Oh I was offering that as supporting evidence for your point lol. There’s roughly nothing (besides reason and compassion) these folks can shit out of their mouths that will surprise me anymore.

RFK Jr., noted brainworm host and multi talented repeater and innovator of quackery, said that shit within the last 24 hours lol

In the scenario I described above, congrats, you now stick out like a sore thumb as traffic flows around you, and you need to hope or pray that everyone coming up behind you is alert. Police can pull you for causing a hazard, and plus you just radiate “I have something to hide” energy. Simply driving slower isn’t some magic solution when no one else joins you.

Most drivers with experience can tell by how a road is constructed (materials, bank angles on curves, etc.) roughly how fast they can safely go, and there’s a subconscious mental tug to get up to that speed. Whether you personally are impacted by that or not, it’s a well-known phenomena.

When everyone on the road, most far less thoughtful than yourself, are experiencing that mental tug, traffic moves naturally faster than the posted speed. And then that gives probable cause for our racist police to pick and choose who to fuck up.

I have lived in places where the speed limit is very obviously around 10 mph too low for the road’s engineering and surrounding environment, consistently. Consequently, there is truly no one during busy times doing the speed limit.

This gives police the ability to pull over anyone, at their discretion, with direct legal cause (not even the “immune from consequences in practice” kind). Even driving the speed limit creates a hazard and merits intervention according to the law.

The place I’m describing was very racist, driving while black was absolutely unofficially illegal, and this lets cops pick and choose in all the worst ways.

Be deeply suspicious of any law that is routinely broken by everyone for years with no change - it is to allow arbitrary, bigoted enforcement.

Great perspectives, thank you! Very informative and much more plausible than what I was saying.

Well thanks for the interesting perspective and I’m very glad to hear it wasn’t so one-sided everywhere, and that you’ve seen a lot more positives! Everything you said about causes of strife makes perfect sense to me and I would imagine those feature heavily for folks who try it out due to simple curiosity or pressure from a partner.

I would imagine, too, that sexual trends exhibit regionality and that they diffuse across regions over time and at uneven rates, much like any other cultural trend. Though of course a lot of cultural diffusion has gotten effectively instant thanks to tech - I remember “back in the day” you could travel from a (US) coast to the Midwest and find everyone basically 10-20 years behind cultural trends, from slang to hairstyles, to dress.

I wonder if relationships and dating and such, being a much slower process in general than changing styles of dress or speech, still have some of that interesting old-school slower diffusion, or more regional pockets anyway.

Anyway, enough baseless speculation from me - cheers and have a good one!

(Edit: I hope it didn’t sound like I’m calling your chosen romantic style itself a trend - I would never, when I call polyamory a “trend” I am referring exclusively to folks who did behave exactly as if it were any other fad that came and went, just with way heavier consequences)

Since you seem knowledgeable, maybe I’ll bug you about something I’ve wondered about?

Did you notice a significant (huge by my measure) increase in attempts at polyamory for a period of time? As in, that trend seemed to have almost a start and an end, and a real big swell in the middle. And if so, any comments on how that fits into your timeline overview above? Some of your thoughts sound like they may point to this but I certainly don’t want to put words in your mouth.

Anecdotally, it seems to me like I watched a huge chunk of my (significantly) younger sister’s generation get themselves into plural relationships, then realize after a year or two of various attempts (often including some serious abuse) that actually they didn’t like that idea at all.

And don’t get me wrong, I absolutely encourage people to try what they are curious about, it’s a tragedy to spend a life never exploring what one might like. But that phenomena with polyamory / plural relationships in particular stuck out to me, largely because many of the people I saw try it had never previously indicated even remote interest in similar, some behaved fairly jealously toward their partners actually. It felt like a strange societal motivation, some kind of soft cultural pressure among peers, to go for it. And I personally never witnessed a positive outcome, either (which is not me saying that no one should live that way if they enjoy it, or that no one can find it genuinely fulfilling, healthy, and preferable). And for those with clear gender lines in the plural relationships, it was always polygynous - never polyandrous (please let me know if those terms are offensive). Felt like weaponized sexual liberation, frankly, by horny dudes, but that’s me making some possibly unfair leaps and introducing my own bias into the interpretation.

I guess more than anything else I was just struck by what felt like a wave in popularity, followed by an accompanying wave of “oh, nah fuck that actually, forever”. Was interesting to watch. Any thoughts?

(Disclaimer: this can be a thorny topic, anyone should feel free to correct anything I’ve misrepresented, misunderstood, or just been unkind about, I’m not a jerk on purpose usually).

Retired corporate laptops ftw! I replaced some machines at my house with a pair of still-capable, well-built business-class Dell laptops for ~$80 each (via local classified ad). Running Bazzite on em.

Doesn’t help that the English adjective “stoic” is used to describe exactly that, usually with a very positive connotation, to boot.

Couldn’t agree more with you both though, in my experience Stoicism offers some of the most broadly-applicable pragmatic advice of all the thought traditions I’ve encountered (with shoutouts to a few others, Buddhism being one, parts of which add up to similar practical advice).

The misunderstanding of it is kind of a sad tragedy, given how many of us could benefit from the teachings. Plus it’s very secular (unless I misremember), which ought to make it more accessible. Bummer.

“oh that? Yeah that’s my poopin’ wedge, wanna take her for a spin?”

These are arguments to refuse censorship much harder, not to comply.

Really wish we would all shun this voluntary self-censoring of very mild words. Fuck the platforms and their algorithms and fuck the people who censor basic language.