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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 22nd, 2024

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  • If a miserable old man wants to hatekeep an entire art style then he’s someone that I can safely and happily disrespect.

    Rich people like him do not have feelings that matter, he’s wealthy enough to solve real problems but instead he protects his personal legacy and wealth.

    Defend capitalism and try to increase the power of the wealthy if you like but I’ll always be on the side of people being free to express themselves regardless of the feelings of a rich old man.





  • That’s the bit about this I hate, I do think porn can be dangerous especially for people who aren’t emotionally and intellectually ready for it but these systems do the opposite of help.

    Teens are curious, letting them sneak a peek at pornhub doesn’t have much risk but forcing them to learn how to accesses backroom porng R ** from seedy discord groups or similar puts them in actual genuine danger from preditors and exposes them to far more intense and possibly illegal porn.

    In my friends kids school there was a situation with a girl that had an iPhone she’d been sent by some guy on roblox, rumor was she’d ‘earned it’ when playing at a friend’s house with less strict parental supervision. It’s already hard to stop teens putting themselves in danger, especially with so many bad people out there preying on them.




  • The sad truth is that the right are pandering to homophobia because it’s a vote getter for them not because they really care about it.

    A huge portion of religious people believe that homosexuality is an especially dangerous sin because it’s a social contagion, they see the increased popularity of gay things and the decreased respect for religion as a clear sign that the devil is winning and faithful, godfearing society is collapsing. To an extent they’re right, modern views on self determination and respect for others is anathema to Christian society as it’s been for over a thousand years - to the faithful it’s like saying the sky is pink or fish live in trees.

    There are of course now grifters using homophobia to draw people into their political ideologies but it’s generally people from homophobic families in homoohobic communities that get drawn into it, it’s easy to forget that when you see a twenty something year old kid making homophobic comments it’s likely at his age his dad was going ‘queer bashing’ for fun with his friends and certainly wouldn’t have hesitated to beat up a gay person in a bar or in the street if encountered.

    Even big artists like Eminem had deeply homophobic messages in his music, now that’s backtracked and he’s friends with Elton - this isn’t entirely because he’s grown as a person but because at the start of this century it was unconscionable that rap or hip hop could be anything but homophobic. School kids used the word ‘gay’ to describe uncool or disliked things so commonly it was even part of my own vocab despite being raised in a progressive and accepting family in a liberal area.

    Things have changed so much just in my adult lifetime but it’s not universal, a lot of religious and conservative people see the ‘gay agenda’ exactly as you see the ‘homophobic agenda’ in that they believe it’s political narrative being pushed just to destabilize morally virtuous power structures to allow corrupt and evil people to take power and steal money.

    Companies that shoehorn a poorly written gay character into everything for the sake of inclusivity feel like a pandering cash grab to me but to the homophobic Christian it feels like asymmetric warfare from a deranged and selfish elite hellbent on ruining western society.

    It’s a hugely complex issue for me, I honestly have no idea what the best thing for the greater good is. Forcing things too hard can be painful for those unready which causes resentment and reaction but holding back and allowing non-violent homophobic behavior to exist in our society is hurtful to those struggling to find snd accept themselves. (For example being 17 and trying to reconcile popular music explicitly talking about how your unexplored sexual desires are disgusting, realizing you have to make the choice between humiliation and self denial - and this is probably a big part of other emotional troubles which can lead to rejection of otherwise sensible social norms leading to unhealthy drug use, self endangering behavior and other things that still have lasting damage to my life to this day)

    I don’t know what will solve these complex issues in our society, maybe making certain concessions to mildly homophobic sections of society would stop driving them into full on culture war crusaders? Maybe highlighting that it’s not only possible but probable to be gay and boring would help ease the anxiety? I actually kinda think straight pride type events and companies pandering to heterosexuals could be normalized and accepted more - not in a way that pits them against everyone else but more of a everyone gets a party kinda way. Stop heteros feeling attacked or at least make those who want to paint that picture looking silly.

    It’s sad to admit but humanity is naturally kinda selfish and shitty, bigotry and group thinking is as natural and easy to us as breathing while compassion and understanding takes effort and the right circumstances to flourish.



  • So if someone made a photoshop of him in blackface with racist iconography and he didn’t like it you’d post it everywhere? ‘Look at putin depicted as a disgusting stupid black guy! It sure is humiliating for him to be associated with terrible things like black people!’

    And yes I know it’s tempting to write off things like this with ‘it’s not complex bro, I just do what I feel like and it’s OK because in my heart it’s a progressive act of kindness!’ but life isn’t so simple, actions have unintended and unconsidered implications.

    There’s so many reasons to laugh at putin, even if he was gay it wouldn’t be one of them. Assume the story that this upsets putin didn’t exist as a meme (which btw is likely nonsense anyway) what would be the point of this image? What would it convey? Just homophobia.







  • This is a fascinating one.

    Some things to consider, a toddler can easily defeat a baby but a 40 and 45 year old are evenly matched. There’s also the question of how much is there to learn, at some point the tech tree is pretty much done - iron is much stronger than brass but maybe light-speed heavy plasma guns are pretty much maxed out and physics simply doesn’t allow more.

    This could result in interesting stalemates, a natural limit to the size of conflicts for example if it’s possible to maintain a defensive sphere that can withstand the maximum level of abuse that a circle of attackers can provide - any weapons platform too far back being unable to increase the force applied. We might get technologically perfect civilizations effectively combined to bubbles of influence around their power sources.

    What is possible is that at a certain level of tech we discover how to tap into the universal internet, aliens give us the rest of the answers to physics and philosophy then show us how to build VR gear so we can explore the cosmos in perfect VR and no one ever needs to build Dyson spheres or hyperwarp megastructures because we can do anything with a dark matter powered computanium smart phone.



  • It doesn’t have to be storage, another option is building over capacity so it’s winter output is sufficient then using the excess in summer months to perform useful work.

    For example a desalination and pumping station at the mouth of the Arizona River, you can scale the pumping from a storage lake by the desalination plant to one or more of the upriver lakes raising their water levels to replace the water used for industry and agricultural.

    Carbon capture and manufacture of e-fuels or similar is another great possibility, it can be scaled with energy production vastly reducing the cost of the process and allowing further transition from oil in areas which might otherwise be difficult.

    E-chems are important because there’s a few things which are vitally important to modern industry but currently produced fairly cheep as an oil by-product, if demand for oil derived fuel declines as we hope and production falls dramatically then the price of those chemicals would skyrocket - being able to transition into using sequestered carbon would save a lot of difficulty, and if it helps create a market for sequestered carbon it could help us start bring atmospheric co2 ppm down slowly.