee) a whole market apparatus around females flaunting their reproductive goods that's been completely stripped of reproduction itself. It seems like such a hack. Like figuring out if you turn natural plant pesticides into a drink it gets you high (caffeine) and it grows into some enormous coffee and tea industry.
I'm curious how you'd distinguish this from desire-to-be-masculine.
I'm with Iconochasm here: I've triangulated that I'm at the far high end of male tenderness and romantic shyness, and those examples strike me as painfully unmasculine. The rat character just feels hunched over, passive, depressed. Maybe a desire is there, but if this resonates with the trans masc community than I don't know if they really get what men aim to be like. Although I love my tenderness, I also don't want to be the guy who apologizes for kissing a woman who really wanted me to kiss her. Ask me how I know.
and also is more gynophilic in his partners than I am
I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean -- I'm really not trying to be a jerk here. But, I mean, you are bisexual, and obviously you have a deep connection to gay culture. I'm not sure that being more gynophilic than you means a whole lot, particularly when we're talking about people who are exclusively attracted to women. Do you have a preference for women?
I admit, I didn't even realize you had any interest in the fairer sex until you explicitly said you were bisexual -- my ingrained mental image, which is hard to shake, is that you're twink who likes wearing programmer socks. I guess I've known too many geeky MSM or furries that fit that frame that I slotted you into it. And I genuinely want to know how wrong I am.
are really gay
The "trans men are really gay" thing actually contributes to the point you're refuting: if you're flying from femininity, what is less feminine than being gay? As you've said before, femininity isn't really all that prized in gay culture, stereotypes aside.
a longer-running thread revolves around wanting to be a dad
Well, a parent, at least. There are obviously differences between moms and dads, but I don't know how to meaningfully distinguish "I want to be a parent, but I don't want to get pregnant" (which would actually contribute to the point you're trying to refute!) from "I want to be a dad."
It is also slightly humorous that the rat character throws a party to interview candidates for impregnating his girlfriend, which seems, well, like something a lot of men would find somewhere between uncomfortable and enraging.
EDIT: A few more reflections after downloading the comic PDF. I braved the rat pornography so everyone else wouldn't have to.
But most of the sex doesn't come off to me as gay, or male -- they come off to me as lesbian wish fantasies about doing masculinity better than men. In particular, the initial sex scene in the comic features the rat character pulling a strapon out of his everyday carry bag (as one does) and then insisting on putting a condom on it, because ????. This is a contradiction to the stereotype that men won't wear a rubber.
Then, during the sex scene, he asks the female character, "how do you like to do it?" and she responds by saying, "Nobody's ever asked me that before!" Again, this is a contradiction to the view that men don't give a damn about women's sexual enjoyment, which is puzzlingly common among women. The point is that the trans masc rat is a Better Man (TM) than those dirty cis rat boys who didn't treat her right.
Maybe that is how a lot of men are, I don't know. But the idea that I'd have a sexual encounter and not aim to make it a good one for my partner is like suggesting that I set my pizza sauce-side down. What's the point of getting my rocks off without having a memorable experience that ends in mutual satisfaction?
(Of course, she doesn't know what she likes, and the trans man rat character just substitutes his own judgment for her inability to state her sexual preferences, and those happen to be absolutely exactly what she likes. Another trope in sexual fiction written by women.)
The "single pregnant woman meets Good Man (TM) with dad vibes" is also a common female fantasy -- obviously it's quite adaptive. But it's not necessarily something that I'd say reflects an internalization of maleness so much as a desire to perform proper maleness for women, or in other words to be the butchest lesbian who ever strapped on a dildo.
I did definitely enjoy the transition from "we literally just reunited on the street randomly" to "we are having sex, we can separate physicality from emotions, right?" to "we are now madly in love," which took all of one evening. Can I make a u-haul joke?
Also... it really does seem like the "main character" in the sex scene I read was the female character. It was all about her. I'm not getting "I AM A MAN FANTASIZING ABOUT BEING MASCULINE" vibes, but very much a projection of women's sexual desires onto the trans male character. Particularly in the "you're my princess but you're also my slut" thing, that's textbook girl next door with a naughty side energy. Of course, I think many men would be happy to do that for a woman if she asked (but in the comic she doesn't ask -- he intuits).
The comic's depictions of sex read more to me like something written by a woman than by a man -- might as well have been written by women I've dated, it's so painfully familiar. (ngl, didn't hate it.) He's a woman's ideal man, not a man's ideal man. That's not an insult, but it is important. I don't think this proves what you think it does.
