the idea that restrooms, locker rooms, etc need to be single-sex spaces in order for women to be safe is patriarchy's way of signalling to men & boys that society doesn't expect them to behave themselves around women. it is directly antifeminist. it would be antifeminist even if trans people did not exist. a feminist society would demand that women should be safe in all spaces even when there are men there.

btw this is maybe the single most key distinguishing feature of the terfy strains of radical feminism, the seed all the rest of it springs out of: they have absolutely no faith in the ability of feminism to actually destroy patriarchy. they do not think feminism can truly build a better world. they cannot really even imagine that possibility. they think patriarchy is an inevitable natural consequence of unchangeable biological facts, and therefore the goal of feminism can only be to mitigate the worst effects of patriarchy, not to get rid of it.

they can imagine a society where women get some designated safe spaces without men around. they cannot imagine a society where the presence of men is not inherently a danger to women.

“they have absolutely no faith in the ability of feminism to actually destroy patriarchy”

This is exactly it. Exactly.

The high control feminist groups I was in years ago were trans inclusive. We had trans women in them. But everything else? Was exactly like this.

The idea of lesbian separatism is fundamentally that men will never stop being evil, and men will never stop having power. So the only option is to go to spaces where there aren’t any men and do as much healing as you can in whatever short time you have before you interact with men again.

(Trans men, even in inclusive spaces, are Schrodinger’s predator. If they’re men lite they’re safe. If they’re something other than the Coke Zero of masculinity you can never ever stop reminding them to look within themselves for patriarchal patterns of thought and behavior. This is, sadly, usually about whether they pass, because of course it is.)

This was terrifying and mind warping. I honestly do believe I was brainwashed, and I honestly do believe that I shocked normies with what I was saying and doing in the same way that a Scientologist spouting jargon about ARCs does.

Patriarchy is a thing. It’s real and it’s bad. But it’s not vibes or energy or people having kryptonite where their hearts should be.

You can’t and you SHOULDN’T exclude men from your patriarchy dismantling. You need them alongside you, noticing and caring about how you’ve been hurt and devoting themselves to undoing the damage and to trying their best not to perpetuate it but maybe sometimes failing a little.

They have unearned power, but they’re people too. Forgetting they’re people isn’t going to convince them to give up unearned power. It’s gonna make them defensive and guard it instinctively and irrationally because you look like a threat.

Stop it.

“they have absolutely no faith in the ability of feminism to actually destroy patriarchy”

This is a really important distinction. And it goes beyond feminism.

I encounter this perspective about racism, too. I wish I could remember who said this, but there was some quote from an anti-racist activist about how "being a racist is like being an addict, you are always in recovery. We will always be recovering racists," and the "we" in this case was not just people who currently exist but all hypothetical future people.

There's a kind of deep-rooted pessimism in many strains of leftist thought: that the struggle is eternal, that the best we can do is continually deal with the symptoms, that these are not specific problems that can be addressed and fixed but broad, vague Original Sin type evils that we must remain always vigilant against. There is cynicism about any progress that we have made and a reluctance to celebrate any victories as genuine victories. If they speak of a future world where this isn't the case, it's always in an extremely vague and utopian way.

And then they talk about Christianity as if it's utterly evil--and totally unique--for believing in the same thing about women and permanent sin, eternal supplication. That's you're always lesser. That it's built on inequality.

It's not just ex Christians who do this. Look around and you'll find people from all religions. And they'll get so hilariously mad when you point this out and ask them why they're behaving like the fundy priests they claim should be murdered in their beds. If they're lesser, baby, you're below even them because you're doing it willingly and calling it justice.

additional comment from the anon: this mostly applies to things like smut or nsfw art. I see a lot of blogs that are 18+ and I’ve always wondered if people actually listen to "minors dni (do not interact)" or if they just ignore them.

It's important that we continue to mark our adult content as "18+ ONLY MINORS DNI" because otherwise where would the next generation learn to lie on the internet

the tags are good tags

We all lied. I have no idea what the kind of person who goes around posting "I'm a minor, make your blog safer for me" does these days, but back then? We all lied.

