There are ~4,700,000,000 men alive on the planet, so sorry I haven’t kept up with them all

When I meet someone who has negative experience with people of color who says they hate black people because of it, I call that person a racist.

It’s really easy to wax poetically about inclusivity, and the importance of fighting hatred and and prejudice as concepts in a vacuum. The true challenge to those ideals is when reality happens and people are hurt. Is equality and inclusivity just an aesthetic? Something that makes you seem magnanimous whenever you extend your grace to people you perceive have less power than you? Or is it something real, something difficult, something that can withstand being tested?

Hatred is harmful to the person doing the hating, and harmful to society. TERF’s exist as examples of how hating men can make the world worst place. They start by making excuses about how the power imbalance makes it pay to hate men, and yet because of the power imbalance the hatred seeks out the only target it can: trans women.

You are correct that you cannot argue people put of the abuse they have suffered. The challenge lies within each of us to look within ourselves and challenge our own prejudices, even the ones we might try to justify.

Yeah i get the message here, but the message isn’t very helpful. What happens if you do this for other crimes?

“What causes murder: murderers”

“What causes robbery: robbers”

“What causes theft: thieves”

“What causes heresy: heretics”

“What causes thought crime: thoughtcriminals”

It’s a statement that references itself. I understand the message that it is trying to send: victim blaming is bad, and a lot of powerful people don’t view rape as seriously as they should. It’s a good message hindered by bad messaging.

So I get that Bad Dragon is old, big, and popular. But I know some people in the industry, and there isn’t a whole lot of love for BD.

One of the rules here is “no shilling for corporations”, so I’ll refrain fron plugging my people and just say it’s worth shopping around.

I think hatred of all kinds is detrimental to humanity and the planet, but maybe thatsthat’s just me.

It’s so weird because End Game is pretty explicitly anti-Bush, anti-surveillance, and anti-authoritarian.

“The ex-president signed a secret bill that could land a legal US citizen in jail. And the Patriot Act stripped away our constitutional rights. They say the concentration camps just popped up, yeah right”

Like, yeah the qualifier of “legal US citizen” is sus, but other than that it’s pretty based. In 2012 when it came out, “ex-president” was very clearly Bush, not Obama.

It’s such a shame how Trump and the Tea Parties managed to brainwash libertarians into being fascists.

I know that false reports are virtually non-existent

This is a difficult subject to discuss, because as you point out the manosphere is saying that this is quite common, feminists claim that this is “virtually nonexistent”.

The article itself says “False accusations do occur, but the evidence is consistent that they are rare (Law Commission, Citation2025; Victoria Police, Citation2017). They are far rarer than these men assumed.”

So I went to the Law Commission publication looking for more info. It basically says the same thing without any data, but cites a 2023 publication from the Law Commission with the same title. And it too, doesn’t have any data, just makes the claim that they are “rare” and cites a 2021 publication fron the Crown Prosecution Service.

So what does this source say? “Other complaints of rape which have not resulted in successful prosecution outcomes always mean the victim lacks all credibility as a witness.”. Nothing to do with the rate of false accusation at all, but instead making the point that ant prior accusations someone has made before which failed to result in a conviction is not necessarily a false accusation and should not harm their credibility, unless there is “a proper evidential basis to allege that the complaint was false”. Which is a great point, but not adequate as a supporting citation for the original claim. It does not answer the initial question: how prevalent are false rape accusations?

It is a difficult question to answer. The range that seems the most legitimate to me which i have seen cited frequently, is 2%-8%. And while I have seen this figure in more respectable sources before, i’m going to cite this site which is dedicated to debunking manosphere myths.

This site uses the word “uncommon”, which i think is fair. The original article claims that false accusations are rarer than the participants assume, but fails to define either of those.

It comes down to the failure of the criminal justice systems of the world to operate adequately to earn public trust. A lot of that is a consequence of patriarchy, and one of the ways that patriarchy harms men. But it is also class-related when the criminal justice systems are biased so heavily in favor of the wealthy. As one of the participants said, "You don’t have a lot of room for mistakes, unless you come from a wealthy family.”

Are they really making much of a statement? Just “many young men see sex as a hazard to manage”.

