GreenBeard

The real heart of the issue is that they have such a small idea of what constitutes masculinity, that they’re utterly incapable of defining male as anything but a 20 year old getting drunk, playing sports, and breaking things. They don’t understand anything that isn’t just that. Mature masculinity, doesn’t exist in their world. Men don’t nurture, men don’t learn, men don’t grow. They don’t teach, they scream. They don’t support, they attack. They don’t create, the break. It’s a very sad world view. Aging gracefully, mentoring, collaborating, building a community, engaging in art, in self-expression, investing time and effort into people, all of that is “girl stuff.” Even having a family, what they want are trophies of their sexual conquest, not relationships. They don’t want to guide and mentor or participate in their kids lives. They want the glory. They make themselves so shallow, anyone with any depth at all is a threat.

That’s Henry Cavill

Sometimes things have to get real bad before people are willing to step up. That doesn’t mean that day isn’t coming, it just means it isn’t today. It took 100 years of wildcat strikes, violence, vandalism, and governments mass-murdering their own people in the 19th century before the wins of the 20th were finally realized. Organize. Organize and build networks of people who can move goods and people. An army is like a knife, the cutting edge may be where the drama happens, but if there isn’t a whole lot of metal supporting that edge, it’s just a fragile wire.

Remember kids, the world doesn’t need saving. It was here long before us, and it will be here long after we’re gone… ultimately, it’s the people that are f****d. Because none of us know the full value of any creature until it’s not doing its job anymore, and none of us can replace a single life when it is gone. Life will probably adapt to 4 or even 5 degree mean atmospheric temperature change, but the crops and livestock we rely on probably won’t. And even those of us in the wealthier countries likely won’t be there when the world as we know it is over, because if there are people left, it won’t be you or your progeny that make it. You’re nowhere near rich enough for that.

When the fuck did this become okay? We need to drive these companies out of business for this.

We would need to drive every computer company on earth out of business. They all do this. It’s not one or two, it’s all of them in a race to the bottom.

I would say it’s a pretty big stretch to describe most of the porn out there as “Healthy” though I know quite a few people have attempted to move in that direction. Still, your point has merit. People masturbate, that is normal and healthy, and they WILL find ways to enhance that experience. This refusal to accept normal, healthy human sexuality is sick and self-harming.

4/5 actually, if statistics are anything to go by. The remaining 20% are just slightly above median stupidity, with a vanishingly small sliver actually approaching competent.

Valid point. Thus far, tech workers in general have had a pretty comfortable relationship with the executive class by comparison to other industries. That made it a little to easy to dismiss the risks of being that cozy with them without some kind of protection.

Forming new professional bodies takes time, administration, and some kind of governance structure. There aren’t a lot of grey-beards that have a bunch of spare time for organizing that. Also, historically, most IT people have seen themselves as “lone wolf frontiersmen” and the rate at which the industry has changed has made any kind of professional certification obsolete very quickly. Legal statutes, the frontiers of medicine, the best practices and techniques for pipe joining and bricklaying, etc. advance very slowly by comparison. Mature industries are much easier to unionize on average. IT is spectacularly immature (in multiple ways) by comparison so it’s very hard to create a professional body to represent tech workers.

Would it be good if we had something like that? Yes. Is it going to be easy to build, hell no. A better model might be the development of independent tech co-operatives, with distributed ownership. If a bunch of senior software engineers with some spare cash to pool creating a bunch of major tech competitors with a co-operative ownership model might actually serve the industry much better than the centralized corporate model we find ourselves subject to, AND provide a basis for developing industry unions, but the closest the industry has to something like that at a large scale is… well Valve, and even that’s not a true co-operative.

But that’s just it, I am conscious of it. That’s why I can safely discard it. That’s why ads don’t work on me anymore. That’s why this conversation doesn’t matter in the slightest. Now, I’d appreciate you letting it go because this digression is an obvious attempt to create a tempest in a teapot.