We knew we might see something that shocked us--this was the Internet, and the Internet has always been Very Weird.

We lied anyway.

We *wanted* to take risks and see what happened.

I don't know what is going on with the young people who say they want to be protected, so I won't speculate. But us?

That was a part of becoming adults. Making our own decisions, and living with them.

Learning how to cope within ourselves when it wasn't wise to tell the adults around us "So I just did what you told me not to do, and now I need brain bleach," because it would mean confessing "I just did what you told me not to do."

I think the more puritanical strain of teens emerging these days is due, in part, to how inescapable the internet (and everything that goes along with it) now is.

When I was a teenager, the internet was optional. It was still mostly for weirdos and introverts like me. You had to venture out into the internet and see things of your own volition; it felt more like a specific place and less like the air around you.

Now, every kid carries the internet in their pocket, every kid is on Xitter and TikTok and feels like they have to be because that's how all their friends communicate and not being on the major platforms would mean being left out. And there's inevitably a lot of unfiltered content on social media. To them, porn and gore aren't some forbidden thing that they seek out while the adults aren't watching, it's something that they can't get away from without completely disconnecting from these platforms that define their lives and that they're just expected to have.

I don't think puritanism and censorship are the answer, but I kind of understand why that kind of authoritarianism is becoming popular now. It's a symptom of the larger problem of social media becoming the default mode of communication and kids feeling an increasing lack of control over any aspect of their lives. People turn to authoritarianism when they're overwhelmed.

The funny thing about "oh no the Internet" is that... You could always go to a bookstore and buy whatever you wanted. Undisguised terrible porn of all kinds just lying around on the shelves, called "romance". Or get it at a quarter of the price from a used bookstore.

You should buy the good porn, but whatever floats your boat.

No one is stopping you. Most parents are not going to care enough to look into the book their kid is reading.

sorry i know i've complained about this a lot but if there was One thing i wish people on here would grasp wrt roman approaches to mythology. is the centuries and centuries of italian mythic tradition & transmission that existed here. like a lot of these myths were being told & transformed & developed local version before rome even existed. these guys were trading materials & traditions with the greeks since like the bronze age. a person in rome might of have heard a lot of these stories as a kid from their grandmother who heart it from her grandmother, who heard it from hers etc etc. they were living changing myths in italy! with their own variations even! so a roman author, while they DO extensively use greek literature, is nevertheless working off something that is a deeply embedded part of their culture too. to act like these ideas were just transplanted directly from 5th century athens to 1st century rome, and especially as if greece had the oral tradition while rome was purely literary, is silly

more specific to the aeneid but like when i read takes on here sometimes it becomes really apparent that people don't realise that aeneas & the story of aeneas coming to italy has an incredibly long tradition in italy going back for centuries before vergil was even born. like vergil didn't just pick up the iliad one day & make all the rest of that up, we have literary & material sources for this going way back. of course vergil did change things in his telling of it, and he was working within an epic literary tradition in which he works heavily off of homer in style and substance but this is an very old italian story he's developing!

Do you know how much people believed - or didn't believe - in those stories?

I've never been quite sure whether people saw these stories as stories, or as actual history and religion. The storytellers seem to have been very willing to adjust details for narrative reasons, but it also seems clear that (for example) Zeus was meant to be a real literally-existing deity.

My understanding is that it wasn't seen as "religion" today is. It was just normal life, there wasn't really a separation. Like we don't think of natural phenomenon as "separate". Zeus was as real and part of life as the rain.

There were clashing stories because they were seen as real people--the same way we currently have clashing "stories" about current events, clashing rumours about celebrities. So yes, there were people who believed every version, just as today every rumour has a believer, and they all fight with every other group who thinks something different. "Swift did this, not that" kind of thing.

Though I don't think there really were "heretics", because it was more like....different ideas rather than bloodsport? Not that it was hippie everyone gets along, but that it wasn't.....something to murder people over. The gods weren't seen as perfect, like modern monotheistic gods are claimed to be. They were capricious, they were nasty, and you begged them for favor which they could grant or not on their own whim. If they didn't like you they could kill you as they wanted. If they liked you, they could kill you too, because they felt like it, and that was just how things were. Just like powerful humans.