I appreciate a comment pointing out sample size for the many people who don’t actually read the article. I see tons of “scientific” articles posted on Lemmy that make much broader and definitive statements with tiny sample sizes. It’s hard to conclude much more beyond “more study needed”. But in this case I think the paper has some interesting quotes for discussion.

The mobile app Connect for Lemmy.

I tried a handful of apps year ago when I started and this was the best at the time. And it has improved over time, to the point where it is better even than Reddit Is Fun was back in the day.

There is a pretty big difference between “citizens have a responsibility to educate themselves and governments have a responsibility tk enable that” and technofascism.

Also there are way older arguments against democracy. Like “I am more capable of physical violence than you, so why should care about your silly little ballot?”, “the gods blessed me with the authority to rule”, or even the classic “we don’t have time to let the masses squabble- we need a unilateral decision maker who can make quick decisions”.

Didn’t she brag about abusing her spouse?

I have just focused on enjoying what I have for now, mostly.

I built desktops for my wife and myself back in 2013 and 2014. Back then I fresh out of college and we were poor, but I had experience building PC’s in high school. So I was able to use those skills to find deals and be efficient so it was a great investment in dollars per hours of entertainment. And over the years I slowly upgraded them- mostly the storage, adding SSD’s as boot drives and bigger HDD’s for storage. I started using integrated graphics for my own, then bought a used 270X a couple of years later.

Something in mine broke in 2019. Either the CPU or motherboard, but at that point both were ancient and it wasn’t worth trying to buy parts to try to troubleshoot, so I built myself a new PC. In 2020, I started building my wife a similar one, accelerating my purchases when I started to see reports of factories shutting down from sone mysterious flu-like illness that was hitting China and Taiwan hard. I couldn’t afford high-end stuff, so we both had an RX580. I have a 2600x, and my wife has a 3600, so basically the same thing. We were really lucky to get such relatively decent hardware before the crypto boom and pandemic led to GPU prices skyrocketing. Those rx580’s were each less than $200, and for 1080p are still a WAY better FPS/$ than anything new on the market today.

I have been keeping an eye on the market and waiting, hoping for GPU’s to come back down to more reasonable levels. I probably would have bought a 9070XT, or maybe even a 9070, if I could have found one at MSRP. Despite AMD’s promises those MSRP’s were completely divorced fron reality: there was simply not enough supply to support those prices. So i’m still rocking those RX580’s.

When I built my wife’s PC in 2020, her old one still worked and I still had a bunch of good parts from mine which broke in 2019. I waa interested in learning about Linux so I cobbled those parts to make a machine with an AMD 8 Core Bulldozer CPU, my RX270X (my wife had an NVIDIA GTX660 which maybe had slightly better performance on paper, but NVIDIA drivers gave me issues with Linux so I switched), and 16GB of DDR3. I installed Cinnamon Mint and fell in love. It was so much more customizeable, so much more stable, so much better performance than Windows was on the same hardware. Felt like breathing new life into old hardware, and i was able to stream games from my new Windows desktop in my office to this Linux machine in my basement. Linux works a lot better with my Behringer audio interface, and this allowed me to have a workflow where I record in my basement where my musical equipment is, then do the rest of the production on my Windows machine because my DAW is not Linux a compatible and my office is more comfortable to be in.

Separate from that, I wanted to dabble with pi-hole so I picked up an OrangePi Zero 2 for $35. At this point Raspberry Pi’s were ridiculously overpriced (as they still are) for what they are, but at least knock offs like tbe OrangePi were still cheap at the time. I always intended to do more with it, but I’ve never gotten around to it.

So at that point I could game in my office and my basement. My living room was annoying. At times my wife had her PC there, and it was a pain. Wires were messy. She somehow broke a ton of wireless mice/keyboards. The noise from her fans was annoying. The scaling was bad. So I moved her desktop to our office (and built a custom megadesk for both of us out of wood) and bought an NVIDIA Shield Pro for our living room. It was way better than the built-in Roku for streaming video, and I was able to stream there from either of our desktops for gaming. Being always-on, low power, with a bit of storage from a USB drive meant it was kind of a rudimentary NAS too. With SyncThing I was able to use the Shield to do stuff like backup the memes from our phones and keep an organized collection of our desktop and mobile wallpapers. I also got into emulation, and basically turned the Shield into a personal Cloud Save solution for my emulators across devices.

