The big noticeable effect lasts probably about an hour. But I’d say there’s probably a 10% residual clarity that sticks around and slowly goes away over a day or two.

I think I agree with your sentiment that sex is overrated. I quite enjoy it, but the way it is portrayed in media is usually more extreme than my own feelings and those of men around me.

I remember when I was around 16-18. I started to diet and exercise, was on the tail end of puberty in my physical prime and drenched in hormones. Went to high school and was surrounded by people my own age experiencing the same. Culture and marketing leads to high school girls constantly fighting with the adults and dress codes to wear skimpier, tighter clothing. I had my first girlfriend and we were both excited to start messing around. And there’s a philosophical component- why do we exist? We are a repeating pattern (DNA) that exists not for a reason, but because it can. Life that does not procreate dies, so in a sense procreation is the most life-y thing you can possibly do.

At the same time, I knew better. I was lucky to have sex education and not be in a very religious household. A couple of friends, and my first girlfriend, were victims of sexual assault. I had seen other men succumb to their desires, ruin their own lives, hurt people around them. Not to mention the very real threats of pregnancy and disease. So even while my physiology craved it and my philosophy guided me towards it, my mind pumped the brakes.

The physiology waned as I got older. Or perhaps just distracted with college and work, maintaining an apartment and then a house. My energy was directed elsewhere. My wife and I quickly settled on having sex roughly once a week.

About a year ago though, we created a polycule with another couple. It was really hard for me to keep up at first. I would have to watch my nutrition- make sure I don’t overwat or ear heavy and greasy foods beforehand. Make sure I was working out and physically active in general, but not a full workout right before or else my muscles would be too tired. Mentally, I would have to start purposefully thinking about sex for several hours beforehand to make sure I was in the right headspace and ready to perform. The past 3 months have been suddenly dry due to just calendar issues and some minor medical procedures in the group, so I’ve found myself in this routine of trying to be horny and keep up but suddenly without the payoff of it. I also have a touch of the 'tism and really like predictable routines and long-term planning while the other 3 people are bi-polar or severe ADHD, and they all seem to have little issue with going from cozy to horny almost instantly.

The actual feeling of horniness I think is similar to most other biological functions. Being hungry or thirsty or sleepy, needing to urinate or defecate. I view it similarly, ideally on a roughly 2-4 day cycle. Ejaculation, which leads to a period of post-nut clarity and calmness that slowly fades over a couple days. I’d find it difficult to get hard for a couple hours after, and difficult to cum again for at least 6, more like 24 hours after. By day 4 I noticed I start to get a little bit more irritable, a little bit more stressed out by little things. Longer than that and sexual thoughts start to interrupt my normal thoughts processes. Blue balls is real too. I know some men exaggerate the affect to manipulate women into sex, and some women have started to think blue balls isn’t real, but the reality is that it’s real minor inconvenience that I try to avoid.

The Wolf of Wall Street scene where they talk about masturbating multiple times a day is hyperbole, but not entirely inaccurate. I think there’s a lot of value to a quick, utilitarian jack off for some cheap stress relief and clarity. Having sex with others is fun, but people obsess over it too much in my opinion.

We have 2 cats. One will bully the other off of the wet food, so we have to lock her in the basement to feed the two separately, and let her out after like 20 minutes.

My wife and j have referred to it as “freeing the beast”. As I walk over to the door to open it, hearing her meows from below, I like to give a dramatic monologue. “The time has come to break the seal, to unleash the insatiable hunger our predecessors sealed long ago”. The little things that give life a bit more spice.

Dimensia Donny seems like a nickname that could fit

Oh definitely. The only subscriptions I have are for content, not services, and even those I am slowly working on replacing. I used to see a lot of people complain about their streaming services and decide to set up Plex instead and like… I guess that’s an improvement but still not all that much better. Which is why I used Jellyfin instead when I set mine up.

I didn’t call anything a distraction, and I doubt you throwing out insults or telling me to “fuck off” is going to change anyone’s mind but okay. Your own comments are full of smug jokes that I chuckled without needing to personally attack you over.

Have you actually talked to any of them?

I’ve seen a lot of houses in my city that I noted as having Trump flags have taken them down this summer. My Republican family members, and those of my friends, certainly aren’t sharing that sense of victory you’re claiming to see. They remember that Trump promised to release the files and haven’t. They’re all riled up ready to prosecute Bill Clinton and wondering why Trump has gone soft.

