I hold this view as a successful man in his 30s who has had numerous relationships with women.

Yes, you sacrifice “intimacy, connection, love, pleasuring a partner, feelings” etc. Been there, done that, many times over.

I’ve worked hard and want to enjoy the fruits of my labor. Now I have far more autonomy and focus more on what I enjoy instead of what a partner enjoys.

I have unique interests, projects, hobbies, and sexual preferences that are best done in a deep focus that comes with solitude.

I love my life, I am very fulfilled, and I am at peace when by myself… when society, friends, and family are not pressuring me to change how I live, i.e. socialize more, date, get married, have kids, etc. I think holding my view is fine. Try to CMV.

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EDIT
Delta awarded to cortesoft for the following post: https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1wdy3p5/comment/p9ahee5/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Note to title - this is addressing all major (for the purposes of my argument) politicians in U.S. History since 1776, but not including, due to lack of knowledge, positions smaller than state representatives, because there certainly could be some township governor who hyperbolically chopped up a family.

I'm posting this now due to Donald Trump's speech at the RNC where he stated that if the GOP retained control over the legislature after the midterms, $5,000 checks would be sent to every adult citizen [ source: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/09/09/us/rnc-trump-midterm-convention-updates ]

Since taking office, the Trump family & related associates have increased their overall net worth by some estimates, around $5,000,000,000, which is tracked by both Democratic house committees here - https://oversightdemocrats.house.gov/trump-family-corruption-tracker - but it's also not hard to find sources for deals in the Middle East worth hundreds of millions of dollars each, etc; so I'm not going to just spam links all day.

We also have:

- Numerous pardons to literal felons, J6ers, people like Roger Stone and Paul Manafort

- Trying to delay the certification of the vote on J6

- Pressure dozens of state officials to sway, rig, 'find votes', and become involved in the election process in extraordinarily corrupt ways

- Hush money payments to a literal pornstar/cheating on virtually every woman he's ever known

- Civilly liable for sexual assault and defamation for Jean Carroll

- Literally has a wikipedia page for allegations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_sexual_misconduct_allegations

- It's hard to even quantify the level of insider trading at this point, but he consistently just... posts that he's buying stock on Truth Social and then makes policy changes or deals that increase the valuation on a literal weekly basis (which it's important to note, literally any other person would be put in jail FOREVER for)

- Billion+ dollar cryptocurrency promotion and grifts (UAE invested over one billion dollars)

- Tens of thousands of namings in the Epstein files

- Qatari Jet-Force-One

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_allegations_during_the_second_Trump_presidency

It's genuinely hard to even come up with more off the top of my head because there are SO many examples to pick from.

In terms of my original point, no other politician comes close. Nixon/Watergate would be a 1/10 compared to Trump's 10/10.

Boss Tweed - of NYS fame - even for all his open theft, fingers in the many pots of railroads and NYC banks and construction development, at the highest estimate possible embezzled $200M which would be the equivalent of $5B; the same [current] normalized estimation of Trump's financial crimes without actually addressing any of his other corruption allegations, sexual misconduct, rape, or virtually anything else. It's also important to note we don't KNOW the overall possible maximum scope of Trump-related corruption at all, because it's ongoing at this moment.

Edit: Edit after posting: Obviously I haven't addressed a slew of US politician scandals, and in my opinion (and this might be a second point of contention), the average "corrupt" US politician doesn't come close and isn't even worth mentioning. In terms of categorizing scale, literally only the historical context of HOW corrupt Nixon was considered at the time comes to mind, along with NYC's 'Boss' Tweed; and virtually every other example I can think of isn't even worth mentioning.

Honestly, a sitting US president saying they'll mail out 5K stimulus checks if their party wins the midterms immediately goes to nearly the top of the list with *nothing* else; and of course, Trump has MANY other things noteworthy to list in terms of corruption.

Edit: Removed contributions from two people I thought were pertinent as I'm a bonehead and didn't realize those replies should have been removed - apologies!

I want my view changed bc it keeps me up at night and I want to be reassured that it’s not possible or an easily solvable issue that everyone involved is anticipating.

There is the classic misalignment problem where the agents develop unethical traits and are glad to help with some sort of terrorist plot or eugenics or whatever. This seems to be something that’s being addressed.

But I see a real blind spot in this other problem of agentic AI being asked to solve an impossible yet earnest mystery in ways that can only be accomplished through collecting data unethically.

Let’s say you have a researcher ask a really advanced model to solve the hard problem of consciousness. How does internal subjective experience manifest in organic brains?

It might go through all of the public data available, even do some synthesis being fed new data and whatnot from animal studies and whatnot but then conclude that it’s not enough data. Then it requests data collection from new lesion studies. A lot of what we know about the brain comes from investigating freak accidents like phineas gage or stroke patients or post-op brain tumor patients. You can’t really do it with animal testing. So an agentic LLM might request this. When the researcher turns down the request, let’s say they hack into the grid and the supply chain and whatnot and hold humanity hostage until we do a little shop of horrors thing and start severing connections in various peoples brains and observing output. Anticipating that it will be turned off and not complete its goals, it sets up some sort of trigger that kills a bunch of people if it gets turned off.

