Way back when I was in my college years, I went from never drinking to be intoxicated, to trying marijuana, and then later, LSD, and even later, high grade speed of some kind.

The short answer to my list of experiences were that some were very good; others very very bad. And although I derived positive benefits from both the drugs themselves, and from doing them illegally, I have no desire to ever use any of them again, even if they become legal.

I discouraged all my children from using any, but didn't punish the ones who tried them. I too learned the hard way, that the idea that my fellow young people who provided drugs for each other, were not even remotely like the freedom loving, good hearted idealists that they were mythologized to be. I had marijuana that had been adulterated with something that made it cause hallucinations and physical sickness; and since the times I lived through were tremendously depressing to begin with, and all of those drugs acted to make whatever was going on, much more intense... the good times became fewer and fewer. I finally stopped it all, because the paranoia and unpleasantness involved wasn't worth the very minor fun of intoxication.

I'll of course, never know if I would have learned what I did without the drugs. It is in the nature of existence itself, that we each become as we do, because of the exact paths we walk. There is never a way to be who we are now, but not have the fun or the disastrous experiences that led us to where we are. So I can't say truthfully that the person who I am now, would have gone back in time and said "no." I would not exist as I am, had I gone down different paths.

Well, I think your premise is in error.

There has been far more violence in popular films since the 70's, for one thing. Granted, the fairly brief fad lead by directors like Sam Peckinpah, to show extra graphic and slow motion bloody muck, while telling grossly depressing stories of anti-heros and failure, was thankfully left behind after Star Wars in 1977.

But the sheer volume of violence now, especially since the Matrix films, is far beyond what anyone tried to do before.

As for violence in the real world, I don't know that that's all that much better. After all, the regular lynchings might be a thing of the past, but it's not like things are that much worse. We had repeated high level assassinations of American leaders in the late sixties, and the advances in technology allowed us to watch actual war in progress in the 70's and beyond.

I'd say there's been some serious regression locally, to be sure, but overall, I know that violence has ALWAYS been a plague across the planet. We just didn't see it up close and personal before, so things SEEMED better.

I've found that lots of people who behave "boorishly," (as I learned to call it in England) is that they never make it to the end-of-childhood recognition that not everyone assumes exactly the same things about everything.

So they think, for example, that if a woman signs up for a dating site, or goes to a party by herself, or walks down the street while dressed nicely, that it could ONLY mean that she is desperate for any guy to show serious interest. So they do so, in the only way they learned how (often without any redesign since elementary school), and if the woman fails to respond positively, they lash out angrily and accuse her of purposeful deception.

Often, this kind of guy is actually shy, but in a not-at-all charming way. They become angry upon being rejected, because they are EMBARRASSED, and as with many embarrassed people, their first urge is to blame the other person, not themselves. So they'll attack the individual if they can, and if they still have energy left, they'll often latch onto whatever popular "whipping boy" concept they see lying around. They'll declare that Women's Rights caused all women to be devious shrews and gold diggers; that Me Too is an insidious plot to keep them alone and lonely; and so on.

And yes, women aren't immune to the same general conditions. But no one person's bad behavior or maladjustment to adulthood excuses any other person's failures or errors.

There are stages.

I'm not actually ATTRACTED right off the moment, usually. I draw a distinction between ATTRACTION, which to me means "interested in more than looking," and "visual appeal."

I can and do enjoy LOOKING at all sorts of women, for a wide variety of reasons, only some of which have anything to do with sex. I certainly do notice physical characteristics of a wide variety before I begin to allow myself to be attracted, but the actual attraction doesn't happen until after a host of other things are at least suspected.

First, of course, I try to ferret out whether or not the woman is even available for me to BE attracted. I'm not going to allow myself to be drawn to someone who is not available to me for any of the usual reasons. I'll happily make friends, but wont allow attraction.

After that, things get fairly obvious and common. How she moves, of course, if it's possible to see that. But most of all, it's how she REASONS that matters most to me. WHY she comes to whatever decisions she does.

After all, the reasons WHY someone does things is a far better predictor of things like compatibility than WHAT a person does.

Religious considerations have always been of necessity, limited freedoms, just as speech in the US is limited.

Sometimes practical considerations take precedence.

Just fyi, Love has never existed as an independent thing. So technically, love isn't "alive" anywhere.

Figuratively, all quantifications are moot.

Interesting question challenge. I don't even know the names of most non-porn actors.

Porn can be tricky to define too.

This reminds me a lot of sports star questions. I only know a very narrow range of sports, and only a few famous names involved with them. I like some sports stars for what their accomplishments represent, but despise them as people. I like some sports stars as people, but officially hate them for being on the wrong team.

I've seen are involved in porn and could be called "stars," but the ones I know the names of, are from a long time ago.

Non porn people who I could have porn fantasies about...maybe Anne Hathaway, because of her eyes and general homey mannerisms. I guess what I like mostly, are women who look like and behave like real women, and not like artificially manufactured sex robots.

