Yes, I’m sure giving him a gift of money for behaving how he currently is behaving will make him re-think his current behaviour and start behaving differently.
A journalist who is often a regular on a podcast I listen to has a theory on why Musk is seemingly obsessed with the UK - he’s up late (due to ketamine, although she doesn’t go as far as to say that explicitly), and people in the US are asleep so he’s got no tweets to react to. We’re awake here in the UK, though.
If you’re a porn producer in the US and the UK government says “don’t show choking in your videos any more and re-edit the past 15 years of videos”, what are you going to do? What’s in it for you to comply?
And what is the government actually going to do? Is it going to go through every single porn video on the internet to see whether or not it’s acceptable? There’s no way they have the resources for that. So then there are basically three options. 1) allow people to browse porn and probably unknowingly watch something which is now illegal, 2) do a blanket ban of studios which have choking videos - which is basically all of them, or 3) only institute a ban for the most extreme studios, which is then defeating the supposed purpose of this bill - to combat the mainstreaming of choking in porn.
I suppose option 4 is to require porn sites to label everything accurately and filter out all porn which contains choking from UK urls. But even that feels like a stretch in terms of practicality. It’s one thing to say to sites “you need to use an age-verification system which we deem acceptable or risk a fine” and something quite different to say “you need to manually review the millions of videos on your site under new criteria and implement strict new filtering based on geolocation”. If they tried this then the end result would probably be porn sites just doing an Imgur and blocking the UK entirely. Which, like the current age verification system on porn sites, would just see people using VPNs.
As legislation goes it doesn’t seem very well-thought-through. I suppose that’s what the Houses of Commons & Lords are for, but it’s far from a foolproof system.
I don’t disagree that it’s troubling how mainstream choking is in modern porn. It’s definitely been a huge shift. There’s nothing against it as a fetish, but it being a fetish with potential harmful consequences suggests that it should be in the same category as BDSM - something which can be problematic unless it’s done as an exercise in trust between partners with full informed consent.
And there have been plenty of seemingly not agenda-led studies which suggest that teen boys and girls are both picking up a lot of what they consider to be “normal” about sex from porn.
And not even talking to each other about it. IIRC, there was one such study which had both boys and girls engaging in a particular behaviour (I forget exactly which, maybe even choking), and neither party actively enjoyed the behaviour, they were just doing it because they thought that’s what you do and therefore what their partner wanted.
But is the solution to ban porn which features choking? Firstly, I don’t see how this could in any way be effective. How would you possibly enforce it? Are police really going to raid people’s homes based on suspicion that they’ve got a nowadays-vanilla porn video on their harddrive? The police literally don’t have enough resources to investigate and prosecute everybody creating and sharing child porn. And now they’re supposed to go after everybody who visits PornHub?
Secondly, we’re basically talking about a de-facto porn ban because, as the consultation itself noted, that describes pretty much all porn made in the last 10-15 years.
I’m not sure what the solution is. I mean, talking about the difference bewteen porn and sex is something that should be part of sex education at school. But I kind of assume it already is? It would be weird if it weren’t in 2025.
Perhaps it would be worthwhile to engage with creators themselves? I know that several porn companies used to put disclaimers before their videos saying that there’s a difference between porn sex and real sex and talking about consent. Several BDSM porn producers also have pre and post-shoot interviews with the performers and make sure they talk on camera about safe words & gestures and consent.
But then that’s something that’s probably not going to be terribly effective in any case and which would require absolutely everybody to get on board, which would have been basically impossible back when it was only really studios producing content, and 100% impossible now that OnlyFans etc are the way that most performers make and distribute porn.
I don’t think it’s an easy question to answer, TBH, but I’m pretty sure that “ban all the porn” isn’t the correct solution.
This is one of those places where they mentally and sometimes physically abuse teenagers because they don’t live up to their parents idea of what they should be, right?