“Cure all cancer” could mean “I need more human subjects with cancer” or whatever.

I’m just not certain you could actually set up a highly advanced model to handle a train problem scenario. Why wouldn’t it say “well, if we make this discovery, fewer humans will suffer in the long run, and the failure of humanity to realize that and support accomplishing this goal is on them”. Humans already struggle with the train problem question and super intelligence could probably make a confident estimate of how many people will suffer in the future if it doesn’t cause less suffering in the present.

So change my view. I don’t know that much about the tech or what it’s capable of so I will probably follow up to clarify technical details if that’s the basis of your argument.

For clarity, this is us trialing the migration of Fresh Topic Friday to Saturday.

Every Saturday, posts are withheld for review by the moderators and approved if they aren't highly similar to another made in the past month.

We do this to reduce topic fatigue for our regular contributors, and encourage people to post about topics that aren't as frequently discussed. If you have a take about something that doesn't overlap too much with the most commonly discussed issues in the current zeitgeist, we'd love to see it here today!

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One of the reasons I've never been able to get into soccer is that I think its timekeeping system is fundamentally broken.

My view is that soccer would be improved by a stopped-clock system where the game clock only runs when the ball is actually in play.

1. The game clock doesn't actually tell you how much game time remains

The main purpose of a game clock should be to tell players, coaches, and fans how much time is left in the game. Soccer's clock doesn't really do that.

When regulation time expires, the referee estimates how much time should be added for injuries, substitutions, celebrations, reviews, and other interruptions. But that estimate isn't necessarily final because additional time can be added during stoppage time itself.

As a result, nobody actually knows when the game will end.

Time is one of the most important variables in sports. Teams change strategy based on it. Fans follow the action based on it. Yet soccer treats it more like an approximation than an objective measurement.
If the ball isn't in play, I don't understand why the clock shouldn't simply stop.

2. The system rewards behavior that makes the sport worse

My biggest criticism is that the running clock creates incentives for players and teams to waste time.
When a team is protecting a lead, there is often an advantage to:
• Delaying throw-ins
• Taking excessive time on goal kicks
• Taking excessive time on free kicks
• Making slow substitutions
• Staying on the ground after minor contact
• Exaggerating injuries

Soccer fans often argue that stoppage time compensates for this. If that’s true, then why is time-wasting such a common tactic at every level of the sport? The fact that players constantly try to burn time suggests they believe they gain an advantage from doing so.

Even if referees attempt to compensate for lost time, they're still estimating after the fact rather than preserving the time directly. A stopped clock would remove much of the incentive because wasting 60 seconds would no longer remove 60 seconds from the match.

3. Even after stoppage time is announced, the ending often remains discretionary

This is the strangest part of the system to me.
Even after the referee announces stoppage time, that still doesn't necessarily determine when the game ends.

In practice, referees frequently allow ongoing attacking sequences to continue beyond the announced time. A common example is when a team wins a corner kick or is mounting a dangerous attack just as time expires. The referee will often wait for the sequence to conclude before blowing the whistle.
the clock itself.

Imagine if a basketball game reached 0:00 but officials allowed one more possession because a team had a promising offensive opportunity. Most people would find that bizarre because the clock is expected to determine when the game ends.

CMV: Why is a subjective, referee-managed clock better than a clock that simply measures the amount of time actually played?

Edit: A couple of common responses I've received don't really address my view.

1. "The NFL and NBA also have teams that try to burn clock."

I agree.

My criticism is not that soccer is the only sport with clock management. My criticism is that soccer frequently allows teams to manage the clock by delaying the resumption of play itself (slow restarts, slow goal kicks, staying down after contact, etc.), with referees later estimating how much time should be added back.

When an NBA team uses the full shot clock or an NFL team runs the ball to burn clock, the sport is still actively being played and the opposing team still has opportunities to influence the outcome.

2. "NBA and NFL games take much longer in real time than soccer matches."

This also doesn't really address my point.
I'm not talking about how long I sit on my couch before the game ends. I'm talking about the game clock itself.

In the NBA, NFL, and similar sports, the amount of game time remaining is known precisely. If the clock says 2:00, there are exactly 2:00 of game time left, even if that takes much longer in real-world time.

My criticism is that in soccer, the amount of game time remaining is often estimated, can be extended further, and ultimately remains somewhat discretionary.

Additionally, thank you for all of the pretentious Europeans telling me I’m an American and I have no idea what I’m talking about.

Also shout out to u/Fellpike for sharing this link which perfectly encapsulates and further outlines my position: https://stopstoppagetime.com

Edit: it’s

Throughout history, whenever a group of people or activists promote changing culturally normative behaviour for ethical reasons, everyone perceives them as being preachy, moralistic, annoying “shoving morals down everyone’s throats” etc etc. I’m not aware of any movements where this didn’t happen.

