So many people are acting like this means Trump can assassinate his political opponents now. While the legal precedent probably has to be defined better, this is about not using trumped up charges to invalidate a presidential candidate. If the roles were reversed, the left would be up in arms about how this was political persecution. 

How many former presidents on the left could have been charged for any number of similar crimes to keep them from running again? The only reason why they weren't is because there is supposed to be a stigma against prosecuting your active political opponents. But the rulebook was thrown out with Trump. They hate him enough to break any and all rules to keep him out.

You do understand that the past few generations of men grew up in a world that regularly told them they were a problem that needed to be solved? I just love how many times I've seen messages about how men are rapists, abusers, monsters, etc. That it's a gendered problem and we all bear the original sin of being a man. That women would rather encounter a random bear in the woods than a random man.

And yet people are surprised we all hate ourselves, that we have no self esteem, that we aren't champions who can do anything and solve any problem. They blame us for not thriving in a world that works very hard to sideline us. 

It's great, really. You are so empathetic. But we're used to it. We know no one gives a shit about us. Where do you think the defeatist attitude comes from? It's because we see the reactions to our suffering. For you, it's annoyance. For many others, it's ridicule. 

And people wonder why the male suicide rate is so high.

People are kind of dumb in a lot of ways. It takes practice and effort to refine your thought patterns and be specific and accurate with them. 

A good example is that you are asking this question as if women don't treat men the same way. You probably rationally understand that everyone is capable of this, but unless you actually take the time and effort to be that specific, you probably aren't thinking about the nuances outside of your immediate concern.

It's just a reality of the levels of conscious thought. We don't do the extra work unless we think we need to, and that leads to incorrect solutions. 

It's not a rich people problem. Those are just the stories you hear about. It's a human problem.

And, honestly, it's not quite as crazy as it seems. We largely use these laws to protect younger people due to differences in psychological development. Sexual attraction and romantic attraction are two different things. Our concept of romantic attraction includes judgments of long term compatibility such as similar life experience, goals, etc. Sexual attraction is generally based on the ability to successfully procreate - it has a lot fewer standards to meet the bar. It is normal for people to find minors who have gone through puberty and developed secondary sexual characteristics attractive. You can blame evolution and its lack of specificity for that. The less common and less natural attraction is to prepubescent minors. That doesn't happen as much, but unfortunately still does.

I argue that it's normal to be attracted to post-pubescent minors, but it's also normal to not follow through on that attraction. We do have free will. Anyone who breaks those laws are rightfully treated like the scum they are. But it is definitely not a rich-person only problem. It is even common in nature, not just a human eccentricity.

Yes and no. When I graduated into my career and started making a living wage, I felt like I'd "made it". Not that I wasn't facing any other challenges in life, but that I was established in a way I never had been before. I can now work pretty much anywhere for good pay. 

Before this, I was always unsure of if I'd be able to afford essentials. I'm not paid as much as I'm worth thanks to inflation, I think we can all relate to that, but I'm paid enough that I'm not struggling to make sure that rent is paid. And that's huge.

I try to just keep my nose down and hope things work out. 

That being said, I think very few people are handling the current state of the world particularly well. Most of us either have our heads in the sand, try to pretend like the world is not on fire, or we struggle to not kill ourselves out of nihilism. 

Your assessment is accurate. The world is in a rough place. All we can do is live through it. Or not. Lots of us are white knuckling our way through life.

People want healthcare to be a science the way math is a science; 1+1=2 and that's just the way it is. But practicing healthcare is more like putting a jigsaw puzzle together when you're missing half the pieces. You can be 99% certain that it's a swan, but it can still turn out to be a very angry goose. 

And that isn't even accounting for human error. Just like in every field, doctors, nurses, technologists, etc, make mistakes. You could be slightly rotated on an xray, within the boundary of tolerance that we don't repeat the image, and it can obscure a metastatic lesion. The same mistake with a different patient might reveal a metastatic lesion that was otherwise hidden. 

We work very hard to minimize the variability of success in medical treatment, but there's no such thing as a guarantee. If that's not enough for you, you're welcome to seek treatment elsewhere.

Human beings are stupid. We are easily corrupted by degeneracy. If I magically became a 10 tomorrow, I would probably go out and fuck every woman I could just because it was an option.

Religion and marriage came about because we suck at self-control. These institutions worked as redundant supports to keep us from sabotaging ourselves. They didn't work 100% of the time, but they helped. Sexual liberation was like taking the chains off a werewolf. Why are we surprised when we find all the mangled bodies the next day. Most of society is miserable when everyone is free to be promiscuous. People figured that out thousands of years ago, but apparently we needed to learn the lesson again.

