Instigate

How I would love to offer an extremely exclusive and expensive product or service and have a billionaire approaching me trying to get it for free, to be able to say “Oh, I’m sorry, can you not afford it? We only offer this to people who have enough money to pay for it. I’m sure if you work hard, one day you’ll earn enough money to come back and give this a try!”

Nothing would hurt a fragile billionaire’s ego more than insinuating that they’re poor. Their entire lives and identities revolve around being rich and to take that away from them, even for a few seconds, would haunt them for many years to come.

Exactly right: a doctor who earns $500k/annum is working class where a landlord earning $50k/annum is capitalist class. The division between the two comes from whether or not the person sells their labour to generate income versus making money from capital assets without expending labour. It has nothing at all to do with the amount earned.

Now, the truth is that there are a fair few working capitalists - those who sell their labour, then use the proceeds of that sale to purchase capital to gain further income - but that’s where the waters get a bit more muddy. I am one of these people; I earn dual income from my job and from my investments. Many might consider me a class traitor, and there’s a fair amount of reason to that accusation, but I personally consider that I am just operating within the confines of the system I was unlucky enough to be born into. I’ll consistently vote for people who would take away my privilege to capital investments but, until they gain power, I’ll use the current system to my advantage.

I feel like it’d be ‘Solstheimer’, but I can’t explain why. Just rolls off the tongue better.

You make a great point - not all of us have the same capacities and there need to be protections in place to prevent people falling for scams - but I just don’t know where the line is between personal responsibility and collective responsibility. Like, for society to function, we all need to assume some amount of collective responsibility to protect others but that can’t be at 100%. People need to take some amount of personal responsibility for their actions, otherwise we slide towards a society with no learning and no repercussions which is a recipe for disaster and collapse.

It’s a tenuous relationship, and extremely context-dependent, so I don’t think that there is an objective and quantitative answer to the question. Would make an interesting philosophical/ethical debate though.

It’s bros before hoes?
But I’m homosexual
The bros are the hoes

It’s ridiculous and stupid, I know, but it comes from some pretty basic biology.

Depending upon size/thickness of a person’s thighs, it can be pretty impossible to put one knee over the other without squishing your dick and balls either on top of your legs or tucked underneath them. Wearing tight brief-style underwear, this can lead to situations where someone tries to cross their legs like this and inadvertently squishes their balls - a pretty uncomfortable circumstance in my own experience. Thus people with male genitalia (usually men) tend to prefer to cross their legs with the ankle over the knee to allow their genitals to ‘breathe’ and not be all squished up.

People with vaginas (usually women) in Western societies are also far more likely to wear skirts or dresses. In order to prevent someone having a peek at their underwear (or lack thereof) while wearing a skirt/dresses and sitting, these people are more likely to put one knee over the other.

Again, attempting to measure masculinity or femininity by this one preference is utterly stupid, but there are reasons why this behavioural pattern has become commonplace in Western societies. I (cis man) tend to do both in different circumstances; usually dependent upon weather, underwear and outer clothing I’m wearing.

And herein lies a big issue - only a minority of men are creeps towards women, but because they’re creeps towards so many women it means that women ubiquitously experience creepy dudes. That causes women to become (understandably) more guarded and jaded and makes things harder for the majority of men who aren’t creeps.

Essentially, yeah! There were three driving modes - kart, hovercraft, and plane. Some tracks only allowed certain driving modes and you would pick your driving mode before the race started. It was pretty novel for the era!

Diddy Kong Racing was the best racing game of this era and yes, I am most definitely willing to die on this hill.

I mean, Homo sapiens are apes. I never understood why calling a person an ape was an insult. It’s taxonomically correct.

That figure absolutely staggers me. The fact that it’s so commonplace to irreversibly mutilate the genitals of a baby that has no capacity to consent to such a lifelong alteration really says something. Conservatives being up-in-arms about trans kids taking hormone blockers to prevent puberty but not about taking a scalpel to babies’ penises would be genuinely baffling if I didn’t already expect that without double standards, they’d have no standards.

It’s been Israel’s playbook against Palestine for a very, very long time.

Many forget that a meme is simply a concept or idea that grabs hold within a human community and is propagated and promulgated. Patriarchy is a meme. Capitalism is a meme. Doing ‘bunny ears’ behind someone’s head in a photo is a meme (h/t Parker and Stone). Doing cave paintings of animals is a meme. Fashion of an era is a meme. Our entire social structure runs on memes.

You guys can use €0.50 coins?! Over here in Australia it’s either a $1 or $2 coin. I wish I could chuck a 50¢ piece in the trolley.

I had a little chuckle-up myself

Exactly right; sex work has always existed (relative to the existence of currency/bartering tribute and some semblance of homo sapien societies) and will always exist in some form. There have always been those who are willing to be in relationships with sex workers and those that won’t. The landscape has changed, but the world’s oldest profession remains.

Simps don’t suck; they do the dating world a service. Anyone whose concept of self-esteem is so external that they derive it from the admiration of strangers is not someone who is ready for a serious or monogamous relationship. Simps help identify those people and weed them out of the regular dating pool.

Straight men can, and should, touch each other more often (CONSENSUALLY. I can’t stress that enough). Hugging, holding hands, playing with one another’s hair, giving a gentle backrub etc. between straight men should absolutely be more normalised. We’ve been conditioned that any physical affection between men is a sign of sexual attraction, when history (and many extant cultures) show us that men can physically love one another without any sexual attraction whatsoever. The only reason we’re touch starved is we’re too afraid to be vulnerable with other men.

Being an incel is a choice; mental illness is not. You wouldn’t refer to incels as disabled and it’s similarly unfair to refer them as being mentally ill. Being an incel is just another form of bigotry. Racists, sexists, queerphobes etc. aren’t mentally ill. The most generous descriptors I could give them is that they’re either misguided, brainwashed, or both.

I also think it’s not great to equate incels with mental illness. I have CPTSD, depression and anxiety and none of those make me act like a fucking misogynistic twat. Inceldom isn’t mental illness, and equating it to or calling it mental illness does a whole lot of people a massive disservice.