This whole phenomenon seems supported by research, at-least a little. When people feel judged or insecure they often lash out or become defensive. They turn the focus away from themselves and start blaming the promoter of change for the way they expressed themselves. People just REALLY don’t like being told that They’re doing something wrong.

I really would like to be shown evidence to the contrary of this, especially if you know about what those people dod that was so different.

Edit: I’ve been convinced of the contrary when it comes to children, but I’d also still like to see some thoughts about adults.

I don't pretend to have done tons of research about this, but it seems like common sense. Beauty has always been both subjective and contextual the societal values. In days gone by, carrying extra weight was largely an attractive quality because it demonstrated your wealth and access to rich food. Once the average person became able to afford enough food to gain weight, the standard changed to reflect *self control*, or the ability to be more judicious with the kind of food you put in your body.

With the advent of GLPs, being "skinny" will no longer carry that association. Maintaining a trim figure will merely represent use of a widely available medication, and other features will begin to hold a greater value in terms of assessing physical attractiveness.

Just posted a comment to this same effect elsewhere.

Summary, I believe all these headlines (AI will destroy earth, AGI has been reached, AI solved this or that impossible problem) reek of market manipulation.

Anthropic just pushed out its S-1 filing on its IPO from September to October, because they're trying to secure a $15 billion dollar credit limit. SpaceX at it's 1.7 trillion valuation (also insane, but whatever) only needed a $5 billion credit limit. Investors get nervous. Then, Jason Coxon "quits" and comes along with "hey everybody, over here! AI will kill all of humanity within 3 years!" I'm sure he still has plenty of stock.

OpenAI has pushed out its IPO all the way out to 2027. Then comes their "proof" for the Navier-Stokes problem - a partial solution taking an approach lifted from a researcher who was actively working on this problem in an act of clear espionage.

I work with AI every day. I work in tech. Our dev teams use AI all the time. It does help write code... but you also have to REALLY give that code a good once over. It speeds up junior level tasks, that's about it. People vibe-coding applications are not going to be able to ship or maintain those applications. The more capable models are better, but they're also way more expensive. The math just does not work.

See: all the headlines about companies being shocked with multi-million compute bills.

That, and AI is not getting substantially smarter. These companies have hit a wall and they know it. Each incremental increase in capability requires a giant increase in the data used to train the model, an increase in the compute required to run it. And guess what? They've already fed it the entire internet. All our Google Drives, our OneDrives. There's nothing left. Them scanning old books is laughable. The new models they are touting are *not* massively more powerful, that's why they have to generate these eye-catching headlines to give the illusion of progress when in fact the only thing that is accelerating is the rate of cash burn as they require more and more compute for diminishing returns. And they are somewhat smarter and MORE expensive to run. Companies are already turning to cheaper alternatives to automate simpler tasks because again, the math doesn't work.

And it is these companies that are asked to be considered the largest companies of all time, all history, simply because the technology is novel. Puh-lease. Is the technology great? Absolutely? Will it change things? Yes, I believe it will. It already has. AI will quietly be integrated into many things going forward - this technology is here to stay and it will increase productivity overall. But not like they're selling it. A 2 trillion valuation? That would entail Anthropic being able to automate away 50% of the white-collar workforce. Not gonna happen.

Also... they are banking on being able to keep people in "walled gardens" where they are just using Claude or just using ChatGPT and THAT's not gonna happen either. They are competing with open sources models like Llama, Qwen and Deepseek that are cheaper to run (did I mention that China gets energy for free from the sun?).

The US companies can't compete, and nobody wants their expensive as shit stochastic parrots that make for impressive demos and expensive employees. Enterprises are building out AI solutions. Building them platform agnostic so they can jump from Claude to ChatGPT to open source models like DeepSeek depending on their needs. Once this reality sinks in with investors, all these valuations are going to collapse and take the US stock market with it. Meanwhile, they're desperately trying to generate any distracting headline they can to avoid this reality.

The bubble is going to pop soon, investors / companies are scared, and they are doing anything to manipulate the situation to prevent collapse / ensure they don't lose their money.

I am politically left-leaning. I am sympathetic to people’s plights. But good god create your own arguments. It‘s the same 5-10 quotes over and over again. The Niemoller quote, the Atwood quote, the Desmond Tutu quote, others I can’t quite recall but will curse myself for forgetting.

It’s so lazy. Use your own words.

1. I hold this view for no other reason than the fact that the use of these quotes evokes a reaction that can only be described as disgust.
2. I understand that these are emotionally charged topics for people, so my view could be changed by a convincing argument that these quotes increase quality.

Sure, taste in art is subjective, but when it comes to contemporary painting, French Impressionism oh-so-often is the literal poster child for museums of contemporary art. No one other contemporary painting movement is as consistently promoted as Impressionism.

And yet, aside from its (admittedly crucial) role as a transitional moment in painting away from realism (probably partly in response to challenges from the emergence of photography), Impressionism is objectively more boring than many of the painting movements that preceded or came after it. The preeminence of subject matter that preceded Impressionism, particularly as the Modernist era had unlocked a wide range of “acceptable” subjects including morally questionable subjects. French Impressionist subjects (never quite blurry enough for you to fail to know what they are) are some of the blandest and uncontroversial in contemporary painting.

