Ah yes. I misunderstood. I agree with your explanation.
Not sure where she is. She was smarter than me and never really got into the social media thing when it was starting and so nearly twenty years later, I've not been able to find a trace of her in terms of social media presence.
She was very much a hippie. But not in a run around barefoot with flowers in her hair doing LSD hippie. Just more in a sense of really down to earth and loved doing things like making soap, or being out in nature. Just really not materialistic at all. Which I appreciated at the time, but something happened, she misunderstood my reaction to it and left me with the belief that she was crazy. And maybe she was, but I should have handled it better and explained things to her in a way that could have kept us together. But that's life I guess.
Saying intellectually honest makes it sound like they are better people
That's because they are. And I'm tired of pretending that they aren't. Treating anti-vax anti-mask idiots as though their opinion is as valid as scientific fact just emboldens them and leads to the kind of shit that is going on in America right now. These people need to be mocked, harshly and repeatedly until their children are so embarrassed by them that their bullshit gets stamped out in a generation or two.
I quote the great Isaac Asimov:
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
That cult of ignorance needs to be stamped the fuck out, and the way to do that isn't by caring about their feelings and pretending that their flat-earth, anti-vax opinions have any merit.
Because the left is, for the most part, intellectually honest enough to be skeptical of broad claims that seem too good to be true. Even ones that ostensibly benefit them.
While the right just grabs hold with both hands at anything they read immediately and start plastering it all over social media.
One side has the most basic critical thinking skills, and one side is lacking in that.
Not having children with my (now) ex-wife. Thankfully found out her true nature before that happened. I don't know what I'd do if I had to co-parent with her and deal with her on a regular basis. So I'm thankful I could just split our shit 50/50 and then forget I ever knew her.
Just to be the nihilist in the room, I honestly think that the point of no return for humanity occurred the moment we stepped down from the trees and started to evolve. And I'm not actually kidding.
I'm not an evolutionary expert, so I'm more than likely talking out of my ass, but I was an Archaeology Major with a focus on the Bronze Age Collapse and what I can tell you is this...
From a certain perspective, the same evolutionary traits that brought our species to this point, are the very same traits that will keep us from moving forward past it. Selfishness, resource hording, greed, the urge to continually expand at the expense of others. Fear of "others" outside of ones own community; all these things in some form were beneficial to growing from hunter gatherers to urban/agricultural societies. We needed organisation to build cities, so we created monarchies. We needed ways to control the growing population, so we created a fear of a deity.
We needed a reason to not allow too many people in to our society so that we didn't waste resources, so we created borders and the concept of "others" that aren't like us. Now, all of that has to get binned if we have any hope of getting past this point because the only way forward is as single planet, not petty nation states. But every single thing that brought us to this point prevents that from happening. It's ingrained in our very DNA, so to speak.
The idiot man-child can "summon" as much as he wants, but they're sovereigns of another country and can't make them do shit if they don't feel like it.
Awesome. Thanks!
Not to be a debbie downer here, but it's important to keep in mind that unless expressly stated otherwise, so-called discoveries that are only published in out-of-the-way (ie. not respected scientific journals) have usually not been peer reviewed or had their results replicated, which is the entire point of the scientific method.
I don't think the GOP was honestly expecting him to win.
Lucid Reading?
You are going to get a whole lot of different answers. Simply because there is no one answer.
There is also no separation between the physical and the mental. They're one and the same. If you don't feel physical pleasure during sex, you're not going to feel emotional pleasure, and vice versa. There is nothing wrong with not feeling sexual pleasure. Sexual interest is not a binary all or nothing. It's a scale from Asexual (not interested at all) to sex-addict, with most people falling somewhere in between. So any answer you get is going to be from different points on the scale, not necessarily close to where you are on it (very close if not completely asexual)
I fall somewhere close to asexual, but not all the way. I'm much more interested in the lead-up to it, first second and third base, so-to-speak, and rounding for home is just kind of a let-down after all of it. A part of that (not to get too into the weeds) is that I love performing cunnilingus, but hate receiving blowjobs, because I can't fathom that a woman actually enjoys giving head, and therefore I can't take any pleasure from it. But 80% of my sexual pleasure comes from knowing that I'm giving HER pleasure. There is no greater rush of endorphins than using fingers and tongue and then seeing your partner not able to walk afterwards because their legs are shaking too much.
THAT is far more of a sense to me; the mental. The actual act of intercourse is no different than masturbation; it's what you do to empty your balls once the fun part has been completed.