I am worried for President Putin: my biggest fear is that he will be alone. — FreeEmotion

You are afraid that he could end up committing suicide?

For the beauty of Giulietta Masina.

That makes us even, I guess.

Don't recall saying otherwise, but sure. — StreetlightX

I think it's important to say these things unambiguously, not just "not say otherwise".

Maïa Mazaurette, French sex columnist and author, had something to say on male sexual misery.


According to a recent study, many men are venting about their sexual misery even as they ignore that of women, and without ever questioning their own stereotyped requirements.

One survey too many...

While consulting the latest Wyylde / Ifop survey published yesterday, I came across this data:

48% of French men would not accept to be in a couple with a woman who does not respect certain beauty standards
45% would refuse to sleep with a woman who has body hair (little reminder: all women have body hair...)
One man out of 3 discards all overweight women
One man in 5 doesn't want a taller or older woman
1 in 10 even refuse richer women...

Seriously guys, that's a lot to process.

Personally I have no problem with men having standards and sticking to them, it's heroic to have convictions. No, my problem is that then these same guys come crying about their sexual misery - poor little rabbits. Because that's the crazy situation we're in: men complaining about not sleeping with enough women when they themselves don't want to sleep with enough women.

In the United States, there is a word to describe this situation: entitlement. It means that we feel that good things are owed to us - a kind of spoiled child complex.

Luckily, a simple economic theory provides an answer! More precisely, the theory of supply and demand.

In sex, men describe, and lament, an asymmetry: they demand more sex than women are willing to give. Okay. Here we have two solutions:

The first: that demanders lower their level of demand because when you can't get what you want, you settle for what you can. Unfortunately, in the case of the sexual market, men prefer not to have anything at all (complain about it and bore us with their frustration).

Second solution: when the demand is higher than the supply, we could increase the supply, that is, increase the desire of women. To achieve this, it is very simple, men must make themselves more desirable or make us want to sleep with them more.

And here, how to say this nicely... Picky guys are already not very attractive. But the survey released yesterday shows that quite a few of these big guys are also bad in bed:

27% of French men would refuse to use a sextoy to make their partner cum more easily
Another 27% would refuse to learn how to make their partner cum

Allow me to summarize. When these men deign to have sex with a woman, they don't even want to give her pleasure. No wonder we live in anti-erotic times: when I hear that, I want to enter the orders...

Okay, that leaves us with a majority of potentially frequentable men, still. Nevertheless, if you take out a quarter of bad sexers, and half of the guys with unrealistic standards, then a lot of women get left out in the cold.

And for someone like me, it becomes very complicated. Three-quarters of men refuse open relationships, four out of five men refuse threesomes with two men. What am I going to do with my weekends?

What is crazy in this story is that men are always talking about their sexual misery, without ever realizing the misery they create in women. What do you think, guys? That we don't want to make love, that we don't want to be carried away by desire? Well, yes, we do! But men still have to make themselves worthy of it, somehow, and for that we have to progress on two axes: the desire they feel, and the desire they arouse.

Meanwhile American material support of genocidal regimes like Israel or brutal dictatorships like Egypt continue apace. — StreetlightX

It's useful to keep all this in mind and to condemn every illegal war, including the current aggression of a democracy by a dictatorship in Ukraine. Two wrongs don't make a right.

From your Reuters link:

The International Committee of the Red Cross [ICRC] called on the warring parties on Thursday to let people leave Mariupol safely and to allow aid in.

Up to 40 ICRC staff and their families had to flee the port along with other civilians on Wednesday, because they had "no operational capacity any more," the organisation's head Peter Maurer told a news conference.

----

Even in this hell, ICRC maintained some staff there all this time. Hats off.

"What good fortune for those in power that people do not think.”
― Adolf Hitler — FreeEmotion

That was part of his cynicism. I believe that in actual fact people do think, which is why a dictator needs to intimidate and misinform his own people.