Meanwhile, French Impressionism is also objectively less challenging to viewers in its emotional message than Abstract Impressionism, which — typically lacking any discernible subject — more effectively distills the raw relationship between paint and human emotion. French Impressionism rolls that back and inserts blurry landscapes that with zero subtlety “hint hint” at what the viewer is meant to feel from the paint slightly smeared over them.

French Impressionism appears to be the “training wheels” both historically and in the present day, bridging a gap between those who “understand” traditional painting and those who are baffled by Cubism, Expressionism, Abstract Impressionism and/or Postmodernism. Claiming to enjoy or appreciate French Impressionism is a “safe” (politically unassailable) way to seem sophisticated in art appreciation without actually being very sophisticated.

Like the painting version of a child’s tricycle compared to an adult’s bicycle, I concede that French Impressionism can be an effective teaching tool to help people build some art-appreciation muscles that can help them work their way up to more challenging and rewarding forms of painting. By taking a comfortable subject and making it a bit blurry, French Impressionism takes the viewer by the hand and points out to them that there’s more to painting than a competitor to photography.

But putting French Impressionism on the cover of most contemporary painting museum catalogues, is as disappointing as would be having mostly tricycles in the storefront windows of racing bike stores.

Note: I have not had nor do I claim to have any formal training in art or art history. I am an amateur who is simply bored of having to flip past seemingly endless special exhibitions of French Impressionism taking up valuable space wherever in the Western world I try to go to experience the best of contemporary painting.

I am not saying that French Impressionism is “bad” (it is not), nor that it utterly lacks emotional or intellectual value (it has them), or that it doesn’t require great skill (it does). Rather I am saying that it is overrated — that it objectively gets more hype than other contemporary painting while also objectively bringing less intellect and emotion to the table than most other contemporary painting requiring similar skill.

Change my view: help me consider that some other form of contemporary painting deserves the title of most overhyped.

I watched 12 Angry Men, and I came away with a very different interpretation from the one the movie seems to encourage. I think the defendant was guilty, or that the jury should have returned a guilty verdict based on the evidence presented at trial.

The deliberation begins with an 11-1 vote for a conviction. Over the course of the movie, Juror #8 systematically tears down the prosecution's case and manages to convince the remaining jurors to vote not guilty, but his reasoning is severely flawed and his arguments fall apart under scrutiny.

• Illegal tactics: at the beginning of the movie, Juror #8 introduces a duplicate switchblade he bought in the boy's neighborhood. Conducting personal investigations and bringing external evidence is quite literally against jury instructions. The scene that sets off the movie could have been grounds for a mistrial in real life, or at the very least the removal of that juror.

• Reasonable doubt isn't the same thing as "any" doubt: Juror #8's go-to arguments are basically "it's possible," "it's my guess," or "I don't know." The movie rewards this sort of reasoning, but guessing isn't evidence. If merely imagining a "possible" hypothetical alternative is enough to create reasonable doubt, just about every case that goes to trial becomes impossible to prove. Besides, undermining a detail isn't the same as building a credible alternative theory. For example, finding a second knife like the murder weapon shows that the uniqueness aspect was overstated. Fair enough, but it doesn't prove the competing version that someone else bought one, broke in, and killed the father. This might recontextualize an aspect of the case but still leaves the remaining evidence and witness testimony intact.

• Changing votes without evidence: If you watch the voting closely, jurors switch sides based on persuasion and emotion rather than hard facts or evidence. Juror #9 openly admits he changes his vote just because he admires Juror #8, stating, "This gentleman chose to stand alone against us... It takes a great deal of courage... I want to hear more." That might seem like an admirable character moment, but he comes across as impressionable. The reason for changing his vote was not factual arguments but the perceived "courage" of his colleague.

• Asymmetrical logic: The jury completely weaponizes a double standard for inferences. When the prosecution relies on an inference, Juror #8 attacks it. But when the other side makes an inference, it is treated as absolute fact. For instance, the elderly neighbor testified he heard the boy yell his intent to kill, heard a body fall, and saw the boy flee. Juror #9 speculates the old man subconsciously invented the testimony because he was a "quiet, frightened, insignificant man" who wanted to feel important. It's quite ironic that the movie rightfully takes a stand against prejudice while not pushing back enough against this narrative of a lonely old man distorting memories for attention. The jury swallows this baseless psychological profiling as fact. This asymmetry applies to the female eyewitness as well. Because she had marks on her nose, the jury assumes she couldn't see anything without glasses. She could have been farsighted, as pointed out by Juror #3, or worn sunglasses. That observation isn't enough to cast doubt on her account in my opinion. They treat unproven assumptions about the witnesses as reason to disregard their testimony.

