17 Sep 2026
"A superintelligent AI makes it so that any lethal weapon used in war will only operate if it will kill someone: no misses or wounding shots. Artillery and small arms are both affected. Only one attempt to fire per second is allowed, to prevent trigger spamming. Does this fundamentally change how people think of war, or just save bullets?"
film Outbreak or Contagion: in middle, maybe shortly before bodies are burned in a building, screen that says "7xx personnel infected, 3xx personnel died". Military deaths. Not talked about to avoid making US military seem selfish for wanting to avoid military deaths; rather, important thing is civilian deaths.
I would prefer to just say #PrayForMH370 a bunch of times than talk about people dying.
Truth is not always easy to see. After the Aurora movie theater shooting in 2012, some news reports said that James Holmes asked a guard how the movie ended. News reports also said that a mask was placed over his face because he was spitting at people. But were either of these things true? (One thing that was true, that many people might have forgotten, was that he left a remote control, like the type used for toy cars, outside of his apartment building, which would have triggered the explosives inside of his apartment. The only reason for doing this, instead of a timer, is to test whether anyone would accidentally trigger it.)
UK authorities had limited information about whether the person who bombed Ariana Grande's concert had much coordination with people outside of the country. It could be just like one person acting on their own to accidentally start World War I, or something else I was recently reading about:
(Folder 'Hot Q Girls etc., 12 Sep 2026':
20151203艋舺青山宮靈安尊王千秋-19-Hot Q Girls - YouTube
20151203 杰德企業&臺北葫蘆堵威武獅 恭迎 艋舺青山宮靈安尊王遶境 Hot Q Girls (函`彤`糖`奈`鳥) 12 - YouTube
20151203艋舺青山宮靈安尊王千秋-20-Hot Q Girls - YouTube
20151203 杰德企業&臺北葫蘆堵威武獅 恭迎 艋舺青山宮靈安尊王遶境 Hot Q Girls (函`彤`糖`奈`鳥) 14 - YouTube
105 6~9 淡水大拜拜暗訪#福靈宮#天使噗噗≈卉 菲 棠≈ 癡情玫瑰花 - YouTube
105 五股六福里福德宮€天使噗噗€惡魔舞團#范璇 瑀心 寶兒 - YouTube
and five unrelated, non-video bookmarks)
(72 bookmarks that aren't in a folder, all of them videos from YouTube or Douyin except for AoE2 Battle Simulator — Who wins? Every unit, every civ, fully upgraded which doesn't work with my old browser, and Gaming - YouTube which is on YouTube but not a video)
Folder 'responsibility, 15 Sep 2026':
person who personally killed the highest number of other humans? - Search
Mikhail Tukhachevsky - Wikipedia
Folder 'failure of being nice, 15 Sep 2026':
many trials during Stalin's Great Purge resulted in a verdict of innocence? - Search (*how many)
Great Terror: 1937, Stalin & Russia | HISTORY
The last article mentions the Reichstag fire, in 1933. Sometimes a single person does something, and other people find it hard to believe they could have done it all alone. It also happened with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Elser#Interrogation_report.
I don't think the person who bombed Ariana Grande's concert acted alone, but because the UK authorities have no evidence of coordination, I as a member of the public know nothing either. So I could be wrong.
But I felt it was significant that the bombing took place after the concert was over. To me that meant, they weren't trying to harm Ariana Grande. They were just trying to harm her fans. They weren't suggesting that it was bad to be a celebrity; after all, is it bad to perform music in front of 20 people in a small commercial establishment? Should an artist be blamed for being popular?
Most bombings are meant to kill people. Suicide bombings are definitely meant to kill the person carrying them out. But, an important comparison: the IS's attacks on Paris.
Many people were probably completely oblivious to the significance of the IS's message about these attacks. Sometimes, when a violent group does something, it doesn't admit responsibility. If I search for "iraq bombing shrine", I find . . .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_al-Askari_mosque_bombing : "there were no casualties . . . Although responsibility for the 2006 al-Askari bombing was not claimed by any party, the incident was followed by bouts of retaliatory violence among Iraqis, with over 100 dead bodies being found the next day and well over 1,000 deaths occurring over the course of a few days after the attack; some counts place the death toll at over 1,000 on the first day alone."
Also on first page of results,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_ibn_Ali_al-Hadi_Mausoleum_attack "The Islamic State carried out the attack, and claimed they killed over 100 people, which came shortly after a series of bomb attacks in Baghdad committed by IS that targeted Shias, killing at least 341 people and injuring over 246."
