Title is pretty self explanatory, but I fear that many Democratic politicians and their supporters may have overplayed their hands with the Epstein files. It's taken for granted that Trump and his administration have blocked the release of all the files to protect themselves and their allies. They are regularly called pedophiles themselves or protectors of pedophiles.

Well if that's the case, then the next Democratic administration has no way to avoid the same criticism if they don't release what Trump has kept back. And if they use the same excuses that the Trump administration uses (e.g. protecting victims), then those excuses must be criticized equally.

The discourse has largely been to release ALL the files. If democratic supporters (and, to be fair, many anti-MAGA republicans) don't continue this demand once a democrat is in office, they are hypocrits.

(To balance the view, briefly: anyone who has supported Trump in blocking the release of the files has no ground to stand on to demand the next administration release them)

Edit: I should add to me view a clarification that my personal opinion is that everything relevant in the files is already out in the open. Trump and republicans way over-promised, expecting to find a sophisticated network of a global pedophile ring, but rather found a pretty small operation that got a few underage girls to one degenerate, Epstein. There is no additional prosecutable information in the files.

It's becoming mind numbingly apparent and repetitive. I see it constantly now on reddit. Literally any interest being labeled "interest+tism" usually referring to themselves in their self-diagnosed autism for which they probably decided on because they don't like their food to be touching. So now their whole personality is the made up disorder they put on themselves.

It's as if people have become so bland, so lacking in self-identity and personality that they are just yearning to find anything...anything at all that gives them some interest. All the while bringing down the people that actually have said disorders and causing society at large to think of it as little more than a joke.

I literally saw someone say in a comment "having any interest with too much enthusiasm is just autism". Self-diagnosed as autistic, of course. These are the people that are actively hurting and destroying the perception of entire groups of people that have been misunderstood for their entire lives. And these people just use it like fashion. Like a skin suit mimicking anything it can.

This is one of those patterns I've observed on this site, that you have these generically named accounts that basically follow this pattern of constant posting on some sports team (Or sometimes another hobby, but its usually sports), showing no signs of any political engagement, and then, all of a sudden, they will come out hard to attack one specific candidate (Always one hated by corporations or the establishment and in a politically contentious situation like an election or primary).

To me, this is pretty good evidence that these are accounts being sold on reddit after being properly farmed up with karma so it looks like they are legit. Does anyone have anything to the contrary that might poke holes in my theory?

Recently, Australia set a social-media ban for users under the age of 16, by requiring social media companies to implement age verification measures in place by requiring users to prove ID. Of course, enforceability of this is difficult and remains challenging, but I see the merits behind this move.

Personally though, I think the product that should specifically be looked at (across all countries) is short-form content (i.e. TikTok, Instagram Reels, etc.). It is deliberately addictive, and the impacts are real.

For example, this study demonstrated that "Results revealed that short-form video addiction not only directly impacted academic procrastination but also placed indirect effect on academic procrastination through attentional control. Furthermore, the mediating effect of attentional control was contingent upon individuals’ boredom proneness. Higher levels of boredom proneness weakened the impact of short-form video addiction on attentional control."

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10756502/

While I am aware that other forms of addiction can occur (video games, TV, etc.) I believe the potency and the effects of short-form content are more harmful because there is

1. Zero effort involved in scrolling

2. Instant gratification / dopamine

3. Zero attention span requirement

I find this to be particularly disturbing for children who are still developing, while we're already looking towards a future that is seeing elevated unemployment rates for new graduates combined with the reliance and threat of AI.

I think that the word Insecure has been overused to the point where it has largely lost its meaning, and is currently being used as just an insult that carries a 100% exclusively negative meaning with it. I believe, however, that insecurity is actually a very normal part of many relationships, and that the person feeling that insecurity should not be completely at fault for it 100% of the time.

Merriam Webster defines insecurity as- deficient in assurance : beset by fear and anxiety, not highly stable or well-adjusted. This happens all the time in totally healthy relationships, and the person experiencing that insecurity should not be scorned as being controlling or a bad guy.

Usually, insecurities within relationships happen due to some degree of an incompatibility being exposed. Maybe some girl feels insecure about her boyfriend having close female friends, maybe a guy is insecure over some party that his girlfriend went to. That is ok, and totally normal, and just means that they discovered that they and their partner obviously have differing values in that one regard. The solution though isn't to completely discount that emotion, as that emotion exists for a reason. The solution is to work with your partner and discuss what they are doing to create that insecurity, and what the other person is doing to work through their own insecurity.

