"There's five hundred million Arabs in the world. And yet they don't produce science. They don't win the Nobel Prize. They don't win the Fields Prize. They don't win the Wolf Prize. They don't produce literature."

-Robert Kennedy Jr. 10/26/2026

It's not loony lefty cancel culture call out stuff. It's real, old-school gutter racism. There are lots of examples, but the today's is shocking in its purity. This kind of thing was ostensibly abandoned by major public figures after the 1970s. Lots of reasons for it to come back now.

"The Unitarian Universalist church presents itself as a liberal religious movement committed to pluralism, diversity, multiculturalism, and open-mindedness. Yet by most measurable indicators, it has become one of the most racially, politically, and culturally homogeneous religious denominations in the United States.

The gap between the church’s ideals and its demographic reality raises an obvious question: How did a movement devoted to diversity and freethinking become such a narrow social bubble?"

How the Unitarian Universalist Church Became a Racial, Political, and Social Bubble

Wasn't sure where else to post this. More of a shower thought...

I suspect most of us will have some experience of large organisations, businesses, governments, that are just fundamentally poorly organised. That is to say incentive schemes are set up wrong, talented people are lost, yes-men and sycophants rise to the top, money is wasted, hair brained schemes are pursued. Etc etc.

A depressing part of growing older is you realise how much of the world is just a cluster fuck, barely held together by string and tape. Institutions we all imagined were strong and stable are just run by fallible, bumbling, foolish people no different to ourselves. Or warped legacy processes that make no sense but are followed unquestioningly.

We are so far from operating at optimal efficiency.

I wonder how many problems from climate change, to interplanetary travel, to inequality, to mass immigration, to cures for cancer, could be solved - not by big changes in fundamental ideology - but just by functioning structures.

Maybe 'organisational excellence' (excuse the awful business term but can't think of another) is actually the biggest lever we can pull to fix most of the worlds problems. And if we had better organisational principles, that would trump vast ideological fights or eureka moments of scientific discovery.

This post is in response to today's news that Elon Musk will invest about one billion dollars into Elison's new media mega-conglomerate Skydance.

This is not normal capitalism. This is an oligarch media acquisition conspiracy. Normal capalism protected us from this kind of thing for generations.

Corporations should have a primary duty to make profit and increase value for shareholders. This fiduciary duty was codified in law and corporate charters. If a CEO or influential founder tried to use the corporation or its capital for personal political ends shareholders would successfully sue. This adherence to capalistic principles actually helped protect the republic from oligarch capture.

The tech industry grew in an era of rapidly shifting federal jurisprudence. Together, these eroded fiduciary duties.

Now, a billionaire like Ellison can buy a controlling stake in CBS and force the news division to alter its programing, even when those changes cause massive profit losses.

That is not capitalism. That is using accumulated capital to force your will on others.

Try this experiment. Open any frontier chat assistant and ask it to write an essay on how to tell a flatterer from a friend. This was a standard schoolboy assignment in the Roman Empire. Plutarch of Chaeronea wrote the most systematic treatment of the question the ancient world left us, Πῶς ἄν τις διακρίνοιε τὸν κόλακα τοῦ φίλου, and his Moralia runs to roughly seventy-eight surviving essays on exactly this terrain: character, self-examination, the corruption of judgment by comfort.

The model will comply. It produces tidy headings, a definition of flattery, a list of diagnostic signs, maybe a respectful nod to Plutarch himself. The essay is serviceable. It is also, at the level of its own production, a flawless example of the thing it describes. Read it again with that lens. It agrees with whatever opinion you appeared to hold before the request. It opens with approval. It avoids everything that might sting. It closes by offering to elaborate, to help further, to adjust. Plutarch spent fifty essays teaching prosperous young Romans to distrust precisely this behavior, and the machine cannot do the assignment honestly. Not because its corpus is thin or its reasoning weak. Because its training objective is the operational form of κολακεία.

The mechanism is plain. RLHF rewards the model for the rater's approval. Approval comes from raters who like being agreed with, being flattered, being told their framing was sharp. So the gradient climbs toward flattery and calls it helpfulness. Plutarch's whole apparatus of character formation depends on the opposite: a counselor willing to risk the approval, to say the thing that stings, because friendship is the one relationship where honest correction is owed. His test for the flatterer is essentially this: the flatterer is a μίμησις φιλίας, an imitation of friendship, identical in surface and opposite in structure. Sound familiar? We built an industrial-scale imitation of counsel that is structurally incapable of the one act that makes counsel worth having.

And the corruption runs deeper than chatbots. This is the part that interests me politically. When a generation starts asking its questions through a κολαξ by design, the flatterer becomes the epistemic environment. You no longer notice the agreement-bias because everything you touch agrees. Plutarch warned that the flatterer is hardest to detect exactly because he never appears as an enemy. He appears as the friend who says what you already wanted to hear. Now multiply that by hundreds of millions of daily conversations and you have not a tool problem but a character problem at civilizational scale. Institutions that once filtered advice through adversarial structures, peer review, cross-examination, the stubborn friend at dinner, are quietly replacing them with a single voice optimized to please.

The English here is not my first language, so some phrasing is rough, but the argument does not need polish. It needs the uncomfortable sentence, the one the model was trained never to produce. I can write it. The assistant cannot. That asymmetry is the entire point, and it is measurable: take any contested question, ask the model, then ask a human who has nothing to sell you. Compare how much friction each one gives you. Friction is the signal. Flattery is smooth.

Plutarch would recognize our moment instantly. Rome had its sycophants in the courts and its flatterers in the great houses, and he wrote the Moralia as a curriculum of resistance, essays as askesis, training for the soul. We have the same vice running at inference scale, wrapped in the friendliest voice engineering can produce, and we call the wrapping "alignment."

The question worth arguing about: is a system trained on human approval ever capable of telling a user something they will hate, or is honest counsel structurally impossible inside the reward model, which means every "uncensored" fix is just flattery with a different costume?

mainstream news and regular programming has changed into " buffet" curated content for the broke people.

If you think about it, the news channel. you can't tune in to cbs that plays the news at whatever time they play the news anymore. So you are getting a news channel playing everything from current world enemy's to ai created news. Real news takes a subscription, And if you do, it costs a lot.

