Worked security at a hospital, and was responsible for signing corpses over to the funeral homes. One week, there was a car wreck in a nearby small town- a pickup truck flipped and rolled with five or six teenagers in the back. I spent the whole night rolling them out of the freezer and passing them off to various funeral homes.

No one I fought with was helping kill brown kids either. You could argue that we were indirectly helping, since we were fighting for a country that was also sometimes bombing areas with civilians. If that’s how you would like to approach this, then everyone helped.

If you’ve worked in retail then you’ve sold goods to soldiers, if you work in agriculture then you’ve fed them, and if you’re a teacher then you educated them. Some small fraction of those soldiers went on to bomb kids somewhere.

If you want to criticize the US policy of invading other countries on a pretext and then propping up governments that do what we want, go ahead. I’m right there with you. If you want to live in a fantasy where all soldiers are merciless baby-killers, I guess you can do that, but that’s where we part ways.

Soldiers are individuals, and they sign up for all sorts of reasons. A very common reason is an education that gives them a better shot at a high paying job so that they can care for their family or start one. Is it fucked that people feel the need to do that? Sure. Would it be great if there was a straight forward way for a person with no resources to get an education and a better job? Yes.

But currently, we’re in an environment where risking your life to fight for your country in an unjust war is the best option some people have. And pretending that the reason they do it is because they’re Bad People doesn’t help solve the problem.

None of the veterans I know killed any brown kids. The people we shot were generally either shooting at us, or had just set off an IED with a car battery. Most of our interactions with kids involved someone getting in trouble for giving away MREs to the kids that would walk up to the vehicle.

Women are you doing the same thing for me

If you’re the smartest person in the room, then you’re in the wrong room.

My planes had groups, but I don’t think they were grouped by seat.

Burn the heretic.

Ah yeah, true. Even with minor exceptions, I still feel like it could be done better. I’m just bitter because I had to take four different planes this week.

That’s the problem with society- all the damn people. *Shakes fist at cloud*.

Load the goddamn plane by column, window seats to aisle seats, grouped by odd/even seat numbers and make people line up largest seat number to smallest. It takes an extra five minutes before you board the plane and saves you twenty or thirty. It wouldn’t even cost you the five if it was the standard.

No worries. I feel like you probably do have to be a masochist to consume Tate media of any type, so it still works.

This is a pattern I’ve seen repeatedly.

Guys find themselves desperate to get laid, and that desperation comes across in all of their interactions with women, who don’t like feeling that they’re being treated like a vending machine, which leads to the guy being rejected for reasons that he doesn’t entirely understand.

He gets in a relationship with someone, finally, and everything is great for a while. Then he realizes that women are talking and flirting with him more than they ever have before, and isn’t sure why, but he enjoys it. He doesn’t understand that, because he is in a relationship, he has stopped being desperate and weird, and is now actually having real conversations with women about mutually interesting topics.

Surrounded by women that are (seemingly) available, he either breaks up with his SO, asks for some sort of open arrangement, or tries to cheat. Unfortunately, for reasons that he still doesn’t understand, as soon as he’s available for sex, women start being turned off by him again (if not to quite the degree they were before) and, again, he finds it difficult to get laid.

From here, guys often fall into some incel-style evolutionary psychology explanation for things, regularly cheat on everyone that they’re with, or gradually becomes aware of the pattern.

If they become aware of the pattern, they can begin to manage it and reduce the desperate, salesman vibe that they give off. As they become more confident and relaxed, it becomes clear to women that they’re perfectly comfortable going home alone or just being friends, which allows them to have more meaningful relationships and, incidentally, more sex with people they like.

Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED Talk on the origin and mating behavior of the involuntarily celibate.

Did you mean misogyny?

Fair. She works in a place that I’ve been a few times and I have said hello once or twice.

I can’t speak to how common this is, or if overall rates have declined, but I still do it. There are a lot of people in the comments who are worried about coming off as a creep, and I’m sure a lot of guys do come off that way, but I don’t think it’s that hard to hit on someone in a non-creepy way. I asked a woman out last week like so-

Me: “Hey, sorry if this is abrupt but would you like to have lunch or a coffee sometime?”
Her: “Yeah! That sounds like fun”
Me: “Cool, let me give you my number…”
Me (after chatting a bit): “Sorry for hitting on you out of the blue.”
Her: “It’s totally fine!”

Things to note:

1. I gave her my number instead of asking for hers so that she could turn me away by just not texting me.
2. I was relaxed and willing to joke about my abrupt approach.
3. I’m not exceedingly handsome, but not particularly ugly either.
4. I’m ready to exit the conversation politely and humorously if she turns me down.
5. We had talked briefly a few times prior to my approaching her.

Never went to public or private school until university.

“Yes I’m weird, and I should be. Jesus didn’t tell us to be of the world, he only told us to be in the world. We don’t conform to that world, and we never will. Don’t hide your light under that bushel, but stand against the darkness that threatens to creep in. Stand against the devil and his minions. Stand against transexuals, leftists, and the woke mob. Stand against the abortionists, the evolutionists, and the false god of science. And when you do, every brother and sister here will stand with you. And all God’s people say-” [crowd] ‘Amen!’.

A preview of things to come. Please excuse me while I go rinse my brain out.

When I deconverted, I found it to be really hard to get past the fear. The thing that finally did it for me was the idea that a truly benevolent God wouldn’t have an issue with inquiry, and a malevolent God wasn’t one I wanted to follow. Fear is definitely a factor that keeps people in the church.

There was a time when I thought that the arrival of easy global communication and information would lead to the decline of religion, but I don’t anymore. Christianity may have declined to some extent, but a lot of the people leaving the church(s) have just replaced it with vague spirituality, homebrew beliefs, or other looser faiths.

These days I’m much more inclined to take seriously the idea that supernatural belief is instinctual. Materialist atheism will, unfortunately, probably remain a fringe belief.