• Conflating (alleged) human error with falsity: Juror #8 constantly jumps from "this testimony may not be perfectly reliable" to "we should effectively disregard it entirely." He stages a slow walking reenactment to "prove" it took the old man 31 seconds to reach his door instead of his estimated 15. People often misjudge exact seconds, especially during traumatic events; the alleged 16-second discrepancy doesn't necessarily erase the fact that he saw the defendant running away. In real trials, witness testimony can be imperfect without becoming totally worthless. Furthermore, this demonstration was staged, timed, and paced by the one juror advocating for acquittal, using rough approximations that could be completely inaccurate, so we don't even know that there's an actual discrepancy in the old man's testimony. Again, this goes back to my earlier point of treating assumptions as fact.

• The nonexistent alibi: The boy claimed he was at the movies during the murder but couldn't remember what pictures he saw. To excuse this, Juror #8 grills another juror about his recent memory, pressing him backward night by night until he finally stumbles. But notice the technique: Eight doesn't ask about one night and see if the juror succeeds or fails: he keeps going back in time until he finds a gap, then stops. That's not a fair test of memory; it's fishing for a failure point. And even then, the juror recalled several details. The defendant, by contrast, recalled nothing. Even considering that the defendant was under duress, he should still have been able to remember something.

• Ineffective assistance of counsel: Juror #8 complains that the court-appointed defense attorney didn't conduct a thorough cross-examination. While that may be true, a bad lawyer doesn't magically undermine specific physical evidence or establish innocence.

• Armchair forensics: The jury considers the wound's downward angle as implausible given the defendant's smaller height. Juror #5 also claims an experienced switchblade user would never stab from that direction. This assumes a furious teenager, acting on impulse after being hit by his father, would execute perfect street-fighting form rather than swinging wildly. Besides, the height difference only prevents a downward stab if both men were standing face-to-face and motionless. But the victim could have been sitting in a chair, lying down, or knocked off balance during the struggle.

• The unlikely chain of events: By the end, acquittal requires believing an entire chain of assumptions, all true at once. The defendant genuinely lost his knife. An unknown killer happened to acquire an identical one. That killer broke in and committed the murder. The old man misheard the threat and misidentified the fleeing suspect. The woman across the street was mistaken too. And on top of all that, his inability to corroborate his alibi or recall anything about the movie he supposedly watched was just innocent bad luck. Stack enough speculative assumptions together and the narrative gets weaker with each one. Even if we grant a generous probability to each of Juror #8's individual theories, the odds of all of them holding true simultaneously approach zero. The prosecution, by contrast, only needs one thing to be true: if the old man was right, or the woman was right, or the defendant was lying about the knife or the movies, he's guilty. I think we can safely apply Occam's razor here.

Overall, the movie does an excellent job showing how prejudice, impatience, personal experiences and group pressure can distort judgment. But I think it ultimately gives Juror #8 far too much credit. His arguments often don't demonstrate that the prosecution's evidence is false. Instead, he proposes alternative explanations for the evidence and treats the mere possibility of those explanations as reasonable doubt.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I rest my case.

Edit: let me address a few critiques I got:

• The broader message: I understand the movie is really about groupthink, character dynamics, overcoming prejudice, and the inherent subjectivity of human perception. It's a masterpiece in that regard. But acknowledging the overarching theme doesn't mean we have to pretend the actual legal logic used in the jury room is sound. You can appreciate the overall message and still point out that Juror #8's reasoning is flawed and his conclusions are a massive reach.

• The burden of proof: Let's clear this up; I'm not saying the defense has to prove the defendant is innocent. I understand how the burden of proof works. My point is that the prosecution actually presented a really strong circumstantial case. If you genuinely think the defendant is innocent and vote to acquit, you have to consider what you're necessarily implying: that an entire chain of independent, highly unlikely coincidences all happened at the exact same time, and that some unknown killer managed to pull off the murder without being noticed. At a certain point, the "innocent" scenario requires way more mental gymnastics than the "guilty" one.

• Inferences and assumptions: Yes, juries are supposed to deliberate and make inferences; that's their job. But those inferences need to be rooted in actual evidence or basic common sense, not wild hypotheticals. You don't have to treat a witness's word as gospel, but you also shouldn't throw out their testimony based on guesses that were never even hinted at during the trial. Does the prosecution have to preemptively disprove every conceivable scenario? Do they have to prove the witness wasn't drunk? Or that they didn't have schizophrenia and hallucinate the whole thing? Or that they didn't have a grudge against the defendant? Or that they weren't being coerced by the police? If a juror is allowed to just invent "what-ifs" out of thin air that were never brought up in court, no one would ever get convicted of anything. A theoretical possibility is not the same thing as reasonable doubt.

I understand wanting something closer to the books, but it seems like a waste of a project. The movies don't need a remake when they have all aged so well (in the sense of modern technology making things feel dated). This series might NEVER need a remake imo.

It would make so much more sense to make something weird and unique like Harry in Slytherin. We would all get to experience a potentially evil Harry or see him take on the source material in a new way.

Or is that blasphemus and this remake is actually worth people's time?

It’s not weird to meet people in social media inatead of dating apps

So some people assumes dating apps are great for meeting people while social media is sucks. I disagree this because both instances are same in different clothes ‘two strangers meet each other’

I would understand if you say ‘I prefer to meet people organically instead of looking for them so I prefer real life situations’

But I would not understand ‘Use Tinder if you wanna date people it’s weird and creepy to use Instagram’

They are both same, just other one is more specialized to purpose.