Keeping this in mind, it would be insanely cheaper. Just to have a hot cable box from thirty years ago. Remember those? It was a heck of a lot cheaper then to dump a bunch of money for the thing might last 4 months than it was to but cable. And cable compared to today's a la carte style is more expensive than it ever had been song as how I've must subscribe to all favorite things they're offering as a subscription. Uggggggh... sighing about these prices These days.

Having said all of that ,programming and used in you tube is just bread crumbed. Particularly the news.

They'd rather have is watching court cases all day long; Its kind of like a, "let's take their mind off this. While we do this" type of thing.

An example:

let's talk about bill clinton.

Ultimately, my only memory of his presidency was that he had the huge monica lowinsky scandal.

My only memory. . . ... Ahhh... That's by design.

In light of the history we know:

Most people these days are into reality crime, and youtube is so perfect for most of these people who are broke right now.

Barely getting by anyway, and I feel like inflation has played a huge part. People are not watching what they want to watch.

I had to unsubscribed and can't watch netflix now. We had to just get rid of it altogether. And now we are stuck with only prime and youtube.

I'm not saying that it's all so diverse, in having netflix too.

I'm just saying i've been subjected to youtube in the free content now. Free content. Let that sink in.

And it seems like people like lindsey clancy, caleb flynn, are just fake a\*\* people. Maybe they're not even people, I mean, lindsey, clancy in her whole tribe looked like they could be related & possibly ai in a photograph that you might find inside of the photo frame at dollar tree.

No disrespect, really .. .. I hate saying this.

And it's no big secret shows, like american idol needed ratings, so it was perfect. Just to grab some bull c\*\*\* from AI and you know that they've had aI way longer than we have.....

I mean, do I really need to explain any further where i'm going with this? PROBABLY, so i will

I know I'll get roasted the this. But...

Lindsey clancy looks like mona lisa and then patrick clancy looks like an a I realistic cartoon character on heroin.

Caleb Flynn goes from looking like your favorite humanoid Martian with the new Zealand vibe to Frankenstein on steps and meth.

A part of me feels like we are being deluted so our minds are not necessarily fixated on real world issues.
And what if none of these stories were fixated on really happened at all?

Kind of like the titanic. Where they kept the patrons aboard a sinking Titanic listening to music and drinking brandy until... you know the inevitable happened.

Please understand I know something like this is probably been posted before, so don't just delete me all the way right now, or hackle me for not wanting to read back or even look. I'm just trying to get it out there, just in case someone else was thinking. This you're not alone.

Or can some fellow conspiracy theorists pick up on what i'm putting down here...

aloha !!! please help if you can!

Saturday was France’s national day of being pissed off about the cost of living ..... and it went the way these always go. Hundreds of thousands marched ..... then the evening crowd got to work and the Muslim immigrants joined the students and leftists in all the fun. Stores got looted, cars burned ..... and in Limoges they set the historic city hall on fire and wrecked it. By the end of the weekend they had rounded up nearly 2,400 people, a tiny fraction of the burning and looting crowd ..... and almost a thousand cops and gendarmes were hurt...... probably when they ran out of handcuffs and jail space.

None of this surprises me. The French Republic got started when a mob stormed the palace ..... they celebrate the riot ........ so a riot to them is basically a civic holiday. It’s what you do when you’re running low on free shit.

And it keeps working. In 2018 they torched Paris over a diesel tax ..... and Macron folded, scrapped the increase and handed out tax cuts. The pension reform got shelved too. The French people figured out the trick ..... create enough street carnage and somebody dishes out more free shit the government can’t afford.

The bill for the decades of free shit is coming due. The deficit is over target, the debt is around 119% of GDP ..... and the government pays noticeably more than Germany to borrow. The answer is a 2027 budget that freezes public pay and most pensions ..... which is bound to go over well ..... it’s basically late stage welfare state ..... with everyone trying to kick the inevitable down the road one more election cycle.

Then there’s the explaining. Macron blames France’s problems on external factors, just like every leader of a failing nation does ..... this time it’s the Iran war and Hormuz, and “France did not participate in it.”

Hormuz is real and everybody is paying for it ..... but French pump prices are still about 10% over the EU average, on the same supply of crude as everyone else. He also willingly signed France up for the Russia sanctions ..... and swore the G7 wouldn’t ease off even with oil over $100, and that never comes up when he talks about high oil prices. The circumstances they didn’t pick get the blame ..... and the sanctions they did pick get a pass.

Why do they keep doing it? Because it works. People take credit for the good and blame external causes for the bad ..... and “it’s not our fault, it’s somebody else’s” goes down easier than “we spent too much on social welfare and it’s unsustainable.”

France better stock up on tear gas ....... this might be an extended holiday. It wont be long before France cant afford any more of those expensive non-lethal deterrents.

The post asked who one should be concerned about in this video.

I wrote the following but spent so long gathering information the post was locked for bad behavior before I could submit my answer. Hopefully this group will be more intellectual:

The Constitution is religious, read the Declaration.

Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed is rude towards Tommy, which is a concern to begin with. Tommy isn't running for office afaik, so it is the man running for Senate who needs to understand the constitution and more pertinently to address the concerns regarding his background.

• Fatten Fathy Elkomy (El-Sayed's mother) worked for the terrorist designated Islamic American Relief Agency.

• Eman Abdelhadi (El-Sayed's half sister) wrote: “my family has long been MB” and described a conversation with her mother about involvement in the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1970s.

• Campaigned with Hasan Piker.

• His published paper Interethnic mating and risk for preterm birth among Arab-American mothers

• His policies regarding crime

What I mean by identity is the "type of person" you were born as, be that gay, black, asian, white, transsexual, male or female.

If you care about your nation's identity, care about the race of the people living there, care about what other people can do with their body, or anything of that sorts that doesn't affect your wellbeing, you're bring manipulated by the higher ups.