Dealing with insecurity should not be a one man job in a relationship. That's antithetical to a relationship. Insecurities exist to make us aware of potential incompatibilities within said relationship, and hopefully smooth over those incompatibilities.

View:

1. Irradiation of foods that will be eaten raw provides some protection from pathogens, such as e coli & cyclospora.
2. While not foolproof, that additional line of defense is affordable and could make a meaningful positive impact on public health.
3. The main reason radiation is seldom used to enhance food safety is because of distrust of science among a minority of the general public.
4. Other nations use irradiation of produce more than the U.S. and consequently have fewer outbreaks of diseases from raw produce, such as e coli & cyclospora.
5. Radiation of food is better for public health than chemical treatments of food, due to the environmental impact of chemical [production] & disposal, as well as effects of trace amounts that remain on food.

What would change my view.

A) Evidence that there are more cost effective interventions that would make comparable improvements to food safety.

B) Evidence that food safety isn't something we should care about.

C) Evidence that irradiation is a paper tiger, that doesn't work.

D) Other evidence or arguments not based on voodoo.

We use many metaphors subconsciously in our language every day. Particularly, we often mention the chronological order of events in terms of spatial directions such as 'before' and 'after', which means 'front' and 'back' respectively. Since 'before' always means 'earlier' and 'after' always means 'later' in many languages, humans are more inclined to picture events within the order from the 'back' future to the 'front' past than the opposite way. Namely,

• √ (back) future --> present --> past (front)
• × (back) past --> present --> future (front)

I will justify my view in terms of primitive intuition and everyday language use:

First, many words related to earlier time have roots related to the original meaning of 'front'. Notice that the word 'past' itself looks like the past participle (e.g. done) of the verb 'pass', which means to move an object through a spot. Imagine a race of sprint: if sprinter A is in front of B and running at the same speed of B, A will reach to and pass by the finish line earlier than B will. This is illustrated by the following:

• (start) >-- B ---- A -- | --> (finish)
• (start) >-- B -- | -- A --> (finish)

If a running track, sprinters and the finish line are analogous to a timeline, single moments and the moment of present respectively, we can see that earlier moments with smaller numbers are 'in front of' later moments with bigger numbers because an earlier moment will ‘reach to’ and 'pass by' the moment of present earlier than a later moment will do (sounds like a tautology, doesn't it?). Thus, humans naturally establish time models where the past is placed 'in front of' the future. As a result, historians practically record moments once they pass by the moment of present, so earlier moments are naturally arranged in front of later ones in a chronicle.

Second, my understanding of time fits the primitive notion of speed quite well. Remember that the speed of an object is defined to be the ratio of the distance over which the object moves to the duration of time taken by the object. Namely,

• Speed = Distance / Time

Since the faster object will eventually be in front of the slower one, the faster object takes less time to travel over a certain distance. Imagine we are doing a task, and a supervisor is inspecting our progress. The supervisor can record the time taken by each of us to finish the task and then arranges these numbers in the order of speed.

• (slow) ∞ >-- 3 -- 2 --1 --> 0 (fast)

If I am the one in rank 2 and I finish (present tense) the task now, the person in rank 1 'finished' (past tense) the task earlier in 'advance' and the person in rank 3 is left 'behind' and 'will finish' (future tense) the task later. Compare this picture to the picture of the sprint race discussed in the first paragraph, they are identical. Therefore, events occurring in the past are 'in front of' events occurring in the future even in the sense of spatial progression: we walk to the front in the future, but we are left behind the people already there.

Last, since I am a native Chinese speaker, I feel that my understanding of time perfectly fits everyday Chinese due to my relativistic view of spacetime. In Chinese, we have the words '过去' (past) and ‘未来’ (future). Literally, '过' means 'pass', '去' means 'go', '未' means 'not' and '来' means 'come'. Both '过去' and '未来' give a figurative image of time evolution of events:

• (后, back) 'not come yet'--> border checkpoint --> 'pass and go' (先, front)

Border officers met visitors who passed and went to the front, but they will meet visitors who will come from the back. Giving more examples in Chinese, some pairs of antonyms like '祖先' (ancestor) and '后裔' (descendant) carry the meaning that 'front' people were born earlier. The pair like '先进' (advanced) and '落后' (backward) carry the meaning that 'front' thinkers accept innovative or revolutionary notions earlier.

However, I observe that some phrases like 'go back to the past' and 'look forward to the future' sound more natural in many English ears than the opposite way. I am glad to take any valuable input and open to change my current view to any degree.

