Maybe there’s a rock out there made, by complete chance, in such huge proportion of silicon that it becomes more viable, I don’t give a shit. It was just an aside anyway, pick another based on the same principle if you like. Why an obligate biped? Why this size? Why not a flying creature? Why not a rotationally-symetrical monstrosity? Why not an intelligent species that physically couldn’t really be engineers but happen to live on the same planet as creatures who can? Or who just get contacted by outside life that can? I’m a dipshit who mostly prefers pulp and cosmic horror (read: fantasy) science fiction, so I’m sure someone who knows more could come up with more and better prompts.

I can’t help but notice that you didn’t list a whole lot of traits that would be considered vital to having a fairly human sillhouette. There’s nothing here about obligate bipedalism, for example, or having just two legs in the lower part of the body at all. There’s nothing here about how the forelimbs are articulated, and whether it would look meaningfully like hands or an array of dexterous tendrils or something. And all this gritty realist speculative biology seems out of place when most sci-fi is basically a particular sub-genre of fantasy anyway. Even being generous to the sci-fi writers, supposing the universe works in a fundamentally different way from how ours does (breaking laws of relativity and entropy, commonly), why can’t some ecosystems work out to stretch your imagination of what could be an advanced species? It all seems very narrowly prescriptivist, even beyond the fact that this is fiction to the point of taking negative liberties with the bounds of what is truly realistic.

Edit: idk, it just seems obtuse. Like, “Advanced life can only be carbon-based because being that way affords these benefits” without considering that other models could provide other benefits (I’m sure you know better than I about the use of silicon-based life in speculative biology). And that’s if the subject is addressed at all.

I wouldn’t really know since I’ve only ever had “traditional” relationships, but I’m pretty sure they still exist. Most of the people I know (which is now mid twenties at the youngest up to near 40) are in romantic relationships or want to be, it’s not just hook-ups out there. Like, don’t get me wrong, thinking about how to find a way to get into a romantic relationship again makes me want to CW, but that’s partly because it was already really difficult for someone like me and it’s getting more difficult as I get older . . . Anyway, of all the things we can blame them for, I think not wanting to fuck men and now wanting to, idk, whip and step on people? is really it. Incidentally, one of the veins of discourse in the incel community is basically doing conversion therapy to become gay because they believe that it’s way easier on average for a dude to get laid if he’s gay. I’ve never seen someone report that the converted themselves, though.

The other side of this is that they’re so misogynistic how the fuck do they expect to get that romantically close to someone before they realise how awful they are?

Well, they didn’t become such sickos until after they already had their negative experiences, at which point they’ve usually given up and made sexual frustration their religion. There’s no contradiction in this specific point, even if there’s a lot of short-sightedness, dehumanization, reaction, etc.

Edit:

The level of intimacy they yearn for is created over months, the sex is usually much earlier. So perhaps part of the problem is that they mentally have the cart before the horse, the order of things that are supposed to happen is incorrect in their heads and therefore they fail the whole dating thing because it doesn’t match with the material reality and issues occur interacting with others over this.

Not to keep playing reverse “Spot the Contradiction,” but you need to remember that these are people who generally have never had a girlfriend. Period. They might get a first date or two and then get ghosted. In the context of a first date, do you think that for a het woman, a man more interested in emotionality than sex is somehow a red flag? Like yeah, if he’s trauma dumping to you while you’re at the diner and you don’t even really know him, that’s probably not gonna fly, but if anything I would think emotionality that is somewhat in check and deprioritizing sex would be considered substantial positives for these guys as candidates. Unfortunately for them, most of them never even got that far and the other ones found some other way (probably prioritizing sex in many cases) to fuck it up.

They could also spend a modest sum and get off that way. There are at least two major things that I think you’re missing:

A lot of them want a partner who they can be emotionally intimate with, not just someone to fuck. A simple proof that doesn’t involve us both needing to look at their forums is that they have a popular acronym “KHHV,” or “kissless, hand-holdless virgin” which I think is used partly to emphasize their literal distance from women, but also to communicate closeness they are lacking besides the sex. If all I want is to fuck people, what do I give a shit about holding someone’s hand? This is also part of why trad shit so easily gained traction there, because it was basically viewed (falsely) as a guarantee to have a partner that you could emotionally invest in and they wouldn’t leave you (there are many ways this is wrong, of course)*

The second thing, as I mention in my dumb rant in this thread, is that incel communities are highly predatory cults. They prey on the mentally ill, racial minorities (particularly Asians), and literal children. They take your trauma** and convince you that it’s just what the world is for someone like you. It’s not about whether you can objectively access sex (again, escorts exist), it’s about hating yourself and, through that, hating everyone outside of your new group of “allies”.