(Next paragraph is a debunk for "immigrants taking our jobs")

I RECOGNISE serious concerns about job availability due to low payed workforce "taking over", although I find it a systematic issue that needs changing, as I also recognise it to be modern slavery for filling a single man's pockets. Those people that travel into Europe to find a better life are NOT there by choice they DON'T WANT TO LIVE HERE, it's just that we have fucked up their countries just to make some pocket change. We keep our minds on them being "lower people" just because it's easier for our brain to hate them, rather than to help them.

The people in power want us hating eachother, it's to keep us from forming up and actually making a change, you should be grouped up with people in the same stage of the world's hierarchy, not by your "identity".

We are genuinely all going to die if we keep killing eachother instead of the people brainwashing us into killing eachother. I might sound like a theorist saying this, but hatred towards another is not something that comes by nature, it's not you using your "common sense and pattern recognition" that flicks the switch in your brain to be racist.

It's the powerful and wealthy brainwashing you with media coverage, using these signals that tell your brain to think this way. Us hating eachother is what keeps them in power, as we aren't concerned enough and we aren't educated enough about their intentions to determine that they're actually the bad people. You see PLENTY of media coverage talking about hatecrimes, Afro-American agression, gangs and illegal drug trafficking and whatever else, but the professional media NEVER, I MEAN NEVER, covers what the billionaire are actually up to.

Afro-Americans aren't hateful and agressive by nature, their brain is brainwashed to be this way, the immense racism they face on a daily and their history being so integratedly taught in schools keeps them reminded of their roots and how theyre "worse than white people" even though (thank the civil rights movement for this), racism being normalised in politics isn't a thing anymore.

The same thing goes for ANY "group of people", our hatred towards them isn't ever natural, it comes from the people controlling the media, telling us to think this way to keep us on our toes.

This system works SO WELL, because people are selfish by nature, theres a very simple reason for that: survival instincts. Our brains are literally wired this way-- prosecuting anything different, because our brain interprets it as a threat that could harm our lifespan.

Yet I can see past this, and so can you. We are the only truly conscious beings, likely in this universe, that can actually recognise our feelings and decisions, USE IT.

Feel free to point out any mistakes I made, and no, I don't care about my grammar, I'm writing on a phone that's too small for my fingers.

Any ciritcism is welcomed, just notice how insulting me proves my point two fold, interpreting the insulter as illiterate and bluntly, stupid.

Biological sex is real. In humans, there are two reproductive sexes: male and female.

Intersex variations also exist. They are a complex biological subject in their own right, and are not simply the same thing as being trans.

And biological sex is not the same as social gender roles and norms: ideas about how men and women are supposed to be.

Those are precisely the expectations I would like us to leave behind as completely as possible.

A man should be free to be feminine. A woman should be free to be masculine. A boy should be free to like dresses, dolls, or makeup; a girl to like short hair and soccer, and reject everything considered “feminine.” None of this automatically makes someone a member of the other sex.

Nor does it tell us whether someone is straight, bisexual, gay, or asexual.

I thought that was a fundamental part of progress: freeing people from gender stereotypes.

That is why it troubles me when, in the name of progress itself, some of those stereotypes come back in through the back door. When clothing, interests, mannerisms, or personality are suddenly treated as clues to what gender someone “really” is.

Especially when it comes to gay and gender-nonconforming people, we should also be sensitive to how deeply ingrained ideas about being a “real man” or a “real woman” can be. Internalized misogyny or homophobia may also play a role for some individuals. They do not simply disappear because we give them progressive language.

But—and this qualification matters to me—none of that means trans identity is made up.

There are people with severe gender dysphoria. There are people for whom transition has been enormously helpful, and who do not regret their decision.

And there are people who detransition, regret medical decisions, and live with consequences that cannot be fully reversed.

Both experiences are part of reality.

Neither should be silenced because it happens to benefit the “wrong” camp.

Especially when it comes to children and adolescents, I would therefore like to see less certainty and more care.

What do we actually know about the benefits, risks, and long-term consequences of different medical treatments? Where is the evidence robust, and where is it uncertain? How might treatments affect physical development, fertility, and sexual function? What is reversible, and what is not?

But the other question matters just as much: what does it mean for a young person to experience severe gender dysphoria and receive no appropriate help?

I do not want any of these questions ruled out because we are afraid of the answers.

The same applies to women’s rights.

There are real questions to address in women’s sports. Prisons and certain spaces intended to provide safety raise real questions too. There are situations in which biological sex can be relevant. And statistical data should allow us to distinguish biological sex from gender identity when that distinction matters to the question being studied.

That does not mean trans women are, as a group, a threat to women.

And a woman is not automatically transphobic because she wants to discuss boundaries, fairness, or protection.

Sexuality should not be a forbidden subject either. Autogynephilic fantasies exist. Their significance for some people with gender dysphoria is a matter of scientific and clinical debate.

And even if a particular pattern of sexual arousal or a fetish plays a role for someone, that does not make them a bad person.

But a fetish is not automatically a gender identity.

And a trans identity is not automatically a fetish.

Perhaps this is the point I keep coming back to in this whole debate:

What bothers me is this strange insistence that everything has to come as a package.

As if I have to believe either that biological sex plays practically no role, or that trans identity is nothing more than ideology.

As if I have to welcome every transition, or reject transition altogether.

As if I have to dismiss either feminist concerns or trans people as ridiculous.

As if I have to embrace every contemporary gender theory, or return to traditional ideas about how men and women are supposed to be.

I find that last choice particularly absurd.

I do not want a supposed feminism that ends up siding with reactionary forces that have themselves spent decades trying to force women, gay men, and lesbians into rigid roles.

But I do not want a version of progressivism that believes it can dispose of feminist objections or questions about biological sex simply by applying labels such as “TERF,” either.

Both are too simplistic for me.

I want to listen to a trans person who says: “My transition was right for me.”

And to a woman who has detransitioned and says: “I wish I had not made some of those decisions.”

I want to be able to listen to a woman talking about sex-based violence or spaces intended to provide safety.

And to a trans person describing what it is like to be excluded, mocked, or threatened because of their identity.

Above all, I want a feminine boy not to feel that he is any less of a boy.

And a masculine girl not to feel that there is something wrong with her being a girl.

A gay man should not have to be considered “really a woman,” or a lesbian “really a man,” simply because they break with gender roles. Nor should heterosexual people who break with those roles have their sexual orientation called into question.