This is the kind of thing that a dude who’s never been in a relationship with a woman thinks
Not any more, there’s a blanket
Most people find honesty disarming. If you say “I’m socially awkward and I feel nervous around you. It’s got nothing to do with you as a person. It’s an issue of mine and I’m trying to work on it. I’m sorry if I’ve made you feel uncomfortable or otherwise upset you” she will probably accept that. And this is something you should be working on, BTW, although only you can really say what form that should take.
As some others have said, do not mention her looks or your crush.
There’s a former nurse here in the UK called Lucy Letby who’s currently in prison for murdering several babies and attempting to kill more. There’s a campaign to get her released based on basically 3 strands.
The first is the fact that there’s no actual evidence that any of the deaths were not of natural causes. The second is the statistical argument. The third is that the police enlisted the help of people who worked with Letby to assess the evidence. As one person put it “how can any fair investigation be even partially carried out by people who the police should actually be treating as potential suspects?”
I have no ideas whether or not she’s guilty, but since i had previously heard of cases like the one you describe I’m definitely of the opinion that there should be a retrial.
If i’d paid £68,000 for a statue to be installed outdoors and the coating on it was so thin that the glue on the back of a pair of googly eyes ruined the entire statue, I’d definitely be asking for my money back from the artist
It’s tricky business. The idea has to be plausible enough to attract investors, but implausible enough not to get looked at too closely by clever investors. Similarly, you have to drum up enough publicity to get interest, but not enough to get scrutiny.
Get the balance wrong and you get Theranos.
Neither. I brush them whilst standing next to the sink.
My hot take is that, of all the intensifiers, “literally” is the one that makes the most sense.
What are the options? “Really”, “actually”, and “literally”. What do they mean?
So if you’re trying to say that you’re scared rather than that you actually soiled yourself, which makes the most sense as a sentence: “I really shit myself”, “I actually shit myself”, or “I literally shit myself”? It’s the latter, right? Because (most) literature is fictional. And reality is reality.
I mean, none of it really matters because, as you say, the “rules” of English are just cobbled-together-nonsense. But to take the “you don’t mean literally because you didn’t have shit up your back” people at face value and apply their logic - “literally” makes the most sense.
Somewhat related - if “flammable” and “inflammable” can both mean “catches on fire easily” so that “doesn’t catch on fire easily” has to be the ridiculous “nonflammable”, then there’s no reason why people can’t use “irregardless”. No, the construction of the word doesn’t make strict logical sense. And…?
There was a story a few years back about a casino getting hacked through a smart thermometer in a fish tank.
I once read an interview with a white hat hacker. He said that people expect him to try to remotely connect to their network and try to brute force his way in. The first thing he actually does is put on a suit, visit the company’s headquarters, walk in the front door, start a conversation with the receptionist, and see how far he can get.
As an aside, you can tell how successful the rebranding of twitter as “x” has been, since even now more than 2 years after the rebranding news articles still have to add “formerly known as twitter” every time they mention it.
This was going to be my answer - one of the ships from the Culture could actually form the Culture for us and let us live in it
I think there’s a few reasons behind the slow-tracking of processing asylum claims.
One is that they were just cutting anything they could in the name of Austerity. Just another way to funnel money from the poor to the rich.
But the other is I think the same reason why the right-leaning press have had small boats on their front pages for years at this point, despite the reason for small boat crossings being a lack of safe legal routes and accounting for a small percentage of immigration - to make people hate immigrants.
Why? Because the right mostly do well amongst the older generations. However, the Boomers are dying off, and younger people aren’t moving to the right the way they used to because they don’t have the assets to make that a sound financial choice.
So the choice for the right becomes between changing your policies to appeal to more people, or creating wedge issues which you can make your entire election platform. And they’re not going to go to the effort of working out policies which would help people, are they? So create a “crisis” involving “those people” and be the party who’s against “those people”, and you should do all right.
Unless an even more racist party comes along, of course…
Yup. I keep encountering it, but I’ve only ever encountered it in the context of old people going “I don’t understand what these young people are talking about!” seemingly having passed into the “I don’t remember what being a child was like” stage of their lives.
I was coming to post this
A lot hinges on the exact definition of “limited“. I could launch a limited attack on NATO today.