i/o on X - "Far more Americans believe that having a job they enjoy is important to a fulfilling life than having children — by a margin of 71% to 26%."
Views of the American Family in 2023 Are Mixed | Pew Research Center - "Public Has Mixed Views on the Modern American Family"
Americans love working so much. No wonder they deteriorate once they retire, unlike in cultures with a more balanced view of life
The Missing Data Depot on X - "The % of Americans saying "having children" is a "very important" value has only declined recently. The decline in "having children" has coincided w/ declines in patriotism, religion & community involvement. By contrast, how much Americans value "money" appears to be growing."
America Pulls Back From Values That Once Defined It, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds - WSJ - "To Janet Boyer, a former Pentecostal minister who lives in Cumberland Township in Southwestern Pennsylvania’s coal country, patriotism has taken on a political sheen and is no longer important to her. “For me, patriotism has turned into right-wing nationalism,’’ said Ms. Boyer, who backed President Biden in 2020... Half said that America is one of the greatest countries, along with some others. The share who said other countries are better than the U.S. rose to 27%, up from 19% when the same question was asked in 2016."
"Poor" is a common insult in the US
We're still told that it's a myth that liberals hate their countries; a few years we were told that nationalism was bad but patriotism was good
Meme - "4 out of 5 people get money in their birthday cards.
Happy birthday, #5"
Meme - *Baby*
"TRADE OFFER
i receive: The burden of human consciousness
you receive: A false sense of Purpose in your monotonous existence"
Meme - "Whenever my bf cums inside me I get ads for plan B and birth control which means my fucking iphone from across the room hears me say "cum inside me” and immediately gets to work on those targeted ads"
Meme - "Right wing revolutionary on the streets, schoolgirl in the sheets."
Pro-Palestinian protesters disrupt Toronto reception Trudeau hosted for Italian PM Meloni : canada - "The Italian PM is pretty much a fascist, or at least hailed as the "most right-wing and populist Italian leader since Mussolini"… I would have thought it was to be expected that her stay here would be met with protests… I’m actually okay with protesting fascism."
"I keep on seeing this and yet nobody can tell me what she has done that is so far right."
"When she was 15, she joined Youth Front, the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement. The Italian Social Movement was a neo-fascist political party formed by the supporters of Benito Mussolini in 1946. When she was 19, she praised Mussolini as a good politician, in that everything he did, he did for Italy and as the best politician of the last 50 years. And there are a lot more. This stuff is very easy to find and well publicized. Have you been living under a rock or something?"
"I'm more interested in the policies that she has enacted since taking office that qualify as being far right?"
"He doesn't have a real answer for that so he names things from many years ago. Apparently putting your own citizens first is "far right"."
"Probably something about her wanting to ban same-sex marriage in Italy. That's pretty shitty."
"That's it? Doesn't take much to be considered a fascist these days."
Meme - "Just quickly glancing at this table of the most murdery cities in the US, the one thing they all seem to have in common is that the black percentage of the population is at least twice what the national percentage is. The exception: San Bernardino, which is 2/3 Hispanic."
"The deadliest cities in the United States, 2020–2022 In my previous version I looked at 2015-2019 data. Many requested a more up-to-date version. Here are the deadliest cities ranked by average homicide rate across the 3 years of most recent data available so far."