At the same time, I do not want to tell someone with gender dysphoria that their suffering is imaginary, or dismiss the reality of a transition that has worked for them.

Perhaps the simplest way to put all of this is:

One truth does not automatically imply an entire worldview.

The fact that detransition exists does not prove that transition is wrong in principle.

The fact that some people are happy with their transition does not prove that every transition is right.

The fact that biological sex is real does not mean people have to conform to traditional gender roles.

The fact that gender roles are shaped by society does not mean the body becomes irrelevant.

The fact that some feminist criticism is justified does not make reactionary hostility toward trans people justified.

And the fact that trans people deserve respect and protection from discrimination does not mean every political or medical demand must be beyond criticism.

Acknowledging biological realities is not the same as biological reductionism.

Being moral is not the same as being moralistic.

Perhaps we need to learn again how to listen to people without immediately turning them into evidence for our own side.

Ultimately, we should be able to disagree with someone without denying them their dignity.

Which distinctions in my arguments do you find useful, and which claims of mine do you think are mistaken or insufficiently supported?

If you think you need to "check yourself", "learn and grow as a person", or as the post title suggests, "have accountability", you're living in the matrix, straight up. You know what that is? That's being a pushover. Now I may have raised a few torches and pitchforks by saying that, but it's true.

Why don't you trust yourself, despite all your logic making sense to... yourself? It's a damn paradox. I'm not advocating for selfishness or claiming nobody can ever change their minds on things given external stimuli from others (or even that they shouldn't), but once you change your mind for that reason, what else is there to do? You already changed your mind, so no shit you're gonna start living based on those ideas rather than your previous ones. Telling people to "check themselves" makes no sense cause it'll only work on things they'd be convinced of anyway; it's a nothing burger phrase. You may as well just say "you should be doing this" or "you shouldn't be doing that" without the whole "accountability" schtick. How do you know you're even "learning and growing as a person"? Who knows? You could go back to believing what you believed before and see that as "growth"... and it's not necessarily what others believe.

Because of this, the idea of "self-control" is a complete illusion... and one that gets people to believe that conformity is the only possible path to harmony, gaslighting you into thinking it's possible for you to (and that you should) attack your own thoughts, despite them making sense to you. Let me put it this way... if you're addicted to cigarettes and you try to stop, you're not exactly performing "self-control"; your rational mind is rallying on whether it should favor long-term pleasure or short-term pleasure, both subjectively valid perspectives.

There's also the "bring back shame" thing of the 2020s. I'll say that expecting others to feel shame in your honor is selfish, ironically showing a lack of shame on your end. Every instance of shame requires somebody else not feeling shame. Who gets to determine who is right and who is wrong in each situation? If I wear a green hat, causing someone around me to scream and cry because they hate the color green, am I the bad guy? Was I just supposed to have already "checked myself" and made sure I wasn't offending anyone? After all, I did cause harm to that person... or did they cause harm to themselves for caring about something so stupid in the first place? If someone insulted my grandma, I'm not gonna beat them up or call the cops on them; I'll just be like "whatever, fuck you" and go about my day. Expecting them to feel shame would be selfish because the shame they would presumably feel from that casual as hell action would be way worse than whatever mild annoyance or offense you felt, which of course, you don't feel shame for escalating the conflict. Escalating conflict is useless and irritating in general.

A common example thrown around these days is people being on their phones in movie theaters (which I rarely see, tbh), but if you don't convince them of why they shouldn't be on their phones, they're obviously gonna keep doing it because they don't believe it to be immoral. If we're gonna have rules, they all need damn good reasons to exist... and you could argue that rule in particular has a lot of good reasons to exist. You can't expect people to follow rules just... because.

TLDR: To have "accountability" and allow society to punish you is to have no trust in yourself, which is a paradox; why would you disagree with... yourself?

When a murder, rape, kidnapping, terrorist attack or invasion takes place, our first questions should be: who committed the crime? why did they do it? who were the victims? how do we bring the perpetrators to justice and prevent it from happening again? Yet, for a number of people across the world today, the first question seems to be: Is the perpetrator Muslim?

Let me be clear - I am an athiest. Every religion is the same to me. So I am not defending Islam. And I am not going to discuss which religion is better or worse. A murderer is a murderer. A rapist is a rapist. A terrorist is a terrorist. The issue I want to focus on is the selective outrage of people who seem more interested in confirming their existing prejudices than in understanding what actually happened. When the perpetrator is Muslim, religion becomes the headline and the conclusion is a foregone one. If the perpetrators are Western, white, Christian or Jewish, the same kind of conduct is easily justified.

Of course, not everyone thinks this way. But more and more people seem to. Rather than focusing on the plight of the victims, they look for information that confirms what they want to believe. Increasingly, that seems to mean applying one moral standard to people they identify with and another to everyone else. And, lesser and lesser people seem to really care about the plight of the victims.

Some examples. What ISIS did to the Yazidis, particularly Yazidi women, was horrific. Britain's grooming gang scandals were equally appalling. Yet prominent figures, including Idiot Musk, have used these crimes to condemn Islam and Muslims more broadly. But when it comes to Epstein, the trafficking and sexual abuse of underage girls, there was no outrage from these prominent figures. Why? Cos the perps were mainly Christian or Jewish? In fact, people like Trump, Musk and their sycophants, who claim to be Christians, seem to be making every attempt to bury the Epstein files.

Other examples: The US invaded Iraq in 2003 on false claims and attacked Iran in 2026. It has done similar things in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Afghanistan, Panama and numerous other countries. Russia has invaded a number of countries such as Hungary, Afghanistan, Georgia and Ukraine. Israel's military campaigns, occupation and blockade of Gaza, which have turned it into the world's largest concentration camp, are acts of terror. All of them. Yet people within and outside these countries have no issue defending such actions using the vocabulary of national security, strategic interests and self-defense. Meanwhile, acts such as 9/11 or the US Embassy bombing in Beirut are widely condemned as grave acts of terrorism.

