Authoritarianism is far right along the spectrum, and liberalism is center, center-right or center-left depending on the specific tenets set by the movement. (There are multiple liberalisms out there.)
Neoliberalism as practiced by the US Democratic Party and the UK Labor Party is right wing.
According to teh internetz it’s related to Dark Brandon and about liberals getting a little spicy. I opine differently.
Since woke is about awareness of systemic oppression in society, to me, it follows dark woke is about awareness that societal systemic oppression is witting, deliberate and malicious.
Granted, I was a late bloomer, an incel until I went from Codependents Anonymous in my mid twenties into the local kink community, and again, into the hands of women who knew what they wanted, and I was still cute enough to be that at least to some of them.
The other factor is that I’ve been crazy all my life and in the psychiatric sector all my adult life (even to the point of doing peer counseling based on raw experience). But it means when there’s drama, when someone has dark stabby secrets, is divergent or has a split personality dissociative identity or something, I don’t even blink, and we’re back to clothes being pulled off again.
My guess is most of us are just looking not to be rejected out of hand over something trivial, or more accurately, to be able to be ourselves without our partner screaming and running off into the night, and any time I could be the guy who didn’t do that, I was usually getting laid followed by invites to come live with her. At least I was looking for [just someone with whom I could be myself mask-off]. Granted hormone addled young adults may think they want more than that, but I got over it really quickly.
The British empire still thinks its the British empire and rightfully owns all it has looted from the rest of the world. So not all nations get the memo.
Black holes eat planets incidentally. They’ll gladly eat stars and whatever accretion that orbits a star, including its planets. Granted, it’ll miss some, and leave a bunch of rogues in its wake.
And yes, all the bits are consumed individually, so poor Earth would get her atmosphere and oceans stripped away before the mantle, crust and core. And that’s assuming earth doesn’t get buzz-sawed by the black hole’s inner accretion disc slicing at near-C speeds.
For most intents, the Black Hole is more nails than booba.
I stand corrected!
I’ve developed the impression that Germany, having openly gone through its fascist autocratic / holocaust phase, is willing to be more candid about its shady past, especially given that phase has been largely recorded in records and photographs. Less so the other nations of western civilization. Much the way each of us has to go through separate successful revolts to escape the bonds of monarchy, we each have to go through a period that really paints the whole nation as a bunch of dastard brigands before we develop some humility and candor about the issue.
That said, Germany still has its factions that hearken back to its days of aristocracy, and hierarchies determined by wealth, so this kind of disclaimer may be a sign of the season.
I was particularly fond of the lightning pirates (lightning poachers, actually) in Stardust.
I’ll be a media pirate until I can see my dreams through, I suppose.
In my twenties, I developed the happy women are horny women hypothesis, and my experiences have been consistent with that ever since.
Dating in my late thirties / early forties, I used the tactic of hanging out with my prospect and respecting her autonomy until she pounced on me and pulled my clothes off. It seldom took more than three dates. Usually two was enough.
Granted, we don’t teach our adolescent young men anything about socializing, so they invent crazy hypotheses on their own, or get them from the manosphere and alt-right channels. We had those in the eighties and they were just as wrong-headed then.
We’ve been in an oligarchy for a while, according to an Oxford study of US history and the policy voting behaviors of elected representatives. It’s only gotten spicy since Reagan, when the Republican party decided it had enough power to take all the cake (and is trying to do so).
The Federalists tried this before, which caused the party to die out and the Democratic Republicans to split. (Source: Helen Cox Richardson) It’ll be exciting to see how this all plays out.
Coincidental as I posted this before the EI12 comment came out, but yeah.
In this case, the original HCA version depicted her as 12… or so I thought. The Wikipedia page is now claiming she was fifteen when she got the hots for a human boy, though this may be the product of aging her up (much like Daenerys Targaryen from SoIaF to GoT ) since we’re now conscious of the risks of young teens becoming sexually interested or active.
I might have been confused, or I might be remembering correctly and it changed. Either way, everyone is twelve is a valid hypothesis.
It can happen to me and has.
For now we have no cure for it, rather a trillion-dollar far right propaganda machine churning out mind-control vibes by the minute.
I wasn’t offering a solution but expressing frustration: It’s only half that we’ve drunk the Flavor-Aid, but also that the human species is intrinsically hot to slam the first glass. The minute the going gets tough, we jump to white supremacy, and so it’s been since the dawn of time (if we track moral codes about cutting the stranger some slack, they go back to Hammurabi in Babylon)
But feel free to suggest what we should do to put Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro in their place, to get Thiel and Vought out of the White House.
Heck, I’d consider assassinating Stephen Miller or Leonard Leo if I had half the chance. And they’d deserve it too, figuring largely in the current epidemic of state violence. Not that that would move the needle but a hair, so I only get to wish upon them a Disney death: eaten by hyenas; or stabbed through the heart with the bowsprit of a sailing ship.
IRL if you have gay sex it only makes you gay if you find you like it and decide to identify as gay.
