The impact of human fertility cycles ("concealed ovulation') and human evolution is a vast, deep field of study and speculation in itself, but I am making some very sweeping generalizations here, referencing people's capability to choose when to reproduce on the broadest levels, not that there was a period or specific instance of this having an impact... more like, it made a difference over very large scales of time, as evident by the fact that our breeding cycles are nothing like most other mammals.

We should all be learning that we're all children. Some of us, over time, gain a lot more baggage and issues, but that shit just layers right on top of the "child" parts so we're all just basically children with complex problems.

The brain doesn't "prune" itself. The brain you had when you were 12, you have that same damn brain. It doesn't change. Stuff just gets added to it.

Almost anyone with an irrational political stance betrays their youth.

Political ideology has always captivated the passions of youth, but isn't successfully implemented or even internalized except by people with age and experience and emotional regulation.

Bears can be trained to drive cars and communicate through various means, it's thought they may be as smart as great apes like gorillas. This is why they were a choice circus animal for a long time.

Yes, this should be terrifying information.

We had the tall stride thing going, we had the super-endurance thing going already, we had gotten good at tool-use like many other primates, in that we could use sticks and rocks to beat things and poke things, just like modern chimps and apes. (Modern primates also throw stones, it's not the evolution-killer on its own that the meme is making it out to be.)

No, the REAL thing that soared us beyond all members of the animal kingdom is how we started abstracting information and sharing it. IE: language, writing, and the cognitive processes behind those skills that allow us to plan ahead. Not just planning ahead, but being able to set up actions far in advance, like planting seeds because we know a plant will come out of it. Moving our camps to where animal herds migrate to so we can stay close to the food, and just the day-to-day actions like preparing a fire in advance so you can see when it gets dark, bringing things with you to use later, having an idea how to ration food, being able to share your plans with others, communicating your movements to other hunters, and yes, all this made us exceptional hunters. When other primates were still mostly foraging for plants and bugs, our ancestors used this "thinking" thing to start getting massive doses of meat. Amino acids, proteins, high-density fuel, food for growing brains.

Not to mention, we're the only creature that chooses when to reproduce. We used this foresight to plan our futures and our families. This is a massive changeup from how nature has handled reproduction. For the vast majority of life on Earth, breeding is just this thing that "happens" at certain points and everything leads to that event, and nothing really has control over how that event plays out.

Breeding is still a big deal for us, just look how horny we all are, but we decide when we're going to have babies, and while it doesn't seem a big deal here and now, it was a game changer when we were migrating packs of hunter-gatherers, following the seasons and the herds of animals.

Our story of how we got here is without question the most fantastic story ever. You are the product of over four and a half billion years of uninterrupted successes. A family tree going back a thousands of millions of years without break, surviving apocalypses that have turned our entire globe to ice, to fire, to water and other unimaginable catastrophes that sometimes lasted for millions of years.

So now you made it, your billions of generations of ancestors secured your survival against all odds, whatcha gonna do with it?

I have this feeling that the "X months" we have, as well the other periods of special recognition, serves a primary purpose of just setting people off.

For real, the ONLY people who really have a strong reaction to things like Black History Month are racists. The ONLY people who really care that there's a "Gay Pride Month" are the frothing homophobes. For everyone else, particularly the people whom those days or months celebrate, it's just Tuesday. Or some such normal day where nothing changes and they still have to constantly look over their shoulder.

If all it does is make some backwards, broken asshole lose his mind and rage about how "unfair" it is that nobody is giving them their special day, then it's a victory. If all these recognition periods do is remind us all that there is a sizable segment of our population who hate you personally then it's actually doing good on the long-term, because we can use it as a barometer. We can use these days and months to gauge how much more work we have to do squashing nazis and purging hate groups, and how much protection our friends and neighbors still need simply for existing outside the "white CIS straight male American" spectrum.

a guy who claimed trans people had their minds rotten by the porn industry.

Holy shit that projection, and how they can't disentangle their kinks from human beings with human experience.

Mods finally took it down along with a lot of his other BS. Just waiting for the wounded screaming about censorship.

I love the ringing silence as they chew on their own tongue trying to decide to even respond to actual data.

There's a lot of data and hard work in that article from the CDC, I bet a lot of people worked very hard and seriously to assemble that information and give it to the public. Shame how many people will put their own sources: conspiracy blogs and subreddits and AM radio shows, at the same level. Imagine how insulting that is to people working in these major institutions to have idiots who never leave their couch screaming about far-fetched plots from George Soros.

Half the time these are 17-year-old middle-class white kids with no worries in the world, raging emotional hormones and a desire to "thrash someone with their incredible intellect" and have no real care for the issues beyond that, they just want to fight and they will lie to their last breath to feel like they're special and smart.

I really feel like if we could see who most of the people are who push back on so many modern social issues, we would have a lot fewer social issues, because we would be able to roll our eyes and close the door on these literal children who are turning every conversation into a debate with children.

I actually need data to make conclusions.

No, you don't. I can prove it.

If you get emotional reactions seeing other people make choices about to wear on their faces, you're dumber than horse shit, you are a toddler, a child, a baby who needs to grow up.

See? That wasn't hard, no data needed, just plain ol' simple "common sense."