Search for "iraq recruitment center bombing":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Al_Hillah_bombing "The bombing caused a worsening of Iraqi-Jordanian diplomatic relations after it was learned that suicide bomber, Raed Mansour al-Banna, had come from Jordan. Banna's family in Jordan gave him a heroic funeral, angering many Iraqi Shia. Thousands protested outside the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad and demanded it close."
Anyway, many bombings that result in high civilian casualties are not claimed by anyone. This is in contrast with groups announcing, and exaggerating, their attacks on military targets (soldiers).
Note that militaries of UN member states sometimes do something similar: saying that a bomb dropped by an airplane killed 100 militants, when it really killed 100 people at a wedding.
So anyway, when the IS attacked Paris, they released their announcement IN FRENCH and listed the arrondissements they attacked.
This was subtly praising France, which at that time was bombing the IS with warplanes. By listing the arrondissements they attacked, they were informing their audience of which arrondissements they had not attacked, due to having limited capability for operations.
Was the purpose of the attack on Paris really to harm France? Or was it to help France? Same with the bombing of Ariana Grande's concert.
Email:
Date: Apr 5, 2026, 10:31 PM
Subject: Lol I'm emailing you a comment I left on your video
Your video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJjURt0cLPU
Cheating Is the Plot (And We’re Supposed to Clap?)
My comments:
Ok, but what about The Sound of Music (1965)? 6th highest grossing film of all time adjusted for inflation.
I probably haven't seen most of the films that are mentioned here. I don't know how many would match the technical definition of cheating. In The Sound of Music, it's not cheating because the female character does not intend to cause anything to happen while she believes the male character is going to get married. The female rival also takes the blame by stopping the male character from speaking and saying that she is responsible for not wanting to get married to him, as he isn't good enough for her.
A story with actual cheating inside a committed relationship deserves criticism. But often, interest in one character by another way is just a way to establish that the character is valued. Very few attractive people are not already in a relationship, or don't have someone they know who is interested in them. A romantic story is about the connection that is established between two people who usually did not know each other before, and almost by necessity, for realism, it has to start when there are already weak emotional attachments to other people, which are ended in the course of the story.
___
"The fantasy of being chosen. . . It makes sense why this trope shows up constantly in movies aimed towards women" (23:55) The Notebook, which you say at 8:49 inspired you to make this video: the cheating doesn't show that the female lead is being chosen. She's doing the choosing. I think the explanation is different: females are expected to be more passive. The male is expected to propose marriage, not the female. So I think these movies are showing female agency. In The Notebook: she's engaged, and her fiancé says he loves her, but does he still love anyone else? Does he only say "it's normal not to forget your first love" because HE has not forgotten HIS first love, and it isn't her? Did he propose because he would have written letters for a year etc. etc., or just because he knew that she would not propose to him because males are expected to, and he didn't want her to be alone?
What if the wrong person proposes to you? You can refuse, but sometimes someone might say yes when they're not absolutely sure it's what they want. These stories are about a chance for one's life to change, even if one said the wrong word when a choice was given to say one of two words. If saying "yes" is too scary, then almost no one would say "yes", and the marriage rate is already low enough.
"They tell us that if he doesn't dangle off a Ferris wheel for you, then it's not true love." (24:44) No more than they also tell us that if you don't have perfect makeup the moment you wake up from sleeping, that you're not worth attention from someone who would do that!
Art is an exaggeration of people's hopes and desires. Most audiences can understand that. The few who can't: well, that's why perfect makeup when waking up is a thing.
"The word loyal" Video description: "Why is the stable partner always boring? Why is the toxic ex always the soulmate?"
Why are movies filled with explosions and gun battles, when I have never seen an explosion in real life (*other than fireworks), even though I went to Iraq for a year and threw a live grenade in basic training? Part of the answer is that people to use movies to justify risky actions: if those actions were not risky, people would have already taken that action. The toxic ex is an ex because they were toxic; if they were an uncontroversial ex, there would have been no conflict in the decision to break up with them. But there's also a cultural bias: the US has a culture where people often suspect that what would be more rewarding is to act in a more selfish way, if only the opportunity presented itself. On top of that, people think that other people are already making the selfish choice, and so what society needs is more people who will not forgive selfish people. Vigilante justice-type storylines. This probably varies by generation: after WWII, people mostly had enough of violence, at least for a few years. People saw how it could lead to an escalation. But now, with the culture that people are immersed in (short-form videos etc.) being tailored to make them feel reasonably content and in the mood for small improvements like an advertised brand? It's easy to ignore the real-world evidence of consequences of deliberately retaliating, and so selfishness in stories is back in demand, as a way to explore its consequences.
Second email:
Date: May 4, 2026, 8:53 PM
Subject: An explanation, and a solution
Not a business email.
About the issues talked about in your video, "Women Are Getting SMALLER (And It’s Not Just Their Bodies)..."