If you are a man and identify as bi, then no-one mainstream will want to date you and if you’re a woman and identify as bi, lesbians will be spooked but straight guys will fetishize you.
So you may want to identify as gay but exploring your straight side sometimes. Challenging your position on the Kinsey scale, as it were
According to Russel T Davies (and the series Bob & June which examines the idea) gay as an identity doesn’t necessarily correspond to behavior, which is how I’ve ended up in Lesbian culture while possessing male characteristics. (disclosure: I’ve been married to a lesbian for twelve years during which I re-identified as enby and renounced my manhood. It’s a long story.)
That said, the blood banks used to exclude men from donating if they ever had sex with another man, even once, what is a permanent exclusion where people who pay for sex are good after a year. I think this restriction is lifted now, but it was there for decades, including when I was donating plasma. So at least according to the California Pacific Blood Banks, a single intimate moment with another male hottie is enough to mark you as gay forever.
For every other part of LGBT+ -adjacent society, though, meh.
I wasn’t meaning to imply that restricting societies to small states is the solution, only that once a state gets larger than a village there’s going to be factioning and rivalry (and hence renegade behavior either to harm or subvert institutions).
Just as we found an alternative solution to infectious disease (centralized disease control, when we give it a proper budget) we need to find an alternative solution to factioning and subversion than keeping groups small. We just don’t know how to do it. Yet.
SMBC once posited a gamification of being nice to each other, in which society was self policing because everyone behaved with benevolence for the points. So I’m not the only person who’s thought about this.
I think the problem is the intrinsic enemy within rhetoric that is used to keep the public willing to tolerate draconian measures. Also the draconian measures, themselves.
It’s like the thing with cults (which I thought about looking to start a good cult or two): The basic cult template is to create an us vs them mentality against the rest of the world so that the followers can be exploited as cheap labor, easy sex or sexual labor.
(I wanted to created the Esoteric Order of Dagon as a means to allow gender redefinition and gay marriage. But cults have the evil pre-baked in.)
[ now I’m just ranting ] This is also the problem with the (blackboard hypotheticals) of the Christian Nation or the Islamic State. Either one, assuming they want a peaceful thousand-year reign needs to embrace enlightenment values such as liberty, social equality, short or no hierarchy, rule of law with no selective enforcement and sustenance guarantees. And by then, the conservative faithful might feel there’s not much of the religion left.
But without these concessions, the government is at odds with the public. It’s less of a problem if your society is under a population of one-thousand, but then larger societies will dominate your society with culture, if not a massive army.
Would you like the Fashion Police Annihilator Pistol or the Commando Laser Hairbrush?
I’ve become bitter, but…
… given our current examples of IRL men being masculine (Donald Trump, Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan…
…and, in SoIaF, masculinity as Joffrey Baratheon perceives masculinity, and Gregor Clegane is seen as a paragon of masculinity…
Having human decency, or character integrity are feminine, or at least the opposite of masculine.
There are plenty of guys that have these features (though considering the gender breakdown of the 2024 general election, many that do not), but I wouldn’t attribute them to what makes these guys men, rather what makes them mature or adults.
Just as truth and facts are left-leaning, maturity and character are feminine-leaning. It is why I am no longer a man (though I don’t take offense at he, him pronouns).
There are literal eldritch horrors we do not comprehend. It is why the sun has all the material features of god, yet we see it as a (very large, implacable, thankfully consistent) object, and we don’t think about how we must refrain from looking at the sun directly, only that it burns our eyes.
Bertrand Russell’s attempt at reducing all of mathematics to a perfect system of logic (until this was proven by Gödel to be impossible) broke him, much the way professors at Miskatonic would go mad trying to model the universe by pondering quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore.
Myself, I was already pretty mad (diagnosed) when I saw lines being crossed in the US that pointed towards a fascist autocratic future and a purge campaign, and so I took to studying moral philosophy and the Holocaust, specifically the human mechanisms that justified the engagement of and participation in evil. Consequently, I broke my brain even further. Nature, human or otherwise, can be unflinching and ruthless in its efforts to exploit or consume us, which is why we need reciprocal ethics in the first place.
I do not imagine the universe is incomprehensible, only that we are small and still pretty simple, imagining the moon closer and bigger since we see models drawn to disproportionate scale. And so the layperson doesn’t understand how difficult it is to launch a probe from one speck so that it drifts for months or years, to fall into an orbit around another speck. It’s difficult to imagibe that the stars in a single galaxy, each teeming with satellite objects, are uncountable like the grains of sand on a beach. We know it’s a number, but still have to estimate its value with a wide error margin.
It’s not forbidden knowlege. The parabolic manifold in which the pillars of R’lyeh stand can be computed, but our hominid brains have to bend a lot, or chain together analogies and metaphors to understand them.
It’s like a dog chasing a hyperball, possibly to its peril.
It’s also very squishy.
It doesn’t matter. Buddha is Buddha.