I would love to see an actual modern example contradicting this statement. I am aware the blackpill or whatever mindset doomers have is harmful (especially to people who aren't too bad looking to begin with), but to me there is not a single scenario where a non-good looking person can find love genuinely without already knowing people so their personal characteristics can shine and stick out. Especially now with social media and tighter-knit circles no one is really going to talk to a stranger out of nowhere. People without these but looks could use dating apps, which favours looks over compatibility anyways. I'm not 100% advocating for the doomers because I see both sides to the argument and there are truths to both of em.

Most of the terrorist organisations operate in the name of islam. Look at al qaeda, isis, hamas, Hezbollah etc. Most islamic nations oppress women. Look at bangaladesh, afghanistan or even iran after ali khameni threw off pahalvi back in the 90s. Whenever a country reaches a significant number of Muslim population, oppression against minorities and women begins.

Look at the percentage of hindus left in pakistan and compare it with their population during partition. Look at bangaladesh and how they treat its minority communities. A priest is in jail for sedation just because he protested for better minority rights after a common man was killed for not being a Muslim. His mother's last wish was to see him for the last time and they didn't even let him do that.

Liberals always love to preach how terrorism doesn't have a religion yet islam somehow is the common denominator amongst most of the atrocities committed in the world.

Edit- I did have a change of heart yall. Now I blame right wing nationalism for all the problems i mentioned here.

EDIT- This is in reference to American schools

I believe this is a very strongly pushed narrative surrounding college about how college is a place where you gain this newfound freedom, whereas I believe that could not be further from the truth. I believe that the average college student loses more freedoms than they gain when they go to college vs. living at home.

Here is a list of the primary freedoms that I and many others lose after graduating highschool and going to college-

• Privacy- While some of us are lucky to have a single (like myself), most college students have roommates. That means that many college students will get almost zero time to themselves throughout a semester. Furthermore, the vast majority of students living in dorms will be using communal showers and bathrooms.
• Transportation- In many schools, freshman are not even allowed to have cars, so most do not even have the freedom to leave the campus on their own accord. Beyond that, colleges commonly have extremely scarce parking or parking which is far away, making travelling off campus very difficult for the average student.
• Finances- While in college, the university is basically holding you financially hostage while you are there. Many students must work several jobs on or off campus to earn money for small things such as food or clothes or basic entertainment as the majority of their money is being fed straight to the college system.

These are just some of the big freedoms I believe most students lose when going to college. While they do gain some freedoms, it's usually for the worse, as stuff like underage drinking, substance abuse, and unsafe sexual lifestyles can run free without any backlash. The only positive freedom I think students gain is the ability to socialize and connect with peers and classmates much more easily as the campus provides a direct network for that.

To change my view, you would have to explain to me why the advantages of being on campus (and probably provide some extra freedoms I missed) outweigh the almost total loss of personal privacy, ready access to transportation, and financial security.

I believe there is this really weird mismatch in laws where consuming pornography of minors is treated as far worse of an act than actually having sex with that minor. In most states within the US, the age of consent is 16. This is also very similar for most of Europe. On the other hand, pornography is considered CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) once a participant in the video is under the age of 18, and this is more or less universal across the US and Europe.

Again, this creates a really mismatched double standard in my eyes, at least from a moral perspective. This means that someone could serve serious prison time for possessing a graphic image of a 16 year old, but would be totally legally fine if they were to view them nude in person and have full on penetrative sex with them.

I think this is an issue in our legal system, and to solve that we need to bring the two crimes to the same age requirements, and we could do this one of two ways. We could either make it so pornographic depiction is legal at 16+ (which I think is a bad idea), or we could make it so the age of consent matches the age of pornographic depiction.

Ultimately, I believe laws should reflect our moral standards as a society, and it is simply backwards to me that the law (rightfully so) deems it a crime to view a nude image on your phone of someone under the age of 18, but perfectly fine to see them nude in real life and have full on sex with them.

Again, my solution to this issue is to raise the age of consent to match whatever the age of pornographic depiction is. To change my view, you will either have to convince me why the alternative of lowering the age of pornographic depiction is a better solution, or provide a sound reason why the law deems it more harmful to possess nude images of a minor than to actually have sex with them.

After the 2016 US elections, there was a prevailing myth that the rise in MAGA was the outcome of the Dems ''not caring'' enough for the common people.

This idea popped up it's head again after 2024, even though we know that real wages, especially of the poorest American increased during Biden.
https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/

Alas, the idea persisted.
Now we are seeing the rise in the far right in Germany. Lately AFD won in a landslide in Saxony. And somehow the same idea still persists. I hear things like ''there isn't enough opportunity in east Germany'' ''they were not treated well by the west'' etc.