Men used to go to war over reproductive access. With most sexually active women only pursuing the top 20% of men, are we prepared for violence to make a return? Because it might. It may only be self-inflicted. But are we prepared to allow men and women to, through their liberation, be turned into miserable husks that can't find love, can't reproduce, and eventually take their own lives? That sounds pretty evil to me. Certainly more evil than monogamy.

I agree, but good luck convincing enough people to care to make a difference. Mens Rights as an interest group has no teeth. No one is willing to protest en masse like they are for women's issues and BLM. We are politically safe to ignore.

As far as ending circumcision goes, you're preaching to the choir. We aren't the ones you need to convince. 

Something to consider is that, no matter how much people pretend that we've all changed, women still want a provider, and to be provided for. All that stuff about equality looks great when it means they can make their own choices, but when it comes to holding up their end on responsibilities? That's when equality doesn't look so hot.

It sounds like you're already doing a lot for her. You're bringing her food regularly, you're reducing her cost of living by cohabitating, you're being a supportive partner. It's not fair for her to be expecting you to support her financially. She's not your stay-at-home-wife.

All of that being said, unless you want this girl to sour on her perspective of you, it may be worth being more financially supportive of her. The whole equality thing is kind of a sham anyway. Relationships are about feelings and being there for each other. I'm not saying support her because it's fair to you, I'm saying you may want to support her because you love her, and you don't want her to feel like you aren't there for her.

Now, if those feelings she has are a dealbreaker for you, then maybe you're fine with it if she were to end the relationship over the related resentment. I think she should pull up her big girl panties and be responsible for paying her own way. I don't want you to get stuck in a situation where the financial burden too heavily weighted on you again. But, again, relationships aren't really about what's fair. My wife isn't a SAHM but I still pay the majority of our bills because I make more, and I love her. You need to decide if she's worth it to you or not.

In a perfect world, yes. Having it be mandatory takes the onus off of men having to justify individual tests. If I suggest the test as a precaution, it makes it look like I think my wife cheated on me. If it's mandatory, then it's just what has to be done, there's no blame to put on the individual. The problem is of cost and scalability. 

My understanding is that we don't have the necessary infrastructure to facilitate the increase in tests this would require. It's not as simple as just using the existing equipment more. It would require more equipment, more personnel, etc. And neither the labor nor the equipment is cheap. 

So, would I like mandatory DNA tests? Yes. Is it realistic that any movement trying to implement them would succeed? Absolutely not. Anyone who tries to implement them will be raked over the coals for being a misogynist first, and for the cost of the proposal second. Forgetting the fact that we already know women commonly commit paternity fraud, the label of misogynist still holds a lot of sway in politics. The validity of the label doesn't matter.

Then there's the fallout to consider. Single mothers are a huge burden on the state. The state is disinclined to separate men from their obligation to support a family even if it isn't their biological children. And if we do implement this policy, the tax burden on citizens would definitely rise to compensate for the increase in single mothers.

I think we're mostly in alignment. I only disagree in the sense that, yes, DEI for the left is more or less the equivalent of taking on a white Christian VP for the right. I have a problem with both, because they both reduce the focus on merit by heavily factoring in representation.

My concern with DEI is greater only because there are many fewer black women, as an example, to choose from. That means that the sacrifice on merit has to be much larger to find a person with the right characteristics. 

In theory, you should have your pick of the litter to find a high merit white Christian male as a right wing VP. The characteristics you want are abundant on the right. On the left, even in 2024, the racial and gender diverse candidates - read "non-white/male" - make up a fairly small percentage of the group. That's not to say Kamala isn't qualified. I'm a Trump supporter and I don't think he is necessarily "qualified" to be president, so it doesn't necessarily matter to me anyway - its all about values and policies for me. But this is where the concern comes from with relation to DEI hiring.

In their defense, they didn't play to her characteristics in promoting Kamala. I think that was smart. Seeing how involved she has been in the prison system, I don't think they wanted to invite more scrutiny than necessary. She's not a dream candidate for a left wing nominee if you care about the way lower class people are siphoned into prisons for profit.

