Contraception is not perfect. If you are on birth control, and you take it every day, you can still get pregnant, it’s just unlikely. If you have an IUD, you can still get pregnant, and even worse every pregnancy is more likely to be life threatening. And of course, condoms can break.

As for having less sex … that’s an interesting thing to say …

I think of it exactly in terms of the trolley problem. The whole premise is that if you do nothing (don’t vote) more people die. By flipping the lever, fewer people die but you’ve taken an action that leads directly to their deaths. The philosophical question isn’t just “is it better for fewer people to die” but “in pulling the lever, are you directly responsible for those deaths?”

My answer would be that inaction is itself an action. In this scenario, you have found yourself responsible either way. Suppose you pull the lever, though, to save as many lives as you can… Wouldn’t the ones who die as a result of this have loved ones that absolutely do blame you?

So your argument is “it doesn’t literally say that to the letter, so you’re wrong?” At best it suggests that this relatively wide swath of the population shouldn’t vote. What’s your interpretation?

From the article…

These are the men swimming in the electoral pool. It’s not too late for it to be drained.

The article is cautious at first, pointing at facts and figures. At times, it almost seems to care. But when it comes to the final arguments, it is just: We gotta get rid of these men. Not even a viable solution, much less a sensible one.

It’s everywhere. It’s not hard to find, but it’s not always overt. Usually, it is dismissive: “Well that’s not what we’re talking about right now.” “Well feminism would fix those problems too.” Or the person gets lumped in with Nazis, or misogynists, or whatever when what they’ve said doesn’t really support that.

I’m going to say something that I fear will not go over well, but I think it would be said. The left has some culpability here. Not in who they chose, but in how they approach the problem.

One of the things that draws me to the left is that people are all supposed to be people. No one is beyond redemption, and much of the worst aspects of people are due to changeable circumstances and not some genetic defect.

Criminals probably do crime because of their circumstances so if we can improve those circumstances we can help rehabilitate them. Addicts who are treated with dignity and compassion are more likely to be able to get their lives together. We shouldn’t paint over people with broad brush strokes, like assuming all Muslims are terrorists just because a few have done terrible things while claiming it is in the name of Islam.

But the left has a blind spot for men. The problem is solely with them, and they are garbage beyond redemption. They clearly are acting only out of hate, and not a result of their circumstances, so people seem to think. “It’s not my job to educate you” became a trope in a society where educating others is literally the only way to make change.

I submit that these people can be changed and can be rehabilitated if they are shown a better way. If their problems are listened to, rather than dismissed. If their circumstances are improved, rather than belittled. There are valid concerns, valid reasons for them to be upset, but they are handwaved away: “Well feminism cares about that too (even if you don’t see it)” or “The privileged feel like equality is oppression.”

Anyway, I don’t expect anyone will learn anything from this result. The left will say, “Man, misogyny just won’t let a woman be President” while ignoring how few people actually even voted. The left will say, “Men are to blame” without ever questioning beyond “I guess they’re just spiteful.” And if we get another election, we’ll have a Democratic candidate who moves right on everything except these problems.

As a nerd, I don’t expect my parental control settings to work forever. They’re more there to prevent childish naivete from getting them into trouble, they probably won’t stop dedicated teen horniness. And I won’t even be mad, figuring out how to get around them requires learning more about how technology works.

This. It’s not an election, it’s what’s next. Is every American election just going to be “Outright Fascism vs. Traditional Conservatism?” Is it always going to be this unrelenting and horrible from now on? Trump losing would be a good thing, but it doesn’t fix the problem.

The way I see it, the problems are that we’ve lost trust in the concept of society. We don’t trust expertise. That’s not even a right vs left thing. I know it’s unpopular to “both sides” these things, but in truth it’s not even a matter of sides: Everyone of all political stripes just disregards what they don’t want to hear.

At the same time, truth is getting harder to discern anyway. Botnets distributing and promoting misinformation, deepfakes making lies look real, and hordes of the financially incentivized pushing whatever their audience wants to hear over what is real.

Anyway, I try to be optimistic but I just don’t see how things will actually get better.

I’ve had a few of those little gimmick penis candies and they are terrible. I mean, it’s just some trash molded into a penis to be funny. Where are the gourmet candy penises?

That doesn’t fix the problem, it just changes who has the problem. Though I’ll admit that idiots buying bad stuff from other idiots in a cycle until eventually one idiot gets their life totally ruined feels a little on the nose.

At least the drug test is on brand. Stupid, but in a way I’ve come to expect. I cannot fathom what the point of the pregnancy test was.

Usually I say “don’t mistake incompetence for malice” because so often when people fuck up, they aren’t doing it to be mean but just because they’re stupid.

In this case, though, you’re mistaking malice for incompetence. Everything Reagan fucked up was 100% intentional. I mean, punishing black people and poor people was basically a campaign promise.

They should flash when they are first turned on, so you can tell that they turned on. That helps diagnose connection issues versus power issues. After that, though, darkness please.

For a long time, I’ve just assumed this was a weird way that my bipolar and my bisexuality interacted. Is this just a normal human thing?!

Please don’t say Trump is in decline. Plenty of people thought Trump had no chance of winning in 2016. He is a serious threat and should be treated like one until at least 10 years after his death.

I’m more irritated that so many people use his disability as an “excuse.” If he were the most average, neurotypical boy in the world, it would still be perfectly normal and acceptable to get excited and emotional about his father potentially being the next vice president.

I was a Sega kid in the Genesis generation. A friend of mine got a Saturn and I so desperately wanted to like Nights because it was the thing for Saturn. I didn’t like it at all. It felt hard to control, hard to understand, and was just not pleasant for me.

Meanwhile, a different friend and I had a blast trading off playing Mario 64. Hands down, way better for a 9 year old me.

Nah, this one has a margin of error. It’s just that “take down a large percentage of all computers in the world simultaneously” is quite a bit outside of that margin for a security software.

Overconfident is an understatement. I remember people thinking that Trump was the end of the Republican party, some people actually said that the party would be forced to disband after their crushing defeat in 2016.

Even many Democrats didn’t like Hillary, but the idea of Trump winning was outright laughable to many. I think that combination of “I don’t want to vote for her” and “there’s no way she can lose” left a lot of people at home twiddling their thumbs instead of going out to vote.

Everyone’s like, “It’s not that impressive. It’s not general AI.” Yeah, that’s the scary part to me. A general AI could be told, “btw don’t kill humans” and it would understand those instructions and understand what a human is.

The current way of doing things is just digital guided evolution, in a nutshell. Way more likely to create the equivalent of a bacteria than the equivalent of a human. And it’s not being treated with the proper care because, after all, it’s just a language model and not general AI.

He’s always been a contrarian. It was harmless and even enjoyable in the 90s and early 2000s when, to him, that meant eating vegetarian and believing in some Hippie woowoo bullshit while being firmly against organized religion and generally distrustful of corporations.

I miss hippie Scott Adams. Weird right-wing Scott Adams is not enjoyable.