The daddy state - "I’ve never been sure about the expression ‘nanny state’, whose mildness fails to capture the UK government’s steady slide to social-engineering authoritarianism and inclination to punishment. The term’s implicit infantilising of the public is certainly apt, but nannies are parental employees who tend to cajole and implore, while enticing their unruly charges with the promise of sweeties if the urchins behave. At most, a frustrated minder might resort to a light smack on the bum, more symbolic than painful. Closer to an old-school disciplinarian father who spares not the rod, the British state is increasingly given to an all-out wallop, the kind that sends a kid flying to the opposite wall. Examples of the punitive and coercive nature of UK governance abound. It was once understood that British culture was inherently polite. Now decency is imposed from above through the enforcement of ‘hate speech’ laws. As a grammatical pedant, I just wish that British peelers were pounding on the doors of cowering homeowners for using the wrong pronouns because the offenders had typed on social media, ‘with him and I’. The pursuit of Net Zero seems to justify unbridled interference with both commerce and individual liberty, because no restriction is too severe, unfair or poorly thought out, so long as it’s intended to ‘save the planet’. The free market is out the window. Embracing a Soviet-style command economy, as of 2024, Westminster will now idiotically fine the manufacturers of gas and oil boilers if they fail to ensure that four per cent of their sales are heat pumps. Shouldn’t the government instead fine customers for not wanting heat pumps? Effectively, the state will do just that. Manufacturers have announced a £300 fee per boiler installation to cover their fines. This Clean Heat Marketing Mechanism is tantamount to the government fining Tesco for not selling enough guava-flavoured yoghurt, when the real problem is that the public hates guava-flavoured yoghurt... The same logic of guava-flavoured yoghurt pertains to officialdom’s cudgelling of companies to make them flog more electric vehicles. As of 1 January, auto manufacturers must ensure that 22 per cent of the new cars they sell are all-electric, a percentage that accelerates to 80 per cent by 2030. It’s a bit baffling just how these companies will bully customers into purchasing a product with limited range, a stonking price tag, inadequate supporting infrastructure, poor resale value and a disconcerting tendency to burst into flames. What’s not in doubt is the staggering size of the fines when the sales force, perhaps lacking loaded pistols to press to the temples of consumers on their forecourts, fail to meet the target: £15,000 per non-electric vehicle sold over the prescribed percentage... Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) are gleefully enforced with more whopping fines. (Hats off to the brave residents of Lambeth in south London, who have stood rain and shine in hi-vis jackets with placards reading ‘£130 fine’ to warn motorists away from a poorly demarcated LTN trap laid for the unsuspecting, like a snake pit in Vietnam. Such selfless looking out for strangers constitutes not mere virtue-signalling, but some of the only genuine altruism I’ve seen in yonks.) Famously, Sadiq Khan’s ULEZ scheme is hammering the owners of older cars in Greater London with a £12.50 fee per day, which is making no real difference to the city’s air quality... Then there’s prime minister Rishi Sunak’s illiberal proposal to make the purchase of cigarettes illegal for anyone born after 2008. It’s not good enough that younger Britons are taking up smoking tobacco at steadily decreasing rates of their own accord. No, no. They must be forced. Not only has Labour been toying with the same heavy-handed policy, but Keir Starmer is also mooting the idea of making vaping prescription-only. Banning has become a national sport. We have bans on XL Bully dogs, sales of ivory including in antiques (the elephants in question being, you would think, well dead), and all the f-words: foxhunting, fur farms, foie gras. Given the soaring cost of living, maybe we should thank our lucky stars that the ban on buy-one-get-one-free bargains and any other multibuy deals on foods high in fat, salt or sugar has been delayed until 2025. So cram the freezer with those half-price frozen chips while you still can. It’s on the council level that British authorities have excelled themselves in their zeal for compulsion, chastisement and constraint – the more niggling the regulation the better. Not content with throwing their weight around by bulldozing whole properties and extensions into landfill over minor violations of planning laws, councils now levy fines for leaving bins out, tree removal, school absence, school drop-offs, barking dogs and littering. In 2018, Peterborough issued 861 fines for spitting alone. People have been fined for dropping a single biodegradable orange peel or apple core, pouring coffee down the drain or losing a tenner.
What Happened When My Wife Let Me Sleep With Her Friend for a Night
Meme - "Afraid of not getting what you ordered with online shopping? Try online dating!"
Meme - Chinese textbook: "Coelacanth *Man's body morphed to resemble a Coelacanth*"
HGTV host saved after eagle-eyed viewer spots lump on his neck - "We’ve heard about TV personalities being thankful for their fans, but Flip or Flop host, Tarek El Moussa, will have to go beyond mere thanks. The host of the HGTV property-flipping show was diagnosed with thyroid cancer after a Flip or Flop viewer spotted a lump on his neck. No, seriously. The fan, a registered nurse named Ryan Read, noticed a large nodule on El Moussa’s thyroid while watching a Season 1 marathon of the show. She immediately contacted producers explaining what she thought she saw, and said El Moussa needed to have it checked out, which led to his diagnosis in 2013 at age 31. Read’s email prompted El Moussa to have a biopsy done, even though he was already told by some professionals that it was benign. It turned out the lump was actually cancerous, and he had to have his thyroid removed. During surgery, doctors saw that the cancer had spread to his lymph nodes, so he was forced to undergo thyroid radioactive iodine therapy. Luckily, the surgeries and treatment worked."
