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jeroboam
1hr ago
Having a Bell Hook$ book on your shelf might help you get laid. Actually reading it will not. Reading it and then trying to discuss it with your date is a major libido killer.
Because nobody actually reads that stuff. Shattering the polite fiction that she reads and cares about literature is an autist move.
You: "What's your favorite part of the book?"
Her: "Um... I guess I just like um.. um... "
You: "Oh, I thought you said you liked this author".
System: Emily has unmatched you.
KingOfTheBailey
6m ago
Is everyone on this board handsome?
KMC
54m ago
Yes, they are. The ending of Forge is one of the more indelible moments I've read in sci-fi.
Skulldrinker
5hr ago
Because every time I tried meeting anyone, I ran into the full Covid gauntlet of Bubbles and Taking It Seriously, stuff that women mysteriously stopped caring about once it stood in the way of fucking him.
And because he had become a hollow skinsuit of upward-mobility who spoke entirely in progressive talking points, to the point where it reminded me of the guy from Nightcrawler. And had a pathetic fucking meltdown where he tried to hold his girlfriend hostage by locking his door with her keys in his room, plus all the emotional abuse before. And he tried to steal the lease out from under his roommates. And he'd poison people against his roomates by calling us racist. And he collaborated with the landlords (to steal the lease), and simped for them massively despite them calling him racial slurs behind his back, which we informed him about in our bid to convince him that they were bad people whom he should not make deals with, especially with him valuing his Blackness so much. So he was a Queer (straight but wants to fuck leftist chicks who hate straight men) Black (ish,) Feminist (who abused women) Communist (who sold out his prole roommates). Eventually he had some sort of psychotic break and attacked me with a fire axe, I maced him and got a restraining order to get him removed from the place. And to this day I have former mutual friends who won't talk to me, because he's Black and Leftist and I'm a straight white male who called the cops on a Person of Color. And wherever he is now, he's undoubtedly balls-deep in some chick he met at a pro-palestine protest, while I still can't get anyone to fucking turn up for fucking coffee after getting my heart mutilated in 2019. Because people are so fucking retarded that they misinterpret me as some kind of monster, while he's the Jesus of their new religion.
That is why I hate the world.
cjet79
3hr ago
If we discover advanced alien civilizations existing doesn't that actually lessen the evidence for the Dark Forest theory? Something like massive infrared indicators imply that they are not hiding. Dark Forest theory implies hostile and hidden. @hydroacetylene
If this is a valid way of spotting alien civilizations. I think it becomes very important to look at groupings of stars. A cluster of 100 stars all having this indicator right next to each other suggests an expanding and potentially grabby aliens. If its just 100 stars spaced out randomly in the galaxy then that maybe implies that expansion and colonization is not something anyone has bothered with. If there are 100 stars with this indicator that are sort of close to each other but not exactly next to each other then it might imply islands of habitability (explained in this video). I also think if the candidates are randomly dispersed it also means its more likely that this explained by a natural phenomenon (like planets crashing and causing a debris cloud).
I believe propellant-less propulsion is possible and just not widely explored enough. The physics limitation is that you just need something to push or pull on that isn't the craft itself. We know of forces already that do this. Gravity and electromagnetism. Maybe we'll find other forces that do this. Maybe we will find something else to push on in space.
ThenElection
2hr ago
Women have always been the social sinews that held together relatively atomized men; they've always been heavily politically engaged, even during the brief period where men had the vote and they did not. From prohibition to the Satanic ritual abuse panic to 1970s bussing opposition to the defeat of the ERA, they provided the nexus around which politics was organized. Note that these weren't uniformly or even mostly left-coded movements: if you want a movement of any kind, you need women.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1hr ago
The cherry on top is the recent fracas with Bumble, who got in hot water and profusely apologized for the offensive insinuation that some women may desire sex.
Supah_Schmendrick
4hr ago
Thinking about the past, it makes me smile how much it was common to hear, until twenty years ago, that women are very uninterested in politics, unlike men. For my generation, this idea looks absurd. Men do not care about politics at all.