Which didn't stop people from being outraged at offense to the gods, but that's not the same thing as how we think of "heresy" today.

Recently I got two books that had strong recommendations from Bill Gates and like... idk. I like reading all these pop-level nonfiction books but I don't regard it as serious? like it's a form of entertainment. That's why I'm always posting about whatever I'm on about and it's kind of interchangeable whether it's some fantasy series I'm reading or some nonfiction book. So... when i see bill gates saying this is an important book... idk. It makes me think of Scott Alexander. Like, he wrote a review of The Secret of Our Success, and said (correctly) that one of the most interesting claims is the story about manioc. But that story is false in all the essentials, you can determine this just by reading the book's own sources. Like we're not talking about the science being mistaken: the scholarly literature, what I'll call the "serious" sources, has the information, and the book for the general public is just wrong. In my experience this is really common. And the stuff that's straight up wrong is just the tip of the iceberg of the more general stuff you can't understand properly from this level of exposition. Not always because it can't be presented in a way understandable to the general public, but it just isn't, which makes a lot more sense to me after reading that @eightyonekilograms linked 的 post about the publishing industry. I think when I was pointing out a mistake in a book I was reading about dyes someone asked me why don't you write your own pop science book about dyes but with those statistics in hand I'm definitely not going to. So now that I've made this analogy between Bill Gates and Scott Alexander, I'm thinking, what if the world is run by people a lot like Scott Alexander? I mean, that kind of person at best. Smart people with an intellectually demanding job who mostly pick up other subjects through pop level expositions. It's actually kind of a scary thought.

How else could the powerful learn about other subjects?

Even a NEET doesn't have the time / energy to study everything properly. Someone who works a job that would require a thousand hours of work each day to do right definitely doesn't.

study with textbooks like the ones used in college classes

They absolutely do not have the time.

Reading a pop-level nonfiction book doesn't give you as much understanding of a subject as the equivalent number of hours studying a textbook would. It's just more fun. As Robin Hanson says, "never confuse leisure that makes you sweat with work."

I know. Why are you telling me this?

Nobody has ever understood the world, and nobody ever will. The powerful, who influence so many different things, will never have more than a dilettante's grasp of their own impact. That's true when they read pop science, and it would still be true if they read textbook chapters.

You mentioned Scott in the OP. He reads the "good" stuff sometimes, even outside his field. He remains what he is.

I don't see why people can read pop books but can't read a textbook. If you have time to read, then you have time to read. What you read doesn't matter. If you choose to read crap and speak based on that crap, then you're willingly believing crap as if it's real. That's a choice. You can choose to just not do that. It does take more time to do it right, but you can either spew bullshit and lies or delude yourself that you're "smart". It's not a hard choice. People just choose to lie about it. I'm certainly not going around claiming I'm a doctor because I read some bullshit aromatherapy pop books.

You can't read enough textbooks to actually inform yourself fully. A better media diet might make you a relatively well-informed dilettante, but you'll still be a dilettante.

I'm not saying don't do it, but I am saying that it won't let you escape the problem described in the OP.

If you're taking about current events, then no, textbooks can't do that. But if you're talking about everything around that, yes, that's where the correct information is. Otherwise we may as well call homeopathy "expertise" because it's in lots of published books and you sure can read them.

There's no way to know what's consensus in the field vs what's one fringe crank's crap opinion by reading "books". Saying "nobody can do that" just proves anyone claiming to "know" doesn't work. Watching "media" doesn't change the problem, because there's no way to know if any given "documentary" is bullshit.