Will Spencer | Renaissance of Men on X - "I absolutely agree that India and Japan are great to juxtapose against each other. But having spent a lot of time in both countries, I think this analysis is only partially correct. As a poor country, India has a ethic called “jugaad,” which essentially translates to “make it work however you can.” This leads to very creative solutions to problems, at all levels. Also known as “hacks.” However, if your ONLY ethic is “make it work,” then once it works you’re done. You’ve fulfilled the ethic. “Good enough” is good enough. And everything in India is merely “good enough”… more or less. Japan, on the other hand, has an ethic of honor. Your performance in any given task reflects on your whole lineage. Consequently, almost everything in Japan is excellent. Streets are clean, buildings gleam, and you have to fight to have a bad meal. The basic idea is that you do an outstanding job for the virtue of doing an outstanding job. It’s the call of craftsmanship, independent of audience. However, my read is that this exerts an enormous psychic burden on the Japanese people. When you MUST do everything to an A++ level or you dishonor your ancestors, you end up either doing far less, or being very secretive about your failings. This sense of pressure and hiding is palpable throughout the country, especially once you get out of the cities. I believe it’s contributing to Japan’s crashing birth rate as well. They’re being crushed under their own sense of honor. The takeaway I want everyone to get is, once again, how superior America is in ways that most don’t realize. The majority of people here understand that you do a good job for the sake of doing a good job. There is a wrong way to do things, a right way to do things, and a more right way to do things. You might not realize it, but most people in America instinctively do things the “more right” way. I’m writing this at In N Out right now, with low-wage workers making great food in a clean and safe environment, because they derive at least some joy from doing a good job. This would be impossible in a “make it work” country. India will never have an In N Out. By the same token, that call to a good job is only lightly enforced. We accept a minimum standard of performance, and don’t incriminate the person’s whole family if they fail. We could probably afford to put more pressure on families to disciple their children better. But when someone screws up at their job, even due to incompetence, we don’t curse their grandfathers. Because America has the true Christian ethic called “grace.” Christianity acknowledges we are broken creatures incapable of reaching our full glory on our own. So, via Christ’s excellent sacrifice, God forgives us our sins. Therefore, we forgive. India has no excellence to look up to and embody in that way. Reincarnation is a shallow promise compared to heaven. Similarly, Japan has no God granting demerited favor, aka grace. So they have no grace to give in return. Both these are broken models in different ways. America worked in its superior way because of Christ at its core. That superior way is being threatened because the core is being removed. The heart is being cut out. What will the result be? Who knows. I’d prefer we didn’t find out."
This took a strange turn
Missing Air Force captain William Howard Hughes found 35 years later - "It’s not clear exactly how long a man who called himself Barry O’Beirne lived a quiet life in Daly City, the sleepy suburb a few miles south of San Francisco. It’s also not clear what he was doing on the morning of Wednesday, June 6, 2018, when, after 35 years, Air Force special agents knocked on his door and arrested him for desertion. The jigsaw puzzle of William Howard Hughes Jr.'s life has many missing pieces. After disappearing into thin air in 1983 he was wanted across the globe by numerous agencies, from the Air Force to the FBI to Interpol. At one point it was thought that he defected to the Russians. Some suggested he sabotaged the disastrous Challenger space shuttle launch... In June 2018, US Department of State special agents traveled to Daly City on a passport fraud investigation to interview a man living as Barry Timothy O’Beirne. “After being confronted with inconsistencies about his identity, the individual admitted his true name was William Howard Hughes Jr., and that he deserted from the U.S. Air Force in 1983,” the Air Force news release read. On the quiet suburban street of Michelle Lane, just a couple miles south of San Francisco’s city limit, Hughes had been living with his wife in a modest two-bed, two-bath townhouse. Neighbors of the man they knew simply as “Tim” were surprised to learn that they were living next to the Air Force’s most wanted man... Hughes was later revealed to have worked as a consultant and actuary for the University of California in Oakland during the 2000s, under the name Barry Timothy O’Beirnes. Colleagues there remembered him in only positive terms... When arrested, Hughes was taken to Travis Air Force base in Fairfield. There, he told investigators he was not a spy. He claimed he became depressed about being in the Air Force back in 1983, so he simply left, changed his identity and has lived in California ever since... It seems possible that Hughes’ wife didn’t know his true identity either – San Mateo County court records reveal that the woman, who took his fake last name, filed for a marriage annulment two months after his arrest... We’ll never know the intricacies of what was happening in his life, but maybe the opportunity to clean the slate and live an anonymous life, saying hi to neighbors, running the treadmill and watching the Giants felt like the only way forward. It’s unclear if Hughes’ once-heartbroken siblings ever reconnected with their brother, they haven't spoken publicly since his arrest."