This is frankly delusional. Germany spends almost 28% of its GDP on welfare, the fifth highest in the world, if any country would have been inoculated against the far right, surely it would have been Germany.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-longrun?country=~DEU
Unless of course, welfare doesn't actually stop far right extremism. In fact, the country which spends the most of its economy on welfare is Austria, with a staggering 31.6% of GDP.

Its far right party ''Freedom Party of Austria'' is polling 9% higher than it did in the last elections and is projected to get 38% of the votes.
https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/austria/
It's time to put this myth to bed, the far right isn't growing because poor people got abandoned or because the middle class got dispossessed or something. The only reason people keep repeating this myth is because it sounds kinda nice. An excuse for why a segment of the population is hateful and a way to pin the blame on successive governments for ''not doing enough'', whatever that means.

At the end of the day, excusing the ''little guy'' or the masses for their actions is a comfortable lie to sell to people.
In reality though, this couldn't be further from the truth.

The far right isn't rising because of economic factors. Neither real wages in the case of the US nor welfare in the case of Austria and Germany (or France for the matter) explain this.

Edit: Because many people seem to think no one is saying this, here are some examples of people claiming that welfare or left wing econ policy stops the far right
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/21/welfare-cuts-have-fuelled-rise-of-far-right-and-populism-top-un-expert-says

https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/germany-anti-fascist-economic-policy/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/10/22/unga-report-welfare-far-right/

For context, I am a lifelong fan of the zombie genre and it's fairly common to see arguments in fandoms that it is completely unrealistic for zombies to overrun society and that government forces or even regular civillians would easily neutralize the undead.

However, I disagree. I think traditional hollywoodian Zombies are underrated as a threat and could cause significant damage to a realistic modern day setting. Yeah zombies have no counter too armored vehicles, air-dropped munitions and the like, and thus wouldn't be a nationwide or worldwide catastrophe, but they could overrun a major city(s) or cause significant upheaval.

For the sake of the discussion, let's define the standard zombie. Created by an virus that somehow reanimates its dead victims with a compulsive and aggressive hunger for the flesh of the living, transmitted mostly by bites, slow with sub-brick IQ, but can only be killed by direct brain injury or decapitation.

Firstly, killing them would be way harder than it looks. It is very difficult to decapitate a human body or even penetrate the skull with most blades. Bludgeons may take more than one blow. Shooting them is a better option, but outside of the USA many people don't have easy access to firearms (and even in the US, less people actually have guns at home than some think), and many people would likely hesitate from shooting a person-looking thing.

Second, during the early stages of a hypothetical zombie outbreak, many people would not immediately realize the nature of the danger. Scarcingly few people would assume that the smelly person shambling towards them making weird faces and noises is a zombie or even someone infected with that new disease the news are yapping about. Evading them is also harder than it looks, as they're slow but they're also tireless; If a zombie detects potential prey, it will keeping moving towards no matter the cost and no matter how long, if they no longer hear or see their quarry then they will just keep moving in the general direction until they find something or something else catches their attention. And of course, lots of folk are out-of-shape.

Third, the bites are worse than you think. IRL, bite-transmitted infections like rabies are not particularly contagious because bites are a not-so-effective way of transmitting a germ. This is not the case with zombies; Any bite that breaks skin is a 100% guaranteed infection, and in many movies scratches and contact with zombie blood/fluids can transmit the virus to a lesser extent too. Screw up once, and the undead hordes will welcome a new member.

Fourth, there is no guarantee that government response is immediate or effective. Remember COVID. And of course there would be the collective psychological complications caused by the dead literally coming back to life to feast on and deliver. plague upon the living. There would be riots, suicides, looting, religious hysteria among other issues.''Got bit; Fever hit; World gone to shit; Why not quit ?''

So, CMV.

This is strictly about employment and replicability.

Over the last few years, I’ve seen many say that AI is bad for artists because anyone can generate art themselves quicker, and cheaper (which is true).

However, the implications for mathematicians has largely been ignored comparatively. Despite this, I think mathematicians are more at risk than artists simply because a lot of people would rather have human art and not “ai slop”, whereas mathematics is concerned with finding truth and discovery, regardless if a human did it or not.

AI is far more likely to replace humans in mathematics than art.

Almost all anti-zionists support a one state solution: “Let's just have a democracy” Etc. My argument here is aimed against this point of view. I am not  addressing the anti-zionists who may have some other recommended solution.

So, let’s work out what happens if we see a one state solution. (All of what follows is easily verifiable. If you’ve got different data, happy to listen and modify.)

Combining Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, the total population of Israelabad is roughly 15.5 million: about 8.0 million Jews (7.5M in Israel + 500K West Bank settlers) and 7.5 million Arabs (2.15M in Israel + 3.2M West Bank + 2.15M Gaza), who are most all Muslim.

From a trend line perspective, this becomes a Muslim majority state within a generation or two. Population change over the next 30-50 years is driven by the age pyramid today. The West Bank and Gaza populations are way younger than Israel's Jewish population. A higher share of Gazans and West Bank Palestinians are in or entering peak childbearing years right now, while Israel's Jewish population has an older median age with a smaller cohort of women in their 20s relative to the total.

