WoodScientist
@WoodScientist@lemmy.world
- Comment on Republicans warn PM of 'punitive measures' over Palestinian recognition 4 hours ago:
There’s a reason the United States historically has not tried to bully every other nation simultaneously. Bully a few choice other nations? Sure, you can get away with that. Try to bully everyone else at once? That’s a different matter.
I think of it like kids on a playground. Schoolyard bullies tend to pick just a handful of targets to direct their ire against. If they tried to bully everyone, they would quickly find themselves completely alone and isolated. Bully everyone and you immediately drop to the bottom of the social totem pole. Bully a few and most will just want to be left out of it, and a few will join in. Bullying is something that only works on a small scale.
What is true for children is true for nations. Tariff a few particularly vile adversaries? You can sway global trade around entire countries. If nations have to choose between trading with a pariah state like North Korea or with the United States, they’re going to pick the United States. Try to tariff the majority of the world’s population or economic productivity? Suddenly you’re not punishing a few bad actors, you’re simply disconnecting the United States from the global trade system. You’re cutting your nation off from the vast majority of the productive, creative, and innovative capacity of the planet. In a rapidly advancing world, that is the last thing any sane nation wants to do. Yet, we plod on regardless…
- Comment on Know your place 6 days ago:
And yet we are the only conscious beings on any of these heavenly bodies that are aware enough to give their existence any meaning at all.
- Comment on Anon asks out a friend 1 week ago:
The toxicity is the weird incel framing around the whole thing. It leans heavily into incel tropes about how women sleep around with physically attractive asshole men when younger and then look for a more stable “nice guy” men when older. The trope is that women will reproduce with asshole gym bro types and then seek relationships with nerds to obtain resources to raise the children they’ve given birth to. It’s the classic cuckhold meme.
The “backup option” part is the toxic thing. It frames women as farm animals looking for a mate, rather than actual complex human beings with different desires and changing personalities through their whole lives. Aka, just like men. People change, and they want different things at different points in their life.
It’s not that the woman in the story fucked a bunch of guys and then, as a last resort, settled for OP. I mean, just think of how absurd that idea is. It is literally not possible to run out of people to sleep with. They don’t think OP is beneath them and have always felt that way, only settling for them now. Why would she need to? There’s no shortage of other men out there if she thinks OP is beneath her.
Rather, people just want different things at different points in their lives. OP didn’t tick that box years earlier, but now maybe he does. She wasn’t attracted to him then, but she is now. The heart just works that way sometimes. There’s no need to add a bunch of incel bullshit to what is easily explainable as the complexities of human emotion.
The reason this is so toxic is that it’s applying this weird bizarre manipulative behavior to the woman in the story - aka parroting incel themes. It accuses her of this deliberate years-long plot, working through a long list of men she finds superior until finally settling for OP. This isn’t how human beings actually behave. Instead, she just happened to not be attracted to OP before, but happens to be now. You don’t need to go into it any deeper than that. People are complex and their hearts change.
This “backup option” framing is just really toxic and creepy.
- Comment on Anon asks out a friend 1 week ago:
This is some really disgusting co-option of LGBT identities to justify incel logic. Being gay is an intrinsic thing about someone. Judging someone for their number of past partners isn’t. One is innate, the other is cultural. You can instantly tell if you have an attraction to someone just by looking at them. A gay man looking at another man will instantly feel attraction if he’s his type. But number of partners? That’s something you can only learn by talking to someone. And there’s nothing innate about a person with more partners that makes them physically less attractive. Unless they have an STD, their body isn’t changed in any way.
People aren’t born with judgmental incel beliefs about the number of sexual partners other people have. Those are cultural practices, not innate aspects of a person’s physical being, like being gay or trans is. We have no evidence of such judgments existing among wild animals, while we have numerous examples of same-sex attraction in nature.
- Comment on Anon asks out a friend 1 week ago:
We should pass a law making it legal that whenever someone deflects an argument with a non-sequitur appeal to “free speech” that they be hauled up on top of a giant pyramid and have their beating heart ripped out with an obsidian knife, their life a sacrifice to the great Sun god.
If you have any objections to my batshit insane proposal, you hate free speech and are a traitor to America… and Huītzilōpōchtli.
- Comment on Posting for the "Now guys he was MURDERED! Don't celebrate!" Crowd 1 week ago:
Why were they kangaroo courts? They were established by an International Charter.. You can point out that the Nazi’s crimes weren’t illegal under German law, but who cares? Multiple jurisdictions can exist simultaneously. Sure there’s an element of ex post facto in making crimes against humanity a legal charge after the fact, but the ex post facto protections are something we democratically agreed to adopt. And maybe we can just agree to not let genocide be subject to ex post facto protections under international treaty. Yes, this was all just made up by people, but ultimately all laws and legal systems were first dreamed up by people doing a lot of improvisation.
- Comment on Too soon? 1 week ago:
Seriously. The idea that they’re just words and they have no meaning is historically ignorant. We executed Nazi propagandists, even if they never killed anyone with their own hands. Inciting others to genocide is still a crime against humanity.