Also, like, nothing against kink, but a fair number of people – especially the sexually inexperienced – are really not into basically any of it. Also I think the huge number of subs is more a gay community thing (I’ve been told there’s a top shortage), but I wouldn’t know since I’m one of those vanilla hets.

*While I believe these pieces of evidence do point to my conclusion, I recognize they are unconvincing. The real reason I believe it is because I spent some time on incel boards (I was never an incel) and the level of sentimentality about relationships, about being told “I love you” and so on was off the charts.

**in the former two cases. With the kids, it’s just straightforward ideological grooming

To their credit, I think the Principles of Communism thing is partially meant as a floodgate, since the devs really do believe in their project and want to avoid over-centralization from everyone defaulting to one instance. They know many people will go “What the hell? No!” and go somewhere else and that’s exactly the point. I’d be surprised if they really thought it would get almost anyone to engage with Marxism with the prompt, especially since you can copy the first sentence of the text and not read anything else (and even just reading it is not engaging with it). I think it’s more like a little joke.

Also, copying a sentence of your choice to a pamphlet is not a pledge and I think it’s silly to view it that way. If it helps, iirc, one of the sentences that appears is “No.” and they will accept that as an answer.

But assuming this was “promoting an ideology directly,” would you find it less sketchy for an instance to promote ideology indirectly? Because if you aren’t directly doing ideology, that just means you are indirectly doing it (sometimes very deliberately). Personally, I appreciate transparency.

Yeah, because they are all part of their respective instances and those instances (de)federate with each other. ml and ee are both good for that purpose. My own instance is bad for that purpose, but after spending some time on a more mainstream instance, I decided this was better for my mental health.

nor is it to “de-Nazify” Ukraine

I think they do want to do this, since the Nazis are extremely hostile to Russia, so it’s crushing the opposition. Obviously this is pretty different from the historical de-Nazification efforts whose corpse Putin cynically puppets as cover for his actions.

If there are meaningful factions of Greater Russia Nazis in Ukraine, he’d obviously be fine with those as he is fine with them in Russia.

in middle east i wish everyone involved regime change, situation is fucked with any of current people in power staying in power. Put Netanyahu, Assad, Erdogan, Khamenei and their cabinets and top people from Hezbollah in Hague then we can talk.

Great man theory doesn’t stop being great man theory if you add “and their cabinets” after.

At some point you need to engage with the problem of why things are the way they are, and the answer isn’t “The bad guy is in charge (and his cabinet)”

Social contract theory, the last refuge of the liberal. Liberals to this day say it’s the fundament of society because some assholes 250 years ago who did zero anthropology said that it’s just what society is.

As others said, the contract is arbitrary, so this doesn’t work as an answer to anything. The Nazis sure had social contracts, and they sure did “not protect” the people who violated the terms of those contracts. This so-called gotcha has no way to distinguish between that and a decent society.

Furthermore, this focuses heavily on a logic of a person’s actions being uncoerced by the environment they live in. The thief who gets his hand cut off does not get asked if he had no other way to get bread if some guarantee of employment or welfare wasn’t part of the contract (and it often isn’t). Sorry, you’re just a legal unperson now! Huh, thought it was the totalitarians who unperson people, not us virtuous liberals!

SCT is nonsense and society should be oriented, by means of unilaterally democratic input, towards the best outcomes for people. Anything else is definitionally providing worse outcomes, or the same outcome in case complete happenstance.

I appreciate your good humor since I think I came off as hostile

IMO the fact that fastfood jobs are considered temporary bootstrap jobs that you’re expected to be exploited to hell is bullshit and an indication of the absolutely broken moral compass of the corporate world. We could do without fast food, but that doesn’t mean we should pay them them minimum wage. Everyone deserves a livable wage no matter what they do.

I guess my perspective is that we’re talking about what OP wants to do in the present world, not what she could do in a hypothetical utopia (or just fairer society). So yeah, fast food jobs could be less terrible and should be, but at the moment they are absolutely not something to aspire to or even to recommend in many places because, again, they don’t even pay enough to live. Maybe OP is still living for free with a friend, in which case I guess it’s better than nothing, but in general it seems bad as a survival strategy.