EDIT: I found that there are some disagreements of understandings of terms we used in our comments. I'll put my own below for everyone to check if we're all on the same page.

Terms describing motion

• Space is where an object occupies.
• Time is an action governing the motion of objects.
• Clock is a measurement of time.
• Event is an occurrence, a frame of animation.
• Chronological order is the direction of evolution of events.

Terms describing orientation

• Front is the direction an observer faces.
• Back is the inverse direction of front.

Terms describing literary devices

• Metaphor/Analogy is a mapping from a source image to a target image.
• Source image is the denotative, literal, and explicit meaning of a word.
• Target image is the connotative, figurative, and implicit meaning of a word.

Many people also mixed up the notion of chronological order with the metaphorical use of orientation word. I claimed nothing about the reversibility of evolution of events, which is the chronological order. What I really claimed in the title was which of the followings is more preferred and used often in many cultures:

• (front) past <-- present <-- future (back)
• (back) past --> present --> future (front)

No matter which one we prefer, the chronological order is, by definition, always

• past --> present --> future

This has been on my mind a lot lately as I’ve been fixated on European folklore. And I don’t mean this in a “love thou neighbor way”, let me just preface that before I get into my point.

I can pretty confidently say I’m more left leaning but I’m not really in support of how migration is being handled in Europe. On that note though it seems a lot of (not all or even the majority) of the anti immigration sentiment is rooted in wanting to keep European culture “pure” of middle eastern culture.

That simply doesnt make sense though since so much of European culture is a direct result of middle eastern influence. I often see white supremacist claim to be purist in the name of Christianity but how can you claim to love your culture so much to the point of hating middle eastern cultures when your religion is from and created by the people you claim to hate. How can you have a distain for brown people and their culture when you worship a brown man as the son of god.

Overall I just feel like I’d have a lot more respect for these people if they truly did only accept their own culture. Like if a white supremacist only followed the same old Celtic religions his forefathers did, and condemned Christianity as a middle eastern religion then I feel like I’d have to have to have some level of respect for his dedication. But instead they accept one of if not the biggest cultural colonizations of Europe. And by far the most successful while claiming to hate other forms of said culture.

I am of the viewpoint that there should be a very basic minimum test implemented on parents to permit the biological conception of a child.

We have adoption test - which check for home suitability, criminal background, and financial capability to ensure that the adoptive parents meet a certain threshold.

I believe a similar concept could be applied. To be clear, this wouldn’t be designed to eliminate 50% of potential parents, but be a low bar litmus test that would really only be flagged in extreme cases where these parents would likely be terrible to start (for example a person charged with pedophilia or an unemployed couple with a mountain of debt).

The biggest issue obviously would be enforcement and what would happen in the result of “accidents.” Yes, I do think that this would be difficult, but some combination of of automatic child monitoring and potential threat of child protection services (until they can prove they pass the litmus test) would be enough of a nuisance in place to deter bad actors.

I am not Indian nor do I seek to say there are not serious problems in India. Just that it seems a lot of criticism is based on prejudice.

We’ve all seen the videos of YouTubers travelling to India to comment on how bad it is, taking videos of garbage, unhygienic street food stalls or worse.

However the amount of negative focus India gets to me seems disproportionate.

Yet India rarely starts wars of aggression, immigrants from there to the west are overwhelmingly legal and it is a relatively free nation for the region.

Brazil has slums like India does, large parts of the world have worse poverty, the murder rate is higher in America and yet people feel comfortable using racial slurs like ‘Pajeet’ for Indians that they would never use for other nations or ethnic groups.

Not to mention people judging strange (local not national) Indian festivals or beliefs by Abrahamic religion standards as gross or disgusting yet excusing local weird traditions (like poop disc throwing in rural America) as whimsical.

Is the level of critisim of India justified? Or is this as I suspect a racism which ha a become acceptable?

He may be THE richest person in the world, but I'm genuinely sick of him getting ALL the hate for his money.

He owns Tesla, twitter and spacex to name a few, which don't directly affect our lives at all.

I don't understand why none of the hate are going towards these massive corporations and billionaires that own all the supermarkets, and oil companies that price gouge and DIRECTLY interfere with our QOL.

Especially considering "hoarding wealth" doesn't matter in this economy, we Arnt on the gold standard anymore and our money is literally fake. We should be focusing on the grocery and oil CEOs that directly ruin our lives, force them to drop their prices to a reasonable amount, then we won't have to raise minimum wage, which won't fuck up inflation, especially since less than 1% of the US is on federal minimum wage anyway.