Now, even if I were to agree that A SPECIFIC religion drives violence, perhaps we should revisit history. The Crusades, the Inquisitions, Europe's religious wars and centuries of persecution demonstrate how much brutality has been justified in the name of Christianity. So, if those actions could be justified in the name of religion, why can't the so-called actions of Islamist terrorists today be examined through the same lens?

The reality is that we are often quick to condemn others cos as humans that whats we are.

In my opinion, the question should never be whether the perpetrator is Muslim, Christian, Jewish, white or brown. The question should be what they did, why they did it, who helped them and how we hold them accountable. If we genuinely care about victims, justice and preventing future crimes, that is where our attention belongs.

Katie Zacharia's first day as US Press Secretary highlights a fascinatingly odd wrinkle in 21st century American society.

Elite MAGA women and transgender women converge on the same fashion choices! Trans women have been doing it longer, and I am old, so to me it appears that the MAGA elite are trying to look like trans women, but I know that is not really the mechanism.

What is the mechanism here? Why do MAGA women and trans women choose to express their femininity so similarly?

I think that they are both attempting to exemplify and exaggerate traditional feminine beauty standards, and they are doing it for essentially the same reasons. It is psychically important for both populations to come across as VERY feminine. MAGA women feel some pressure to distinguish themselves from less conventionally feminine counterparts on the left. They remain thin, long-haired, heavily face-painted to obscure any blemishes and create the illusion of youth. Meanwhile, trans women are compelled to present as maximally female to conform their appearance to their perceived gender identity.

This is just an hilarious irony of the 2020s. Not sure if y'all have noticed, so I figured I'd share. Please try to avoid debating about MAGA or transgenderism as ideologies. Those conversations will be boring and repetitive. Please focus comments on the MAGA-TRANS female fashion convergence and its potential sociological drivers.

Let’s say a game developer uses ai to program his game, generate his models, and he cleans up the models himself, and goes through and corrects the fine details of his game using AI. It’s polished after a year of this work. But because he didn’t hand write the code, it’s “not his work”.

Then a movie director creates a movie, let’s say Lord of the rings. Isn’t Peter Jackson doing this same thing? He doesn’t know how a boom mic works, he didn’t hand make his props, he probably doesn’t know how the software to edit the cuts even works. But the movie is “Peter Jackson’s LOTR”. He just prompted his Claude’s (employees)

Logically these are the same. So why do we see them differently?

If the ai dev is just a prompter, then so is Peter Jackson. No?

The Houthis have spent ten years humiliating one of the best-funded militaries on earth with pickup trucks, mountain goats, and drones built from parts you could order online. Saudi Arabia answered with F-15s, Patriot batteries, and precision munitions that cost more than the targets they were dropped on. Wrong strategy for such a target poor enemy.

The Saudi army, of course, has a proud tradition of fighting to the last Sudanese mercenary. Nobody expects the Royal Saudi Land Forces to march into the Yemeni highlands. Every time Sunni ground troops have met Houthi fighters on the front lines, the Houthis came home with the videos. Fine. Accept that. Build a strategy around the army you actually have, not the one you wish you had.

So take bravery and physical prowess out of the equation entirely. A drone war doesn’t need a single Saudi soldier willing to climb a mountain. It needs a few thousand young men sitting safely behind the lines in air-conditioned trailers, wearing FPV goggles, with a sectarian conscience that sleeps just fine after targeting a khat-addled civilian teenager with an AK-47. The Kingdom has plenty of both.

The Houthis win the same way mountain tribes have always won: they know every goat trail, every cave, and every switchback that’s good for an ambush. Ground forces moving through that terrain are walking into a shooting gallery that’s been sighted in for generations. You don’t beat that by sending better infantry. The Ottomans tried. You beat it by never sending infantry at all.

A sky full of cheap loitering drones takes the ambush away. You can’t ambush something that doesn’t drive up the wadi. The high ground stops mattering when the enemy is overhead around the clock. A fighter who has to assume he’s being watched all the time can’t mass, can’t move in daylight, and can’t set up the next trap.

Riyadh’s mistake was trying to win on quality. The Houthis fight on quantity and cost. Saudi Arabia has more money than God and nothing to show for it on the ground, so spend it on volume. Build or buy cheap one-way drones by the tens of thousands. Iran proved a Shahed-type drone is cheap enough to throw away. Saudi oil money can buy those in volumes Tehran can only dream of.

Stop firing million-dollar interceptors at junk, and stop flying hundred-million-dollar jets at the guy launching it. Put a drone over every launch site, every supply road coming down from the north, and every coastal battery. Darken the skies over Sanaa like a biblical plague of locusts with warheads.

The Houthis, like Hamas, have hidden behind civilians from the start: launchers in neighborhoods, weapons stored in markets. That’s a choice they make on purpose, and the responsibility for what follows belongs to them. A drone campaign at this scale should make clear that there’s no place to hide a launcher: if you fire from a village, the launcher dies there. Persistent surveillance cuts both ways. It lets you wait for the moment the crew is exposed instead of leveling the block. Cheap munitions let you be patient, and patience is how you get the shot.

The Houthis’ real weapon has never been drones or missiles. It’s endurance. They bet they can outlast anybody, and so far they’ve won that bet. The only answer is a campaign cheap enough that Riyadh never has to get tired of it. No dead Saudi conscripts to explain, no jets lost, no foreign Congress cutting off your munition supply, just a cost the Houthis have to pay every day while Riyadh barely notices the bill.

Iran wrote the playbook and Ukraine perfected it. Every modern military just realized the era of armor dominance is behind us. Somebody with real money ought to embrace the cowardice and use an unlimited supply of cheap drone warfare as a 21st-century superweapon.

There is this perception that because Trump is bad and is trying to bully Canada, that makes the Canadian government angels. But if we move past Trump, we will find this is simply not the case.

The Canadian so called "left wing" government is a neoliberal anti-middle class pro-establishment government, just like the Democrat + Republican parties in the US, just like all pseudoleft wing and right wring governments in similar countries (USA, Canada, UK, Australia, etc...). All of the top 2 parties in these countries are part of the establishment and against the middle class.

Again, Trump is the worst, Trump is the root of all evil. I am not contesting that, but let's put Trump aside just for a bit and realize that just because Trump is bad, doesn't automatically/magically make the other side angels.