Come to think of it, the current situation is akin to Hitler's invasion of Austria in March 1938, in an alternative history version where instead of marching unopposed all the way to Vienna, the Germans would have only captured 20% of Austria after three weeks of war, at great cost to their war machine.

The war in Ukraine is a failed Anschluss.

Ha ha. Thanks. Ok i was boasting a bit in that story, but as a matter of fact, i do not remember much of the banging, and it's not what the story is about. What I remember the most is the story-telling, this feeling of disclosing oneself to a total stranger, and of discovering sides of her too, approaching a life so different. We reached a place of natural, immediate intimacy. It was real nice and rare. These things do not happen, normally.

In international politics (and honestly, I could leave out the "international" part) everyone is a piece of shit (excuse my French) and your only choice is which flavor of shit you'd like jammed into your mouth. — Tzeentch

You are welcome to go live in North Korea. We'll send you our good wishes and an orange once in a while.

I guess it was the same around Germany in the 30s, lots of people trying to point out the pretty clear reality of what is going on while some people just couldn't accept it. — Christoffer

Plenty of people in the 30's thought that Hitler and Mussolini made a lot of sense.

I'm beginning to think there are people in here that are truly part of the Russian propaganda machine, apologists for Russia and this war. — Christoffer

I agree that Boethius must be on their payroll. Otherwise, his behavior here makes no logical sense.

EU doesn't have hard power, — boethius

LOL. Any European coalition can beat this Russian army flat out. The Italian air force all by itself would blow those Sukhois out of the sky in a day, and then be able to bomb Moscow day and night. Not to speak of the French or the Brits. Even the Germans should be able in a few years to beat Russia single handedly.

If they can't beat the Ukrainians, they can't even beat Belgium.

Any fact in this sea of confusion? Any salient idea, even? It reads like a long, clumsy propaganda piece, honestly. Your rhetoric is as empty as the Kremlin's.

What does the EU get? More or less the collapse of its immense soft power position in the world overnight, — boethius

In your cryptosoviet dreams.

I still loved her but couldn't take the madness anymore.

Ukraine's presidential advisor Mykhailo Podolyak about the Russian bombing of Ukrainian cities:

“It’s a paradox: it wasn’t Western Ukraine that was bombed — the main devastating blows fell on the cities of Eastern Ukraine, where more or less pro-Russian sentiments existed until February 24. Massive strikes were carried out in residential areas where the Russian-speaking population lives. Do you understand the absurdity? "We will now make you fall in love with the Russian language by bombing." It just looks ridiculous."

The first point about a legitimate grievance is that it matters to the counter party — boethius

How do you know that it matters to them?

I hope you had and still have support from family, friends or any other caring and good listener... — Amity

Huh, this is not a story I tell very often. I won't tell the whole thing here for sure, but thanks for the kind words, it is much appreciated.

I once told it to a girl, I mean a woman, a total stranger. This I can evoke here, it's a good and light memory of intimacy. It will help balance the other one. Sorry if I brag a little.

It was on a flight from Beijing to Bangkok. The flight had been delayed quite a bit and we had met at the odious buffet of a brutalist business lounge, a room without windows deep inside the immense airport. She was Chinese, thin like a reed, preppy in her business suit, round face, one eye a bit astray, not too much... There was something innocent in her, in that strange look, as if half of her was keeping track of the sky all the time. It gave her the face of an angel, somehow. I liked her, and more importantly, I trusted her, immediately. I could see she liked me too. I was in a suit too, preppy and all. Both in our thirties. We started chatting in the lounge, eating whatever we had picked.

I am a romantic bloke, but also a very shy guy. I don't do pick up lines. I don't do dates, they seem preordained and planned, lacking what I naively cherish in romance: surprise and spontaneity. But once in a long while, a woman has had the good sense of hitting on me.

She was not really hitting on me, not in any heavy or unladylike manner, but she was clearly interested. What was happening between us was more than just the boredom of two strangers, trying to keep each other company during a long wait, in an aggressively ugly place. We clicked, almost magically like in romance novels. The way I like it.