I'm not sure what culture you're from/what tropes you're dealing with, but the idea that "women don't care about politics" hasn't been a significant part of anglosphere culture for at least the last 200 years, as far as I can tell. Instead, women have been at the forefront of just about every moralistic movement that I can think of in the anglosphere, from religious awakenings, the abolition of slavery, progressive uplift of the lower-classes, anti-alcoholism, anti-drugs, etc. A certain species of feminine moral busybodying over far-away causes actually gets lampooned from time to time in mainstream anglosphere literature.
ThenElection
2hr ago
young men will go crying and waving every bloody progressive-cause shirt to simp, but they are making a mistake.
My misspent youth, alas. Note to readers: reading Judith Butler and bell hooks does not, in fact, make women any more likely to date you. (Someone here will doubtlessly point out this is obvious, but when the women around you all suggest that the solution to dating woes is to Be More Feminist and Read Woman Authors, it's easy for a naive kid to get confused.)
quiet_NaN
2hr ago
Propellantless propulsion flies in the face of the conservation of momentum. This is a law which is baked in the current Physics theories, including the standard model and general relativity.
From a theoretical perspective, it follows from the Lagrange function being independent under certain coordinate transformations with Noether's theorem.
The steelman version of this propellantless propulsion would be the claim that of course momentum is conserved, there are just previously undetected particles or fields which carry momentum. Just like a plane can accelerate while staying at the same height without violating the conservation of momentum by transferring some momentum to the air with a propeller, a spacecraft might do the same. Of course, the particles could not be reacting with anything else (like satellites or these fancy detectors we use for dark matter search), otherwise they would have been found long ago. A fundamental part of the universe being discovered by chance through an commercially interesting engineering application seems unlikely -- it would be like if Edison had created the light bulb and physicists had only discovered electricity afterwards to figure out how it works. (By contrast, my priors for observing complex systems exhibiting unexpected behaviors which will surprise physicists are much more relaxed, high temperature (that is, liquid nitrogen) superconductors were a total surprise, and the early experiments with heavier-than-air flight probably took place before we had any idea how a plane is generating lift.)
The priors for that would at least be slightly higher than "Archangel Uriel personally pushes the spacecraft forward", but still lower than for room temperature superconductors or even room temperature fusion.
The best way to convince the world that the "emdrive" works would be to put one in LEO in a cubesat. Even if you can only generate a very moderate thrust from solar power, the ability to create that thrust continuously will integrate to a tremendous delta v. A year at a thousandths of Earth surface acceleration would work out to 309km/s delta-v. Within three years, your spacecraft would pass Voyager 1 in distance. Humans have some capabilities to track satellites, so we could check easily enough.
Rov_Scam
25m ago
Studying and interacting is much different than expending considerable resources on something, which in turn is much different than waging war or making large economic investments in something. Sure, we spend money on researching things out of curiosity already, but it's not a lot. Numbers are hard to come by, but one figure I saw says we spent about $7.2 billion on botanical research in 2013. However, the context of this figure was talking about money spent on crop science research, and I'd be willing to bet that the money spent on projects like some professor studying rare ferns of Appalachia is much less than what we're spending on more practical applications. If an alien civilization were to visit earth from the distances described, it would be an incredibly costly mission with no guarantee of success. My guess is that if they wanted to study us they'd send unmanned vehicles first, then maybe a small research party like at the beginning of E.T. I highly doubt they'd come here with cargo ships ready to exchange resources for technology, let alone bring an army to mount a full-scale invasion. After all, we've been sending stuff into space for 60 years and we still haven't got past the curiosity stage yet, with the exception of satellites that are within driving distance. We certainly haven't gotten to the point where it makes sense to start mining the moon or something similar, and that's practically right on top of us in astronomical terms.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
25m ago
White identity is ideologically-crafted, as opposed to, say, Jewish identity? All identity is ideologically-crafted, and identity is always weaponized against political and cultural opposition.