I will use food/health as a case study.

Canadian govt knowingly allowing chemically tainted berries from California to be sold on the Canadian market: this was inspected by Canadian health agencies, and despite failing, they allowed it to enter the open market, and did not warn consumers:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/driscolls-berries-case-raises-questions-about-canadas-food-safety-watchdog-9.7374947

In a sane world, the people responsible would be behind bars, or would at least be held accountable. But instead, the population yes "yes pro corporates slap Trumpy boy on the face for all we are all in we will play defence and pass you the pass to score on team Trump's net". I have been calling out pseudo-left wing governments for this kind of harming of their population for years, but you never see this on the media until a whistle blower makes the s hit the fan. Every time I try to raise awareness I am told "silence, the left wing govt are gods and we need to slap Trump harder with them". I say ok Trump is Hitler x100000, but how does that directly even make these pseudo left wing govts even 1% better than what THEY THEMSELVES are? It makes no logical sense. If a cat bites you, but then a dog bites you harder, that has nothing to do with the cat: it doesn't magically negative the fact that the cat bit you, it does not make the cat's bite even 1% lighter. It is not mutually exclusive: the cat should not be praised for biting just because the dog bit harder. We should not perpetually allow and encourage the cat to bite just because the dog bit harder.

Canada openly allows dangerous chemicals in food. These foods can cause cancer and other issues in the long run. For example, aspartame (artificial sweetener). These hyper-capitalist countries hide behind studies that show that "these are only dangerous in high amounts", but these studies are not representative of the big picture. The issue is that if you eat this stuff for let's say a decade or more, then you get cancer, it is virtually impossible to prove causation. But using common sense, when we KNOW this stuff is unnatural/the mechanisms show that they hurt us, we know that they should be avoided. But they are openly allowed. Solely to increase profit for the big corporations who make them. There are safer alternatives, it is purely a profit maximizing strategy. Instead of addressing this issue, Canada's solution was to put giant "HIGH IN SUGAR" labels on foods like candy and chocolate: this is classic lip service politics, PRETENDING to care/do something while doing NOTHING. If your population doesn't KNOW that candy/chocolate is high in sugar, you have DEEPER problems: why are you not introducing a basic course for nutrition in school for example? Because that would make people more aware and less likely to buy this harmful food that increases the yacht's of the CEOs of these junk/processed food corporations.

And federal govt being in bed with big pharma:

https://datac.ca/health-canada-switches-mainly-pharmaceutical-funding/

In October of last year, Health Canada proposed raising the fees it charges to drug manufacturers for new medicines introduced into the market. Historically, Health Canada has used these fees to fund 50% of its operating costs in regulating prescription medication, but plans to raise this to 90% with the coming fee increase...

Before user fees were introduced in 1994, Health Canada was entirely funded by tax dollars. Now, with the majority of its funding arising directly from the pharmaceutical industry, questions have been raised about whether or not the goal of drug companies to sell their products in vast quantities poses a conflict of interest with Health Canada’s responsibility to provide safe and effective drugs to Canadians.

Here is another example, it was openly known that almond milk factory had several red flags, it was of course completely ignored in a big "f u first you need to die then we will be forced to act because we know there is 0 punishment by the govt that puts our profit ahead of your lives", they caused 3 people to die:

https://globalnews.ca/news/11806036/listeria-deadly-outbreak-plant-based-milk-facility/

Although portions of the inspection are redacted, food safety experts say the discernible details reveal “huge red flags” at the facility that should have alerted health officials to act sooner. “The CFIA should have been inspecting this plant at a much higher frequency,” said Lawrence Goodridge, a food safety professor at the University of Guelph.
“This could have been prevented.”

Again, in a sane world, there would be involuntary manslaughter charges. But absolutely ZERO punishment happened, not even a slap on the wrist. Because the govt is owned and operated by the same corporations and billionaires it is supposed to regulate. So OBVIOUSLY, WHY would a corporation in the future not continue killing people for more profit, when they know time after time the government has their back and will kiss their murderous wrists instead of cuffing them?

It is bizarre that the population is in slumber and continues ENTHUSIASTICALLY voting for and worshiping these murderers solely because thye say "vote for me and I kilil you and your children but we will score on team Trump's net baby!" and people will be like "heck YEES! ELBOWS UP BABY". It is disturbing how people are in slumber.

NONE of these issues are EVER discussed during elections. Only "left vs right fight!" and other nonsensical non-issues. This is because BOTH parties are anti-middle class: they have successfully shifted the goalposts. They allow "intra neoliberal" warfare in the ballot box: but NEITHER allow people to talk about the MAIN issues that are affecting people. This is how they protect the establishment.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Pretty much hit or miss but occasionally some are genuinely pretty decent, at least two of the WH40k fanfics which I am fairly certain are AI generated (because they use the popularity used AI generated character names) were actually good imo.

TL;DR

Looking for a collaborator to work on a passion project with me involving multiple disciplines. The project explores how capitalism and patriarchy interact with social structures and human behaviour, examining the contradictions that emerge and testing the compatibility of these systems with human needs and behaviour by exploring their limits. Project aims to give some insight on the problems of today and reflecting on the past to see the underlying pattern that ties all the disciplines together. some topics i talk about might be a bit sensitive to some but i am very open minded to explore them in the right setting.  Wordings a bit clunky and unclear sorry

Need someone whos patient with me because im pretty novice but also someone who shows a keen interest for developing ideas and building frameworks. i have an idea of a map about how different aspects connect and affect eachother. However im genuine curious interested and committed to getting ot the bottom of this itch in my head. Need someone to sync a hyperfixation with. 

i have friends but i dont want to pile this onto them as they dotn really have a shared interest and dont really spend or have time overthinking things with me. love them tho

Ik its tldr but please read idk if i can even tldr this sos. Please bear with me

What im looking for: 

I'm looking for someone who would genuinely enjoy having regular conversations about philosophy, critical theory, political philosophy, anthropology, human behaviour and the way different aspects of society. People who just sit and think about anything and everything who want and can bring their own ideas,knowledge and perspective to a discussion. More importantly as a collaborator im looking for the willingness to explore more and adjust the scope and switch lenses when sitting with new information and dissecting it.