Other than that, I got a Steam Deck. Best purchase of my life. $400 in February 2023, and very similar performance to my desktop. I upgraded the storage, put SyncThing on it to syncronize any saves that Steam won’t (including some Steam games that don’t support cloud saves, like Sonic Adventure 2: Battle). I installed Steam Link as a non-steam game so I can stream from my desktop, saving battery life, heat, and fan noise and getting around and games that don’t have Proton compatibility.

I also picked up a used 2019 10" Amazon Fire Tablet for $50. Used Amazon Fire Toolbox to open it ul and remove telemetry, added Steam Link for Streaming.

I invested in a 12TB HDD and a Blu-Ray drive that allowed me to rip all of my physical media. I slowly transcoded all the video and set up a Jellyfin server. I think that was 2022 or 2023.

This year I upgraded our router to a GL.iNet one. It can function as a VPN server. We formed a polycule with another couple, and my bf and I set up our own VPN’s to connect our networks. He dropped like $5k on building a new NAS, while I spent about $1k to buy a pair of 24TB HDD’s to drop into my Linux machine. I moved my Jellyfin instance off of my desktop and onto there (though I still use my desktop for transcoding because the RX580>RX270).

And that led to me finally making my Linux machine a proper server this year. Still running Cinnamon Mint because I’ve had no reason to change. I re-ripped our CD collection and set up a Navidrome server. I started backup up our Google Photos every month and set up an Immich server. I started collecting ePub files and set up a Calibre-Web-Automated server. I set up Dashy to easily link to all of these.

I have also dabbled with services like Journiv and Nutritrace, but haven’t really gotten them up and running. I really wish I was able to build a proper new server, with rack hardware. I wish I could build a new gaming PC too, or maybe have a dual-GPU server with VM’s for my wife and k to stream from. But prices are just too damn high.

I started as a cart attendant, so I noticed that cars entering the parking lot would usually correspond with the traffic lights nearby. Pretty simple and straightforward.

What’s weirder is that most people exit in groups. Maybe not the same group they came in with. Some people might need to go Guest Services for a return. Some people would stop at Food Ave for a snack. Some used the restaurant. Some would peruse softlines (clothing) for an hour or two with multiple trips to the fitting room. Some would go straight back to the pharmacy for their meds. Some families would come in and split up. And there would be the occasional straggler checking out on their own, but there was an overwhelming tendency for several parties to all check out at once. Then they would form their own traffic leaving the parking lot.

I think some of it is subliminal. Once one group starts to check out, that starts to put the beeps of the register, the hum of the convertor belt, the clatter of items being moved, and the rehearsed conversations of a transaction to float through the air of the front of the store. My hypothesis is that customers shopping in the front who were close to done would have their decision to check out accelerated by this.

Some of it could be the result of all of the other psychological manipulation that happens in retail stores. That is a whole science of its own that I am only vaguely aware exists, but it is very likely that a contributing factor too.

Or it could be emergent from human behavior. For example, studies have shown that people will commute ~1hr max to/from work (I can’t remember the exact number, it might have been closer to 45 minutes). Doesn’t matter if they are walking, riding a horse, rowing a boat, driving a car, taking a bus, taking a train, or any combination. Once the time starts to exceed that amount, people either look for a new job or new home, and this has had an impact on the way that neighborhoods and cities grow over time.

I had a similar experience. A couple nights ago, winding down for bed and getting high. I open up Nebula for something to listen to as I fall asleep, but my subscription feed was all full of either miserable (I feel obligated to learn about the atrocities of history, but for my mental health limit that content) or academic. I had exhausted most of the happier, lighter content like Tale Foundry, Razbuten, Austen McConnel, etc.

I never heard of Geller until i subscribed to Nebula a few years ago, so I would occasionally go back and just binge watch his content when I waa in the mood for something chill and easy to watch. So a couple nights ago I searched for him and the only results were a handful of videos where he appeared on other people’s channels.

At first I figured it was just Nebula’s search being weird and only looking st video titles and not the channel names, because he probably doesn’t have any videos with his own name in the title. So I scroll through the list of channels I subscribed to and… He’s gone. So I assumed he just ended his relationship with Nebula for business reasons. So I go to the internet to see what is up, wondering if maybe Nebula had done something terrible like sell out to private equity.

