There has to be an armed conflict between two or more nations. Otherwise they’re “just” crimes.

Can it be a war crime if you’re not actually at war? Seems like it’s just murder.

It was a weird show. All the contestants were nice people who reacted well to their situation, and you could see the presenters and guests getting more and more uncomfortable as the week went on - being less and less sure that it actually was funny rather than mean.

The finale was a little anticlimactic as the contestants seemed to have pretty much worked it out. I wonder if they had a little help in that department.

Yeah, that’s the significant thing for me here. Not what’s being said, but which paper is saying it.

I use Perplexity for most of my searches. Not because of ads (I have robust adblocking to the point that I’m genuinely gobsmacked whenever I’m in a situation where I can’t browse any other way, like on someone else’s machine), but because of third-party SEO and first-party paid-for search results. Perplexity is far from flawless, but unlike google, Bing, etc. and the engines which rely on them (DuckDuckGo is Bing, for example), it’s actually designed to return you the answer to your question.

We can discuss the exact meaning of “ads” and whether the paid-for search results count. I’d say they’re similar but with subtle differences. And it’s not what’s being suggested for ChatGPT here, although for over a year now I’ve been suggesting that the AI-equivalent of SEO & paid-for search results is where we’re headed.

I’m sure I’ve heard this song before. These kinds of stories can make people think “well, that’s okay then” and not vote when the time comes.

The odds are against you, for sure. It can happen, so it’s not impossible. But the odds are against you.

To increase those odds as much as possible, take one bit of advice over all others - married isn’t something you are, marriage is something you do. You’re not saying “I’m going to be with you for our entire lives” to your fiancee, you’re saying “I am going to spend my entire life working hard to make sure that we don’t grow apart or grow complacent or take each other for granted, and I fully trust that you’re promising the same thing”.

The only way for a long-term relationship to work is if both people dedicate effort to making it work. You’re looking at a life full of compromises. You’re looking at a life of times when one or the other of you is going to get sick, or will fall apart mentally, or will get addicted to drugs, or…any number of other things which can tear people apart. Are you really, fully prepared to deal with those things?

You say you want a family. What if you’re infertile? What if she needs an emergeny hysterectome? What if you find out that you have the genes for Huntington’s and you’re probably going to condemn any children you have to a slow, painful, undignified death? Will you adopt? Have you thought about it? Have you discussed it? Are you 100% sure this is the person who you want to go through those things with? Are you sure you’re the person they would want to go through those things with? Or are you just kind of thinking it’ll probably work out somehow?

Marriage is hard. It’s work. It’s not a thing you do on a day, it’s a thing you do every single day until one of you is dead.

A lot of older people are dismissive of young love. I’m not one of those people. I remember being your age and in love. I remember how deep and all-consuming it is. You will probably never love anybody as deeply again, not with the same burning passion. Not in the same way.

But love and marriage are two very different things. And I think it’s that difference that older people mean when they say things like “you don’t know what love is”. You do. Perhaps in a way they’ve forgotten. But what they mean is the mundane days. The big moments. The effort and work it takes to truly build an “us”. That’s what you don’t yet have enough experience to fully appreciate.

I wish you well. But before you get married to someone, you should try to have an appreciation of what it is that you’ll really be promising.

The advice given above to live together for a year first is good advice. That won’t give you an idea about everything, but it can give you more insight to the little things which can be more important than you think. You might think it’s cute that time she used your toothbrush without asking, or that she leaves her knickers strewn around the house. You might not feel that way in a year when she keeps doing it day after day. And you’d be surprised how significant those little things can become over time. How much are you prepared to work at it? How much is she?

Just try to be sure, going in, that you really have thought this through (because it sounds like you haven’t). And communicate. The only way you’ve got even a slight chance is if both of you communicate openly and honestly and vulnerably with each other - and not just about the big stuff.

It’s partly because forums aren’t really a thing these days. People tend to spend their time on places like Instagram, twitter, YouTube, etc. All algorithmically feeding them content. And that algorithm isn’t what’s best or most liked, but what is the most engaged with. So anything “controversial”. Which, in the real world, equates to right-wing content.

Seriously, say you go on YouTube and you want to watch a video about a film. Say you liked the most recent Ghostbusters and think it’s underrated. You find a video called something like “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is actually better than you think”. It’s 30 minutes long, which is about the length of time you want to kill. You start watching and you’re agreeing with it. Then it gets to the 20 minute mark and suddenly the video is talking about the woman-led reboot and how bad it is in comparison. The word “woke” starts getting thrown around. Its lack of quality is blamed on women as a whole being incapable of being funny.

Suddenly you realise that the maker of the video is a misogynist and you stop watching.

But you’ve already watched 20 minutes. YouTube now thinks you like content of the kind produced by that channel. So you’ll see a lot more of that kind of thing, because it makes people angry. Either angry because they agree with the author about how wokeness is destroying everything, or angry because they think he’s a misogynist. But either way, they’re upvoting/downvoting and leaving comments.