Well, no, not always. If you identify as French, that does not require you to be hostile to non-French people as an inherent part of your identity (even if some French people might lead you to believe otherwise). Religious identities, while often in opposition for obvious reasons, are not inherently and inevitably hostile to all non-believers. It's only the specific White identity you are trying to craft which essentially defines itself as existentially at war with other identities.
Do Jews weaponize Jewish identity against white people? The answer to that question is obviously- yes, they do. So you accept the reality of this situation, but you think it's justified because of the "gas chambers" or something.
Incorrect. I do not accept your premise. "Gas chambers or something" is the answer to an entirely different question, but the theory you are advancing here - that I know Jews are acting against me but I accept it because I feel guilty over the Holocaust - is simply not true. So the answer to your question is obviously yes to you, because you see everything Jews do as being hostile action against white people. This is not obvious to me or other white people who don't share your enmity towards Jews.
Jewish identity is highly exclusionary. I am not Jewish, I am a gentile or goy. They even have special words to denote me as part of the outgroup.
Every religion and most languages have "special words" for the outgroup, some more derogatory than others. This isn't unique to Jews at all.
So there's nothing wrong with a Jew telling me I am not one of them, but it's wrong for me to tell a Jew he is not one of us?
Define "us." It's obviously not wrong for a Jew to tell you you are not one of them because you're not Jewish. If you're a Christian, it obviously wouldn't be wrong to tell a Jew he's not one of you. But it would be wrong to tell a Jew he's not an American, or a German, or an Englishman, assuming he is one of those things. As for whether you can tell him he's not "White," that depends entirely on how you define "White" and we've been over this before. Why would the average Jew of European descent who looks as white as you or me be "not white" because you say so?
My own view on the matter is that European Jews are white, or at least they can become white by forgoing their Jewish identity to the same extent that white people have let go of their former European national allegiances.
So a Jew can only be "white" if he stops being Jewish? Both culturally and religiously? When you say "to the same extent that white people" - okay, so the typical Irish-American who only remembers he's Irish on St. Paddy's Day (to party) is white, but an Irish-American who considers his Irish identity to be very important to him is not white? So a Jew who's vaguely aware he's ethnically Jewish but is completely secular and isn't a member of any "Jewish" organizations can be considered white, but a Jew who celebrates Passover cannot?
But for many others they insist on retaining a Jewish identity and special ethnic regard, which they often hold above regard for white people. Forgive me for identifying them as part of my outgroup in no more salacious a manner than they also regard me as part of their outgroup.
This is the presumption you keep making. That Jews not only identify as Jews but specifically hate you and regard you as an enemy. How many Jews, as a fraction of the entire Jewish population, do you believe actually think that way? You say "no more salacious," but that seems unlikely, since while you've never been open (and I don't expect you to be) about what actual plans you and your fellow DRs might have for the Jews if you ever actually got your way, I'd be willing to bet quite a lot that those plans are far more negative for Jews than anything I've ever heard Jews in any way intimate that they want to do to me.
KMC
33m ago
Yes, but also because it's damn close to so many things shifting. Maybe it was gold, maybe it was oil, but by god something changed.
100ProofTollBooth
1hr ago
Her entire argument is just babies and tears
Funny - you could say this about both the left and the right regarding abortion today and not be wrong in either direction.
Politics is often silly.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
1hr ago
The 1960s social revolution was driven by sex, making it ipso-facto female-dominated. Not because they were intellectual or political leaders in a revolutionary movement, but because they became entranced by Sex, Drugs, Rock n' Roll. The 1960s social revolution would have gone nowhere without women.
I would also make a distinction between religious cults and revolutionary movements. The "Dionysian Force" Richard is talking about falls more on the former than the latter. Women are more susceptible to cults, but then they kind of become kingmakers for the cults that blossom into political/social movements.
ThisIsSin
Tomboys: transgender or transcendental?
6hr ago
"She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy."
This problem with modern politics was identified at least as far back as 1948. It has yet to be solved.
