I’m still waiting for my pheromone-overlord 😞

Some species of termite can effectively molt backwards, meaning they can physically return their bodies to a juvenile stage, AND THEN re-mature from that juvenile stage into a different adult body plan!

So adult worker (medium sized head and mandibles, etc.) -> juvenile morphology -> adult soldier (huge head and mandibles). And other forms I don’t remember, think they can go back and then become something with wings, etc. - big bug changes!

And what’s crazier is this is done in response to pheromones secreted by the mound’s queen. Termite Queen up in the mound playing Sid Meier’s Civ lol, controlling her city through different stinks! Too few soldiers after the latest bird incursion? Got a buncha workers with nothing to do? No problem, stink-compel em to go back to goo and come back as what the mound needs!

I got all this from a fairly goofy podcast a buncha years ago - be kind, anonymous grumpy expert, if this is way wrong lol

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

He’s in a position of leadership at a national organization bearing the name of the country doing the genocide. And it’s too much to find out what he thinks about it before allowing him to perform at an event they themselves organized?

That’s a bullshit argument - this story is about one guy, and your attempts to generalize it into something that applies to everyone are dishonest.

All of this protracted benefit of the doubt you’re giving him, this moralizing, bleating “but he might be secretly a good person!” - why?

Your answer doesn’t matter. I know why, and the rest of us do too. Goodbye.

“Well then why aren’t the posts here full of [thing]?”

“What? Here specifically is literally full of [thing]”

“Yeah I know, but [different argument]”

This is what you sound like lol

This habit of asking questions that you incorrectly believe have obvious “gotcha” answers, and which don’t really relate that closely to the issue at hand…really not providing the rhetorical weight you’re hoping for.

The folks running that festival have every right to curate who they invite to perform. That really has nothing to do with what I choose to consume, but yes, I do consider the people behind whatever entertainment I might want to enjoy, as well as where I’m willing to shop. We all should, to whatever degree we can manage. Stupid question.

Finally - these folks are in the business of hosting musical performances, that’s the thing they are there to do, and cancelling one is precisely the opposite of their business model. You understand that right? Don’t you think ANYONE in that position would reach out to the guy and give him the chance to clarify? Don’t you think they did exactly that, and ended up discovering he’s probably a fuckin Zionist?

Anyway, your arguments are too bad to continue to rebut. See ya later.

More moving goalposts. Is he banished from the sane parts of the world? Or did he just have a concert canceled?

Let’s look at your question phrased like you’re arguing in good faith instead! Goes like this:

If you’re a U.S. citizen should you have to publicly denounce Trump’s fascism or else risk having your public performances canceled in sane parts of the world?

It was a shitty “gotcha” in the first place, but boy is it worse when it’s accurate. No wonder you resorted to hyperbole.

I mean, respectfully, what the fuck are you talking about? An enormous amount of content on the fediverse in general, not just here, is literally public disavowal and complaints about our regime.

As a US citizen and seeing what’s happening to this place, yes, I would recommend everywhere find out where a given American stands on various issues when deciding to allow them in or not. Easy question.

Such half-assed, predictable, lazy moving goalposts here.

“All Jews now…” (extraordinary statement from you)

“Well no, how about because he’s a citizen of the country perpetrating a genocide, crime of all crimes?”

“Yeah exactly, in this specific case they’re targeting him cuz of his national origin!” (roughly an entire galaxy away from your original claim)

If you’re being disingenuous (my assumption) - go fuck yourself. If you’re actually just this bad at thinking and argumentation, strongly consider sticking to reading the comments of others.

It gets dumber…there was a school shooting today, 3 kids dead, 1 state over from this.

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.

Feeling hopeful about giant tech companies ignoring attempts to reign them in is unwise, even when it occasionally lines up with something you personally want. And I even say that as someone with permanent distrust of the big power structures doing the regulating.

Speciation of fungi in the first place makes a mockery of our futile, hubristic attempts at taxonomy. Fungus spits on the petty distinctions made by man.

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).