The biggest reason for declining marriages is that people can actually make choices now and people don’t want to be shackled to someone they hate their whole lives.

People had radically different attitudes about marriage in olden times, when marriage equaled survival in many ways, and survival of your family, your connections, your career and your status, which was held through generations. It wasn’t thought of normally in terms of love and that’s a very modern view of marriage.

Romance and marriage for love certainly existed, but that was usually considered fantasy or stageplay.

Or thought the child was a small dog.

Yes, from holsters that require special training to simply remove the gun from.

Even if they weren’t special holsters, try unsnapping a leather or ballistic snap with a dino toy.

It’s just fake funny shit that gets distributed waaay too far because our species has lost all capability to think.

And here we thought it was bad trying to get a coherent message accepted on the left. Leftist infighting is legendary because the left has no idea how to dog whistle, which is a good thing. But the fact that there are 900,000 splinter groups with wildly different ideologies perfectly willing to fight tooth and nail to be the One True Leftism means the left knows infighting. Experts at it even. That’s why leftist policy is so timid and careful usually.

The right has ridden long and hard on the basic fact that most of their base are too stupid to think hard enough about ideology that they could worry about having to make them all work together. You easily get anti-vax moms riding alongside armband-wearing nazis on the right, because they’re both too dumb to realize that they’re supporting each other.

But all that is finally starting to come to a head (hopefully) as the current Democrat contenders are talking actual policy, as in, things they will do on a legal, prescriptive, professional level to enact changes. The right has gotten away with not doing anything for a long time because the left became basically the opposition group instead of actual challengers.

So they have to put their actual desires on paper, AND get them universally accepted by everyone on the right. It all looks a little different in that light. Seeing abolishment of birth control right next to their desire to abolish Civil Rights is making them sweat. These are NOT universally held positions of people on the right.

And honestly, most on the right, even the most frothing zealots, they don’t really want social disruption and rollbacks to the dark-ages. They are children. They are toddlers. They want to be heard and be recognized that they are angry, and they want to share that anger with the rest of their own little WWE Wrestlemania audience that lives in a fantasy world. That’s all. They don’t want to work on coalition building, they don’t want to phone-bank, they don’t want to have debates, they don’t want policies signed into law that will change their comfortable lives.

These are people who really need to discover some kind of Dungeons and Dragons gaming system that appeals to their anger and stupid worldbuilding.

Conservatives clearly don’t even understand words.

Which is wild because these are the same people who treat words like we found them in a fucking meteor crater and have to uphold the ancient definitions of gender, sex and relationships between people AT ALL COSTS.

You have obviously never been in a movie theater men’s restroom, a sporting event men’s restroom, or any busy gas-station restroom. The floor is entirely pools of piss. I rather stand on a grate that someone pissed on.

There’s a reason many homes ask guests to take off their shoes.

I don’t see it changing anytime soon. If I may go off on a tangent.

If any of us have gained anything of material use from the “AI revolution” it wouldn’t be plagiarized drawings of Taylor Swift as an anthropomorphic fox with six breasts, it would be the dawning realization that we’re not so special.

If so many of us can be tricked with a predictive text app into believing something is aware and alive, a technology in its infancy, what are the next several decades going to look like?

I don’t believe in the AI hype, the “singularity” subreddit is packed with the most delusional people in the world. And they sound exactly like Christians, Trump supporters or scientologists or any other cult.

It’s inherent to our experience here, that our brains trick us into thinking that thinking is special, that our conscious experience is somehow separated from the universe.

The harsh reality is it’s not separate from the world. Most of our decisions are made up to an hour in advance, most of our life is rehearsed by parts of your brain that don’t talk, that don’t narrate. You are made of thousands of layers of “entities” that sort and assemble information and then make you think you’re able to control the world around you with something called “choice.”

So now, understanding these hard truths about the human condition… when will it get better? When will we start to set aside superstition and fear and mythology to make us feel better about that gnawing fear we all have, the one lingering in the backs of all our minds that we can’t quite touch, the fear that we really aren’t in control, we really aren’t that special. We made cities, but can ants. We travel in space but so can fungus. We go to war with each other but so do chimps.