Speaking for myself as someone who was dismissive, my best contribution to the answers here is that it’s reductionist to a seriously misleading extent. It seems like you have a couple of conditions contributing to your struggle, but it all gets reduced to “your number is too low.” As others have alluded to, how much of that is your adhd? How much is from some condition you may have that hasn’t been diagnosed because you have been unsupported throughout your life? I don’t think anyone is denying that you have real neurological conditions that hinder you, they just doubt low IQ as being a meaningful description of what you’re facing compared to something that gives a better causal explanation.

I’m sorry about how you were treated. That was fucked up and you didn’t deserve it.

I don’t think it’s over for you, it’ll just be difficult. You’re clearly able to overcome (presumably with effort and time) some of what you talk about since this is pretty well written.

Alcohol is pretty hazardous on all levels (I assume that’s what you cite as an addiction) but if you need pot to function, I see no problem with that besides it being another expense. It’s probably worth finding a support group in your area with respect to the alcoholism, though.

As far as I know, low IQ, insofar as we treat it as a credible concept at all, doesn’t correspond to not being able to do things, but it just taking longer to learn them. That’s probably not much of a consolation with respect to all that you’ve been through, but it’s relevant for looking forward because it means you don’t need to write things off as being something “for smarter people,” though there are definitely circumstances where the extra time it takes could make something not viable (like needing more time in college representing a significantly greater financial burden, possibly).

I think you can do it. Just remember that there is no shame in leaning on others; We’re a social, cooperative species.

If everyone was engineers and lawyers we’d have major problems keeping shops and fastfood open.

Alright, this is a little condescending. I think OP can aim a little higher than that and frankly probably will need to if she wants a living wage.

The fast food industry is basically a way for corporations to extract a pretty significant amount of labor value out of teenagers and the most desperate in society and all for the end result of contributing to society’s bad health. It’s not like society would collapse without it, unlike something like carpentry.

Lastly, insofar as IQ is a valid concept at all, studies say low IQ alone doesn’t prevent you from learning anything, it just makes it take longer to learn.

Edit: I apologize if it comes off like I’m going off on you, I just felt some things were worth noting. I like the rest of your comment.

It’s less than the bare minimum because he’s the fucking President. He shouldn’t be doing a highly truncated version of what any average Joe has access to, he should be using his office!

Among the most-viewed misleading claims where X failed to add accurate notes were posts spreading lies that “welfare offices in 49 states are handing out voter registration applications to illegal aliens,” the Democratic party is importing voters, most states don’t require ID to vote, and both electronic and mail-in voting are “too risky.”

This is just normal Republican lies. There’s no particular reason to attribute it to foreign influence. In fact:

One false narrative—that Dems import voters—was amplified in a post from Elon Musk that got 51 million views. In the background, proposed notes sought to correct the disinformation by noting that “lawful permanent residents (green card holders)” cannot vote in US elections until they’re granted citizenship after living in the US for five years. But even these seemingly straightforward citations to government resources did not pass muster for users politically motivated to hide the note.

This appears to be a common pattern on X, the CCDH suggested, and Musk is seemingly a multiplier. In July, the CCDH reported that Musk’s misleading posts about the 2024 election in particular were viewed more than a billion times without any notes ever added.

It seems like some of it is nearly-openly lead by the platform owner, with judgements on veracity handed down from him to his fanboys.

The calls are coming from inside the house. You can’t pin everything on foreigners, least of all things where you have no specific information on them being to blame.

“But bots!”

Even setting aside that the article doesn’t attribute even most of what’s happening to bots (hence its title), that’s not an adequate counterclaim. Do you really, really think that among the mountain of Republican think tanks and other organizations, none of them are running a bot farm of even a few dozen accounts, like the 45 cited in the article? Granted, it could be Russia (logically, it probably isn’t China, which Republicans are usually harder on), but there have also been domestic operations, haven’t there?

Here’s an easy example that does not directly “prove” the above case is not foreign interference (again, it’s at an overlap point of the interest of different groups) but demonstrates that it clearly seems that there are domestic bot nets doing numbers and thus that such a possibility needs to be considered for other cases where a Republican bot net might have an interest.

Defensible sentence technically, but I think it’s actually plausible with three hads and the second past perfect makes the sentence unnatural.

We both know the answer in most cases is “None, they can all die”

I don’t know how you do it

Two grey sections are explicitly labeled as kingdoms.

Presumably ownership lapsed and some .world individual noticed and decided to own teh tankiez