How To Be More Impressive - "Suppose we want to publish something that is as simple as 1+1=2. This is not very impressive. If we want our article to be accepted by IEEE reviewers, we have to be more abstract... Equation (2) may therefore be written as ln[limz→∞(1+1z)z]+(sin2x+cos2x)=∑n=0∞cosh(y)1−tanh2y−−−−−−−−−√2n"
🌰 Saucon Deez Nutz 🌰 on X - "NEA literally tags almost every tree in Singapore for health monitoring purposes, afaik. If a bird's nest fern on a tree is warranted, it'll appear on the tree overnight. Nothing lasts forever in SG, and if they do, it's likely because of some underlying strategic reasoning."
mirax on X - "Only a Malaysian used to city pavements falling apart and forests logged into near oblivion for the enrichment of a few cronies will complain about trees being cared for and the "artificiality" of maintained infrastructure."
Đorđe Martinović incident - Wikipedia - "Đorđe Martinović (also spelled Djordje Martinovic; Serbian Cyrillic: Ђорђе Мартиновић; 1929 – 6 September 2000) was a Serb farmer from Kosovo who was at the center of a notorious incident in May 1985, when he was treated for injuries caused by the insertion of a bottle into his anus. The Martinović affair, as it became known, turned into a cause célèbre in Yugoslav politics. Although the facts of the incident remained in dispute for years afterwards, it played a role in worsening ethnic tensions between Kosovo's Serb and Albanian populations... Martinović reportedly admitted that his injuries had been self-inflicted in a botched attempt at masturbation. Public investigators reported that "the prosecutor made a written conclusion from which it appears that the wounded performed an act of 'self-satisfaction' in his field, [that he] put a beer bottle on a wooden stick and stuck it in the ground. After that he sat 'on the bottle and enjoyed'."Community leaders in Gjilan subsequently issued a statement describing his injuries as the "accidental consequences of a self-induced [sexual] practice". He was transferred to Belgrade for further investigations at the prestigious Military Medical Academy, but a medical team there reported that his injuries were not consistent with a self-inflicted wound. The team, which included two doctors from Belgrade and one each from Ljubljana, Zagreb, and Skopje (thus representing four of Yugoslavia's six republics), concluded that the injuries had been caused "by a strong, brutal and sudden insertion or jamming of a 500 ml. bottle, or rather, its wider end, into the rectum" and that it was probably physically impossible for Martinović to have done this to himself. The team argued that the insertion "could only have been carried out by at least two or more individuals"... The Serbian newspaper Politika asserted that the individuals who had allegedly attacked Martinović were members of a local Albanian family who wanted to purchase land that Martinović refused to sellThe claim had considerable resonance in Serbian politics; the steady exodus of Serbs from Kosovo was seen as being the result of deliberate persecution of Serbs by Albanians seeking to drive them off their land and seize their property. Many analogies were made with the Ottoman Turks, who had ruled Serbia until 1833 (and Kosovo until 1912). The incident was widely compared with the Ottoman use of impalement as a means of torture and execution. This link was explicitly made in poetry commemorating the incident, which invoked "Ottoman" themes... The Martinović case was held by some Serb nationalist ideologues, intellectuals and politicians to symbolise a supposed Muslim penchant for sodomy. An influential psychiatrist and Krajina Serb nationalist activist, Jovan Rašković, argued that "Muslims [are] fixated in the anal phase of their psychosocial development and [are] therefore characterized by general aggressiveness and an obsession with precision and cleanliness". It was seen by many Serbs as a prime example of how Albanians were (in their view) mistreating Serbs while the Albanian-run Kosovo government "looked the other way". For their part, many Kosovo Albanians took the view that (as indicated by Martinović's early confession) he had accidentally inflicted the wound on himself and tried to cover it up by blaming it on Albanians, enabling Serbian nationalists to exploit it to provoke anti-Albanian feelings"
Japanese female pro gamer fired after saying men under 5 feet 7 inches tall 'don't have human rights' - "Kana “Tanukana” Tani, one of the most prominent female figures in esports fighting, had her contract with Cyclops Athletic Gaming terminated after she made controversial remarks. In an esports world dominated by male players, Tanukana stands out with her impressive records and placings on “Tekken.” On Thursday, however, her livestream comments where she stated short men under 5 feet 7 inches did not have “human rights,” adding that those who fall under in height should consider bone-lengthening surgery. This resulted in her firing from Japanese esports company Cyclops Athletic Gaming, whose main sponsors are Red Bull and Alienware. Tanukana is not new to controversy. In 2020, she reportedly told someone watching her stream to “kill themselves” and that they were “the trashiest trash of society”... The average height of a man in Japan is 5 feet 7 inches, according to a 2018 study."