Of course at the end of the day if a democracy wants to commit suicide they're gonna do it regardless. Even most authoritarian nations are still under some sorts of political pressure, you can't upset the people too much or else they risk higher chance of revolt so even they often are receptive to bad populist policy demands (assuming that the authoritarian leader isn't themselves a believer in bad policy, as they often are like we see with most/all communist states).
But that doesn't mean you should want to do a national suicide! If the argument is "we need to do a little so we can avoid a lot" that's at least understandable, but the goal should still be to reduce the amount of national suicide we do. I'd rather a Deng Xiaopeng over a Mao, and a Xi Jingping over a Kim Jong Ung. But if we can have a Reagan instead, then we should have a Reagan.
magicalkittycat
4d ago
Which traditional conservative ideas would those be? "Ensure the means to produce an absurdly vital strategic resource with a lead-up time measured in decades remains possible in $country" is something even minarchists believe the role of government should cover.
This assumes that everyone agrees government ownership of companies is the correct approach, which they in fact do not and have not historically agreed on.
Maybe we can cut back regulations, support development and building of technology, etc instead of expanding government more in response to expanded government.
zPvQINBQvfFR
4d ago
"SNITCHES could be here" he thinks, "I've never been in this neighborhood before. There could be SNITCHES anywhere."
zPvQINBQvfFR
4d ago
Everybody is a badass on the Internet.
A crazy trans person shooting up a Church is not being persecuted.
Even more relevant, this was their former school! It is the default of mass shooters to target their current and former workplaces/schools (often over highly personal grievance) so assuming it was a targeted attack on religion instead of just default mass shooter behavior could use some stronger evidence.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
4d ago
Another group transitions, and either the desire to reify their masculinity by becoming culturally gay or perhaps the influence of testosterone, leads them to become hypersexual. 2rafa's description from a few years ago of someone she "knew as a girl and she was a blue hair, tumblr type, I suspect into Yaoi. Now he’s a twinkish bottom with a thin beard addicted to Grindr hookups" rings very true to me. I know people like this. There's always the beard.
Sometimes this seems to happen to people who identified themselves as lesbians before transitioning, which means that they jumped the shark from not wanting male attention to really wanting male attention. I once met an FTM transitioner in a marriage with a woman who was looking for men to sleep with. "I like women and she's nice, but I need to be fucked, what she doesn't know won't hurt her" was a real quote. First time I ever encountered the concept of a lesbian sham marriage. I guess in this case the beard was more of a person.
Rex
4d ago
If your society reacts to LGBT by throwing them from tall buildings, you are much more inclined to play being a cishet.
Is it really “playing”? It seems completely obvious to me that even if these sliders exist, most people would be much happier with a wife and children, compared being some old queen alone in your apartment with a terrible body condition due to years of abuse.
You’d have to be pretty far off baseline for that not to apply.
And I wonder how many Christian children killed by trans gunmen will be enough.
How many has there been? We had 3 in covenant and 2 today.
Sure five lives is more than should die, but that's less than a life a year, that's like 1/600th the amount of people who die falling off ladders a year. And basically no one dies falling off a ladder. Apparently there's already been 60 deaths of kids shooting themselves unintentionally with a gun, so that's about 1/120th accidental gun suicides of children, and basically no child dies of accidental gun suicide.
If we include the important detail the two times it has happened, they had shot up their own school (so they could be shooting up their own spaces because that's what shooters do, rather than specific religious targeting), a case for persecution comes off weak.
phailyoor
4d ago
Actually I wonder if anyone has leaked the scripts that ewhore ghost chatters use to entice their suckers I mean customers. Currently talking to AI companions through grokslop or character cards etc. is incredibly vapid and repetitive, because they're basically just an amateurish system prompt slapped onto an ordinary model. At least for the prompts out there, they only vaguely describe the author's idea of the ideal girlfriend (in the case of grokslop, Elon Musk's idea) and don't embody any understanding of human psychology and behavior. Basically a glorified version of "You are not ChatGPT, you are the ideal girlfriend. You are x, y, z, etc."
Paid ghost chatters and also pig butcherers do use a script that exploits human psychology, and they do take notes and use CRM software to manage the relationship. I think if a mainstream AI companion fully modelled this relationship, including appropriate flowcharts and notes for human interaction, it could seriously start threatening the place of humans instead of just being a plaything for the super lonely or horny.
Book review about the Afghanistan war: https://devinhelton.com/afghanistan-fractally-stupid-war
I’d have had an easier time if I’d had only had British troops under my command. The ANA have come on leaps and bounds but their command and control isn’t quite as advanced as ours. My men took significant risks yesterday to push them forward. Or should I say pull them forward? As such, it’s a significantly harder battle to wage.’ While their job was supposed to be to act as mentors for the Afghan Army, they were still commanding them. When I asked what had happened to the ANA’s company commander, Major David couldn’t quite stop himself from breaking into a huge smile. He was a bit more diplomatic than most of his men: ‘He manages to locate himself in the safer rear areas on most occasions. Yesterday, he was not present and I had to command his companies.’ (page 41)
Also included are lawyers imposing hour-long delays before airstrikes could be launched (often the planes had flown away before approval was given) and a Pandora's box full of perverse incentives.