Kirk was openly calling for the extermination of a group of people that represents the same portion of the US population as the Jews did in Germany prior to WW2. It is not all hyperbole to place Kirk’s death in its proper historical context. We literally executed people for doing what Kirk made his whole career doing.
- Comment on Posting for the "Now guys he was MURDERED! Don't celebrate!" Crowd 1 week ago:
Sure. Even if the raw numbers said that say, trans people are 1% of the population, and 1.5% of shooters, that would still be a meaningless figure. The sample size is too low to make any meaningful conclusion.
But the point is even if you don’t apply statistics, even using the sample we have, trans people are vastly under-represented among shooters. We represent about 1% of the population and 0.1% of shooters. You don’t even need to apply statistics. The numbers on their face show that there is zero evidence that trans people are over-represented.
Now, statistically, I would say that there is insufficient evidence to suggest that the rate of trans shooters is any different from the overall population, higher or lower. But there is less than zero evidence that trans people are over-represented.
The trans shooter myth is simply blood libel.
- Comment on Posting for the "Now guys he was MURDERED! Don't celebrate!" Crowd 1 week ago:
It was more anti-trans hate mongering. 2 or 3 trans shooters out of 5700 is nothing. If you can whittle down the number of “mass shootings” to just a handful of incidents, can make it seem like trans people are vastly over-represented among school shooters.
- Comment on Posting for the "Now guys he was MURDERED! Don't celebrate!" Crowd 1 week ago:
He was engaging in hate-mongering right until the end. Just like the Nazi propagandists of the WW2 era, he was spreading a message of a demonized minority group being responsible for countless crimes and social ills. He ran literally the exact same playbook against trans people as the Nazis did against Jews.
I have no more sympathy for him than the Nazi propagandists we hanged at Nuremberg. They’re guilty of the exact same crimes against humanity.
- Comment on Posting for the "Now guys he was MURDERED! Don't celebrate!" Crowd 1 week ago:
At the end of the day he is a human being, that’s why.
Julius Streicher was also a human being. He was hanged at Nuremberg for the same kind of hate-mongering that Kirk made his whole career doing. Kirk was guilty of crimes against humanity.
- Comment on Posting for the "Now guys he was MURDERED! Don't celebrate!" Crowd 1 week ago:
Neither did the children and families of Kirk’s numerous victims.
- Comment on Too soon? 1 week ago:
You’re right. He wasn’t Hitler. He was Julius Streicher.
Charlie Kirk’s life ended on September 10, 2025 shot in the neck by an assassin’s bullet.
Julius Streicher met his end on October 16, 1946, hanged from the neck in Nuremberg Prison.
- Comment on Posting for the "Now guys he was MURDERED! Don't celebrate!" Crowd 1 week ago:
Exactly. I’ve been saying this all day, but we literally hanged people at Nuremberg for doing exactly what Kirk made his whole career doing. Kirk was guilty of incitement to genocide.
- Comment on Too soon? 1 week ago:
No, he actually, absolutely, objectively did deserve to die. Maybe not by vigilante justice, but he absolutely deserved to be in the ground. The world is a better place without him in it.
Have you forgotten your history? We hanged people at Nuremberg for doing exactly what Kirk made his whole career doing. We hanged people at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity who did what Kirk did. We hanged Nazi propagandists who spent years inciting hate against the Jewish population. Kirk was absolutely guilty of incitement to genocide. He was responsible for countless deaths. He made his whole career trying to incite violence and hate against innocent people.
In a just world he would hang for his crimes. But we don’t live in a just world. The closest we get to justice is vigilante justice.
- Comment on Anon doesn't like AI 1 week ago:
The top 10% of the income ladder are already responsible for the majority of all consumer spending in the US. That concentration can simply continue as long as the consumption of the wealthy continues to grow along with wealth concentration.
We’re going to turn the world into Solaria. A handful of rich people living on vast robot-run estates selling goods and services to the wealthy owners of other estates.
- Comment on Reddit lost it 1 week ago:
Dangerous and addictive technologies and substances are always regulated. There’s a reason we don’t let ten year olds buy vodka.
- Comment on It's Wednesday! 2 weeks ago:
Happy Day of Odin to all of you!
- Comment on UK’s last local currency axed due to rise of digital and card payments 2 weeks ago:
I wonder if crypto coins could serve a similar role here. Except instead of mining, just create the tokens and start the currency by giving every resident an equal share.
- Comment on Leave it to a Bezos-owned company to confuse customers and mislead them for profit. 2 weeks ago:
Write them a physical letter complaining about their website and mail it to them via international mail. That should get the point across nicely.
- Comment on That's an impressive drop. Any ideas why? 2 weeks ago:
Many animals breed less in captivity. Many do not breed at all. The less people feel a sense of control over their own lives, the weaker the desire to procreate becomes. Even if people use birth control, sex drive is still ultimately a reproductive urge. If you’re a farmer in the 19th century ? You have a great deal of freedom and independence. Mid 20th century American worker? Homes are cheap. Jobs are abundant. Labor rights are strong. You have lots of options on how to earn a living. You have a clear path to getting a home and raising a family on your own terms. Present-day 20 something? You don’t just have roommates in an apartment; you’re actually sharing bedrooms. Or you’re stuck living under your parents’ roof forever, your only hope of home ownership being them passing it on to you. All the jobs available to you don’t come close to providing any kind of independent living, let alone the wages to actually buy a home, start a family, etc. You’re just going to have to run on the wage slave treadmill til you die.