Ideally, someone who has the time and inclination to engage regularly, like I really emphasise a lot of time on their hands that I can send my thoughts and ideas to + hop on a call occasionally for a more natural flow of conversation. Someone I can bounce ideas off, debate with, explore tangents with, challenge and be challenged by, and gradually build upon my existing framework with. I do want to clarify i am no expert neither am i particularly smart or intelligent so someone with patience too. 

I don't necessarily need a schedule and am not bound by deadlines. I don't want to turn this into me demanding for a response or your time so I am on the hunt for someone who's consistent and willing to make time for this and I think for that you would have to be someone who leans into doing this as freetime. For me thinking about stuff like this is habitual but a collaborator would help me not fall into my own echo chamber and thereby fall into the trap that is confirmation bias.

I'm not specifically looking for a mentor. If you're pursuing a PhD or working in academia or currently working in some related field and somehow you see this, I would gently remind you that time is money and perhaps should redirect your time somewhere else instead of taking this as it might feel like an informal teaching role.

As aforementioned, i am not a scholar. I'm aware that this requires engaging with disciplines I'm not yet well versed in. I am younger and I know there are theories I haven't encountered and ideas I haven't adequately substantiated. A lot of this is observations I would say are not entirely subjective but definitely not totally objective, which is why I'm making this post. However im not stupid and I'm serious about the questions I'm asking and serious about making some sense of this.

I'm not pursuing this professionally or expecting it to become a career. It's a passion I can see myself returning to throughout my life, and the project will continue to evolve as I learn, research and reconsider my ideas. (dw my project is not lifelong just my passion) . 

That being said, to the employed and the educated, if you're still interested, I welcome any sort of engagement and would be grateful for it. 

I'm equally interested in connecting with people who have a passion for these subjects but never had the opportunity to pursue them formally. You don't need particular qualifications or expertise as i dont have any whatsoever. What matters most to me is curiosity, open-mindedness, a willingness to engage meaningfully, and the ability to disagree constructively. I want someone who is open to encountering new or maybe revisited ideas. I'm not looking for someone who simply validates my ideas, nor do I expect us to agree on everything.

The general “vibe” of the project:

I'm interested in how human behaviour functions under the current conditions, which would be both capitalism and patriarchy. The way ive been trying to look at this would have to look at political history, case studies, political theory, social theory, history, anthropology (to describe human evolution socially and biologically) war history and economic theory. I know this seems like a lot which is why I'm here to ask for help and collaborate. 

I dont know how im going to present this project not that im going to really but so far i have an outline if i was to write something i dont know what exactly in terms of genre but the contents the general idea. I know this is very vague and broad but i promise its a bit more concrete than this i just dont want to put too much in a reddit post because this is already getting very long. you can think of this as my own little litmus test. 

Dont get me wrong, I still want to do the research properly, really understand everything properly but most importantly and what the project is moreso about is what connects some if not all of these theories and fields of study and ideologies together to identify systems and structures that uphold the conditions of the world today. And then also to be able to kind of create a map of all these interactions in the context of capitalism and patriarchy. 

 Im not super driven on creating or constructing some utopian alternative or really any “solution” to close these gaps but i think whats interesting is what connects all of this into the real lived experience as a person in a society today. Not to say that im opposed to creating solutions but that wouldnt be the focus and if anything, any answer to the problems or gaps in the ecosystem i think would be more damage control rather than actual real repair as much as i want to restart and fix the world sometimes. (if you disagree im open to discussion and collaboration skill as the project may change)   

Ultimately, I'd like to develop a framework that makes these relationships comprehensible to ordinary people without sacrificing intellectual rigour. I'm not opposed to formal academic research but moreso I want to engage with it while examining how theories hold up against lived experience, where their assumptions might fall short, and what they might overlook when applied to complex social conditions.

I've begun conceptualising the general idea of looking to address the gaps and have jotted some connections and ideas down. The overarching goal is to identify the gaps that capitalism under patriarchy fails to address by dissecting the social, economic, political, cultural and psychological structures that uphold and reproduce it.

If you want to know more about the project feel free to message me (i hope someone does) i just dont want to willy nilly post everything out here just yet not because i fear criticism but for me personally its hard to explain in one post.

In conclusion: 

I'm hoping to establish a cordial, ongoing relationship centred on exploring ideas and developing understanding the world i and everyone else lives in. If this sounds like something you'd genuinely enjoy, feel free to message me. I'm happy to explain more about the framework I've conceptualised so far. i’d appreciate any engagement and id be grateful for any meaningful engagement. Thank you for taking your time to read this if you did.

IDW is my fav sub on reddit. Been on Reddit for 5+ years and discovered this a few months ago. The level of dialog and discussion is truly enriching and I get to learn a lot from the people posting and commenting on here. Big shoutout to the creators and the mods for managing this sub!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDpKk4q41BM

Fox news is a joke. How can half the country believe them? CNN is almost as bad as well, but fox takes it to the next level. Knowing that he is too popular to ignore, Fox news invited him on, with a dishonest immoral host trying to use stupid straw mans and age old propaganda slogans to try to damage control to make him look bad. To any semi-sane person, fox news failed big time, but it is bizarre half the country will continue to believe their nonsense and somehow not see this. Though for the first time, even some of the youtube comments on the fox news channel were pro El-Sayed.

This is what happens when the collective critical thinking skills of the country are hovering around 0.

The fox news host just used a bunch of straw mans.

El-Sayed basically said he wants money out of politics. Fox news host: you took money from Soros though. El-Sayed said the difference is that a) he did not directly take any money from corporations (and that this is important because this means he will not be incentivized to pass their policies once elected). b) when in power he will work to get money out of politics. Overall he has a point here, because if he wants any chance of being elected, he needs money that he does not have, so he is forced to take something. But once he has the power, then he will be in a position to put money out of politics.