Hillary was arguably the bigger DEI pick. Her entire campaign was laced with feminist messaging. It was both implicit and explicit that the big draw with her was having the first female president. In my opinion, her feminist views were the only thing that humanized her, and I say that as someone who thinks feminism is a cancerous ideology in modern times. Hillary is representative of everything wrong with politics. She's a genuinely disgusting person, completely in line with the crony corporatist values. She just veils it all behind left-wing-friendly charities and causes. She's the kind of person you would see building companies like Blackrock - they look so good with their ESG promotion, but then you realize that its all a front. What they actually do is latch onto successful companies like a parasite and slowly destroy them while milking everything good out of them that they can in the meantime. That is what Hillary represents. But, in her defense, that's most politicians. She has just already been successfully employing her craft for decades.

I digress. For as much as the VP needs to be qualified, Harris is. But if you take her race and gender out of the equation, was she the most qualified option? Probably not. That's what DEI is. It's not taking someone who isn't qualified necessarily. It's devaluing qualification to meet standards of demographic representation. Just like nepotism, the issue is not that the candidate is unqualified, it's that the scales are weighted unfairly. It is not equal opportunity. It is discriminatory. 

Imo there's no such thing as a left wing male advocate. Men are the enemy of the left wing ideology, because the left view everything as oppressor/oppressed. Because a handful of men hold most of the power in society, that means all men are oppressors in the left wing ideology. Despite what some will tell you, it is a zero sum game, and they want the limited time and resources being given out to women and non-whites, not men.

You will never see advocacy for men gain traction on the left. It will always be relegated to the corner, and beaten back into submission if they ever get too loud. The right is the only place men can actually advocate for themselves. That's why all male advocacy is labeled right wing. It's antithetical to the left wing belief system.

Nah man. It's so much the other way. People want to help beyond their ability to help. That's why you've got people who will raise such a fuss over protecting your sovereign border. It's such a basic concept, that you need to regulate travel of non-citizens to your country. I don't understand how that idea has become "xenophobic" in the past decade.

Look at Canada. We've had ridiculous levels of immigration for a long time, suppressing wages and making it difficult for citizens to fight for better working conditions. Post-COVID the government has set immigration to overdrive, it's even worse now. But the wealthy benefit greatly. It's only recently that the tide has really started to shift. It was extremely common to be called a racist for even questioning our immigration policy 5 years ago.

As you point out, beyond the concerns of wage suppression and infrastructure overload, there's no capacity for assimilation with immigration at these levels. This destroys whatever was left of a cohesive society. It has nothing to do with hating immigrants - that's such a bad faith interpretation to make. I can empathize with immigrants while still pointing out that this is breaking our country apart in ways that may be irreparable. 

It's not about racism or superiority. It's about sustainability. The best case scenario for your average citizen is to have a smaller population where everyone shares similar values and there are more jobs than people to fill them. The market forces in that situation benefit the have-nots. The worst case scenario for average people is mass immigration of cultures that clash with the host country. It means everyone is fighting for work, driving wages down, and it means we might disagree on a lot of fundamental concerns. Lots of recent immigrants here can't even speak English. 

It's common sense to put your own emergency mask on before helping others. That's all this is. You have to make sure you aren't killing your own country just to meet an ideal. The welfare of your citizens should supercede all other concerns. If they're well off, we can tolerate moderate immigration with assimilation. But no one is well off right now.

Whenever you hear a woman talk about men, there's something helpful to consider, a concise explanation of which I attribute to HoeMath (YouTuber).

When women are talking about men in this way, you have to remember that they're either talking about men they find attractive, or men who have power over them. The rest of us are "Not People". They're talking about their boss, their ex, or the politician they hate who was democratically elected. They aren't talking about the slave labor they never have to or want to interact with. We are not men to them. We are beneath them and their considerations. 

That's why they are willing to speak so radically in generalizations. We are invisible to them.

As others have said, NATO sort of forced Putin's hand. We can't know for sure what would have happened if NATO didn't have the backing of the Biden administration. It's possible that the invasion still would have happened, but it also could have been delayed, even indefinitely. 

One of the things I liked about Trump was his willingness to engage our "enemies" in good faith (outside of China, who really needed to be put in their place in regards to trade). I don't know if he would have been successful in Biden's place, but I believe Trump would have been much more likely to persuade Putin by threatening to support Ukraine instead of doing it covertly like Biden originally did. I think Trump's negotiation acumen is one of the big advantages he brings to the position. If a candidate could "sell" Putin on the invasion being a bad idea, it would have been Trump.

Now, is it guaranteed? Of course not. Is Trump talking shit about how he could do everything better if he was elected? Of course he is, every single politician plays the same game. Humility rarely wins over confidence. But NATO is an aggressive world power that was snapping at Russia's ankles. You back a wild dog into a corner and expect him to back down? Russia may have been courting war, but NATO set it off.

