Acebuckeye13 posted:

Woofer posted:

Maybe not direct trump coverage but people have been mainlining stupid poo poo news for the last 100 years it feels like. i see news networks fabricating a lot of bullshit or embellishing incredibly small poo poo just to keep up with the new demand for stupid news.* i do think that news addiction has become a real thing (or maybe it's officially an actual thing) and there will be side effects from people taking the needle out of their arms.

*the news has been sensationalized since OJ. but i think theyre going to have to amplify that in light of the last four years. they jsut won't have the crutch of trump hand delivering them the stupid poo poo.

mlmp08 posted:

Nah, it sucks.

https://mobile.twitter.com/rafaelshimunov/status/1334120757543243778

Riot Carol Danvers posted:

All these scumfucks need to be jailed for murder and incitement of violence but they never will be.



And this woman right here ran as a Democrat in the primaries. Get the gently caress out of here.

Milo and POTUS posted:

Yup.

There's also army and I think even coast guard but that one hasn't ever happened. Maybe army hasn't either

Milo and POTUS posted:

Surprising at all that reagan would give a poo poo about the grid

orange juche posted:

Nick Soapdish posted:

https://twitter.com/dwnews/status/1338307153816211456?s=20

Sure would be cool if the US did this so I could donate blood they don't want my blood since they have enough A+

Mr. Nice! posted:

Also, if you hadn't seen, the white house chief of security had to have his leg amputated due to covid complications and the family, much like mine, has had to use gofundme to pay the bills.

Wasabi the J posted:

Italy is the country that had a bridge fall because they used bootleg mafia concrete.

Spain is the country that had to hire the french to build their modern marvel bridge.

quote:

6 August 2018 . Following the explosion of a LPG tanker, the viaduct-bridge of the Casalecchio A1-A14 motorway junction collapses. One dead and 145 wounded.

9 March 2017. The collapse of the overpass on the A14 between Loreto and Ancona causes two deaths and two injuries, involving the cars below.

April 18, 2017. A viaduct of the Fossano ring road collapses, in the province of Cuneo. The structure was built in the nineties and inaugurated in 2000. Only by chance there were no victims: no one was passing above.

23 January 2017 . A bridge collapses in Calabria, the Fiumara Allaro, fortunately there is no victim.

October 28, 2016 . The Annone overpass collapses, in the province of Lecco, which passes over the “Valassina”, the SS 36 that connects Milan to the upper Brianza. The bridge collapses due to the passage of a truck of over 108 tons carrying steel coils: it crushes the Audi of Claudio Bertini, 68, who loses his life.

April 10, 2015 . Due to a landslide caused by bad weather, a pylon of the Himera viaduct on the A19 Palermo-Catania motorway collapses. There were no injuries.

25 December 2014 . The Scorciavacche viaduct on the Palermo-Agrigento state road yields. It was inaugurated on December 23rd. This accident did not involve vehicles and did not cause any harm to people.

July 7, 2014 . A section of the Petrulla viaduct collapses on the state road 626 between Ravanusa and Licata, in the province of Agrigento. Four people, including a pregnant woman, were slightly injured.

November 18, 2013 . In Sardinia there is a strong flood that causes the collapse of a bridge on the provincial road Oliena-Dorgali. A police officer dies and three of his colleagues are injured.

22 October 2013 . Due to a storm, in the night between the collapses the bridge in Carasco, in Liguria, on the Strula stream. The victims are two.

Wasabi the J posted:

man we got a bunch of goddamn succ-rear end Dems.

I had hoped a little, so I suppose that's what I get.

facialimpediment posted:

https://twitter.com/clarissaward/status/1340993392646483969?s=19

betaraywil posted:

Re:


May I present...

Reddit Weirdos and Porn: An post

We've come a long way from the days when the Weekend Web was a portal to places mortals feared to tread. These forums were exotic places with weird layouts, incomprehensible jargon, and totally alien worldviews. Now, of course the complete (Anglophone) human experience can be found, give or take, on Reddit (and maybe to get that last 8% of the human experience you still need to go to FetLife).

There are two main drivers of Anti-Porn Reddit's ideology. One of them is regular red-pill style toxic masculinity, but with Nazis who think that if they don't cum that much, the extra semen will make them more masculine. That's weird and all, but that's not what we're going to come across in this thread. (I'll link to this Slate piece from May by Kelsy Burke and this piece by Eleanor Janega about medieval antecedents for Nazi semen retention.)

What we're more likely to come across is a modern, mainstream, plausibly feminist strain of anti-pornography. Of course, anti-pornography sentiment has a robust history among feminists, and, well, yeah. The porn industry is terribly exploitative, especially of young female talent. There are labor issues galore, and even the recent history of the industry is filled with shady monopolies robbing performers with accounting practices as evil as anything you'll find in the mainstream entertainment industry.