Nickelodeon was 'infiltrated' by PREDATORS, records reveal. Channel employed FIVE convicted child molesters and two other accused pedophiles to work on set of kids shows - "Child safety activists claim the channel was infiltrated by predators who saw the power it gave them as a way to get close to their victims. Two of the offenders were highlighted in a new HBO documentary about alleged child abuse at the channel... Gabe Hoffman, a child safety activist, previously exposed child molesters who worked at Nickelodeon and other Hollywood studios in his 2014 documentary An Open Secret... 'Convicted pedophiles still get hired in Hollywood today,' he said. 'Sex offenders worked with children at Nickelodeon, and unless the industry makes changes, more children in Hollywood will end up getting abused.'... A California law was passed in 2012 to stop convicted pedophiles working with child actors by requiring background checks and permits... 'Investigations have demonstrated this important law is mostly ignored by Hollywood, and state and local law enforcement appear to have little interest in enforcing it,' he said. 'For example, in 2018, Olivia Munn was forced to publicly out a convicted pedophile actor in the film Predator, a set on which minors were present, as the Director and Studio refused to act. She was later shunned by her co-stars for doing so... in the HBO documentary, former Nickelodeon writer Christy Stratton said that he named a character played by then-underage Amanda Bynes 'Penelope Taynt' because 'the taint is a part of the body that is between the penis and the anus'."
Time to mock Christian churches for being hotbeds of pedophilia
Kari on X - "I can’t speak about the other posters responses, but I genuinely would like to understand. Seeing where Trump seems to be headed, I will never understand supporting “him”, but I would like to understand why Dems are losing some black, Hispanic, Asian support."
Lubdha Khandelwal on X - "Thank you for genuinely asking. It is a challenge to be thorough yet nuanced on this platform, but I will try
- Economy: a number of us grew up in anti-free market economies, and have experienced first-hand how that hinders growth and innovation. I have those same serious concerns with some of what the D economic policies warrant with taxation, "free" stuff, etc.
- Law and order: a number of us have also seen the effects of a lax system of enforcing laws and holding those who break them accountable, and its overall effect on public safety. We see local policies being implemented in a number of the coastal blue cities that are similar (although some have started course correcting already).
- DEI: I personally completely agree that DEI, when done right, can make our society a better place for everyone. However, I have a specific issue with the specific implementation of DEI as advocated by some on the left, where the "E" is implemented as being Equity in Outcome instead of Equity of Opportunity as I believe it ought to be. The whole algebra-is-racist debacle being one example of it.
- Foreign policy: I voted for President Obama but I cannot imagine voting for those policies again, specifically the India/Iran/Middle East policies.
- Immigration: the overwhelming majority of immigrants support a legal, safe, humane system of immigration - after all immigrants are what has made his country what it is today, one that we came to call our home. However, what is currently going on at the border + what a mess it is to legally immigrate to the US right now is essentially incentivizing illegal migration while making legal migration more difficult. It should be the other way.
That being said, I will not be voting straight R any time soon - there are way too many issues (sensible gun control, marriage equality, sensible bodily autonomy, my personal objections to the presumptive nominee for President, etc.) that I find myself unable to reconcile with the "other" side on. As a result, I find myself a political orphan who will vote for the best candidate for any given position, regardless of their party affiliation."
Daxton Brown on X - "I started out a socialist in college. You will move right with time as the Utopian promises of the Left crumble. Two countries to watch right now are Argentina and Venezuela - see where they are in three years."