When the plane came we asked the steward if we could sit next to one another on these comfortable business class seats.

She was on her way back to Australia where she had come to study, and was now working in some consulting firm specialised in China. She was flying a lot in those planes. Her marriage (with an Australian) was unhappy, and without love. She had a way to say that... bowing her head, but still, in a low yet assertive, factual tone she said it, sure of her rights to sexual and romantic happiness as a young woman in this modern world.

She had been a child during the cultural revolution, she remembered a few things, first the hunger and the cold, then the violence, and the shame of her parents who were teachers, lambasted and beaten up by their students.

I told her many stories too, all real. And since back then the story of that other girl was recent, I found myself telling that one too. I emptied my soul to her, and like you guys, she forgave me and comforted me.

We kept talking of many things throughout the night. We had started to lean on one another to murmur our stories, not to wake up other travelers who had all dozed off. At some point our heads touched, and we both let them there. And then the rest of our bodies followed suit, in a progressive, timid at first then bolder and bolder exploration of one another.

All this time she was checking on the angels above with her left eye, or perhaps on God or on some Chinese equivalent. Whoever they were, I believe they were looking back upon us, because we both missed our connection in Bangkok and ended up in the same hotel room.

At some point I told her she was truly beautiful. She retorted categorically that she was not, that by Chinese standards she was ugly. She had a round face (which for some reason was bad), small tits and an eye checking on God. And yet to me, she looked like an angel.

She left the room first, without any fuss as the practical woman she really was, on her way to Sydney.

unlikely they care about ethnic Russians fighting the war. — boethius

Also unlikely that they care about ethnic Russians NOT fighting the war either, because the civilians being bombed in Mariupol are in majority ethnic Russians.

You understand now? Putin lied when he said he cared for the lives of ethnic Russians in Ukraine. It was not a 'legitimate grievance', it was just an excuse.

I don't see how the proposals are mutually exclusive. — boethius

Honestly, you don't?

Note: this is out of topic so mods, feel free to delete or reposition.

There are some good theories, but recent events have put some of them into question. — _db

That was intriguing. My current hypothesis goes from Darwin to the death of God and the triumph of materialism over humanism. IOW, I lean to a philosophical explanation along the lines of Camus in Letters to a German Friend:



We have long believed together that this world had no higher reason and that we were frustrated. I still believe that in a way. But I drew other conclusions than those of which you spoke then and which, for so many years, you have been trying to force into history. [•••]

You have never believed in the meaning of this world and you have taken from it the idea that everything was equivalent and that good and evil could be defined as one wished. You assumed that in the absence of any human or divine morality the only values ​​were those which governed the animal world, that is to say violence and cunning. You concluded from this that man was nothing and that one could kill his soul, that in the most insane of stories the task of an individual could only be the adventure of power, and his morality, the realism of conquest. And in truth, I who thought I thought like you, I saw hardly any argument to oppose you, if not a violent taste for justice which, in the end, seemed to me as unreasonable as the most sudden of passions.

Where was the difference? It's that you accepted to despair slightly and that I never consented to it. It is that you admit enough of the injustice of our condition to resolve to add to it, while it seemed to me on the contrary that man had to affirm justice to fight against eternal injustice, to create happiness to protest against the universe of misfortune. Because you have turned your despair into intoxication, because you have freed yourself from it by erecting it into a principle, you have agreed to destroy the works of man and to fight against him, to complete his essential misery. And I, refusing to admit this despair and this tortured world, I only wanted men to rediscover their solidarity in order to enter into a struggle against their revolting destiny.

You see, from the same principle we have drawn different morals. It's because along the way you abandoned lucidity and found it more convenient (you would have said indifferent) for someone else to think for you and for millions of Germans. Because you were tired of struggling against the sky, you rested in this exhausting adventure where your task is to maim souls and destroy the earth. In short, you have chosen injustice, you have placed yourself with the gods. Your logic was only apparent.