Recently I got two books that had strong recommendations from Bill Gates and like... idk. I like reading all these pop-level nonfiction books but I don't regard it as serious? like it's a form of entertainment. That's why I'm always posting about whatever I'm on about and it's kind of interchangeable whether it's some fantasy series I'm reading or some nonfiction book. So... when i see bill gates saying this is an important book... idk. It makes me think of Scott Alexander. Like, he wrote a review of The Secret of Our Success, and said (correctly) that one of the most interesting claims is the story about manioc. But that story is false in all the essentials, you can determine this just by reading the book's own sources. Like we're not talking about the science being mistaken: the scholarly literature, what I'll call the "serious" sources, has the information, and the book for the general public is just wrong. In my experience this is really common. And the stuff that's straight up wrong is just the tip of the iceberg of the more general stuff you can't understand properly from this level of exposition. Not always because it can't be presented in a way understandable to the general public, but it just isn't, which makes a lot more sense to me after reading that @eightyonekilograms linked 的 post about the publishing industry. I think when I was pointing out a mistake in a book I was reading about dyes someone asked me why don't you write your own pop science book about dyes but with those statistics in hand I'm definitely not going to. So now that I've made this analogy between Bill Gates and Scott Alexander, I'm thinking, what if the world is run by people a lot like Scott Alexander? I mean, that kind of person at best. Smart people with an intellectually demanding job who mostly pick up other subjects through pop level expositions. It's actually kind of a scary thought.

How else could the powerful learn about other subjects?

Even a NEET doesn't have the time / energy to study everything properly. Someone who works a job that would require a thousand hours of work each day to do right definitely doesn't.

study with textbooks like the ones used in college classes

They absolutely do not have the time.

Reading a pop-level nonfiction book doesn't give you as much understanding of a subject as the equivalent number of hours studying a textbook would. It's just more fun. As Robin Hanson says, "never confuse leisure that makes you sweat with work."

I know. Why are you telling me this?

Nobody has ever understood the world, and nobody ever will. The powerful, who influence so many different things, will never have more than a dilettante's grasp of their own impact. That's true when they read pop science, and it would still be true if they read textbook chapters.

You mentioned Scott in the OP. He reads the "good" stuff sometimes, even outside his field. He remains what he is.

I don't see why people can read pop books but can't read a textbook. If you have time to read, then you have time to read. What you read doesn't matter. If you choose to read crap and speak based on that crap, then you're willingly believing crap as if it's real. That's a choice. You can choose to just not do that. It does take more time to do it right, but you can either spew bullshit and lies or delude yourself that you're "smart". It's not a hard choice. People just choose to lie about it. I'm certainly not going around claiming I'm a doctor because I read some bullshit aromatherapy pop books.

So here's a question: what does it mean to say that so-and-so is a wonderful person when sober, but that alcohol makes them a monster?

(This question is inspired by having just finished the Netflix series Maid, where it's basically the crux of the Sean character. Soon I might be posting a review of Maid, which I found engaging but deeply flawed in the character-writing.)

Speaking as someone who at one point in my life knew tons of people both in sober states and drunk states, I've come to a pretty clear conclusion since long ago that not only is one's drunk self not a separately compartmentalized person from one's sober self, but actually what comes out of someone when they're drunk (and thus less inhibited) is if anything a truer reflection of the kind of person they really are. Lovely people I've known become lovelier when drunk; douchey people I've known become downright a-holes when drunk. I know I'm no more capable of doing something horrible to someone when drunk than when sober. I guess I can't think of anyone I've known who seems genuinely lovely when sober but horrible when drunk (the closest I've seen is that some people's tempers are shorter when drunk, which I consider a different phenomenon), but I think if I did encounter someone like that in my life, I'd be able to connect their drunk behavior and personality with at least something subtly detectable in them when they're sober, just hidden under layers of conscious beliefs and care.

I've assumed that this is true of most other milder substances (there are some, which are highly addictive and euphoria-inducing, that make people into utility monsters and thus might turn a good person into an effectively evil one, but that's a different thing).

Now it's occurring to me I could be wrong. Maybe there are certain substances for certain people that act as a magical chemical trigger in the brain to drastically change whatever governs their fundamental morality. Maybe there's a particular combination of chemicals specially attuned to turning Liskantope into a terrible person while he's affected by them, and it just doesn't happen to be alcohol. But for some people, that chemical could be alcohol, which for them acts not only as a disinhibitor but by temporarily reconfiguring something more mysterious in their brains. I don't know. Until I see evidence of that, I'm going to continue judging people who are abusive and terrible while on the bottle as (at least in part) bad people.

i think someone who has a bunch of impulses to hurt people but controls these because they believe in doing the right thing should be judged inclusive of their selfcontrol

I have never been drunk partly because I have very different intellectual and instinctive feelings about violence.