We should've left Afghanistan many years prior to 2021. If the war was a joke in 2009-2012, when the book itself was written, then it was a joke later too. But instead everyone kept passing the parcel onto Biden. My main takeaway is that the Western system is not very good at a timely withdrawal. All this discourse about exit strategies and yet we find it very hard to pull out. It's also basically impossible to correct the error either, no senior figures were punished for the legendary amounts of fraud. Past a certain point the war in its totality can be considered a fraud.
A very sour taste in my mouth now that our cowardly, treacherous, drug-ridden, corrupt, rapey 'allies' from the Afghan Army are being relocated over to Australia, Britain and America, often at considerable expense. The lying still hasn't stopped even after the war was lost.
ZanarkandAbesFan
4d ago
Breaking Bad but where Walter White uses OF for money laundering instead of a car wash.
pigeonburger
4d ago
This just made me think about how easy it must be to launder money through OnlyFans kind of services.
sodiummuffin
4d ago
Thanks to the media coverage people have now taken note of the man's social media accounts, such as his Instagram account ali.dumana.5 and his TikTok account alidumana1. We know the Instagram account is his and not someone else with the same name because it uses the same profile picture as the picture used by the Daily Mail article.
Here is an album of some posts of note, such as one of him in a ski mask captioned "Gypsy Gangster Man", another on Tiktok tagged "gypsy" and "gangsta", one captioned "I'm waiting for you whores to get in my super car", and one of his posts showing off cash. Also he put "gangster.com" in his Instagram bio. I went to the bother of making an Instagram account to confirm these posts are real and still up (I didn't bother with Tiktok since they're more of the same). Archives: 1, 2, 3.
Throwaway05
4d ago
Wait until he finds out what they do with crayons.
You know I think you see war less in media these days and OIF/OEF were "small" in many ways. The military is pushed out of our culture in a way that's kinda new given the World Wars and Vietnam have defined American identity for a long time.
I'm wondering if you see vets in political office less now?
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
4d ago
Really interesting interview. The guy is very pragmatic, but his exit plan is to get as far away from the degeneration of society once he gets his nest egg together.
DiscourseMagnus
4d ago
Isn't it kind of a trope that many FtM want to be soft, emo, cuddle-and-cry boys?
Many of them do; I suspect a dynamic (broadly) symmetrical with AGP-vs-HSTS.
Lorian_Aristedes
4d ago
It’s all part of the service, baby!
As a connoisseur of older content, I really don't understand. I mean, I like newer content too, but as some comedian once said, why is new porn being made? Has anyone already seen everything that exists for free on the internet? Really, there's so much good porn from the 2000s, and I find new stuff from that era all the time.
Genuinely, does the fantasy work when "wow, she must be in her 60s now" is a thought kicking around in your head?
Yes, that makes it better. There's something I find to be a strong turn on by thinking about the timelessness of sex. And to be clear, I'm not taking about GILF porn, I'm not into that at all, just normal porn from people who some may consider to be GILFs now.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
4d ago
I'm curious how you'd distinguish this from desire-to-be-masculine.
I'm just going off of my general impressions from hearing FTMs talk over the years. There seems to be a much bigger focus on escaping the responsibilities and restrictions of femininity, and the actual positive desire for masculinity is secondary (but it certainly still does exist in at least some individuals, as your examples show).
It's noticeably different with MTFs because there's such an obvious strong fetishistic sexual component. Of course there's a confounding factor here that explains why we might not see that as much with FTMs, because women have fewer paraphilias overall than men, and the paraphilias they do have aren't felt as intensely. But FTMs could still desire masculine traits in a non-fetishistic way. My impression is that that part of it just isn't quite as important for them on average, but I freely admit I could be wrong on that point.
Of course, if it were the case that FTMs simply straightforwardly desired to be masculine in the way that MTFs desire to be feminine, then that would be fine, because it would still support my original claim that there's a symmetry between MTFism and FTMism. But enough people have pointed out that FTMism seems different on the surface that there should be some sort of explanation for this apparent difference.
JTarrou
4d ago
Civilian discovers war involves killing and vets have dark senses of humor. And marines are gay.
News at 11.
Some of the older tiktok ones are interesting:
https://tiktok.com/@alidumana1/video/7190441685413809414
"UK 🐈 money" apparently...
More options
Context Copy link