And literally just last week the UK arrested 2 men for projecting a picture of Trump and Epstein together during his visit, which has brought a ton more attention to the story. It’s not going away just because you seem to want it to.

I was agreeing with your argument but you seem to come to the opposite conclusion as me.

These fools already vote against their own interests. They had pensions, union jobs, government funded infrastructure, benefits. They voted to give all of that away and embrace fascism because they were emotionally manipulated to do so. You can give a Truml voter all of the facts you want: climate change, vaccines, immigration, taxes. They aren’t moved by any of that. The people who would be moved by that already know better and never would have supported Trump in the first place. I understand a lot of people here fall into that category, but we must be careful not to fall into an echo chamber and ignore just how dumb and irrational huge swathes of Americans are because that’s how we got into this mess.

If you want to dislodge Trump’s current supporters, you need to attack their emotions. Bombing thousands of Muslim kids in the middle east doesn’t move the needle, but a dozen or so good white Christian girls who had their precious virginity stolen from them? (I don’t mean to belittle the suffering of the victims, just to illustrate that this appeals to mysoginists and Christian nationalists). That gets clicks, that drives outrage.

You’re making a lot of broad assumptions about audiences. And “serious conversation”… My sibling in Satan this is c/politicalmemes.

These memes don’t just stay on Lemmy either. They get reposted all across the internet, printed on stickers and posters and t-shirts. The UK just jailed journalists last week for the terrible crime of projecting a picture of Trump and Epstein together on a building during Trump’s visit. It’s very much a topical issue that is heavily tied to broader issues of free speech and political corruption. And it’s not just about Trump- how many other powerful people are in those files that faced no consequences? This isn’t distracting from other issues- it’s a part of them. All of these other issues seem to always track back to billionaires promoting horrible inhuman behavior and fascism, so I don’t see how the Epstein files are distracting from anything.

I’m also critical of Biden and Garland for not doing more with this when they were in power. This isn’t

I agree with you that the Epstein case is relatively small compared to the millions of people who Trump is causing to suffer. However, the Epstein files also seem to be the first thing that cracked his base of political support. It is a weakness that anyone against Trump should exploit, not because it’s the most important issue, but because it’s the one that is most likely to remove him from power.

Deporting immigrants, locking up trans people, outlawing abortion, destroying free speech and political opposition, supporting genocide… These are all things that his base WANTS. They rejoice in the suffering of the “other”. They care about the economy too, but they’re told dumb to realize that Trump is the problem.

You know that Godwin’s Law waa just some random guy making something up, right? It’s like claiming that the average person eats 7 spiders a year or that the average male thinks about sex once every X seconds.

For a long time I was confused by two seemingly separate pieces of information.

1. The majority of people I seem to interact with seem to act like communications are effortless. “Just pick up the phone”. “It’s just an email”.

2. Most communications I get are terrible. Like, the number of times I need to restrain myself from typing “as I mentioned in the email below” is insane, or how often I send an email with a bulleted list of issues that need to be addressed and the response only addresses a fraction of them while the rest are ignores.

Then I realized that most people are stupid, casual, and oblivious. They put very little effort into communications, so while they seem so easy and effortless they are harming the quality of that communication.

I’d be interested in a link if you have one.

That’s why I qualified my initial comment. Like, I included video of him saying those things but with AI it’s hard to say for sure.

Hard to say for certain in a post-truth world, but allegedly he was calling for the full release of the Epstein files and was softening his support for Israel.

He was still a terrible piece of shit and I’m not sad that he’s dead.

P.S. I hate so much that Twitter is where this shit is stored. I also found references to Kirk saying that October 7th was an inside job, but the linked tweet is gone.

It seems you believe the myths that media wants to tell you about modern courtship. Yes, such shallow people exist. And yes, there are thresholds of hygiene and stability someone should be expected to meet. But a lot of women want to get laid just as bad as men, not for the money or the status but for the sex.

1. My first question about studies like this is always “how do they know this?”. And I while I know I could find the study and dig into the setsils, I don’t have to do that to know that this is the result of surveys taken over this time period. Unless technology develops to grant us a way to monitor and track the sex lives of people objectively and unobtrusively, that’s just the best way can do. So any conclusions drawn really should be “the decline in people’s surveyed frequency of sexual intercourse has gone down over time”. Just to throw out some baseless speculation: could people in the past inflated their answers to appear “cool” or similar? Could there be cultural shifts pressuring respondents to deflate their numbers now? Personally, I’m inclined to believe the results of the study ARE true, but I’m not confident in that.

