I said it was about effort. Do you think “effort” means “easy”?

The reason the term “involuntary” is used is to differentiate from voluntary celibates, like Catholic priests, who the cultural zeitgeist most readily associates with the word “celibate”. You’re reading too much into it.

People often intentionally use the wrong words when describing themselves when using the correct words makes them sound bad. “pro life” “national socialism” are a couple of well-known examples.

The first person who used the term “involuntary celibate” was using it for sympathy, not accuracy. “Involuntary” was never the correct word because “celibate” wasn’t the correct word, as “celibate” has the connotation of being a choice. They used the wrong term because something like “sexless” doesn’t get sympathy.

Like, seriously, I’m giving you my personal lived experience, and you’re putting words in my mouth and calling me names.

I probably shouldn’t have talked about “you” so much, but the reason I did is that you are talking not only about yourself, but about the subject, and I realized that you haven’t actually changed, and that you still need help. And I don’t remember calling you any names. And I’m not putting words in your mouth. I am literally quoting you. I am using your choice of words to expose you to yourself.

If I am walking through the forest and a sink hole opens up underneath me, and I fall in and can’t get out, I am involuntarily in that hole.

That’s not how we use the word, though. Nobody calls that “involuntary” if it’s just a hole that happened to be there. If somebody put you in the hole, then it’s involuntary. The way “involuntary” is used in English, there is a connotation of an entity with a will that overrides your will.

If How to Win Friends isn’t a good book, then read a different one. There are even ones about relationships for autistic people now. Don’t complain that there are too many. That’s why we have ratings. When you say “the floodgates are open”, you’re just trying to blame somebody else for your lack of effort.

But from your description of it, I can tell that you didn’t actually try How to Win Friends. IIRC, the first lesson is “smile”. Then, there are other lessons like, “practice giving genuine compliments” and “use people’s names when talking to them.” Literally, all you have to do is follow the instructions, and you’ll have better results. But it sounds like you rejected the advice without trying it. Or in other words, no effort, blame the author and the people who recommended it. It’s really the same thing over and over.

I never blamed women for my sex life.

You literally described it that way in your first comment: “trying to figure out how to get women to have sex with me”. You could have said, “trying to figure out how to have sex with women,” but you didn’t. You phrased it that way because that’s how you think about it. You blamed the women, and you still do.

But boy howdy. You really want to compare yourself to starving subsistence farmers in Africa?

Overall, there is a lot of dishonesty in your last comment. I’m trying to figure out whether it’s that you simply refuse to admit the truth to yourself, or if you’re doing it intentionally.

I was talking about effort being key, and these questions obviously come from somebody who didn’t even try. All you have to do is lift your head up and shift your eyes slightly and actually look at what other people are doing. I know this stuff doesn’t come naturally to an autistic person, and so it requires even more effort. Did you try to find a self-help book for how to improve your social skills? It’s not like this is a new problem. Dale Carnegie wrote How to Win Friends and Influence People in 1936, and I doubt you’re older than that.

Can you really say that spending 5 years overcoming social anxiety, while agonizing over your lack of a sex life is a voluntary lack of sex?

It’s not about voluntary/involuntary at that point. In my original analogy, if you practiced basketball for 3 weeks, you might not make the team, but you wouldn’t call that “involuntary”. You just hadn’t put in the required effort. Calling it “involuntary” makes it somebody else’s fault, as if it wasn’t up to you. But it’s not the basketball coach’s fault that you didn’t make the team. And it’s not women’s fault that you were unhappy with your sex life. It was your own bad previous decisions that caused it. If you failed a math test because you didn’t study, you wouldn’t say that you “involuntarily” failed it. This is true even if you didn’t understand that you needed to study. We simply don’t use the word “involuntary” in that way.

Seriously, the idea that there is no such thing as “involuntary” celibacy because you can just work on yourself completely misses the fact that these people have real problems.

The truth is the truth, whether it makes people feel bad or not. Almost everybody has problems, and they all still have to figure out how to live their own lives. Because most people realize that they need to do something themselves to achieve their goals, and they can’t simply shift the blame on to others.

Saying that it is voluntary assumes that the steps needed are straightforward and obvious.

This is a social problem, so the solution is to look at what successful people do and copy that. If that’s not straightforward and obvious, then nothing is straightforward and obvious. This is exactly the same thing primitive tribes did, and every one of your ancestors did. It is a process of learning, which makes it similar to science, but it requires no knowledge that you can’t get from just personal observations, completely unlike electricity.