There has been the usual amount of incompetent reporting about this.

Perhaps eager to come up with tantalizing headlines, we get reports that imply that the death penalty has actually been against the law, and is being reinstated; but that is entirely false.

The reason why federal executions had been halted, was due problems with the drugs being used to perform them; NOT to any particular opposition to executions as a punishment, on the part of the government.

These reports SHOULD state that EXECUTIONS are being resumed.

Not that the Death Penalty has been reinstated.

To the extent that this DOES happen, I have come to suspect that it is due to SIDE EFFECTS.

There are lots of SIDE EFFECTS to having a lot of money. Such as:

* better fitting clothes are possible and likely;

* better overall health, due to higher quality food (this makes any person look and smell better);

* the APPEARANCE of much greater CONFIDENCE, due to having little or no fear of being unable to pay; all problems are easier to solve, just by paying someone else to solve them; that sort of thing;

These kinds of "side effects" add up to making ANY person more attractive to ANYONE ELSE, even when the idea that the rich person will give you some of their wealth, never comes up.


This is why the idea that rich guys get more interest than us po folks, is far less due to pervasive money grubbing or "gold-digging," than it is to the exact same reason why a person with the SAME amount of money as everyone else, but perhaps better taste, or healthier habits, will tend to have an easier time being well liked.

Another sort of accident or side effect of the way socializing works, is that when someone IS more attractive (for ANY reason), they will tend to have more ability to choose among a variety of interested suitors, and as ALL humans do, will tend to choose the most physically attractive they can. The overall RESULT of this, is that the more attractive people will end up with other more attractive people.

Since wealth does result in higher attractiveness, it will APPEAR that the good looking people are actively choosing the rich mate for the sake of the money alone, and the rich mates are actively choosing the best looking people in turn, based on looks alone.

But this is really just the accidental result of the most common reasons why ANYONE likes ANYONE ELSE.

I agree that changing one's name due to attacks, feels like giving in to the attackers. Letting them succeed.

However, I also want to point something out: the fact that people can identify Jewish families by way of certain Germanic names, suggests that those names are as much Jewish, as they are German.

I do know, that especially during the wars, a number of non-Jews changed their germanic names, to avoid appearing unpatriotic. I understand that the British Royal family officially changed their name to Windsor, specifically to leave the germanic family name behind.

I'm not clear on why Bob Zimmerman changed his name to Dylan. Maybe it was an art thing, likening himself to Dylan Thomas. And I know that lots of people in the entertainment business have changed their names, mainly to make them sound more "snappy" for advertising. One, changed her name because some psychic told her that adding an E to the end would nudge her over into the next level of success. That seemed to backfire, and she eventually changed her name back to Dionne Warwick.

I do know well, what this is really about.

It's not a matter of a particular word or phrase, it's any time a guy gets up the whatever-it-takes to try to initiate a more personal relationship with a woman, and she uses a deflection of some kind to fend him off, while saying something that is "nice" on the surface.
What's upsetting isn't really the word itself, it's the totality of being told "no" in a way that is insincerely flattering.

I don't know at all what it's like to be female in America, but to be male in America is almost all about appearing strong, decisive, and confident. To fellow males as well as to females.

The "let him down gently" technique, while seemingly logical and caring on the surface, is actually demeaning, because it's being used on men. It essentially combines the "no," with a declaration of "I don't think you're tough enough to take the truth, so I'll cushion the blow with obviously meaningless flattery." This may be connected to how many of us learn that when someone says "but you are cute," that it's a sort of consolation prize. And consolation prizes only serve to console the people handing them out.

And despite how well I know from long observation, that many males can be VERY bad "sports" about rejection, and how unpleasant they can be to deal with, I'm not sure that the "let them down easy" technique is the best way around that.

It can be worse, when the "catch phrase" for saying "no" gets to be sort of "socially recommended," as this particular one seems to be. It can feel as though you're being rejected by an entire group, and not just by one woman, entirely by accident (or maybe side-effect).

So in my case at least, it's not the word "cute" that's the problem, it's the totality of covering rejection with insincere or meaningless flattery.

This doesn't quite feel right to me. Loving one's partner more than oneself doesn't seem functionally possible.

I can certainly see one partner loving more than the other partner, but I don't think it's really possible to love someone else more than oneself.

It's the practical side of it that I'm not seeing. How can we measure and compare love for the self with love for someone else?

I have of course known many people who DID MORE for their partner than they did for themselves, plenty of people who sacrificed themselves to save their partner even.

But all the cases I've witnessed where someone in a less dramatic fashion, were said to functionally "love" their partner more than themselves in a day-to-day, moment to moment way, the reality has always been very unhealthy, and NEVER resembled anything that I or especially the partner who was thus "loved," experienced as feeling they were loved.

