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.

I see two possible explanations:

1. Class warfare. The same people banning porn are the ones banning abortion, banning homosexuality, banning gender transitions (although they never seem to ban the same therapies for cis people), banning sex education, banning contraception. All of these attacks on individual sexuality are to try to push people into unprotected heterosexual sex. At the same time, these same political groups have been attacking both parental support systems and child labor laws. They want parents too desperate to rebel. They want children working. They want a larger supply of labor: more supply means more competition amongst workers for wages, which means the labor is cheaper.

2. Power. Maybe these payments processors don’t actually care about pornographic games. But attacking pornography in the name of “defending women and children” is easy to sell to the public and sets a precedent for these payment processors violating neutrality. So eventually they will move to banning games that are too violent (well, they’ve already been trying for decades). Then it’ll be games that are too “extreme” or promote “terrorism”. If these payment processors don’t see any consequences soon, I expect in the next 5 years they will try to take down any games that are anti-Zionist. Maybe games that are pro-Ukraine. In 10 years it could be any sort of left-leaning game. Disco Elysium for promoting communism. Horizon for depicting climate change. Stardew Valley for allowing same-sex relationships and being anti-corporate.

Notice that these discussions never seem to apply to copaganda. It’s perfectly fine to be violent and bloody as long as that violence is authorized by the state. The US Military offices have a well-documented relationship with Activision for Call of Duty, so you aren’t going to see any of these groups call for CoD to be banned.

Men, particularly the vast majority of working class men, are victims of the patriarchy even at the same time they receive privileges. There’s an unfortunate sentiment among the woke that people who happen to be part of a privileged group are bad. White people are colonizers, straight people are toxic, men are all violent sexual predators, etc. For a lot of people, it’s much easier to be woke and fight for an equal and just world when the victims of that oppression are obvious.

If this exact same comic was made by JK Rowling and replaced “men” with “trans women” or “trans men” the comments section would be (rightfully) shooting it down as being bigoted.

All that aside, from a practical standpoint it’s also worth pointing out that any sexual assault expert will tell you the vast majority happen between people who already know each other. A victim is more likely to be abused by their own family members, family friends, teachers, religious figures, youth leaders, coworkers, or significant other than they are a random stranger. Of course, it’s always dangerous to meet strangers (robbery, fraud, and more).

Which is important to point out because it’s a very quick jump from “women don’t feel safe because of all of these men around” to “well let’s get rid of the most violent men”. Which, oddly enough, tend to also be a part of whatever group they are trying to eliminate. Jews in pre-WW2 Germany, black men in America, communists in McCarthyism, Hispanics under Trump, Syrian refugees in Europe. It always starts with “this group wants to hurt our women and children” and ends with everyone losing rights to authoritarian regimes.

I mean, I can’t speak for everyone of course but a couple of the local farms near me are open to the public as kind of a tourist-y attraction. They have petting zoos and hay rides in the fall and sell a lot of their own products (honey and honeycomb, produce of course, baked goods, apple cider, etc). And everyone is welcome to see the animals grazing on real green plants, in open fields.

With other farms I can talk to their employees at the local market, I can find news articles about them, or I can even drive by and look then up myself.

Are they perfect? Of course not. But… What are you asking people to do? Should we all just give up and go to the local Wal-Mart for all our produce? Or are you naive enough to think everyone should be growing their own Victory gardens?

All the good phones are dying. I still quite enjoy my 1 IV, and honestly the Xperia line would probably be my choice in a couple years when I am ready to upgrade if they are selling them in the US at that point.

I’m hoping Fairphone gets US support at some point because they seem like the best option.

It really feels like design peaked a decade ago. Headphone jacks, micro SD card slot, removable batteries, front-facing speakers. Everything good has been removed and the phones are 5x more expensive. The few phones left with some of those features are the cheap weak models for people who only use their phones to call and text.

https://fedia.io/m/[email protected]/t/2531490/-/comment/11832636

You might be living in an echo chamber. Most Americans use AI at least sometimes and plenty use it regularly according to studies.

You literally are right here accusing me of being in an echo chamber for thinking Americans view AI negatively, then when I back that up with a source you are now… Claiming that the article says that.

Except that the whole “most demographics are positive on AI” piece that you toss in counters your own countering of my disagreement. You’re talking in circles here.