You don't just tell the viewer about your observations of what people are doing. You also give your opinion or judgement.
Consider the following question. I described this question before to someone else, who has 5~10 million followers on each of her accounts; a reasonable person would say it's unlikely she read my email. "You have to pick one gender to be treated worse. Which gender do you choose?"
How do you think people would answer this question, when they have to answer without seeing what other people have answered? What would you wish the outcome to be: around 50% split between male and female, or for most people to pick a certain gender (like the choice that you would select for this question)?
I have not made this as a poll myself and am not aware of anyone who has. But many attitudes could be explained if most people would pick males to be treated worse.
Suppose people have the attitude, "we want females to be treated better." One way to get people to treat females better than they are already treated, is to believe and act like females are currently treated worse. That what males have, when males have something that females don't, is better than what females have.
In your discussion of "traditional wife" videos, you suggest that there is a power imbalance. Clearly, you are suggesting that the male who is earning money has more power: that what the male has is better than what the female has.
You also say that the person who is not earning money is "vulnerable". Later, regarding "stay-at-home girlfriends", you suggest that the vulnerability is to the possibility of the male cheating or leaving the female, in which case without a marriage contract she would end up with nothing.
What about the possibility of the person who earns money dying? This would also leave the remaining parent in a vulnerable position. Would you say that this vulnerability is successfully mitigated with life insurance?
If you don't consider this to be a significant vulnerability, then it suggests that you are using "vulnerable", regarding the "traditional wife" trend, to really mean "lower status": a subjective, sort of, term, in that people could collectively change what they see as low or high status.
Note that the logic defining "vulnerability" implies "vulnerability" if one partner derives any financial benefit from the other. If a "traditional wife" has X vulnerability to the possibility of her husband dying without life insurance, then a wife in a two-income household still has vulnerability of X/2, assuming that the male's income pays half of the rent and so on.
The "stay-at-home girlriend": if the boyfriend doesn't earn enough money to accumulate significant savings, a separation would seem to leave both in a similar financial position. Why do we say the girlfriend is vulnerable? Because we see that getting a job is hard, even for many people who were recently studying or working, so it's even harder for a "stay-at-home girlfriend" who suddenly needs to earn money.
So if someone who suddenly needs to find a job is "vulnerable", and the way to avoid this "vulnerability" is to have a career even if the money isn't important at a particular moment, then it's really some kind of moral dilemma in which people are rewarded for looking after their own interests, even if it harms the group. And the best way to help the people who are "vulnerable" is not to say "just focus on your career". It's to create more jobs, so that someone who was previously a "stay-at-home girlfriend" or boyfriend can transition to supporting themselves without much difficulty, if the need arises.
The explanation of the poll I suggested above, "which gender would you pick to be treated worse", is a bit complicated. I'll just say that if you are fundamentally ok with the possibility that most people would answer that they would pick males to be treated worse, which explains things like people joking they are "just a girl", then you can feel comfortable with ignoring this email.
If you think the outcome of the poll should be balanced, then here is how to create a lot of jobs: https://i.imgur.com/ia2s7AM.png
(The subject this email says "and a solution", so I felt I had to include that. I think it would result in a more balanced outcome for that poll, making something that you might want to share if you would prefer the balanced outcome, and something you might not want to share if you would prefer that a certain gender be heavily selected in the poll.)
Rather less important, about Tiktok:
"Human" I have a shorter attention span and skipped to the end to get the keyword. I've never had a smartphone and so don't know much about Vine or early Tiktok, but going off of what you said: it became mainstream when the content became easy, instead of being original. What if most people, like 90%, can't be original? Would they prefer a platform where they can't succeed, because they aren't original, or one where unoriginal people can still succeed?
We can imagine two platforms: one for the 90% of people who are unoriginal, and one for the 10% who are original. The most-followed accounts on the unoriginal platform would have 9x the followers, and 9x the cultural influence (or more, due to networking effects) as on the original platform, and the unoriginal platform would also be at least 9x more profitable, or more if unoriginal people are easier to influence with ads.
In this thought experiment, if you're unwilling to use the original platform simply because the unoriginal platform is bigger, then your real concern, that prevents you from just doing what you want to do, is that society does not value originality.
This isn't the same as not valuing difficulty. Even when people are just copying dance moves (and there are still original dances, reason for the 'DC' dance credit tag that most people don't use because they don't even know who made the original dance), it's hard to 'win the trend'.
Copying is a popular strategy in general. All life is based on copying of DNA etc, and cells copying themselves to make new cells. It's hard to argue that copying is bad. The bad effects from not valuing originality are more about the consequences of most people trying to make new things. Life is based on copying, but when there's too much copying, we get monocultures, or cloned bananas that are vulnerable to a single type of fungus, or like (Tasmanian) Devil facial tumour disease.