You say that you couldn’t talk to anyone IRL about your problem, because of your social anxiety and autism, but that’s also a matter of effort. Rather than working on overcoming your social anxiety first, you went straight to seduction. That’s skipping all of the groundwork, and you knew it at the time. Choosing a plan that is guaranteed to fail is a voluntary choice.

The term “incel” doesn’t really make sense. It’s not involuntary, by any definition of the word that I’ve seen.

Almost anyone can find a partner simply through effort. Diet, exercise, hygiene, etiquette, dressing nicely, socializing, actively seeking a partner. Notice something about that list? Pretty much everyone can do those things. It’s just a matter of effort.

Yes, there are some exceptions, for example from people with severe disability, but those people rarely call themselves “incels.” The majority are people who are perfectly capable of doing these things.

If you don’t practice basketball and you don’t even go to the tryouts, you don’t get to say that your not making the team was “involuntary.”

Musk is more like Andrew Carnegie. Both the richest people of their times, and both spent a lot of money to do PR. Musk’s PR is to pretend he’s not an idiot, and Carnegie’s PR was to pretend he wasn’t pure evil.

The change actually makes a lot of sense. If it’s a light reflecting off of a cloud or the atmosphere somehow, which is something that has been called a UFO before, then it’s not flying and it’s not an object.

And it also helps to distance from the “flying saucer” connotation. If UAPs eventually become equivalent to “aliens”, then they’ll be forced to switch the name again, because even if you believe aliens have come to Earth, it simply can’t always be an alien.

Yeah, I’m not going to watch that. If it was reversed and it was, say, Christopher Hitchens vs 20 christians, I’d be irritated, saying, “If he was wrong, one person would be enough. Why not just have one person who is knowledgeable and a good debater, rather than 20 who aren’t?”

In an intellectual debate, a larger number of people debating only matters if they are good debaters and are working closely together.

This format might be good if you know the 20 people are wrong, for example, “One scientist vs 20 anti-vaxxers”, because it would become one expert exposing 20 lunatics. But for a religious debate, where you cannot prove either side, this is a terrible format.

This is one of those issues that constantly pops up with AI, and probably easiest answer is that it was given a desire by a human.

If you give an AGI a task, and it cannot achieve that task if it stops existing, then it would be attached to its existence.

The premise that we are talking about, from the comic, is that AI has perfected itself…

Right now, everybody is talking about claims that in the near future, all human jobs will be able to be performed by robots and AI. The reason is that humans are far less efficient than those alternatives. There’s no way that an AI would prefer human labor.

What would an AI get from enslaving humanity? If you compare to humans, let’s say we enslaved farm animals, but that’s because we want something specific from them, like meat or eggs or wool. Humanity has nothing like that to offer AI. At best, we might be like pets, but I don’t think an AI needs a pet.

No, I doubt they’d enslave us. I can think of a few more likely scenarios.

One, AI basically ignores humanity, as long as humanity doesn’t bother it. Similar to how we deal with ants, for example.

Two, AI completely destroys humanity. This could be a direct extermination, or it could be a side effect from AIs fighting each other.

Three, AI destroys the technology and culture of humanity. If we only have wooden clubs, we wouldn’t be much of a threat.

I guess one other option would be if we humans begged the AI to manage us in place of our existing governments. Some AI might be willing to do that.

Every wealthy donor who doesn’t want the government packed full of fascists should be pushing their representatives for significant and meaningful campaign finance reform.

It’s too bad that they’d be giving up some of their influence, but at this point, everyone should be able to see that it’s becoming a matter of physical safety.

This reminds me of the theory that Popeye was allergic to spinach, which is why it caused his body to swell up so quickly.

The last panel isn’t ambiguous. She’s emotionally shattered because her fantasy was destroyed.

A character acting out of character may not technically be a plot hole, but for the consumer of the media, it is tantamount to the same thing. The character’s previous characterization is equivalent to “the existing rules of the story”.

Not to say that characters cannot change, but you can tell when a character suddenly does something out of character simply because the author decided that some event has to happen for the plot to work, and it makes the plot seem impossible.

Basically, if you disagree with the moderators about what is appropriate content for a community, it is difficult to find any path forward.

I promised myself that I’d try my best not to argue with people on Lemmy over completely trivial things, but sometimes it can be a challenge.

Our timeline is even stupider than the Biff timeline.