It's a progressive curve. You start playing a game, like it, get into it. Then you notice some problems. They aren't big enough to really bother you, but they crop up now and again. You keep playing.

A year passes, new content, you're still having a good time. But these problems are still around, and the more you've gotten into the game, the more you notice how they impact your daily experience. You voice your opinion, try to get the devs to fix them, keep playing the game.

Another year goes by. You're still enjoying the game, but the devs tried to "fix" the problems you were having by adding a system that is actually even worse. You're having fun, but it's harder and harder to ignore these problems as you become more adept at the game. Your attention is less divided, and it's even clearer how they impact your experience. 

Year 4. The devs are content with their replacement system for the issues you have. The game is something you would objectively call 95% awesome. But these issues have been around for so long, and you've been frustrated by them for so long, that they are glaring and blatant. How can the devs not fix this? Can't they see how flawed this system is? They're ruining something you love! They're making a 95% great game, but it feels more like a 6/10 when you think about how frustrated you are.

Passion for something is great when it's positive. The dark side of passion is anger. Those angry gamers actually love that game (or they did at one point, sometimes devs really ruin a game big time). But a little itch doesn't seem like a big problem at first, either. An itch left unscratched, though, will get more and more intense until you finally snap.

This is your daily reminder that women say a lot of bullshit. 

Women don't know what they like until they've taken the time to get to know him. If you listen to what they say they like, you will be confused for eternity, because their actions constantly contradict what they are saying.

I know this sounds misogynistic. I don't mean it to. Men can be guilty of the same thing. But women have been described as mercurial for centuries for a reason: they change their mind all the time. A 5/10 man who isn't her type can become an 8/10 man that she wants to marry just by proximity and her getting to see his character. 

Don't trust what women say about what they want in a man. Chances are they couldn't pick their future husband out of a lineup.

1. Not my thing. There's no such thing as clean enough imo.

But you do you, I'm not here to shame anyone. Just not for me.

It's what women say they want. And, to be fair, you are 5'11. It wasn't enough on its own to land women, but you're tall enough that most women wouldn't count it against you.

Forgetting the fact that women don't actually know what they want until they get to know him, of course men are going to be insecure when women en masse claim they won't date anyone under 6'. Just like women are upset en masse when men say they don't want to date them if they are over 150 lbs. Neither side completely represents reality, but both genders feel like shit when we're excluded with a broad brush stroke like that.

Also, women pretty much universally prefer men who are taller than them. That preference is clear and obvious, and men who are already insecure about their height see that and it just affirms their insecurities.

I don't want to be that guy, but humans are the most apex of apex predators.

We also probably are more violent, just not in this context. It's not like bears have wars where they kill hundreds of thousands of their own kind.

I like your energy. Your statement is just not quite specific enough to be accurate.

God Emperor Trump all the way! But good news is this comment will be down voted and hidden, so no worries.

I mean, you had me up until the bit about feminism being for equal rights. That's just factually inaccurate and brings everything else you say into question. 

Let me know when feminists start throwing protests over the gender pay gap in modeling. Let me know when they are protesting the gender disparity in trash collection, sanitation, sewage treatment, and oil rig workers.

Feminism being for equal rights is one of the most successful lies ever told. Feminism is a female empowerment movement. ENORMOUS difference.

Disclaimer: I support equal rights, not Feminism.

POC doesn't make "person" = "white" by default. POC is just a fancy way of saying non-white. It's essentially a marketing/political term to group non-whites with a privileged title. It makes it easier to organize a large group against the white majority. And if you disagree about its purpose, then tell me why we don't just use the specific ethnic title for each group? 

It's the same reason Christians rally under the Christian banner. They disagree about a ton, and generally specify themselves by denomination as a point of pride. But using the title "Christian" allows a bunch of different groups that have different interests to coordinate more effectively against non-Christians. The LGBTQ do it too, that's why they're always adding letters.

Then there's BIPOC. Would you rather use that instead? That's POC but where black and indigenous people have given themselves the privilege of their own separate letters. Kind of like how in some circles LGBTQ is actually 2SLGBTQ; indigenous people are higher on the progressive stack I guess.

Based on my research, it's a way to market their investment portfolios to investors who care about "improving the world". Environmental concern is a good example of what some investors care about. To get into these attractive portfolios, your company has to win "good guy" points, and the easiest way for a video game developer/publisher to do that is to promote DEI.

It's the typical left wing bs perspective that progressive ideals are inherently good, so if you support their political goals you get advertised to investors more aggressively.