Aren't you guys all about "common sense?" I think It's common sense to let people make their own choices and not get so hyper about someone else's political agenda that you have to chime in about.... mask bans. It's just awful. I can't imagine doing that and looking at the mirror and saying "Yeah, I am making the world better."

Okay but that addresses no part of my comment, why do you get mad when you see people wear facemasks? Isn't that kind of strange? Is it helping anyone?

Doesn't it make you feel manipulated to have others able to make you start having emotional reactions to things you see that you wouldn't have thought about before?

it never went away, it was just removed from sight.

But the people who segregated water fountains and chose where people should live based on their skin color? They're still alive and kickin' and making laws and business policies and decisions that impact us all. They have learned how to change their language but they have the same exact values that they did decades ago, or the same attitudes and values that their parents did. They have learned to hide in plain sight while also making sure that we remain divided and afraid and deeply obsessed with the superficial appearances of society.

America is funny, we tend to forget anything beyond about a 5-year window when events are still current, otherwise a lot of people here think that women and people of color have had rights here for like, a century or more. To the average liberal American, the idea that there are full-on, hateful nazis living next door to them seems radically unthinkable, and this is why they're getting so comfortable taking off their hoods.

Racism is so America right now always.

This has become inscrutable and over such a trite matter, there will be no further scrutiny.

You think the person praising the actresses appearance and saying how hot she is not attracted to women?

I am utterly lost how the general internet generation armchair psychologizes other people anymore, I will assume this is some new "everything is reverse" zoomer thing.

Not only are you correct, we will never have any real sense of scale of just how correct you are, since we've only been exposed to about less than 0.01% of life that's ever existed on Earth in the last several billion years.

For all we know there were clans of synapsids that were exclusively homosexual for terms of child-rearing and had complicated social systems with language and structured hierarchy, etc.

The idea that we can even remotely determine what this world's natural systems have been like from looking at a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of the total picture is once again peak human hubris and self importance.

This planet has been a thriving source of life in the universe, maybe the only one like it for far, far longer than any human alive can comprehend. In the last several billion years nothing complained about homosexuality. Humans will be here for a brief blip on the larger picture, and there will be no record nor impact from anyone's hate or fear of sex acts. Earth will keep spinning through the void, life will keep evolving. Protest signs and hateful messages will dissolve back to the systems that created them.

All you people screaming and crying about "woke" this and that, and who get confused by terms like LGBTQ+, it doesn't matter. You will be dust for far, far longer than you will be a human screaming about what's "natural."

I think the user at top of this thread was confused and thought the image from Tumblr was being critical and saying something negative about the actress in question, or they meant to respond to the referenced haters.

Whatever it is, the comment was too confused for any of to try to make any kind of statement about anything about it.

Which person? The one in the tumblr image above is saying she IS sexy and beautiful. The one(s) referenced as saying she couldn't be a love interest? I haven't read any of their actual comments here but I tend to agree that if you get on a soap-box to scream to the world how something in media you're choosing to watch makes you feel, you probably have more complicated feelings about the topic than you're letting on.

The strangest part of this was how conservatives used to be the ones pushing for wearing masks as alternatives to vaccinations, because the mindless fear of needles goes waaay back. See, chances are I'm older than you, so I've seen these cycles repeat themselves over and over. You've only seen it once or twice tops.

What happens is that a politician will dangle a new fear over you, and you will attach to that fear because that's how our brains work. I am talking universally, not specific to one party or ideology, this is how we ALL work, and leftists are equally guilty of grifting their base the same way.

But you HAVE to understand where this came from, why you're fighting with people about this, where this came from.

Never mind that people have been wearing face covering for millenia to reduce spreading disease, we have paintings and etching of lepers and plague victims going back thousands of years wearing something to prevent accidental spreading of saliva or body fluids. This isn't a complicated idea, and a lot of people wear face coverings anyway to prevent illness or for safety around immunocompromised people. This isn't new, this isn't something that was planned or contrived, the ONLY reason you're having arguments with people about face masks of all things is because someone out there knows how to connect your brain to a story to explain how it feels. To make you expend your energy on this, not making our world better or focusing on your elected representatives and what they're signing into law, and I bet it works great. I bet you don't get involved in your local politics. Nobody does, nobody spends as much energy on their actual neighborhoods as they do arguing online about props.

See, like with a lot of other things, a lot of us were unsure and worried about the future, so a lot of people trying to get power used masks as their props to fixate that insecurity on. I am not even going to talk about their effectiveness or not, it's like wearing a hat in the sun, sure it won't save you from sunburns but it's just a thing we do to try our best to protect what we can, it's not a big deal.

Your brain is not a tool of logic and reason, that's an illusion. It's a tool to tell you a story to explain how you feel. And it LOVES when someone provides a story for it. Because your brain wants a story that makes sense, not one that's accurate. There is a difference. A lot of things can make sense and not be true.

It should be a giant, glaring alarm that someone is fucking with your brain when you start feeling contentious about what other people wear on their faces. That HAS to trigger something deep inside that makes you wonder why you're so emotionally connected to this "debate."

You got chains around you and they're going to keep attaching chains until you realize how deeply you're playing in the WWE theater of political rhetoric. Let this one go, just walk away, it's objectively a nonsense campaign designed to distracted you.

The outraged reply you're already pounding out in your head is part of that distraction. You are giving your soul away to others to use as they will. Doesn't that bother you?