2. The decline of 3rd spaces, which is a big concept with multiple causes. Car-centric infrastructure, industrialization, women moving to the workforce, capitalism, technology, etc. It has become harder for people to have intimate personal interactions with others who live nearby. I believe the rise of things like social media, dating apps, and now AI companions is less about “hey we developed this new technology to replace and maybe be better than real human interaction” and more about “we need to develop something to replace what we have lost”.

3. Consent. Reductions in arranged marriages and child marriages. Protections and rights for women and children.

4. Economics. Everyone is overworked and tired. I’ve seen this in a lot of the other comments here but I actually don’t buy into this quite as much. There seems to be an inverse relationship between GDP per capita and birth rate, at least recently. Most of Europe, Japan, Australia, the US, Canada, Korea, and perhaps most notably… China. All have experienced declines in birthrates, and in a lot these cases there is good modern data showing the birth rates changing as these economies develop. The countries having the most children are poorer countries.

Now, it could be that these wealthier countries have access to birth control, so this does not necessarily dissolve economics as a factor. But, my own theory is that sex is one of the cheapest forms of entertainment available to humanity (if you don’t factor in the costs of children). So the citizens of these wealthier countries are spending their time and money doing other things. Not just skii vacations or going yachting, but reading books and watching TV.

Churches where I live tend to be built or really nice stone, with interesting architecture. There’s real craftsmanship involved. Beautiful detailed ornamentation. Stained glass. They’re often built at some of the highest points, on top of hills. Some of the old churches have been sold and are used for other things like venues. I kind of wish they built more buildings like that today.

Also it can be an opportunity to experience different cultures. While my city is mostly western Christian churches, the occasional “onion dome” of an eastern Orthodox church, the miniret of a mosque, or the bright yellow of the local temple is interesting.

I’m sure some tourists are there for religious reasons, but for a lot of people on vacation somewhere churches are just interesting buildings.

The image quality is not helping, but I think that’s Turkey, not China.

I’m pretty sure the US is holding hands with Saudi Arabia. Israel could be holding hands with either Bahrain or Qatar, but given the context it’s almost certainly Bahrain. The dogs from left-rjght are France (probably), Turkey (probably), UK, Germany, ???, Italy. With Ukraine in the corner.

My vexillology is failing me on the one dog. The lighter blue plus the small dots that appear to be constellations kind of give me island vibes. It’s almost like if Tuvalu had just a shield with the English colors instead of a full Union Jack (not that Tuvalu’s inclusion makes any sense anyways) in its corner. Doesn’t match NATO or the UN or the EU. Maybe it’s an old flag, or one for some organization I’m not thinking of?

I was interpreting this as a commentary on how these countries are being treated by the US and Israel, not a commentary on how they should be treated. The Trump admin has been treating Ukraine like shit and treating European allies like dogs.

It’s entirely possible that you’re correct and this is supposed to somehow be an anti-Ukraine message, but other than “Ukraine = Shit” I’m not sure how it would tie in with everything else. I’m also not sure why Ukraine is here at all.

If I imagine a Russian trying to cram a Ukraine commentary in here… This seems like a natural spot to repeat the story Russia has been trying to sell that the Ukrainian government is secretly run by Nazis, but the artist chose not to do that.

And there’s no Russian flag. That makes it harder to figure out if this is Russian propaganda or not. Which may be why they aren’t included, or it could just be that the artists didn’t think they were relevant because they’re really trying to show how the US is controlling these other nations to prop up Israel.

Trying to look up J. Michael Springman, the only thing I can find is this guy. I’m not sure if this is the artist or not, and if it is I’m still not sure whether he would be pro-Ukraine or anti-Ukraine.

The whole inclusion of Ukraine is definitely weird. The cartoon would probably be better off without it. I’m just not sure I have enough info from the comic itself to fully conclude the artist’s intention here.

Honestly there were some food points back then. A lot of people simply are not able to wear headphones responsibly. It’s only gotten worse with noise cancelling technology. The ability to ignore the outside world is great when you’re in a safe space to do so, but people doing it out in public or while driving are absolutely mad.

The quotes about “breaking societal connections” or whatever are funny to me though. Because that was happening at the time, but it had far more to do with the erosion of 3rd places and the rise of car-centric infrastructure than it did headphones.