You will see these critiques on anti-porn Reddit, but you'll see much more than that. Some of it is familiar, like pearl-clutching about how Only Fans "ruins" young women. But more often, the focus is on how pornography ruins men for their partners. "Pornsick" men lose interest in sex, fall into depression, and suffer erectile dysfunction. They can no longer experience arousal in the presence of mere human women. They are--over the long term--incapable of fidelity. Above all, consuming pornography is evidence of an undeniable addiction. There is a perpetual fog around mind of an addict (and on subs like Love After Porn, this is the only acceptable term; "my boyfriend" becomes "my addict" or "my SA"), and he lives a diminished shadow-life oriented entirely around getting his next fix. The damage is not only to his romantic relationship, but to his friendship, his parenting, and his career. Just like any other kind of addict, he will bankrupt his family to get his fix. If that sounds farfetched to anyone, the answer--still, now, in 2020--is "hey, look what Tiger Woods threw away."

The only way forward is to admit your addiction, declare your powerlessness, and try to rebuild. But once you come to terms with your addiction? Don't worry; there's a whole industry out there with products that will fix you and your marriage.

The Hook: Jesus and Memes
As with any toxic ideology, people don't come to Anti-Porn for the catastrophic thinking and the psychological snake oil. At least not at first.

There are many feeder communities--Relationships and RelationshipAdvice are two of them!--but for this post I'm going to focus on ChristianMarriage and FemaleDatingStrategy, since they represent something of a complete spectrum of anti-sex ideologies. ChristianMarriage is basically Relationships but for evangelical Christians (see, any romantic relationship is either a marriage or a betrothal for marriage), while FemaleDatingStrategy looks at the toxic, misogynist gender essentialism of MRA/PUA/RedPill culture and says "yes, that's more or less correct, but how can I make it work for me?"

I don't recommend going to ChristianMarriage. It is a sad place, filled with children who got married to other children and don't understand why the resulting marriage is not as fulfilling as their pastors led them to believe it would be. (Except when it's adults who got married to children or vice-versa wondering the same thing.) CM posters (broadly speaking) believe that they are practicing radical monogamy, and more importantly that their community is defined against society at large by that radical monogamy. (I mean, yeah, there's that Jesus guy, but true Christianity only comes from keeping yourself pure for your husband.) Pornography obviously has no place in such a worldview, and consuming it is an act of infidelity, not only against the wife and the marriage, but against the entire moral order that has defined the spouses' lives to this point. What can one possibly do after such a betrayal? Pray, forgive, demand accountability, and check out LoveAfterPorn (a support sub for "survivors" of addicted partners, modeled loosely on Al-Anon).

FemaleDatingStrategy brings people in in a more familiar way: Memes. There are lots of tweets about women suffering because they put up with bullshit from undeserving men. Lots of men being ogres. There's specialized terminology to restrict the reader's imaginary and make her incomprehensible to others (a woman who desires male attention is a "pickme" or "Pickmeisha"; a lovely man is a "scrote") some of it borrowed from RedPill culture (lvm = low value male, you get the idea). The "strategy" is that you can work odious stereotypes to present as a High Value Female and to sort out Low (or No) Value Males. Porn is evil and bad because the industry is exploitative (and--showing the hand a bit--so is basically all kink). But FDS is in perfect accord with CM, because the real problem with porn is that it's cheating. Infidelity is one of the clearest signs of a low value--it would take a real pickme to put up with a cheating scrote! And again, even if you don't think porn is infidelity per se, it's a warning sign of sex addiction, which leads inevitably to infidelity. You can get everything you need here, but you might want to check out LoveAfterPorn!

(Let's not neglect the internalized misogyny. Women who make porn--especially on OnlyFans--are the ultimate pickmes. They devalue themselves, spread the pornsickness that ruins previously HVMs, and are generally sex-traitors to all the women who know what's really up.)

The Grift: Betrayal Trauma
You knew it's a grift, right?

There are books (for the recovering addict and the partner), home diagnostics ($10 for the questionnaire that will help you find out if you're your partner is really a sex addict), daily support groups ($50/hr, but 10% off if you're a site member), one-on-one Zoom sessions with a certified counselor (oh you poor dear; we'll work out a sliding scale). A NetNannyesque browser extension for Christians in sex recovery is about the annual cost of MalwareBytes. Groups like FightTheNewDrug sell merch and take donations to raise awareness (well they all take donations). Flared users are very generous with links to commercial enterprise, and the bottom half of the LoveAfterPorn masthead is basically a catalog.

The term of art is "betrayal trauma," because the grift is about validating and amplifying big feelings, turning a lustful gaze into infidelity, disagreement into betrayal, and habit into addiction. All degrees of discomfort and dysfunction are elided. The tagline of one LAP-linked support group is a perfect chain of escalating equivocations:

quote:

Face the lies, porn use, infidelity, sexual coercion, emotional abuse, and narcissism with support & confidence.

