Gay, lesbian, etc. are sexualities, which has nothing specifically to do with gender per se. Gender is a performance we do based upon what our culture expects of us based on specific labels and (often physical) traits. Think “goth girl” or “punk” or something. When given a label like that, you probably thought of a specific set of physical traits and behaviors, including fashion, hairstyle, and makeup. That’s gender in a nutshell. Sexuality is more “if not attractive, then why x shaped?”

It gets complicated because people really like to put things into an either/or box when life is so much more than a or b. Originally, sexualities were defined as two states: heterosexual and homosexual. Hetero, meaning other, means an attraction to the other sex (generally thought of as the opposite sex/gender due to a lack of information on intersex folk and the aforementioned two boxes appeal in the human psyche). And the opposite would be homosexual - an attraction to people of the same sex. But this is an elementary level of understanding, like when we teach kids about the 3 states of matter and leave out things like plasma.

Because people have preferences and all straight men aren’t attracted to 100% of women, and then there’s lesbians and gay men and bisexuals and then there’s how gender presentation plays into our attraction like with butch vs femme lesbians or how men and women both can appreciate a girl who could bench press them. And then some people are into femboys and women only while some are into men that belong in the Scottish Highlands wearing kilts and claymores and women who own fainting couches and ball gowns and wouldn’t even glance at anything outside of those 2 groups, and then some people are only attracted to specific body parts (dick or pussy) but are less strict on who those parts are attached to, and then there’s the people who don’t care about anything beyond personality, and then…the list goes on and on.

And then it gets even more complicated when you start talking about romantic attraction, because that’s entirely its own spectrum as well. People can be romantically attracted to the same or different genders compared to sexual attraction. Some people are sexually attracted to multiple genders but could only see themselves dating one specific gender, some people experience no romantic attraction at all or no sexual attraction, or even both together. The human brain is a massive mess and there’s simply no way to easily quantify the human experience - if we even can at all. I saw a post recently that went something like “the brain is 3lbs of mostly fat puppeting a meat suit by using less electricity than a light bulb, and if it can hallucinate algebra into existence then I’m fully willing to believe that it’s also capable of identifying its own gender” and I think that sums it up pretty nicely.

They mistook your comment as disagreeing with their take on how there are real victims of Grok’s porn and CSAM and saying that they themselves were supporting CSAM, rather than saying that you agree and were saying Sweeney is supporting CSAM.

You know those signs at roller coasters that say “you must be this tall to ride”? The US is that, except the sign says “you must be this rich to play”.

I was literally just about to post this:

Multiple forms of life evolve to fill an extent niche.

Everybody and their mother will have recommendations on their favorite flavor of Linux, but as somebody else about to make the switch with similar priorities as you, I’d suggest also taking a look at Bazzite. It’s built on the same distro as the SteamOS and comes in at least two flavors for what your use case is. One of its selling points is that it’s an “immutable” version of Linux, which means that it’s a lot harder to accidentally break it as a new user.

Netanyahu actually would’ve been another good comparison.

My comment wasn’t a “Russia = bad” deflection, but a comment about world leaders’ response to the invasion of Ukraine and what I expect their response to the continuing aggression of the Trump regime to be: strongly worded letters and not much else.

Also, let’s get our facts straight on the genocide in Palestine. The US hasn’t put any boots on the ground yet, despite Trump’s promises from earlier in the year. As of the time that I’m writing this, the US is enabling the genocide but not an active participant. That could change tomorrow or may have already changed, but we don’t need to make things up about the government when there’s already so many evils to point at. They’re already war criminals, we wouldn’t want them to get off on account of making false accusations.

I haven’t watched the Simpsons in over a decade so I don’t get the reference, but my point was the similarity between the world’s response to the invasion of Ukraine and the likely response to continuing US aggression.

A lot of strongly worded letters and not much else is what I expect.

What’s it going to take to truly stop Russia?

Don’t forget about the Sword of Damocles that is the lack of social safety nets. Also, political ignorance is a feature, not a bug in our political system. A quarter of the American population would kill the rest because they think the regime is “hurting the right kind of people” and not anybody that they care about. This also includes the minorities who will soon learn that being “one of the good ones” just means that they go to the showers later rather than sooner.

I’ve seen one of these talked about before, and the mechanism seemed to be in that one that there’s a gene in our DNA that triggers us to grow new teeth (that’s how we replace our baby teeth with adult teeth), but that that gene turns off after we grow in our set of adult teeth. It’s apparently the same gene that allows sharks to grow new teeth. What the drug does is it turns that gene back on, allowing us to grow new teeth to replace lost ones.

This might not be the same study though, as I’ve also seen one previously years ago that was about a drug that turned on a gene in our teeth to allow them to repair the enamel in them and fill in cavities by putting biodegradable gauze soaked in the drug inside a cavity and letting the tooth do the rest.

When you ask a Mechanicus player what their type is: 316 stainless.

My problem is that I love the state/region I live in, but large swathes of the rest of the country are a risk to my life and my age, skills, and minority status don’t make me appealing from an immigration standpoint, let alone that many places have just as much of an issue with people like me as the Republicans do.

The thing is that it would take an extremist left wing government to bring it back to some level of normality. FDR was a Democratic Socialist (officially), and the New Deal was one of the best improvements for the country we’ve ever had (minus all the blatant racism and destruction of minority communities that the highway projects caused). It was American socialists and anarchists who fought a bloody struggle that won the world the 40 hour work week and weekends. And even that was merely considered a stepping stone on the path to a 20 hour work week. The Overton Window has been pushed so far to the right that we’ve forgotten what it truly looks like to have 2 sides in the government.

The bigger and more intrusive screens have gotten, the more sales of new cars have flagged. People are sick of them, and lawmakers are starting to catch up on regulating physical controls back into vehicles.

The last time I bought a car one of my stipulations was a car no newer than 2016 because that was the last year that RAV4s had the small screens in the middle of the dashboard instead of mounted practically on the windshield, and the guy at the dealership that I talked to said that practically everybody who came in looking to buy a car had similar sentiments. People generally hate the big, intrusive screens, it’s just that car makers aren’t making any other options and then claim that that’s what people want.

I’d argue that that’s probably already the case. Sunk cost fallacy at play. Your posts, comments, blocks and stuff don’t follow you from one account to another.

You beat me to it. I was gonna say “non-political” means “make it harder to spot and avoid the Republicans”.

Freud would’ve creamed his pants were he still alive.

That just means that you aren’t a fossil (yet). Give it a century or two.

Isn’t cough medicine more cost effective per alcohol percentage? That’s what I remember the alcoholics drinking when I was younger.

And Republicans claim that the US is a Christian nation all the time, despite half the Founding Fathers being either atheists or at least agnostic and specifically and expressly stating that the US is not beholden to any one religion.

I am in no way defending Putin or Stalin, but just because he claims to be honoring a former leader doesn’t mean that he actually is. So long as it suits the propaganda narrative, people like him, the Republicans, and Israel will claim whatever they want about history.