We are not letting go of religion or mysticism. Not in our current form. Maybe if we’re really, really lucky some of the most delusional techbros are right, and we will have a system in our lifetimes for “upgrading” our brains and expanding our ability to comprehend and understand each other. I am not holding my breath though. These are the same people who tried to convince us that NFT’s were the future.

Lets all remember that time one of the largest pop stars in the world gave a message to her fans on stage to remember to vote, and was instantly targeted by the GOP for being anti-american, and they started a beef with her that would drive thousands of people against the right.

How does anyone not see it and get what’s happening? I feel like you would have to have eaten ALL the crazy pills for this to make sense.

I too am taking advantage of the summer sale and am about 20 hours in and still wildly infatuated with this weird, weird amazing game.

After a while you start getting a slightly better idea of what’s going on, but that doesn’t make it more “game like” if anything, the more you learn about the game, the more it reveals itself to be a giant tool to explore meta-narratives and there are some moments of conversation regarding this that are absolutely chilling.

I have this feeling that the “X months” we have, as well the other periods of special recognition, serves a primary purpose of just setting people off.

For real, the ONLY people who really have a strong reaction to things like Black History Month are racists. The ONLY people who really care that there’s a “Gay Pride Month” are the frothing homophobes. For everyone else, particularly the people whom those days or months celebrate, it’s just Tuesday. Or some such normal day where nothing changes and they still have to constantly look over their shoulder.

If all it does is make some backwards, broken asshole lose his mind and rage about how “unfair” it is that nobody is giving them their special day, then it’s a victory. If all these recognition periods do is remind us all that there is a sizable segment of our population who hate you personally then it’s actually doing good on the long-term, because we can use it as a barometer. We can use these days and months to gauge how much more work we have to do squashing nazis and purging hate groups, and how much protection our friends and neighbors still need simply for existing outside the “white CIS straight male American” spectrum.

a guy who claimed trans people had their minds rotten by the porn industry.

Holy shit that projection, and how they can’t disentangle their kinks from human beings with human experience.

This has become inscrutable and over such a trite matter, there will be no further scrutiny.

You think the person praising the actresses appearance and saying how hot she is not attracted to women?

I am utterly lost how the general internet generation armchair psychologizes other people anymore, I will assume this is some new “everything is reverse” zoomer thing.

I think the user at top of this thread was confused and thought the image from Tumblr was being critical and saying something negative about the actress in question, or they meant to respond to the referenced haters.

Whatever it is, the comment was too confused for any of to try to make any kind of statement about anything about it.

Which person? The one in the tumblr image above is saying she IS sexy and beautiful. The one(s) referenced as saying she couldn’t be a love interest? I haven’t read any of their actual comments here but I tend to agree that if you get on a soap-box to scream to the world how something in media you’re choosing to watch makes you feel, you probably have more complicated feelings about the topic than you’re letting on.

I can easily find 30 cute people that I could cuddle.

The problem is that they don’t want me to cuddle them or touch them or be around them.

deleted by creator

You are so cool for being able to point out political ideology you don’t like, you’re cool.

edit: I also love how I just said “nazis and sexists” and this clown goes “Oh yeah, the left is bad too!” Bruh, doesn’t that say something right there that you assumed it was a political attack?

The public voting system is massively flawed when it comes to websites and sharing content. Since anyone who really wants visibility can just pay any number of services to boost their posts and comments, you have no idea what’s real and you have no idea what the general public actually supports.

For the average person who doesn’t think about what’s going on behind the scenes, it looks like an accurate representation of society’s interests and leanings. This is probably why we have a sharp uptick of far-right assholes and why so many young guys are turning towards sexist, racist figures online. The very same people who also proudly talk about how good they are at manipulating people. Hmmn.

So far a lot of the people I’ve interacted here have been more dense than reddit, I mean, a lot of the people here have been banned from reddit after all.

I mean, so was I. But it was for quoting someone’s use of a slur so they couldn’t edit it, then evading that bullshit ban. Apparently when you actively call out nazis and sexist assholes the powers that be will find a way to make you regret it.