tae glas [siad/iad]

i hope it didn’t come across as harsh! really both problems 1 & 2 that you’ve outlined are the same things that everyone is dealing with. a lot of systems of oppression like patriarchy, european colonialism, capitalism, ableism, etc push people into isolation by design, & then tell people to heal from that in isolation, rather than in community.

(i suspect it’s designed that way to make people feel that these are individual problems & not collective problems, because if we realise that we’re all suffering from the same systems of oppression, we might do something to end those systems!)

we humans are a social species, and we’ve lived & learned & healed in community with one another for hundreds of thousands of years. just being open & communicating with the friends you already have about those issues is a great first step, then seeking out hobby groups etc is a way that you might expand your social circle beyond other men.

for the dating side of things, dating apps can be great, because boundaries are lot clearer there (over what is a date, what people are looking for etc) & that way, you can avoid the potential messiness of dating within your friend group.

tl;dr: i don’t think the formality of classes/training would be needed for this, but talking to your friends about this & going out of your way to make friends with mixed company would help a lot. (also, gathering with your friends, new & old, to dismantle the systems of oppression that are causing all these problems will solve things for future generations too 😎)

in my opinion, no. an artist’s worldview informs their art, so things like racism/misogyny/ableism etc etc seep into the works they create. consuming media like that uncritically can be harmful by reinforcing biases, conscious or unconscious.

there’s also the more direct harm that can be done by financially supporting certain artists. jk rowling, for example, is funnelling any wealth she gets from the harry potter franchise into funding anti-trans organisations.

in my experience, people who want to separate art from the artist just want to continue uncritically consuming everything, without feeling guilt over the harm they could be doing by “voting with their dollar”.

If men are facing a loneliness epidemic, they could learn to be friends with one another, enjoy one anothers’ company, and open up to one another about being lonely etc, instead of expecting women to train them.

I cant train men on how women want to be treated, and I wouldnt even want to tell men how women should be treated seeing as im not a woman.

Women want to be treated as equals to men, to be paid the same as men are, to be promoted in jobs as often as men are, and to be represented in government and media as much as men are. This is absolutely something that men can and should tell other men about.

the developer of bad parenting has apparently been grooming 14-17 year old children on his discord.

there’s a google doc going around with more details/screenshots, and his game’s fandom site refers to him “dating” a 14 year old child.

https://badparenting.fandom.com/wiki/2oo2

for myself, if i can recover passwords etc, i delete the account to lower the possibility of that data being used to train ai, and to lower the numbers of registered accounts they have.

i think stakeholders are more likely to see accounts being deleted as worse than an inactive account, because people can always come back to an inactive account.

so many websites are eager to keep users by making it difficult to delete accounts, or by adding a 14 day wait before they’ll delete an account, etc., so that alone makes me think they want even inactive accounts for usage statistics or to steal data from.

they’ll spend money on anything except fixing the housing crisis or cost of living crisis, it seems.

which is something that in turn would cut down on “keyboard warriors” as they put it, because when people aren’t priced out of living their lives, they have other things to do!

i really worry about what spaces kids online are going to be pushed into, with all these bans. so many people my age were groomed on internet forums when we were kids; i imagine social media bans are going to push kids into spaces like that, where it’s not technically considered a social media site, and there’ll be little to no adult supervision from anyone who’s not in the inner circle of the forum.

the average person wouldn’t buy a new bed/mattress/wardrobe for a hostel (or even a hotel) they were staying in for a few weeks, no. buying larger furniture items like that would generally indicate to a family that OP might intend to stay longer than a few weeks.

it’s not really about the cost, but about making sure that everyone’s communicating their plans/return dates/expectations, so no one’s in for an unpleasant surprise when OP heads home.

overcommunication will at worst result in a “we know, you’ve told us all before”, while undercommunication could result in “i assumed you’d changed your mind about leaving, after you bought so many things for the house”

ahh. that’s a good bit more than someone would buy for a hostel stay, and probably more than someone would buy for a friend, too.

just be sure that you’re clearly communicating your intentions & letting everyone know that while you didn’t mind spending that money, you also don’t intend to move in & stay longer, despite your new purchases maybe indicating otherwise.

are any of these purchases wildly beyond what you might have bought to make a hostel stay more comfortable, like food/bedding/clothes/entertainment?

without more information/any red flags, it sounds like your parents are just being overly protective/suspicious.

assuming i somehow aquired Too Much Money (the centi-billionaire sorta Too Much Money), i’d give the money to land back projects, reforestation/rewilding projects, and native food forest projects, globally.

that probably still wouldn’t use up much of a centi-billionaire’s money, but i genuinely cannot grasp how much money that is… maybe get involved in politics & make it an international crime to charge money for anything that’s a human right, like housing/food/water 🤔

the article feels like whataboutery in itself, imo. gchq’s main thing is mass surveillance of uk citizens. if they didn’t steal & store people’s data, then that stolen data wouldn’t be stored in one convenient central location from which to steal it 🤷

edit: i do get that it’s not great that this has happened, of course. i just don’t think surveillance should be seen as inevitable in the first place.

until they have a problem with bringing in digital IDs, and the amount of data being stored by google/meta/amazon/apple/etc, this just feels like sinophobia & xenophobia. stealing & storing our data’s bad in general, not just when china or russia want to do it 🤷