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Fruck
Lacks all conviction
29m ago
Trust the plan snark is directed at human plans. God is on a different level. If it discredits the eschatalogical Christians that will probably impact the popularity of Christianity I agree - because threats are a good way to bully the ignorant into line - but it can only be good for Christianity on the whole - and the world, since it reduces the number of people doing things like trying to breed special cows to bring about the end times.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
2m ago
Interestingly, in cishet girl lore, there's a coping fantasy about a particular kind of female physicality, distinct from the normal T&A variety, that somehow connects up with a woman's soul and channels male physical attraction into magical emotional intimacy and commitment. You can see it in Disney films and romance novels, where the hero absolutely never starts by noticing the protagonist's bouncing breasts, but may be magnetically drawn to something spiritual and ineffable about her hair or eyes or posture, which turns out to express some deeply unique feature of her personal character.
I would probably get accused of lying for saying this, but while I certainly don't lack attraction for a woman's curves, the physical feature that makes me feel deep attraction to someone is their facial features. I don't know about "spiritual and ineffable," but a warm smile and deep, thoughtful eyes make my heart melt, and a connection of shared vulnerability gives me butterflies in the chest. Someone once told me I made her "feel like I'm in a romance novel," because I talk that way, and similar statements have been made by other people I've dated. But I'm also well aware my romantic orientation is not typical for men, and I have no clue how I ended up with those feelings. It's one of the biggest mysteries for me.
That said, I would not describe myself as "demisexual," and I have the hardware and software for immediate sexual interest. It's just not something I particularly like acting on, and never have. For me, the romantic and sexual attraction have to happen together -- typically, if I find someone romantically attractive, they have a warm smile or seem smart and kind and radiant, I'll find them sexually attractive at the same time. I will admit that a passionate love affair in which sex occurs early has its attraction. But only because it would mean the passion is strong and intense that we found ourselves unable to control the sexual tension -- which is remarkably similar to the sexual fantasies that women will sometimes admit to.
I can also find people sexually but not romantically attractive, though that's almost always because they have some personality flaw that I find repugnant and I see no vulnerability to which I can relate. If I find you attractive, and you find me attractive, I will find myself staring into your eyes or fantasizing about what it feels like to hold you close or whether it would feel like being in a whirlwind to kiss you, probably more than I will fantasize about what sex with you would be like. My own experience is that sex fueled by passion is just massively more pleasurable, even in raw, hedonistic terms, than sex divorced from it. It's just hotter.
All that being said -- the male complaint is that men with this attitude are often more shy and reserved, and oftentimes get passed over or not romantically noticed by women. And when they do get noticed, the things they say and do that demonstrate their strong romantic orientation are often seen as fake or dissembling, precisely because men try to fake it to play women. And the orientation is so rare among men that I'm not sure most people believe it even exists. I just don't know why my psychology on this is so unusual, or how I ended up there.
YE_GUILTY
10m ago
Yes, but when compared to the opportunity to compel the nation to submit to your worldview, those benefits are small potatoes. Tax exemptions may be enough to motivate a medium-time con-man to declare his pyramid scheme a church, but those with higher aspirations might be willing to forgo them.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
14m ago
If current trends continue then the world will be less secular in the future, not more secular.
According to Pew Research (and they're arguably the best at this sort of thing) in 2050 Christianity will stay at a little of 30% of global population, same as it was in 2010, while the religiously unaffiliated will fall from 16.4% of global population to 13.2%. And in the United States the decline of Christianity seems to have leveled off.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
20m ago
My (naive?) theory is that Trump owes his victory as much to the Evangelical community more than any other - they very much represent his spirit. The GOP would do well to embrace that community, and I think they are doing so especially in the House led by Mike Johnson.
Trump owes his victory to winning over not-particularly-religious white working-class voters in the Midwest. A preaching-to-the-choir electoral strategy designed to increase margins in rural Arkansas from 80% to 85% would be an electoral disaster for the party.
Thanks, that's a fascinating bit of anthropology right there! Wish I could read a thorough firsthand account by a straight guy who's tried it: the male experience of unreciprocated male sexual attention is really intriguing to me.
What breaks the symmetry in your example is the fact that straight women do, actually, find at least some men attractive some of the time. Some of the attention she gets throughout her life will be from creepy undesirables. But some of it will be from men who are genuinely attractive, and who she may be attracted to in turn, and who she may judge to be good romantic partners.
The tricky part there is that there's notoriously no reliable way to convert male sexual interest to male romantic attachment, and in fact the former sometimes seems to operate at the expense of the latter (see: madonna/whore, "she put out too soon," etc.). Very inexperienced girls often do have a pleasant few months of mistaking sexual demand for actual social capital, but there's inevitably a rude awakening, and I suspect most hot women could tell you the painful story of when it happened to them.
Interestingly, in cishet girl lore, there's a coping fantasy about a particular kind of female physicality, distinct from the normal T&A variety, that somehow connects up with a woman's soul and channels male physical attraction into magical emotional intimacy and commitment. You can see it in Disney films and romance novels, where the hero absolutely never starts by noticing the protagonist's bouncing breasts, but may be magnetically drawn to something spiritual and ineffable about her hair or eyes or posture, which turns out to express some deeply unique feature of her personal character. I think the average-demisexual woman, if surrounded by men who find her beautiful in that way, would indeed be in the enviable position you describe, where she has only to wait for the right candidate to close the bargain. But unless she's 15 or has serious daddy issues, the average woman surrounded by men ogling her tits knows that she's about 180 degrees from being in that position, and if anything is depressingly farther than ever from pair-bonding with anyone willing to "pay a fair price," as you put it.
No_one
47m ago
To get on the same page, you're okay with the way liberal democracy functions in practice- the sock-puppeting of civil society, the media manipulation of public opinion in the interest of stability ?
gattsuru
53m ago
It's been possible for a while to use AIgen to go from text to image to 3d model to animated rig to (extremely large) set of animations. Usually struggles a lot the further you get from standard human. Largely workable with most human intervention early in the chain, and would scale a lot better than using aigen (or something like posenet) in realtime, not just in compute resources but required bandwidth.
Dunno if that's what they're doing here, but it's how I'd attack things from a naive perspective. Honestly kinda surprised that it hasn't already been done at scale, but it would have enough repetition -- and especially idle animations for the existing two 'companions' are very repetitive -- that it might be undesirable to a lot of self-driven devs or experimenters.
Very much the 2nd. My take as an Orthodox Christian is that fomenting fears and guesses about the apocalypse is strictly sinful, and mostly a Protestant thing. Christ Himself says:
“But of that day and hour knoweth no one, not even the angels of heaven, neither the Son, but the Father only.“
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