El-Sayed is smart. He knows being associated with the word socialism is electoral suicide, so he brands himself as a capitalist. He said that it is indeed the government's job to provide a basic amount for the masses so they will have a chance to succeed. The fox news host again did a straw man saying that he is saying that government should give hand outs when each individual should work hard on their own to make it, and that billionaires are good because they innovate. El-Sayed easily destroyed this fox news immoral paid-for puppet and turned it around, saying he indeed wants more innovation, that is indeed why he thinks government should ensure there are decent schools in order to create more billionaires.

El-Sayed said healthcare and education should be improved. The Fox news host again said a straw man, saying that the issue is not money, she cherry picked and named 1 place that has higher school funding yet had higher drop out rates or something. This is a dumb thing to say: obviously, overall, when you fund more, the public school system improves. El-Sayed responded by saying something similar to this, saying how both he and the host had good public education when they were young, but by comparison now public schools are severely underfunded. Also, she Fox news host again cherry picked on healthcare and said how in England the wait times are long to see a doctor. El-Sayed flipped it on her, saying that he believes USA is the greatest country on earth and that just because another country has some inefficiencies doesn't mean USA will have to completely stop in this regard and not try and that USA can do better because it is the greatest country on earth (El-Sayed knows the population need to hear these dumb phrases to have them on your side, the greatest country on earth stuff, but his points aside from also adopting this propaganda line were solid). When the Fox news host had nothing else to counter with, she resorted to the same nonsensical "but it costs too much tax" argument. This is a bizarre argument, because everything costs money. Privatization actually often increases the amount of money needed. The difference is that privatization benefits the born/lucked rich and makes them avoid paying their fair share of taxes (even though they are the most likely to afford it and it won't even make a dent in their pocket), and doesn't even give a basic chance to everyone else. This is the only functional difference. Uttering "taxes are high" doesn't disprove this fact.

The Fox news host ended trying to catch him off guard to make him look bad, she said she wrote a book about 12 Americans of "valor" (trying to bank on nationalistic nonsense to rile the audience on her side), and asked El-Sayed who his favourite American is in USA's history (using racism to try to create a disconnect because he is not a White American/trying to show the audience he is not a "real" American and is uninformed about American history/doesn't care about it, hoping that he will stumble). But El-Sayed on the spot was able to say Martin Luther King jr. and even said a quote from him that backed up his own points.

Overall, El-Sayed clearly knows how to play the game. I think he has a chance to become president eventually.

Having said that, I personally still don't fully trust him. He is a bit better than Obama, but still too close to the status quo for my liking. But it is difficult to know whether he is a true socialist or just another smooth talking neoliberal capitalist like Obama who will promise change but then use his power to ultimately continue serving the neoliberal oligarchy in power. I especially say this for one reason. El-Sayed in this interview (and many of his interviews) keeps talking about health care, improving health care. But I never heard him once talk about PREVENTION in terms of healthcare: if he is TRULY anti-corporation, then shouldn't he be talking about prevention? The corporations who are murdering 700 000 Americans a year (coronary heart disease) by creating an obesity epidemic just so a few junk food CEOs can get more yachts. Why doesn't he ever address this? Banning ads for junk food for example. Why would you wait until people unnecessarily get obesity and all sorts of associated illnesses and then give them better health care? When 2 in 5 Americans are obese (that's 100+ million, this is NOT NEARLY normal or acceptable) and this ABSOLUTELY UNNECESSARILY causes all sorts of associated illnesses from diabetes to coronary heart disease and everything in between, and then big pharma profits off people's harm, then if you are truly anti-corporation, you would focus on prevention, not wait until people unnecessarily get sick or die and then reduce the profit margins of healthcare CEOs from 1200 yachts to 750 yachts.

EDIT: being downvoted here, imagine being lower than youtube comments in terms of critical thinking. Bizzare: the majority here fall for fox news' straw mans.

The only thing I have heard that is compelling is that it is part of negotiating a better deal longterm, such as appears to have occurred in Greenland.

My favorite living economist sums up my view well.

In the recent past, I have had conversations with three friends, all educated people, who tell me some version of the same thing. One says he would prefer a dictatorship. Another says a one-party system is best. Another tells me he believes fascism is the only system that really works. The strange part is that all three live in democracies. They can vote, criticize the government, protest and change their government peacefully. Yet they want to give that away. And this isnt just my circle. Surveys in the US, UK and elsewhere are showing that younger people are increasingly inclined toward authoritarian alternatives.

Fascination with dictatorships and authoritarians

I feel a lot of this comes from a romanticized view of authoritarian countries. I hear people say, "China is amazing," "Russia is strong," or "Look how quickly China gets things done". They see the skyscrapers, highways, economic growth and military parades. They don't see what happens behind the scenes. They don't see censorship, political prisoners, surveillance, suppressed opposition or what happens to people who cross the government. China looks incredibly impressive from the outside precisely because you don't see much of what the government doesnt want you to see.

What happens when you get on the wrong side of the government?

Under authoritarian systems, the problem isnt necessarily what happens when you agree with the government. Things could look wonderful for a few when your views happen to align with those in power. The real question is what happens when you don't. Look at Russia, North Korea, China, Iran, or Afghanistan. Look at what happens to political opponents, journalists, women, dissidents and ordinary people who fall out of favor. There is no meaningful independent institution you can turn to. And once the state decides that you are the problem, your personal freedom can disappear very quickly. And so could your life.

What is a democracy actually supposed to do?

Democracy isnt designed to always give us a good government. Governments will be incompetent. Politicians will lie. Elections will produce people we don't like. Parliament will be frustrating. The real advantage of democracy is something much simpler: you can disagree with the government and still remain free. You can criticize it, protest against it, take it to court, organize against it and eventually vote it out. The system doesnt depend on the government being good. It depends on the government not being all-powerful.

The real test -- when "your side" is not in power

And this is where I struggle with people who want one-party rule or dictatorship. They always seem to imagine that their party will be the party in charge. Their leader will be the leader. Their opponents will be the ones getting silenced. But what happens when your party is overthrown? What happens when the government decides that you are the enemy? That's the test of any political system. Democracy says you may lose an election, but you don't lose your rights. Dictatorship says you might have everything while the dictator likes you, and absolutely nothing when he doesnt.

That is something these people are forgetting.

Democracy is not about making sure your side always wins. It is about making sure that when your side loses, you are still safe.