I’m sad. I’m disappointed. I’m tired.

Suspended for one semester, couldn’t have been that serious

This thinking is precisely the problem. The seriousness of the offense is unknown and completely unrelated to the consequences.

Universities have created these strange sort of pseudo a societies with their own perverse versions of what a justice system should be. The goal of the university is simple: profit. They want wealthy parents to believe their children will be safe going to school there. The incentive is to silence and squash and manage the “reputation” that the school has first, and everything else is tertiary. It is very possible, likely even, that it was a very serious offense that was swept under the rug with a slap on the wrist. Geller even said in his own statement that he felt like the consequence was too mild. Geller did not face the criminal justice system: he faced some school administrators for what should habe been a criminal offense.

The problem is that in the US, the actual criminal justice system really is an organized crime syndicate with its roots in finding runaway slaves, who exist today to protect capital and not people. When people cannot trust the government to administer criminal justice fairly, vigilante justice rises to take its place. And vigilante justice is terrible. Remember the time Reddit managed to “find” the Boston marathon bomber for example. Vigilante justice often becomes a popularity contest, or a measure of social influence. A lot of people right now blindly repeating the phrase “believe women” are conveniently forgetting about how many innocent black men have been lynched for that.

The lack of trust in the criminal justice system ALSO precludes any opportunities for societal forgiveness or growth. Norway, for example, has a system focused on rehabilitating criminals to become safe members of society. The US system is built around perpetuating slavery, providing a sense of vengeance for victims, and trying to pretend that the threat of a terrible life in the prison system acts as a deterrent to crime. The vigilante justice system, even one as mild as “cancel culture”, is similar. It de-humanizes perceived offenders and leaves no room for forgiveness or rehabilitation. Cancel culture also is not universal: there have been plenty of celebrities that have been "canceled"who still have successful careers making money off people who dont participate in that culture. Jacob Geller still has his YouTube channel, which is likely his biggest source of income, where he has not posted anything at all regarding this. JK Rowling is still a billionaire.

A lot of people ARE angry about Trump. The problem is that rapist won the popular vote in the last election, meaning more than 40 million people decided they didn’t care. There are probably a lot more people who are not angry at Geller than there are at Trump.

This just plain sucks. I’ve been a Nebula subscriber for years and I enjoyed Geller’s content a lot. I will miss it. I’ve considered “what will it take for me to be comfortable watching him again?”. I don’t have any solid answers, but I have some ideas.

One is turning himself into the police and admitting to it as a crime. Not sure what the statute of limitations is, and as I said above this would not be all that productive. Him being subject to slavery, sexual assault, and likely antisemitic violence in prison for a few years doesn’t really make the world a better place.

A statement from the victim could help. She does not owe him or me or anyone else anything here though.

Community service? Significant commitment to women’s charities? Maybe. Charities are a whole other issue: they are often sources of tax evasion, corruption, and reputation-washing.

Maybe the answer is that he just needs to find new, less public work and I need to find a new, less problematic content creator.

I think a balance is good.

I worked at Target a long time ago as a Front End manager, before the days of self checkout. So I know how to cashier quickly and efficiently, and I get annoyed shopping at other places where the employees or customers are being slow.

I also appreciate just how volatile needs can be and how difficult it can be to staff. There have been books written on the subject, but in short for large stores with a lot of volume, customers do not usually trickle into checkout constantly as one might expect. Instead, they crash against the front of the store like waves. Personally when i’m shopping I try to identify these waves and time my checkout between them. At Target, we would often only have a couple of dedicated cahsiers, and would call the cart attendant or floor employees to help out for these waves. Self-checkout helps to smooth this out a lot and reduces all that walking back-and-forth.

I also hated all the upselling they made cashiers do. Target credit/debit cards and extended warranties on electronics. As an employee it was obnoxious and felt like we were annoying customers. As a customer, I was annoyed. One of my complaints about self-checkout today is how they ask you so many questions. My local grocery store self-checkout requires 5 button presses after i’m done scanning, which i think is bad design.

But also sometimes people need help. Some products are more complicated to buy. Some people are disable. Coupons are a plague upon society which machines are incapable of addressing. Some people just plain want a social experience, and it’s good to have human employees standing around in general. So I like the idea of having a mix.