That's typical. On any post on one of these subs, no matter how far down on the page it sits, somebody will come in with a completely catastrophic narrative of their (or their partner's) pornography use. Again from Christian Marriage (and this is an excerpt from a longer post, on a post with all of 52 upvotes):

quote:

Porn is far worse than you can imagine. It is training him to see women, including you, as nothing but a body, not a person. It is infidelity which NEVER has a place in a marriage. It will destroy his emotional intimacy with you. It will even lead to erectile dysfunction. And it is even worse than that. Porn is about chasing a dopamine high. It is extremely addictive. As the mind craves the dopamine, the dopamine sensors in the brain lose their sensitivity. So the addict (yes addict), is literally driven to find more and more extreme porn to chase that dopamine high. Think gay porn, violent porn, incest, children... eventually the addict can only get aroused by this extremely disgusting stuff and regular sex will mean nothing.

And porn is extremely addicting. Quitting it is not possible unless the person is 100% committed. Failure can not be an option. Cutting back on porn is not an option. They have to be at the point where they're going to be clean or die.

Note the use of pseudo-science. "Pornography changes the chemistry of the brain" is a continuous refrain, after those clickbaity headlines about how cheetos light up your brain like cocaine. No real woman can compete with the dopamine burst that comes from pornography, any more than a woman can compete with heroin. There's plenty of questionable stuff taken from the AA model--"the addict must hit rock bottom"; self-assessments are open-ended with ambiguous questions calibrated to maximize false positives. Of course the diagnostics are not intended to diagnose anything like a mental health issue so much as coopt the language of medicine to induce feelings of powerlessness: Note that the very same resource page links to "10 Signs You're a Sex Addict", which describes masturbating "20 or 30 times a week" and ruining relationships with infidelity until it drives you to suicidal ideation. The contradiction between these diagnostics can be resolved with amplification: If you look at pornography, you are a sex addict. If you are a sex addict, you have no control. If you have no control, you will cheat on your wife and ruin everything.

Now give me fifty bucks.

The Cure: "God doesn't want you to trust your spouse"
It's a big grift, but it's not just a grift. It's also about social control.

On ChristianMarriage, the gold standard for an addict in recovery is establishing accountability partnerships with other Christian men. That can certainly include a minister or pastor, but in most cases it's what it sounds like--you come out to your friends as a porn addict and ask them to help you struggle against porn. Whatever the intention is, the effect is to humiliate and isolate. (Also that is definitely the intention.) Total digital transparency is often a requirement--that means your wife checks your phone on demand, checks your internet history, puts parental controls on the teevee.

(FDS is kinder in many ways; you can just leave that no-value scrote and level up. Start LooksMaxxing!)

There are lots of remedies, but the overwhelming message is that none of them will ever really work. The only thing that can free an addict of porn is continuous vigilance, not only on the part of the addict but on the part of friends, coreligionists, and above all the partner. Like just about all social violence directed against men, it's also about controlling women, keeping them insecure and frightened, pliable and bilkable. A pretty low-interest LAP post (22 upvotes) asking "Does the overthinking ever stop?" got a handful of responses on the order of:

quote:

No, it doesn't fully go away. When trust is broken, it never gets fully repaired to what it was. What you had was blind trust before and that simply is a one time deal. Once you break someones trust, they will never ever be able to blindly trust you again because they know better now. My husbands been sober for almost 3 years and every once in a while i still get doubtful and my mind races itself into a panic.

(This, by the way, is a common refrain on ChristianMarriage: You can't trust your partner, and you never should have trusted your partner; we are all sinners, and all you can trust him to do is be tempted to sin.)

I think that's what gets me the most about the internet anti-porn people (and why I don't really bring them up in this thread). If you spend any time on these subs, you'll notice that their posts and their replies are low visibility, but filled with the same replies over and over again. Posts about porn (as opposed to meme posts on FDS) rarely crack 1000 upvotes (or even 100). Replies to those posts net even fewer. But those replies are earnest, lengthy, and intense. A lot of them are expressions of significant human pain, bared for an audience of fifteen or twenty or thirty, day in and day out, with no change in intensity. Some of the people who see these replies are persistent members of the movement, some of them are people in pain passing through just long enough to throw a couple of bucks into the pot and pick up a few emotional scars, and some of them are me, coming to study and gawk. Because it's Reddit, those posters will never know how many of which. They may not ever really know whether anyone's reading or being helped, but they keep doing it. The real cure for porn addiction--a thing not-quite made up by conmen--is to warn people about porn addiction, over and over again, hoping that one day you'll get through, like some kind of really lame ancient mariner.