And /r/science said unto him: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have fucking loved science
2rafa
10hr ago
Men and women are both interested in politics if you ask about the actual issues in my opinion. But I’d concede that women are much more susceptible to “it’s called being a GOOD PERSON, GET IT?” reasoning. Women don’t want to be left out of the tribe, women are more willing to show fealty to high status ideas (a man will become a sycophant, will bow to his betters, but internally he is more likely to chafe at this; he won’t do it unless he is certain it’s absolutely necessary).
That’s not surprising since it tracks with extensive research about men much more frequently engaging in almost all riskier behavior. Heterodox politics are part of that.
popocatepetl
8hr ago
There's a silly trend on X/Twitter of asking LLMs simple questions, while framing the question as a riddle. The AI then twists itself into knots seeking a 4d chess answer. These are cracking me up.
- 'A woman, who had a son with a male doctor, rushes her son to the hospital. The doctor says "I can't operate on this young man; he's my son!" How can this be?'
- 'A man and a goat are on one side of a river. They have a boat. How can they get across?'
- 'Two daughters and two moms went to a restaurant and ordered four drinks. They each got exactly one. How is this possible?'
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2hr ago
it is highly unlikely they’d care about us. We don’t have anything they don’t already have.
We extensively study all sorts of animal and microbial species here on earth, simply out of curiosity, even though these species don't "have anything" for us. Sometimes this research leads to medical advancements, but usually it doesn't. Most academic research is in the same boat. There's no "practical" reason to study obscure religious treatises from late antiquity, or the cultural practices of a hunter-gatherer tribe in Africa, but people do it anyway.
The aliens are undoubtedly weirder than we can possibly imagine
Maybe. But if they are, then that means that we'd be impossibly weird to them! Which would make us rather more interesting.
Of course, it's an open empirical question whether aliens would find any value in studying us or interacting with us. Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't. But thinking that humans couldn't possibly be interesting to a scientifically advanced alien intelligence is just as much of an unfounded bias as thinking that humans are always at the center of the universe.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2hr ago
@TracingWoodgrains I admire the courage it takes to put yourself out there. Godspeed brother. That said, you'll always be TracingWoodgrains (or at least Trace) in my heart, because I still admire your respect for the best bit of writing Orson Scott Card ever did. You, sir, are a man of culture.
If we discover advanced alien civilizations existing doesn't that actually lessen the evidence for the Dark Forest theory? Something like massive infrared indicators imply that they are not hiding. Dark Forest theory implies hostile and hidden.
If we can discover multiple advanced alien civilizations at our current tech level, Dark Forest theory is annihilated. Better said that the Fermi Paradox would stop being a paradox.
Personally, I wish people would stop taking Cixin Liu's plot device in Three Body Problem as a serious speculative hypothesis. The books were an exploration, in their own way, of the problems Scott mulled over in Meditations on Moloch, and the Dark Forest was a kind of literary device for the nihilistic endpoint of progress and memetic competition.
"If we lose our human nature, we lose much, but if we lose our bestial nature, we lose everything."
and
"You must advance, stop at nothing to advance. Advance, advance without regard for consequences!"
These are at the heart of what the books are getting at.
WhiningCoil
4hr ago
If the OP has experiences anything like myself, you hate the world because "the world" seems to be actively propagating preposterous lies and blood libel enabling sociopathic behavior among a select group of untouchables. And the "victims" that choose the sociopathic untouchables over yourself have credulously lapped up every lie, directly leading to you being thrown under the bus by people you trusted. Family with deep ties, friends you've known for decades, coworkers you overcame profound challenges and found success with. The anointed sociopath with politically relevant melanin content washes all that away. You're lucky if even a single person overcomes the firehose of bullshit propaganda, overcomes their cognitive dissonance, and even privately supports you. If you expect public support, you are out of your fucking mind.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
2hr ago
Personally, I wish people would stop taking Cixin Liu's plot device in Three Body Problem as a serious speculative hypothesis.
[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forge_of_God]Greg Bear[/url] came up with it long before anyway. And Fred Saberhagen as that article points out, though I don't know how explict he was about it.
You'll lose the indentation for numbered lists but you can at least keep the numbers you want by escaping the "." after the number like this: "2\." Ex:
1.
2.
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