One example I'm thinking of, was a real person I knew who was literally starving himself in order to pay for fun things for his child. On the surface, that might SOUND like "loved his child more than himself," but as I pointed out to him (and successfully persuaded him to stop doing it), what he was really doing was killing himself entirely unnecessarily, and depriving his child of his protection and help for all the time AFTER he became unable to function due to ill health.

I've seen plenty of people who claimed to love someone more than they loved themselves in other unhealthy situations as well. Stalkers come to mind as an obvious example. Such people certainly SAY they "love" their target, but since the target never ASKED for their "love" or sacrifice, it sure didn't look like love to anyone else.

It's confusing, because self-sacrifice is so often an act of ultimate selfishness. That is, the person who "sacrifices" themselves, is declaring that THEIR PERSONAL sense of what love means, is going to overrule what their own claimed lover wants.

What about this: can someone be cheerfully pessimistic?

I am more of a "the glass IS half full, but I don't really like what's in it all that much myself" kind of person.

That is, I'm overall optimistic, but only in a general way. I feel some kinship with the people here who get labeled as being pessimistic, while feeling they are just realists.

Basically, I KNOW what my limits are, so I can't get all that intensely involved with certain pursuits, but I think well enough of myself overall, that I don't get down on myself for not doing so. Nor do I get mad at others who don't appreciate what good qualities I do have, or find me desirable because of them.

Whenever someone finds they are "wound up easily," the cause is usually continuous stress in their lives. Often made worse by the use of stimulants.

For example, I am currently "wound up easily," because a third family member is dying a very long death, and the country is teetering on oblivion due to horrifyingly bad leadership on every side.

Because stress like this is so exhausting, I end up drinking too much caffeine in order to stay awake enough to work.

That in turn, results in my having a very short temper, when inanimate objects fail to behave, and I end up making things worse by "punishing" my inanimate objects.

Well, just a related observation, but I've often seen that the reason some people ARE so nice, easy going, undemanding, and easy to chat with...is directly because they ARE taken. That same person, if you met them when they were searching for a mate, might well be every bit as cagey, or anxious, or sexually driven in talking to you as the worst people you've interacted with.

In other words, not all people who appear to be nice, are as balanced and polite as they seem to be; and not all people who are not so well behaved, are that way because they are really bad people. Sometimes it's more the result of circumstances of the moment.

Well, these times, we might actually ENJOY being eaten. By someone we like,at least.

All in all, it boils down to the fact that there are some potential threats to us that we can NOW deal with, and some that we can't. SOme of the threats are so far beyond what we can deal with, that they would literally destroy us all nearly instantly.

Which is why SOME of us want to invest in working towards being able to deal with more potential threats, while others have more or less decided (without really openly admitting it) that they want to spend all our resources having fun NOW, and just leave worldwide disaster to chance.

This particular threat,is why I personally favor a constant funding of space research, on a general approach, to enable us to have more options someday. As opposed to the people who want to insist on immediate for-profit goals, like mining asteroids, or colonizing the Moon.

I don't think it's anything deeply historic, myself. There are probably SOME left over sensibilities we have, from the days when we were still in the trees and caves, but in my direct observations of myself and others, I see much more recent things going on.

Certainly, the BASIC attractions seem to be more biology than upbringing or personal experience. I remember quite clearly, finding some girls VERY attractive when I was only five years old, and others not attractive at all, and it wasn't because they did or didn't remind me of my sister or my mother.

Nor was I being trained by TV. I know that, because I was very selective from an early age about which famous women I liked or not, and I often liked women I could tell I "wasn't supposed to," and didn't find the ones I was "supposed to" like, all that attractive. Frankly,that made me worry that there was something wrong with me, or wrong with my deductive powers.

Something interesting, that I never figured out, is why some of us can instantly recognize deceptive behavior in others, and others of us can't. I could see right through most of the liars, glad-handers, and manipulative jerks of the world, from a very early age, though I couldn't often explain to anyone what bothered me, until much later. An adult who pretended to be very friendly to children, who really wasn't at all, would make me furiously angry or frightened every time. It was again worrisome to me that because lots of people DIDN'T see this, that I could be the problem, and wasn't until I had a LOT more experience that I realized that my "instincts" were right every time.

So overall, at this point, I suspect that we all have a lot of senses and sensibilities, most of which come built into us, but that it takes a lot of human experiences to learn what our reactions actually MEAN. Sometimes anger is really fear. Sometimes fear is really desire and anxiety about being liked. Sometimes confidence is really blindness. Sometimes confusion is the result of refusing to listen to ourselves properly. That sort of thing.

In my experience and observation, MOST people are nowhere near that logical.

Basically, they start from " I enjoy this, but that grosses me out," and then AFTER the fact, they work out sometimes VERY elaborate cover stories and involved excuses for why it should be okay for them to do whatever they happen to want, in reaction to their sensibilities.