The economy has developed to squeeze ever more out of workers and consumers. We’re psychologically manipulated at every turn. Every business feels like a scam trying to pull one over on you. You can’t even sign up for a gym membership without risking getting caught in dark business practices (their infamous cancellation policies.) People feel and are trapped in a system that they have little to no control over. Politicians only listen to the wealthy. Unions provided some voice to the voiceless for some time, but those have been gutted. People feel like cornered animals. They feel as though the entire system is just on elaborate exercise in thinly veiled slavery meant to extract every last once of the work product of your entire life from you. The wealthy pay you a pittance for your labor and then take all that pittance back in usurious rents. People feel trapped.
Lots of animals refuse to reproduce in captivity. Lots of animals reduce their birth rates under captivity. Why should humans be any different? Why should we be any different than the mice of Universe 25?
- Comment on That's an impressive drop. Any ideas why? 2 weeks ago:
My husband and I met on OKCupid, definitely not a traditional third space. But we met back in 2014, back when the site was still good. It’s algorithm was actually really good back then if you put the effort into actually filling out the quizzes and surveys. But as time has gone on, it seems they have really enshittified. Instead of helping people finding meaningful relationships, they just try to keep people subscribed for as long as possible. And my husband and I met on OKCupid without ever subscribing for anything; we never gave them a dime.
- Comment on He took it literally 2 weeks ago:
IDK. On the one hand, the dude is likely a psychopath. On the other, if you actually are trying to exercise your right to remain silent, then you pretty much have to look like a complete psychopath during an interrogation. If the cops accuse you of a horrible crime, the natural response is to get emotional and start vehemently defending yourself. Their whole interrogation strategy is to get you worked up, to break down your defenses, and get you to admit or provide evidence to a crime you may or may not have committed. Police interrogators are masters of emotional manipulation.
The only way I can see to get through that is to adopt a grey rock strategy. Just realize that they’re trying to get to you. Disconnect the emotional parts of your brain. Let the words of the cops pass over you unperturbed and simply remain calm, disinterested, and dispassionate. Adopt a soul of ice and refuse to engage with them at all emotionally. This guy made the mistake of talking to them at all. He should have remained dispassionate but also just refused to answer in any form.
I just can’t think of a way to truly remain silent without making yourself look like a psychopath. The natural response by an innocent person to being accused of dismembering someone would be rage, fear, and desperate indignation. But doing so could incriminate them. But if an innocent person is remaining silent, they would by necessity just have to sit there completely uncaring when accused of the most horrible crimes. There’s just no way to exercise your rights without seeming completely insane. And cops use that fact to extract evidence from people.
- Comment on Youngest actor ever 2 weeks ago:
It’s still being produced. They’ve made over 13,000 episodes of it.
- Comment on What is "human husbandry" called 3 weeks ago:
Capitalism.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
He’s going to end up running a consultancy where he charges absurd sums to give talks to corporate leaders on how to prevent this sort of attack. 😁
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
The difference is, the rich and powerful do their crimes with lawyers. A contractor could actually write something into their contract that allowed them to install such a kill switch. And it would be perfectly legal. No different than if you stop paying for a software license and the program stops working. But regular employees don’t have the leverage to demand such a kill switch. Maybe more programmers should form unions. Write it into the contract that if the contract ever expires before a new one is signed, the union has the right to remotely activate a kill switch, shutting down crucial operations within the company. As long as this was all disclosed and signed to, it would be perfectly legal.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
Is it even possible to do this in a way that can’t be tracked back to you? Unless you’re a Hollywood hacker that will rig something up to literally burn down the building the server the malicious code is contained on, there will always be some fingerprints left behind in the software. And there will almost always be a relatively short list of possible suspects. Even at large companies, there won’t ever be more than a handful of people with the skills, motive, and access needed to pull something like this off. Oh, the company’s entire database suddenly and mysteriously deleted itself? I wonder who caused that, maybe the disgruntled sysadmin we just fired? There really aren’t that many suspects in situations like this. And once you’re a suspect, they can get a warrant, seize all your computers, and scour them to dig up even more evidence against you. Hell, even just documentation of ill will against your old employer would be evidence in court. You better hope you really left no trace, otherwise you will be found out very quickly.
- Comment on Evolution: 🖕 3 weeks ago:
I’m not in that community myself, but from what I hear a high quality for suit can cost $10-20k. Not sure what differences in construction may exist between those and what you made. But some artists definitely make decent livings making them.
- Comment on Evolution: 🖕 3 weeks ago:
I’m just imagining the scene in a sci fi comedy.
“I thought you said we were getting mechanical tails? Why the Hell is this attached to my front?”
“Experiments determined that this was actually the more effective and cheaper option. Don’t worry, a front tail works just fine for balance!”