I haven’t been exposed to shit. Have you not been listening? I don’t feel any particular sympathy for China, in fact I firmly oppose those trying to lean my country towards them. I don’t have many sympathies for Iran either, though I do have some sympathy for those who opposed the regime. It’s unfortunate they’re likely entirely dead now thanks to the dipshit in the White House. I don’t appreciate anyone trying to push propaganda on me, whether it’s Russia, China, Iran, The US, Google, Microsoft, Open AI or Nvidia, or Israel. I had to learn to breathe underwater in the sea of propaganda and lies from every direction.

For example, I can see you trying to twist a comment on American corporate bullshit, and the world being a better place when America finally falls apart, because a sick and dying whale thrashing around is more trouble than all the chaos of a multi-polar world, and trying to turn it into a debate on the middle east because you only care about Israel. You’re irrelevant and I will forget you tomorrow, just like all the propagandists that came before you.

You really have no reading comprehension. I said they’re the only ones I’ve seen. Not that that’s all that exist. I’m a millenial. I was raised to spot and discard propaganda by all the American corporate advertising that’s been jammed down my throat since I was born.

The only thing that I find offensive about the Iran conflict is that western lives and resources are being wasted fighting people we have no reason to hate. I don’t give a damn what happens to Israel. They’re not my problem.

And you can spare me the blood libel of equating Judaism with the crimes of Israel. Watching Jews being abandoned and attacked by their own community for not trying dismiss and ior God forbid justify the crimes of Israel is the most antisemitic thing I’ve ever seen.

You mean the Lego things? That’s the only Iranian anything I’ve ever seen, but nice try. Catchy tune but didn’t change my position on anything.i don’t believe in “mowing the Israeli lawn” if that’s what you’re afraid of. I do however believe in letting Israel suffer the natural consequences of its own decisions, and not protecting them out of some misguided sense of guilt.

By justice I meant the billionaire parasites and the Epstein class.

If you think I expect world peace you didn’t read what 8 wrote. But I will die proudly for justice. For mercy. For the truth, and I will not mourn a hegemony that enforces “peace” at the cost of thos values.

The Spanish flu killed more people than all the human wars in the last thousand years. How many genocides still occured under “Pax Americana.” Taking the whole world into account, 90% of humanity would be under just as much threat of violence if the US vanished tomorrow. There hasn’t been an era of broad peace among most of the globe in 6000 years. You act like it’s been sunshine and roses under the monopolar system. Ask the people of Libya, Syria, and Iraq how they feel about that? Ask the Cubans, and the Guatemalans and the Haitians if they feel protected.

While you’re not wrong, it’s also not the whole story. The damage he’s done will take decades to undo just to break even. Simply reversing his EOs won’t raise the dead, or rebuilt the knowledge and skills that have been lost. Our grandchildren, if there be any, will still be dealing with the consequences of what has happened in the last 2 years.

Hypothetically, a relatively stationary (not doing a lot of accelerating and decelerating) “Space Datacenter” would be a perfect test bed for something like Curie point radiators. Might help with the size of radiator needed to produce the same effect, but that’s probably the least difficult problem with that environment. The radiation shielding you would need would be… well astronomical.

There was a hypothesis proposed a number of years ago that a mono-polar world is inherently unstable. A second great power keeps the other “honest” to a degree and limits the scope of corruption. It doesn’t stop it entirely mind you, but it has to at least maintain the appearance of integrity or expose its vulnerability. Any world where only one great power exists, must eventually collapse under the weight of internal corruption.

Looks like the hypothesis had some merit.

It’s the year of our lord 2026. Rule of Law is dead. The other Golden Rule is now supreme: He who has the gold, makes the rules.

There’s some truth to the inter-generational conflict. A lot of the boomers and early Gen X were granted limited access to the tools of the owner class (eg. “Reverse Mortgages” are really just a tiny version of the same equity financing the ultra-rich use to access their wealth without sacrificing control of their companies or paying taxes). They’ve socially conditioned and co-opted a lot of our elders into protecting their interests for them, however you are correct that it’s more of an attempt to obfuscate the real threat (the sociopathic rich bastards) and keep us fighting with each other rather than organizing against them.