I chose justice on the contrary, to remain faithful to the earth. I continue to believe that this world has no higher meaning. But I know that something in it has meaning and it is man, because he is the only being who demands to have it. This world has at least the truth of man and our task is to give him his reasons against fate itself. And it has no other reasons than man and it is he who must be saved if we want to save the idea we have of life. Your smile and your disdain will tell me: what is it to save man? But I shout it to you: it's not to mutilate him, and it's to give a chance to this justice that he is the only one to conceive!

This is why we are in struggle. This is why we had to follow you first in a path that we did not want and at the end of which we, in the end, found defeat. Because your despair was your strength. From the moment it is alone, pure, sure of itself, pitiless in its consequences, despair has a merciless power. It's the one that crushed us while we hesitated and still had a look at happy images. We thought that happiness was the greatest of conquests, the one we make against the destiny that is imposed on us. Even in defeat, this regret [for happiness] did not leave us.

But you played better, you made history. And for five years, it was no longer possible to enjoy the cries of birds in the cool of the evening. We had to desperately despair. We were separated from the world, because at each moment of the world was attached a whole people of mortal images. For five years there has been no morning on this earth without agonies, evening without prisons, noon without carnage. Yes, we had to follow you. But our difficult feat was to follow you into war, and not to forget happiness. And through the clamor and the violence, we tried to keep in our hearts the memory of a happy sea, of a hill never forgotten, the smile of a dear face. Just as well, it was our best weapon, the one we will never lower. Because the day we lose it, we will be as dead as you. Simply, we now know that the weapons of happiness require a lot of time and too much blood to be forged.

We had to enter into your philosophy, agree to resemble you a little. You had chosen heroism without direction, because it is the only value that remains in a world that has lost its meaning. And having chosen it for you, you have chosen it for everyone and for us. We were forced to imitate you in order not to die. But we saw then that our superiority over you was to have a direction. Now that this is going to end, we can tell you what we have learned is that heroism is little, happiness more difficult.

Now everything should be clear to you, you know we are enemies. You are the man of injustice and there is nothing in the world that my heart can hate as much. But what was only a passion, I now know the reasons for. I fight you because your logic is as criminal as your heart. And in the horror that you have lavished on us for four years, your reason has as much a part as your instinct. This is why my condemnation will be total, you are already dead in my eyes. But at the very time when I judge your atrocious behavior, I will remember that you and we started from the same solitude, that you and we are with all of Europe in the same tragedy of intelligence. And in spite of yourselves, I will keep the name of man for you. To be faithful to our faith, we are forced to respect in you what you do not respect in others. For a long time, this was your huge advantage since you kill more easily than us. And until the end of time, it will benefit those like you. But until the end of time, we, who are not like you, will have to bear witness so that man, above his worst errors, may receive his justification and his titles of innocence. [•••]

This advantage you had over us, you see that you continue to have it. But it also makes our superiority. And it is it who now makes this night light for me. Here is our strength which is to think like you on the depth of the world, to refuse nothing of the drama which is ours, but at the same time to have saved the idea of ​​​​man at the end of this disaster of intelligence and to draw from it the indefatigable courage of rebirths. Certainly, the accusation that we bring against the world is not lightened. We have paid too dearly for this new science for our condition to cease to seem hopeless to us. Hundreds of thousands of men murdered at daybreak, the terrible prison walls, a Europe whose earth is smoking with millions of corpses which were its children, it took all of that to pay for the acquisition of a couple of shades that may serve no purpose other than helping a few of us die better. Yes, this is hopeless. But we have to prove that we don't deserve so much injustice. This is the task.


https://livre1.com/lis/lettres-a-un-ami-allemand/chapitre-1/

I don't know your circumstances but I reckon you're one of the brave guys. — Amity

It seemed more like self-preservation at the time. Nothing brave at all there.