And, of course, Universal Basic Income so we can stop asking “but what about jobs?” about every new innovation (but fuck AI though).

A lot of answers here are things that are acquired tastes. Most alcoholic beverages for example: once you get used to them you start to appreciate the interesting alcohol-soluble flavors that you can’t get anywhere else. Learning to like bitter flavors opens up things like coffee (though the caffeine addiction probably helps too).

The one drink that I cannot understand is cola. I remember in the 90’s seeing all the ads about Pepsi vs Coke. Restaurants and grocery stores and households picked a side. You’d occasionally encounter the weirdo or centrist who liked both, the juggalo with Faygo cola, or elitist with Jones soda, or the weirdo with a generic or another minor brand. All of them are terrible. I like a bunch of weird and strong flavors. Umami, salty, herbal, floral, sweet, acidic, whatever. I have a bag of Horehound hard candies on my desk that everyone else hates. I like to make my own mint soda by adding mint syrup to club soda. I cannot understand how cola ever became popular.

Joe Biden spent his first two days in office breaking the record for executive actions.

https://politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jan/27/marco-rubio/how-joe-bidens-first-executive-orders-compare-past/

I am old enough to remember that most of these were either doing things that Trump SHOULD have done to address Covid but refused to (as the article points out) or were just undoing what Trump did as the previous record holder fro his first term.

Like,i get it. Biden was a neoliberal and a capitalist. The DOJ should have put Trump in jail long.before he had an opportunity to run for office again. But this BoTh SiDeSrhetoric is factuay inaccurate and actively pro-fascist.

Just to add some more options, there are the 5 Neurodivergent Love Locutions.

Infodumping, Parallel Play, Support Swapping, Deep Pressure, and Penguin Pebbling.

Honestly i’m not a gigantic fan of any of them in particular though.

Physical touch is good, but my joints get stiff and my skin gets sweaty from too much cuddling. I also don’t really like being a smaller spoon - I become very conscious of moving my head and or catching my long hair on something.

Quality Time is probably my biggest. Like, time = life. Giving someone time is sharing life with them in that sense. Responding to messages or giving thought counts. Doing things actively together counts. The Parallel Play locution counts.

Words to Affirmation… Maybe it’s the autism but anytime i’m getting the impression that someone is saying something with the goal of making me feel any certain way, it tends not to work. Like, I’ll understand and appreciate that you want me to feel that way, but the words won’t themselves won’t matter much. This applies to a lot of stuff, both positive and negative. If someone insults me I just think “oh you don’t like me” without ever ruminating in what the insult was. There is also some evidence that autistic people are less susceptible to advertising and propaganda too, though I would never be so arrogant as to claim imunity from such things.

Acts of service and gift giving are pretty similar in that I am uncomfortable just receiving stuff from people. I’m very particular and I often have unusual taste, and I really enjoy researching things and making a purchasing decision. I prefer collective contributions. I love when my wife and I spend a couple of months saving for and discussing a big purchase we are going to share. I love when we both work together on things like yardwork or cleaning or swapping around the seasonal decorations. It makes me feel like part of something bigger than myself: our household, our marriage, whatever you want to call it.

Infodumping… I can handle some and can provide some on occasion. Maybe I just got really good at masking as a kid, or learned from watching people call my older sister a know-it-all, but I learned fron a young age to evaluate how much someone already knows about something and how much they are willing to learn in that moment. My bf and gf never learned this and occasionally I get exhausted by them. Especially when it’s a topic we are both interested in and I disagree.

Parallel Play used to be great. I think I miss it. One of the problems of being in a polycule is that I always put pressure on myself to be more present with whomever I am with. It seems my wife doesn’t appreciate parallel play the same way that I do. I’ve still not gotten to the point of doing so with my bd or gf.

Support Swapping is not something I’ve done much of. The support I need is mostly time alone. I try to support others by providing a calm, stable presence and a listening ear.

Deep Pressure- I have a bad knee that benefits from massage, but other than that I don’t love deep pressure.

Penguin Pebbling- I like a small amount of it, but I also get overwhelmed by clutter. I feel a bit bad because my gf definitely loves this one, and they cone back from every trip with a huge bag of random trinkets they have scavenged, and I am like “I’ll take one (1) please” to add to my designated trinket box.

It isn’t quick anymore either.