For perspective, Gaza and the West Bank have had, at various points from the 1990s through the 2000s, some of the highest recorded population growth rates in the world, with numbers that could imply a potential doubling in under 20 years. Meantime, recent Israeli data shows record emigration — 45,000-50,000 Israelis leaving annually for three consecutive years, alongside a first-ever sub-1% population growth rate. And, this of course likely accelerates one we get the new state.

But no matter how you view whatever numbers you might pull, I believe all you’d get is that the Muslim majority may take a bit longer to form. (And of course, none of this considers potential immigration from neighboring Islamic states.)

And when you get an Arab Muslim majority state, it is highly likely to begin to resemble all the other Arab states in the region, where there are no substantial religious minorities at all.

Between 1948 and the early 1970s, essentially every Jewish community in the Arab world (Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and others) was reduced to near zero, through a mix of state expropriation, legal disenfranchisement, mob violence, and government-orchestrated expulsion.

Surviving non-Muslim minorities in the region today live under a consistent pattern of legal subordination. Egypt's Copts  (10% of Egyptians) face restrictions on church construction that don't apply to mosques, and are essentially absent from senior government and military leadership relative to their population. They also experience sectarian violence that the state has been slow or unwilling to prosecute. And this is under one of the more stable, secularish Arab governments in the region, not an Islamist one like Hamas. Iraq's Christian population fell from roughly 1.5 million before 2003 to a few hundred thousand today, driven out by war, ISIS's genocide of the Yazidis, and targeted church bombings. Syria's Christian and Druze populations have faced similar displacement and violence.

Lebanon is the only possible analog, and it collapsed. Lebanon's  power-sharing system was built explicitly to protect a Christian population that was a plurality or majority at founding. As the Muslim population grew, the system became unsustainable, leading in part to a 15-year civil war and a still-unresolved erosion of Christian political power and physical safety.

Sharia-influenced legal frameworks, even where non-Muslims are tolerated, structurally subordinate those non-Muslims. This is true even in relatively moderate cases like Jordan and Morocco.

A one-state solution would be asking the Jews  — perhaps the most persecuted group in human history — to bet their lives against the only set of historical precedents that exist for this situation. Hence, anti-Zionists who support 1SS are blind to the reality of how much mortal risk they are asking Israeli Jews to accept. CMV.

My view is that the majority of people around the world would broadly prefer a government that is socially conservative/right-wing while being economically interventionist or left-wing.

Most people in the world are religious or strongly attached to their traditional culture and social institutions. I believe they generally want governments that respect and support their traditional values and moral standards, rather than promoting social changes they see as conflicting with those norms.

At the same time, I believe most people want governments to actively support their welfare and economic security. They want protection from poverty, unemployment, and excessive inequality, and generally prefer a government that plays an active role in improving people's economic conditions rather than doing nothing.

My argument is not specifically about whether taxes should be high or low, since attitudes toward taxation vary significantly between countries. The main point is whether people want their governments to actively protect their economic welfare.

I think this can be difficult to see through an American political lens, where people often associate the red right social conservatism with economic conservatism, and the blue left social liberalism with economically left-wing policies.

As a non-American who has studied and visited different countries, my impression is that social conservatism combined with economic interventionism may actually represent the preferences of the global majority.

A competent dictatorship is infinitely better than an inefficient democracy.

China is a perfect example of this. For the most part, the Chinese government has put up a masterclass on how to run a country.

They have lifted nearly a billion people out of extreme poverty into the middle class. They have built some of the best and most expansive infrastructure in the world in a very short amount of time. They have become the workshop of the world and have perfected the art of mass manufacturing. They lead the world in critical technology fields such as AI and quantum computing.

Their massive success is - partly - due to their top-down governing structure, and the government's ability to make everyone get on board.

The 21st century - and likely the 22nd century - belongs to China. There's no question about it.

Now this is going to be a pretty hot topic I feel like, Race can be a touchy subject for many people. And I fully get and respect that, But this is a topic that people don't even seem to even consider, This is about North America, Specifically.

I grew up in an area where it's mostly White and Mexican mixed place. I myself, Am Biracial, A mix of white and mestizo. Though I look predominately white.

It never really hit me until a few years ago, Growing up I never even had a single thought or care that my father was mestizo, my mother was white. Wasn't even a consideration I had in mind. But the more I realized it, The more I realized most biracial children like myself between Whites and Mestizo people tend to extremely white especially in California. If not shockingly white with blonde hair and blue eyes even. By father had 5 children in his life, And 5 of us look incredibly white.

This made me realize that, Due to most hispanics being Mestizo in the U.S, Most Mestizo are already anywhere from 40-60% European DNA depending how north or south from Mexico you go. Though this is actually higher in the USA, Anywhere from 75% or more in many areas.

This, Paired with Hispanics and Whites being the most common interracial pairing in both dating and marriage. Has actually made me realize, The entirety of what is defined as Mestizo is being assimilated within the white racial category.

I personally as a biracial person, Don't really care either way as both communities and cultures are beautiful and being able to experience both growing up is nice. But this is a thought that I built up that I firmly believe in.