(It is helpful that I don't like the taste of alcohol.)

Also, I see the OP take as somewhat analogous to the "real self is the one in agony on the deathbed" argument between I forget which theist and Hitchens, where I am entirely on Hitchens' side in calling bullshit.

Alcohol is a depressant. It's not a party drug despite people treating it like that. The social belief around it, though, is that it gives you an excuse to do whatever you want to do. You can get away with anything, "because you were drunk". That's why people act shitty. You can't separate that from the actual drug. It's not a truth serum, otherwise you would have to conclude that all math people are cheating and faking their expertise because they can't do it when drunk.

If you tell people that they won't get in trouble and that anything they do is fine, you've essentially taken away all moral restraints. That's not a reflection of "who someone really is", that's them being told they're gods and nothing matters. That's how it's always been with alcohol. That's literally how people treat their own modern gods: nothing they do is wrong, no matter what they do.

I've heard something along the lines of this idea claimed before (with even more confidence than I'm hearing from you): that alcohol is a depressant which impairs motor control and some other things but that it's a complete cultural myth that alcohol is a disinhibitor, that this myth has just been socially passed down for millennia and is therefore a social construct but "real" in the sense that drunk people often believe they're on a substance that has removed their inhibitions and so treat it as an excuse to act without inhibition.

I would really like to see the scientific evidence behind this, because, while I've occasionally known (younger, less mature) people who do the "pretending to be idiotically drunk" thing, from my own experience with (even at the level of modest amounts of) alcohol, a direct, raw effect of weakening inhibitions is absolutely a real thing, and that a majority of people who've used and been around alcohol would say the exact same thing. (Although, I suppose one will argue that the social conditioning has just done an extremely good job on me and those other people.)

It is definitely a disinhibiter. I just think that the way it's treated like an "upper", with people running around crazy, that's the myth. Nobody should be getting energy from it. It's a depressant, you should be zonked out like weed does. Instead people treat it like I said: permission to be cunts, permission to do everything they're too afraid to do, to do literally anything. Alcohol doesn't do that. It's not PCP. It's not meth. It's weed. You don't have ragers. People who drink at home alone don't go setting things on fire screaming running up and down the street, they're sad sacks who sit and watch TV for hours.

It does disconnect you higher thinking ability and motor skills, but it's not meth. It's not MDMA. Running on instinct dots not turn literally everyone into party animals who want to rape and destroy things, that's the social myth. That's completely fake and that's the social perception of "I can do whatever I want because I had a drink". We don't treat meth and PCP like that. Imagine, "ohhh I did drugs so you can't tell me I can't rape you, it's your fault if I get mad at you when I'm on meth and beat you to death, don't you know it's your wifely duty to do whatever I demand?"

So here's a question: what does it mean to say that so-and-so is a wonderful person when sober, but that alcohol makes them a monster?

(This question is inspired by having just finished the Netflix series Maid, where it's basically the crux of the Sean character. Soon I might be posting a review of Maid, which I found engaging but deeply flawed in the character-writing.)

Speaking as someone who at one point in my life knew tons of people both in sober states and drunk states, I've come to a pretty clear conclusion since long ago that not only is one's drunk self not a separately compartmentalized person from one's sober self, but actually what comes out of someone when they're drunk (and thus less inhibited) is if anything a truer reflection of the kind of person they really are. Lovely people I've known become lovelier when drunk; douchey people I've known become downright a-holes when drunk. I know I'm no more capable of doing something horrible to someone when drunk than when sober. I guess I can't think of anyone I've known who seems genuinely lovely when sober but horrible when drunk (the closest I've seen is that some people's tempers are shorter when drunk, which I consider a different phenomenon), but I think if I did encounter someone like that in my life, I'd be able to connect their drunk behavior and personality with at least something subtly detectable in them when they're sober, just hidden under layers of conscious beliefs and care.

I've assumed that this is true of most other milder substances (there are some, which are highly addictive and euphoria-inducing, that make people into utility monsters and thus might turn a good person into an effectively evil one, but that's a different thing).