I am so very sorry for what you have endured as the result of another's personal choice.
I mean nothing more and nothing less than to let you know that my heart aches for you. — ArguingWAristotleTiff

Thank you, you are very kind. Honestly I failed her, but yes, in the end it was her choice.

I just googled around a bit and found this plethora of videos telling us guys how to set up the ideal dating site profile that will get us the match we want. — Tobias

Oh oh... Now you'll be bombarded forever with ads from dating consultants and firms, telling you how you are doing it all wrong.

I get them. Because I did a similar search.

I haven't hit on a woman for the past 20 years, and prior to that I did it three times in my entire life. But now I can't go on Youtube without this c..t in an advertisement, telling me how I am doing it all wrong... Hey, I'm not doing anything.

Yeah, this seems to be a common theme here. I don't know anything, I don't believe anyone, I don't give a fuck, but I am going to bloviate at length anyway... — SophistiCat

Exactly. Arguing from a position of ignorance is already ridiculous, most of times. But arguing that others know nothing because Joe Sixpack knows nothing -- now that must be the pinacle of imbecility.

Which is odd, as with your purported background you should be in an ideal position to do so. Ergo, either you are not what you claim, you cannot provide the requested answers because they do not exist, or you are aware that I am correct in my general assumptions. — Book273

Or perhaps I couldn't be bothered to dispell your mistakes, which are yours to deal with. I am not in the business of educating careless cretins. I don't think you are well disposed to learn, anyway. You lack the necessary humility.

What is your back ground, that you would judge me incompetent? — Book273

Information and knowledge management. It takes some competence to check information and from what I can see, you are lacking it.

Likewise, if you want us to believe that the Russian government gives a rat's ass about the lives of ethnic Russians in Ukraine, feel free to explain why Russian forces are bombing so many ethnic Russians in Ukraine...

This is what I mean by non-correlating information. — Book273

My guess is you are just confused and incompetent at doing such verifications. If you want to be sure, do travel to Mariupol and see for yourself...

Well, ask your wife then, because I can smell a fish here. You've been screwed.

The other had a reporter in the forefront of a parking lot "filled with the dead", — Book273

Would you have some recollection of the channel? Of the reporter? Any evidence to show or point at?

As any woman will tell you, men don't have a monopoly on being nasty.

You claim to have better information than I do, yet, so far, have not been able to explain the discrepancies I have noticed. Either you are unable to do so, are unwilling to do so, or are unwilling to even look to confirm or disprove my observations. I am seeking a logical counter to what I see, and have not yet found it. — Book273

You're probably right that the Russians are not really bombing Mariupol and that in fact, the aliens from Mars are the guilty party here. Thanks for the heads up.

(combined with previous)

most of those posting here are, in fact, not informed past whatever the media has told them. — Book273

And my point is that you cannot possibly know that for a fact.

Some here may be on the Russian payroll and spreading talking points. And some others may be drawing from their own military or geographic experience, or have access to other sources than the media.

Don't assume that, because you are ignorant, everybody else must be ignorant.

Also it is Maple Syrup. Not marple. Just letting you know. — Book273

See? I wasn't kidding when I said I knew nothing about it. But you knew something, at least you knew how it is spelt, and you corrected me. So my ignorance does not imply yours.

Likewise, your ignorance about Ukraine doesn't imply other people's ignorance.

I guess you trust your media. I don't trust mine anymore, nor my government, which is why I have the position I have. — Book273

Why then speak about it? What is the point of going around flaunting your ignorance about a topic?

I could go to a reddit thread on, say, marple syrup and say that I know absolutely nothing about marple syrup, never even tasted it, nor do I trust it one bit, because I wasn't there when they drew it from the marple tree, was I? And you guys who think you know something about marple syrup are soooo fucking naïve.

That'd be fun. :/

I'm getting my info from the media.

Is there a female leader you admire? And why? — Amity

I was a fan of Merkel, but not because she was a women. Because she a regular nice bloke, cautious, smart, not an asshole.

French. Nobody's perfect... Where are from?

I am not in Ukraine.