Just passing through.

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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • Well, I think the deteriorating effect social media and the modern internet has on society affects all of us, whether we participate or not. Russians stole the 2016 election using the internet - it’s not like it didn’t affect people who didn’t use Facebook or Twitter.

    Of course there’s a lot of wonderful things as well. I use the internet all the time, obviously. But it would have been fascinating to see what the world would have looked like if the Internet had remained much more primitive and run largely by enthusiastic individuals.








  • The left didn’t get a majority, so it’s just parliamentary politics. It’s a bit unusual for France where the biggest party tends to form a government, but that’s a political norm we would have been happy to see broken had the Rassemblement national done as well as everyone expected it to.

    What is more problematic is that the Cabinet is not allowed to vote in parliamentary matters, which Macron needed in order to marginalize the left. So he fired his Cabinet, so that they formally returned to parliament and could vote. The problem is, of course, that they don’t have any replacements, and their roles need to be filled. So now they’re voting in parlament while continuing their duties, giving the sleezebag Gabriel Attal the title “Outgoing Prime Minister Gabriel Attal”, but not changing anything of substance.

    It’s not constitutional, but the courts let it slide, because they’re as terrified of the French left as Hindenburg was of the Social Democrats.


  • Fucking Macron.

    He thinks he’s a stronghold against polarization. Well, this shit is why people flee to the far right and to the far left.

    And treating the French left as a huge threat is plain bullshit. There are two groups who could legitimately feel threatened by the French left - billionaires, who would have to pay taxes to fund the public sector, and the French left itself, which is too incompetent to ever cooperate and would shoot itself in the foot within weeks.

    Meanwhile, Macron keeps destroying the country while promoting himself as the second coming of centrist Christ. A conservative by any other name.


  • Yeah, it’s an important and challenging job, and I have several friends who are psychologist.

    It is, however, a bit of a stereotype that a lot of people who choose to become psychologists are often to some degree themselves viable clients. Perhaps wanting to understand themselves is a motivation to study it in the first place.

    They can still do an amazing job, but I think a lot of psychologist find themselves in a Pagliacci situation where they can help anyone but themselves.



  • A friend of mine keeps doing this. He’ll pretend to be an expert of fucking anything, and you can generally tell immediately that he doesn’t know shit. When he goes on about things that I actually do know things about it’s unbearable, and of course his ego is too fragile to handle being told he’s wrong.

    We have a lot of impressive common friends with awesome general knowledge, and I frequently wonder how the hell we have the patience to keep him around. My general knowledge is shite, but at least I’m quite open about being ignorant.

    He’s hyper sensitive about social situations, yet introducing him to new people is almost always embarrassing.

    Perhaps unsurprisingly, he is a professional psychologist.



  • I think you have a point, and it is indeed something different - if two people live together and simply have different preferences or care about different things, it’ll of course lead to some friction.

    I think this goes both ways in most relationships. I keep bothering my girlfriend about the bathroom sink and the office desk we share; she complains about me keeping half dirty (half clean) clothes in a pile in the bedroom. That’s not what it’s about, though I think it can get easily confused.

    It’s more about the “I don’t know how to use the washing machine/book bus tickets/change bags in the vacuum cleaner/cook a pie/change bedsheets/clean the toilet/make a vinegrette/change diapers/whatever”, where instead of an emphasis on learning the skill it’s only left to the other person.

    It’s not all men, but it is common. I think it’s a systematic issue that men don’t carry the full responsibility for. They’re raised by mothers who do everything for them, and while their sisters are taught how to take care of themselves they are simply left to “be boys”. And then they go out in the world and find a woman who can effectively replace their mothers.

    It’s the kind of guys who move away from home but keep going back to their mothers whenever they need laundry done.


  • Yeah, I kind of agree. Toxic masculinity is a thing, but it doesn’t mean all masculinity is automatically toxic.

    Then again, usually when I’m hanging out with guys and the testosterone level runs a bit high, someone will crack a joke about it and we’ll laugh at ourselves.

    I think having a fragile ego and not being able to joke about yourself and/or your masculinity probably does make it on in the toxic list.


  • When we have female friends in common and suddenly it turns out they want to fuck her and they assume I’m only hanging out with her because I want to as well.

    I have never had any men brag to me about their sexual encounters; generally the people I end up hanging out with don’t make sexist comments about women in public or anything like that. But this bullshit I’ve experienced on numerous occasions.

    I guess it’s not really a “toxic trait” as much as “being toxic as fuck”.