Now it's occurring to me I could be wrong. Maybe there are certain substances for certain people that act as a magical chemical trigger in the brain to drastically change whatever governs their fundamental morality. Maybe there's a particular combination of chemicals specially attuned to turning Liskantope into a terrible person while he's affected by them, and it just doesn't happen to be alcohol. But for some people, that chemical could be alcohol, which for them acts not only as a disinhibitor but by temporarily reconfiguring something more mysterious in their brains. I don't know. Until I see evidence of that, I'm going to continue judging people who are abusive and terrible while on the bottle as (at least in part) bad people.

i think someone who has a bunch of impulses to hurt people but controls these because they believe in doing the right thing should be judged inclusive of their selfcontrol

I have never been drunk partly because I have very different intellectual and instinctive feelings about violence.

(It is helpful that I don't like the taste of alcohol.)

Also, I see the OP take as somewhat analogous to the "real self is the one in agony on the deathbed" argument between I forget which theist and Hitchens, where I am entirely on Hitchens' side in calling bullshit.

Alcohol is a depressant. It's not a party drug despite people treating it like that. The social belief around it, though, is that it gives you an excuse to do whatever you want to do. You can get away with anything, "because you were drunk". That's why people act shitty. You can't separate that from the actual drug. It's not a truth serum, otherwise you would have to conclude that all math people are cheating and faking their expertise because they can't do it when drunk.

If you tell people that they won't get in trouble and that anything they do is fine, you've essentially taken away all moral restraints. That's not a reflection of "who someone really is", that's them being told they're gods and nothing matters. That's how it's always been with alcohol. That's literally how people treat their own modern gods: nothing they do is wrong, no matter what they do.

Well this is fucking heinous.

Other findings from the poll include 46% of Republicans (and 30% of Democrats) want to end birthright citizenship; two-thirds of Americans say illegal immigration is a "serious crisis" that isn't just being blown out of proportion; and more than half believe illegal immigration is responsible for an increase in violent crime.

Hello!

This obviously sucks but I wanna add a touch of nuance that these results may not be entirely reliable.

There's been recent discussion about the dangers of online opt-in polling. Essentially, when you run an online poll and you pay people to take it, you end up with some distorted results, especially for younger respondents and (at least in the US) Latino respondents. People in these groups are more likely to say "yes" to outlandish (and especially extreme) things. Theoretically, this is due to the fact that many surveys have a hard time getting enough respondents in those demographics, so you can make more money responding to these paid polls if you're young or Latino (or pretending to be). So you have some people who are only pretending to belong to those groups, and you have some people who really do belong to those groups, but are taking a million of these polls to earn some cash. That means that they're going really quickly through the questions (which often means clicking 'yes' automatically, no matter what the question is) and they may be really bored of these questions, which makes them more likely to click fringe answers just because it's fun.

I don't know if this is explicitly an online opt-in poll because neither Axios nor the Harris Poll will admit it, but it's definitely online. They say it's a nationally representative sample-- but what that means is just that they think they got enough young people and Latinos, and that they are probably weighting the answers of the young and Latino respondents more heavily. It looks like maybe the Harris Poll is done through an online panel, which can be more reliable but only if you're monitoring the behavior of your panelists and weeding out the ones who are clearly cheating. The Harris Poll suggests that their panel is huge ("multimillion"), which suggests they aren't doing a lot of due diligence, and also the fact that they're a for-profit polling service that does market research as well means that they have a vested interest in keeping their panel large so they can run a lot of surveys really quickly. Meaning, again, they probably aren't doing much to filter out bogus panelists.

It was a similar poll that lead to headlines a few months ago that 1 in 5 young adults in the US don't believe in the Holocaust. Pew Research replicated that survey using their own (well-vetted) panel, and found it was completely bogus. (For fun, they also ran an experiment where they asked respondents in an online opt-in poll if they were licensed to operate a nuclear submarine, something which is true for less than 0.1% of the population. They got 12% of people under 29 saying yes. So, uh, don't trust online opt-in polls.)

The current chairman of the Harris Poll is Mark Penn, which is a huge red flag all on its own.

