I just want to say, you’ll be much better off if you forget about the points and try to ignore them. Taking all this to heart with such intensity will only stress you, since you can’t decide how others perceive you and your takes.

Just chill, participate and enjoy. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Now that the election is out of the way, maybe I can continue talking about this. I held my tongue during the past months, but I think now is a good time to think about this result.

While the result is unfortunate and disappointing, there are sides to it that aren’t all that bad. They pushed towards the right, pandering, and now the voters told them that this isn’t a winning strategy. I think it helps setting them straight for the future.

I think you put it very aptly. Of course it would’ve been best if Harris had won, but at least now we can think about it from a neutral perspective: Had she won despite all the right-pandering and genocide-enabling stances, it would either send the message that pandering to the right works, and the progressives are, indeed, either too small a group to listen to in the future too, or too much of pussies to listen to in the future, too — they’ll toe the line no matter what kind of shitty positions you take.

At least now they know that a change is needed. It’s almost unthinkable to lose to such a weird fascist populist that barely behaves cohesively. They did, by ignoring the progressives. That means something. At least it ought to.

Things don’t often change unless things hurt. If doing shitty things keeps working, nothing changes. But when things hurt, it opens some eyes at least. Forces re-evaluation on everyone’s part.

But that being said, this fucking sucks. Despite all the reasoning we can do to make it feel a bit better, this really should not have happened.

This is funnily something actually taught at (at least some) Russian troll farms. Confuse the conversations and revert to thin, barely applicable accusations of logical fallacies or other kinds of “rules” of supposedly civil discussion. But this certain sense of “civil discussion” where some misguided sense of self-perceived (and sadly, almost always unfounded) logical superiority prompts one to be as confusing as this comment here, claiming to have a point, which the other supposedly does not, while elevating the fact that they themselves already claimed not to have found a source for their outlandish and confusing prior claim, to be some sort of bonus point to “win” the argument with. All this, without a hint of self-consciousness or admittance that their very original comment was equally or more pointless, if this is how points would be decided according to their view. And the importance put in virtual brownie points that prompts them to go to the trouble of amending their initial, ill-received comment to with an edit explicitly stating that they laugh at the downvoters, while being obviously hurt and unnecessarily heavily affected by it…

It’s so weirdly confusing and recognizable that this must be a cultural thing. A long time ago I knew some academics/students from Russia, and they all seemed similarly interested in some logical “winning” even in just normal discussions, in this certain way that is just uncanny. Self-importance and the persistence with misguided logical superiority despite having clearly themselves made an oopsie in the first place, seems to be something of a cultural difference in this specific flavor.

Of course this is done everywhere, the whole self-importance and all (as demonstrated by yours truly!), but not in this one specific uncanny way.

Well, you actually begin with a good example of another outlandish claim. They are right? I don’t suppose you can back that up? If not, that’s just an unbacked claim. Outlandish, of course, is subjective, but I’d say it sure is just that.

The one you claim is outlandish, is, indeed, outlandish. I agree with your point that this is what the ruling class would do, if we remove this thought experiment from any context and real-life bounds. They 100% would. If they knew they’d get away with it.

I don’t believe they would, in reality, though, get away with it.

So while that point is logical in a detached sense, it still is as outlandish as everything else.

Edit: What’s up with this .ee instance by the way? Has anyone else noticed that a lot of commenters and comments like this happen to be from there? Contrarians, completely weird takes, oddly common “I’m a leftist, BUT…” comments, and a lot of third party voters and enthusiasts. I’ve noted it earlier but this finally made it hit. Does anyone know some context that they’d have time and energy to share?

Anecdotal, and not a woman personally, but I’ve had a similar experience from days long gone; ultimately we ended up trying out different toys and the sucking sort of vibrator with lower settings was what got her past the “block”, but it was via masturbation. We’d only move it to our together time after she got comfortable with the sensation and desensitized, as she described it. In our part of the world the main brand name for this kind of toy was “satisfyer”, not sure if that is global though.

After a while it all just clicked and it became something more familiar to me too, with fingers and tongue (though she did still prefer sucking over licking, which for me as a young man back then was new, but very much a priceless enlightenment and a much appreciated skill I later had time to hone more) ultimately joining in and it all becoming something more familiar to my less experienced younger self.

What I’ve learnt since though, is that everyone is so wildly different, that just simply masturbating together, or learning to, if the other party/parties aren’t experienced there, has been key to lasting mutual satisfaction. And people and their needs/wants change over time, that’s also important to keep in mind. And masturbation is the thing that naturally reflects that. Just talk, talk, talk, and then experiment. Try and keep an open mind, and try to be accommodating. Change and new things take time. Try your best not to get frustrated or load too much expectations into the process. And try and understand the other party/parties are the ones having a harder time coming to terms with the fact that they could not meet your initial expectations. They have a lot of pressure due to this, though it’ll ultimately be mutually beneficial.

Also I’ve noted that it’s so easy to fall prey to thinking that you’re the one giving or somehow “improving” their life here, but this is, in fact, your need that needs to get satisfied. You want her to feel things she does not currently. It’s not a bad thing, this is how life is when you share it with someone, but do not think you are being the giving party here. This is your need, which she either chooses to accommodate and figure out together, or not. And you might best start accepting that this experiment might not lead anywhere, and that you might have to change your expectations accordingly.

I’m boosting this and the screenshots too, but just thought I’d point out for quick scrollers that it does not seem as dramatic as this comment initially lets you believe.

I mean it’s awkward, but just seems more like your usual social awkwardness/incompetence than malicious behavior as such.

Now hold on a moment, I think we need to at least discuss this whole removing France thing further…

I think most clients should implement some kind of logic to remove bot comments form the comment counts. AFAIK, lemmy already has a feature to distinguish bots(?), so it should probably should be possible to at least suggest some easy enough api for that if none exist currently.

This is severely disturbing and dystopian, I can not believe we are just letting all this happen, the same as with Ukraine.

Earlier I was talking with my partner about these things from my safe home, far removed from these situations, and we realized this must be how the original nazis happened. It had puzzled us both, and many we had talked with in the past, how it was even possible to come to be.

I guess now we know. This is how it comes to be.

Feels so powerless and diminishing, but at the same time very human. Can’t realistically do more than vote locally when we can, but that’s not going to help anyone right now, or realistically even in the short term of a few years…

It’s so heart-breaking, and it’s bizarre because we probably don’t even know a fraction of all of it…

I think you are (intentionally?) confusing the large gap and missing the nuance between raping, potentially even worse things as we’ve recently got more proof of, and acting goofy and awkward with greetings or whatever. Both can be described inappropriate, sure, but you have to realize there’s a long way between rape, pedophilia, and awkward greetings with kisses to forehead or whatever.

Update: It seems requesting a password change from support side toggles the flag and lets you start the game again.

Unsure if this works multiple times, but at least for me, it worked, and this was my first time this happened.

Worth a shot people! If you ever find yourself on a similar situation

I think we’ve already demonstrated our willingness to change, which is to say, we’ve already demonstrated how unwilling we are, as a whole, to change.

Isn’t much else to it. We will act too late, too little, and we will have some extremely hard times to endure at some point.

My only regret is that I will have brought children to this world to eat the consequences… 😩