I get that Elon is a fuckwit and all but come on he's the least of our concerns 😭

EDIT: I am in no way an Elon supporter, or support any billionaire.

EDIT: Please don't feel attacked. It is simply a neutral discussion. I am also gay myself and I don't mind discussing the nature of my own sexual orientation. If you feel offended or think this topic isn't important, I'm sorry, but please extend the respect that people should show one another.

If you're willing to change my views with reasoned discussion, I'd be genuinely glad. I appreciate people who are willing to examine ideas openly and explore every perspective.

EDIT2: "Deviation" simply describes a difference or a variation from the norm; it does not, by itself, imply that something is good or bad.

EDIT5: Someone recommend me "diverge" is a better word here. (I am not native speaker, so I am sorry if deviation sounds offensive, I mean no harm anyway)

Hi everyone. I am not a native English speaker, so if my words are not accurate, I apologize in advance.

First of all, I am a gay man. I am not ashamed of it. I simply feel neutral about it. I don't have any intention of trying to become straight as I believe that's impossible.

Second, I am atheist. So this post is not about labelling homosexuality as a sin.

I believe the reason homosexuality is a deviation is this: If homosexuality were a normal developmental sexual orientation, then within the gay community, the number of people who are attracted to each other and can pair up should be roughly balanced, allowing for natural pairing. However, based on my personal experience as a gay man, I have observed that the majority of gay men tend to be more feminine. In fact, when someone says they are gay, it is usually not surprising because it is often observable — the so-called "gaydar."

But what I have found — and this is an undeniable fact — is that most gay men are generally more attracted to masculine, straight-acting men rather than feminine ones. As a result, in the gay world, it is more difficult to achieve the kind of balanced 50-50 pairing that is common in the heterosexual world.

EDIT3:

In movies they often choose straight men to play gay characters. Both Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer are straight men in real life.

In dating apps, a lot of gay men saying they are NOT into feminine men, but you rarely see people saying they are NOT into masculine men.

On gay forums like LPSG, the guys who are praised and desired by many gay men are usually masculine looking, straight acting men, not feminine men.)

EDIT4:

"Why do you believe this?"

Because if homosexuality is norm, not deviation, then gay men should be mutually attracted to each other. In terms of numbers, there should be a balance. But gay men are usually attracted to masculine traits which are found in heterosexual men and a minority of gay men. This leads to an imbalance of pairing in the gay community.

From a scientific and objective perspective, the attraction between men and women exists primarily for the purpose of reproducing the next generation. Although this may sound like the story of Adam and Eve, it is indeed a fundamental requirement of natural reproduction. Without attraction, there would be no reproduction. In contrast, same-sex attraction does not lead to reproduction. I know that technology now makes it possible, but that is irrelevant to the discussion of sexual orientation itself.

EDIT6:

A comment asking:"Is there some person out there arguing being gay is the default? Thats the opposite of your view, correct?"

Yes, default is a better word than the norm or normal. If you are born a male or female, it is a default setting that you should be attracted to the opposite sex. The sexual attraction serves a purpose of reproduction. Homosexuals don't lead to reproduction. That's why I think homosexual is a diverge, deviation.

Note: Although scientists have not yet fully explained the causes of homosexuality, one of the leading theories is the prenatal hormone theory. It suggests that gay men may have been exposed to lower levels of androgens (male hormones) during fetal velopment in the womb, while lesbians may have been exposed to higher levels of androgens. This could explian why many gay men tend to exhibit more feminine traits.

Everyone is still talking about lines on a map, but this war ended the moment Ukraine's demographic foundation collapsed. ​Let's be real about what's left on the ground. Millions of women and kids packed up and left for Europe, and they aren't coming back. Add the staggering number of men lost, and the actual human engine of the country is gone. You can't rebuild an economy, run a society, or sustain a nation when the people simply aren't there anymore. ​The West keeps pretending that another aid package or a new weapons shipment is going to magically reverse a demographic ghost town. It won't. Russia has the strategic depth, the war economy, and the sheer human mass to outlast a country that's running out of citizens. ​We're just watching the slow motion aftermath of a foregone conclusion because nobody wants to admit the strategy failed now don't get me wrong I'm not russian or anything in fact I'm half Ukrainian but I just want people of reddit to realize this this was a war of attrition, and ukraine lost. ​Change my view because I genuinely want it to be changed even though I can't see anyone commencing me .