I used to do research and we would get bogus results a lot. Nothing you could do about it. Lots of people would write in the "funny numbers" because they were being paid to do the thing and they didn't care to actually put effort in.

That's not even.. what's going on (re the last tweet). People with ocd aren't contemplating sexually abusing kids, they're afraid they might sexually harm a child by mistake, or be a pedophile without realising, or any number of similar anxieties, but the point is that it becomes an anxious fixation because the person finds it so repellant. It's such an incredibly common ocd symptom, but most people are understandably terrified to talk about it

I remember reading a study where a therapist was helping people with similar anxieties - though not involving children - work through them. One client said she was afraid she was going to murder the therapist, not that she wanted to but that she'd somehow lose control of herself or an accident would happen. The solution? The therapist brought a kitchen knife to an appointment (with the patients consent), handed it to her and basically said "okay, what now?" Turns out nothing now, nothing happened, and it helped the client deal with the phobia

Obviously that approach isn't workable with something like pedophilia/csa anxiety but I think it highlights the true nature of what the anxiety actually is. It's irrational anxiety that comes from a deep fear and disgust of csa, not a desire to perpetrate it

OCD-haver: “I have ridiculous irrational fear disease, it causes me to have ridiculous irrational fears”

Enlightened normal-brainer: “that is ridiculous and irrational, clearly you’re worried because it’s secretly true”

OCD-Haver: [tired stare at camera]

Ya know. This makes it really obvious where this kind of thing comes from.

"the only reason you think about it is because you already did it or you want to do it"

And that's where hell comes in. You're only worried and have fear and anxiety and you're only sorry and want to do better because you're secretly the worst person to walk the earth, and god knows it. That's why you're a wretch, that's why you deserve hell that's why you don't deserve forgiveness, that's why you deserve eternal torture, etc etc

It's built out of the ancient belief that anything foul you think about someone else is automatically true because they can't refute it. And because in order to make you shut the fuck up, they have to attack you, because you lack all basic civility and you're incapable of simple respect for other people, which everyone else thinks is normal behavior because saying foul things about other people is called entertainment. When your victim attacks you, that's taken not as justified measure due to your foul behavior and threats against them, but as proof of your lies. Which is insane.

That's fundamentalism. Not just Christianity, but every religion can do this. Authoritarianism is practiced by every political belief, it's a tool, not a side. It's a feature of small mindedness and hate.

So i am kind of addicted to diet soda, flavored/fizzy water, diet sports drinks etc (American needs large beverage etc). The regular ones are too sweet for me but i know even the diet shit contributes to weight gain. So, if i were to say cut my consumption of those down to 2/3 or half of what i drink now (replaced with water, oj, lemonade, etc), would that hopefully get rid of some belly fat? Is 'hard fat' from drinking carbonated beverages really a thing or is it just pop-nutrition woo?

I drink a fair amount of Diet Sprite and Sparkling Ice Black Cherry, and I'm dubious that it makes you fat, at least if you otherwise have healthy habits.

There's no such thing as being able to target where fat comes off. The association with diet drinks and weight gain is, as far as I know, an association and not a direct cause. It's thought to be because people believe that if they use "diet", then that means they get to pig out on things like cookies. That's not how it works, because calories are calories. Essentially people believe in vibes based eating and don't actually do the work, which is how you get "diet soda makes you fat". Literally anything can make you fat if you eat too much of it or treat it like permission to not care about anything else. "I exercised so now I can have cake" sure only if your goal is fitness and not weight.

No, the theory is that artificial sweeteners end up increasing appetite by sending the body confusing signals. I just don't think the effect is big enough to matter if you're otherwise trying.

Ah. Well I kind of think you'd notice that reaction? Maybe it happens to some people, or maybe there's a combo of factors that create it. But like you say, if you're not eating when bored or other bad habits then it shouldn't be an issue.

Being massively overweight and eating junk regularly can make you feel hungry. I don't know how it works but from experience it's something like your body gets used to having all that sugar, and it's the "sugar crash" that makes you feel fake hunger. Do you want to eat even when you don't really need it. It's an urge, like how lots of people describe sugar addiction.