It’s also worth noting this article is using a sample size of 700 and doesn’t go all that heavily into the methodology. The author describes themself as a “social computing scholar” and states that they purposefully oversampled these minority groups.

The conclusion is nothing but wasted time and clicks. You’re in this thread telling people to “read the article” and I’m in here to warn people that it’s not worth their time to do so.

And this is part of a trend I’ve noticed on Lemmy lately: people posting obviously bad articles, users commenting that the articles are bad, and usually about 3-4 other users in the comments arguing and trying to drive more engagement to the article. More clicks, more ad revenue.

We could argue all day over who is experiencing reality or who is in an echo chamber.

Pew Research found that US adults who are not “AI Experts” are more likely to view AI as negative and harmful.

The thing is, EVERYONE hates AI except for a very small number of executives and the few tech people who are falling for the bullshit the same way so many fell for crypto.

It’s like saying a survey indicates that trans people are more likely to hate American ISP’s. Everyone hates them and trans people are underrepresented in the population of ISP shareholders and executives. It doesn’t say anything about the trans community. It doesn’t provide any actionable or useful information.

It’s stating something uninteresting but applying a coat of rainbow paint to try to get clicks and engagement.

For the most part they trusted me. It helped that my step-dad played videogames before he met my mom. It probably also helped that I never gave them any concerns. I was a fat nerd who never got into fights or showed any signs of violence. My parents were concerned about me spending too much time indoors and not getting enough physical and social activity, but never concerned with the content.

I also was a smart enough kid that I knew the limits of what I could ask for. I wasn’t going to ask them for Leisure Suit Larry or BMX XXX, for example.

There were a couple of exceptions where my mom heard things about specific games through the media. I remember the marketing campaigns for God of War and GTA3 really leaned into the controversy. Although I did end up getting GTA3 eventually.

Ironically, there was only one case where I felt like I was allowed to play a game before I was ready, but it wasn’t one I asked for. My step-dad bought Twisted Metal Black. I had played a bit of the Twisted Metal series earlier, but preferred the much more whimsical Vigilante 8. I still remember getting nightmares about getting my head locked into a mask like the one character (I think her name may have been Dollface?). As I am remembering it now I realize it was probably a metaphor about identity, but as a middle schooler I was just freaked out about it.

That’s a fair point and one I also considered. The original article should have included a date, or at least a month and year.

Trying to find news articles further back on mobile is a pain, but here’s one from September 2024 about the US moving missiles to the Philippines back then too.

Also despite the claims of OP’s article, it looks like this was reported on 3 months ago when it happened. And they are surface-to-sea missiles so that explains why no one seemed to care that they are “within range” of the Chinese mainland.

Both countries know that they can strike each other almost anywhere of they want. This isn’t the 60’s anymore.

The US wasn’t flying under the radar or trying to sneak this by the world: it was a public show of force to get China to stop their incursions into Philippines waters.

If the Attorney General is complicit in covering up a child sex trafficking ring, the political norm would be to fire them, and potentially investigate them and prosecute them for obstruction of justice.

So the question becomes: how much did Biden know? And considering that even I fucking knew that there was an Epstein list the government was sitting on because it was reported years ago, I have no qualms about blaming Biden for this.

I hope the Dems are able to press this issue to gain political support against Trump because that would reduce the suffering of literally the entire planet, but the Dems also need to learn a lesson from this. If the Clintons were on the list I want them prosecuted to the full extent of the law, the same as Trump. If Biden and other DNC leadership were complicit in a coverup then they should be prosecuted too.

The thing is, those costs are already built into their margins and they have acceptable thresholds for them. Do porn games in particular exceed that threshold? We would need their proprietary data to determine that.

My hypothesis would be that these games have much lower rate of these charges. The reason being that these sorts of games are already subject to stricter restrictions and parental controls. I would expect the strongest association with charge backs and fraud investigations to be with games that are recurring subscriptions (people forget to cancel) or micro transactions. Which could include both pornographic and non-pornographic games.

I would also expect to see spikes in charge backs for specific games at specific times. Like when. Publisher adds Denuvo or some other draconian malware, or when 2K decided to add launchers to their game that hurt Steam Deck compatibility, or when some update happens that ruins gameplay, or when some executive comes out and says something stupid. But those would be events, not trends.