Now, you’re not interested in that kind of material, but perhaps there’s a video that you wouldn’t have been recommended before which isn’t as extreme, but just has a couple of things you disagree with. Perhaps it’s masked with irony and edgy humour. Watch enough of this new kind of content and you might find yourself being a little more sympathetic to the parts that you would previously have disagreed with.

This is particularly true if you’re someone who doesn’t see themselves as being in a good situation. If you haven’t got a job, then it’s much more palatable to be told that it’s because of those foreigners coming here on small boats than it is that you’re not particularly employable, or there just aren’t very many jobs right now because we’re in an economic downturn, or that the entire system is rigged to take money from the poor and give it to the rich and that you’re on the wrong side of that equation. Those things are emotionally uncomfortable and complex as ideas. The thought “it’s all because of them” feels good, because anger feels good, and it’s simple. Just get rid of “them” and all will be wonderful again.

Same with women. Do you need to work on yourself? Do you need to actually make a conscious effort to examine your attitudes and the attitudes ingrained in society and think before you make an off-hand remark to a woman? Do you need to change your attitude and start thinking of women as complex people with inner lives who don’t owe you anything even if you really, really think they’re very pretty and they smell nice and are a bit gothy and have big tits and even if you’re always polite to them and hold the door open for them and once gave them half of your chocolate bar and she accepted and smiled at you? No! It’s the femoids’ fault for only wanting Chad and Tyrone! Come join US! WE understand you! We’re not going to tell you that you need to take any responsibility for anything! We’ll tell you that you ARE owed sex and that she’s a bitch for witholding it by putting you in the friendzone! It’s not YOU! It’s THEM! It’s all THEIR fault!

There’s a lot of people in bad situations. There’s a lot of people feeling neglected and lost and helpless and hopeless and emotionally disconnected. And the message that the answer is simple and it’s all the fault of [group X] and that if you could just put [group X] in their place then you’d get everything you ever wanted, is a very, very seductive one. “It’s complicated, and will require effort, and even then things may not get much better” is a much less appealing pitch.

Combine those things with engagement-pushing algorithms which favour right-wing content - alongside far-right groups actively trying to recruit people with irony and a “boil the frog” approach, and some platforms (twitter, I’m looking in your direction) actively trying to push a far-right narrative - and it’s not really a surprise that some people, men in particular, are moving to the right.

WhoCouldHaveSeenThisComing.gif

They’re generally treated as different animals, but toads are actually a subset of frogs. All toads are frogs, but not all frogs are toads.

He called for them to be executed. Let’s not soft-pedal this.

I mean…you do see the irony here, right?

500 billion…

One woman famously sent the BBC a dry cleaning bill because her husband had literally shat himself

Similar to the Strangelove example - although not about history - know what medical professionals consistently say is the TV show which not only had the most accurate medicine, but also best depicts the social paradigm of working in the medical sector? Scrubs.

Oh, I’ve got a carrots one, too. Rabbits don’t have a particular fondness for carrots. We just think they do because of Bugs Bunny. But Bugs eats carrots to imitate a Clark Gable scene in It Happened One Night, with the carrot substituting for a cigar. Over time the connection got lost and it just sort of became “rabbits = carrots”.

They don’t mind them, but they have no particular preference for them.

That’s not the only Bugs Bunny-related thing, either. “Nimrod” has come to mean “idiot” because of its use by Bugs. But that’s not the intended meaning in the cartoons. He specifically says it to Elmer Fudd. Nimrod is a Biblical figure, known for being a great hunter. He’s being sarcastic. But again the reference got lost and people just thought it meant “idiot”.

“We’ve released this feature which works 80% of the time and which we feel morally obligated to tell you can install malware, or simply send all your files to a malicious actor. Why aren’t you jizzing yourselves?”

There was research which showed that when women make up a third of a group, both men and women tend to think the numbers are even. More than a third = more women than men.

Not just presence either. If women in group settings collectively speak for more than 30% of the time, both men and women feel like women are dominating the conversation.

I do have several external harddrives, three monitors, and a MIDI keyboard. But “this computer will run fine as long as you don’t use the usb sockets” isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement itself.

I’ve thought before that if i were to be dropped back maybe 200 years ago i could maybe do okay for myself by passing off existing stories as mine. You’d have to change some details here and there, but you could absolutely write the terminator as a book and pretend it was your idea, for example. And people would never have read anything like it.

I don’t think you’d become rich and famous, because success is as much about time and place as it is ideas and talent. But I’m sure you’d be able to get them published and thus sell well enough to pay your bills on ideas alone.

Not true for something like Tolkien. Those need to be his words for the books to work. But Alien? Psycho? The thing? The day the Earth stood still? Forbidden planet? Arrival? You could sell those on ideas alone.