Or to generalize: when people think the answer is always just to copy, we get fewer solutions, and there are still plenty of problems that need solutions.
Long comment is long.
I left a comment on a third video, which I think I copied to a previous post.
In my post on the 'pro-eating disorder' community on Reddit (which was probably created because 'pro-anorexia' was banned, and 'eating disorder' includes both eating too much food and eating too little food), or rather in a reply to a comment on the post, I suggested that eating disorders can happen because a boyfriend becomes distant when he sees that his girlfriend spends her time talking about fashion and celebrities instead of problems like war. (Like, the lack of interest could be interpreted as "he thinks I'm physically ugly".)
In this explanation, the eating disorder would not develop if the boyfriend just accepted that "females are not interested in war-related topics, and this is fine". Note for example,
https://www.cnn.com/2012/08/29/opinion/ghitis-sex-strikes
https://www.npr.org/2011/10/07/141159283/battles-against-oppressive-regimes-led-to-nobel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_of_Liberia_Mass_Action_for_Peace
I tried to get males to share this idea. I posted on a forum for 'involuntarily celibate' ("incel") males.
The problem is really that males do tend to experience better outcomes with higher performance. This idea, and the problems it would solve, has a certain complexity. The process of living is not inherently complex, but we allow it to be so.
You can segment the world into "people who would prefer to have a job that helps other people, even if they currently do not". Or you can segment it into, "people who would prefer to be earning more money than the average person, even if they currently do not". Maybe in the first view, 55% of people are 'good'. In the second one, 45% of people are 'good'. It might seem like a small change, but sometimes being in the majority is the difference between victory and total defeat.
New approach: is there any country where people see most other countries as having a positive influence on the world? Like with the question in these polls, which I'm lazy so just uploading instead of finding the source, as well as some other documents:
ls -tgo ~/"stolen & temp/reading"|tail -30
-rw-rw-r-- 1 5201027 Aug 30 2014 2014 bbc country-rating-poll.pdf
[...]
-rw-rw-r-- 1 2822452 Feb 14 2014 [Small Wars Manual] Fortitudine Vol 35 No 1.pdf
[...]
-rw-rw-r-- 1 369580 Mar 7 2013 cultureThought.pdf
-rw-rw-r-- 1 3988751 Mar 6 2013 2012_bbc_country rating final 080512.pdf
-rw-rw-r-- 1 2049022 Feb 8 2013 PsychofIntelNew.pdf
-rw-rw-r-- 1 1630790 Nov 30 2012 Rethinking_Consumption_Consumers_and_the_Future_of_Sustainability_The_Regeneration_Roadmap.pdf
-rw-rw-r-- 1 694127 Nov 24 2012 Mate poaching - 3184.pdf
-rw-rw-r-- 1 401400 May 23 2012 wp914.pdf
-rw-rw-r-- 1 3232770 May 18 2012 TT_ICC_2012_Report_Interactive_PDF_jg-Hw.pdf
-rw-rw-r-- 1 98686 May 18 2012 feardie.pdf
-rw-rw-r-- 1 143151 May 18 2012 deceive.pdf
-rw-rw-r-- 1 431180 May 18 2012 BriefingPaper292.pdf
(If 'ls' had an option not to show file permissions, I would use it in cases like this; the compound command I use based on 'find' just shows size and date, but I hadn't really intended to list all files, just link the country polls.)
Some countries are viewed positively by almost every other country. But probably, all countries view some others positively and others negatively. Well, it makes sense, right? Is there any country where people would say the world has no problems? If there are problems, it makes sense to assign blame. A few countries blame themselves, but no one is arrogant enough to say their country is solely responsible for all problems in the world.
So, even if the objective is just "improve people's quality of life and happiness by 5%", if the goal is not met, then someone must be blamed. Most likely, people will just end up saying that about half of all people support the goal and half oppose it. But is it exactly half, or slightly more, or slightly less?
If males think the proportion of people who truly care about fixing problems is slightly less than half, are they dumb? Or, more precisely, if males who — due to their age and financial position — are themselves interested in trying to fix problems think this, are they dumb?
The video titled, "Women Are Getting SMALLER (And It’s Not Just Their Bodies)..." (after A/B testing optimized the title) talked about Ariana Grande appearing dangerously thin. Talking about males was just a way to avoid saying this, because I'm not sure what to say about it. When I mentioned seeing a preview scene for Wicked: For Good (2025), I purposely avoided referring to Ariana Grande as an actor in the film and just referenced the character she portrays.
Do people with anorexia (anorexia nervosa) want to die? Did the Islamic State's bombing of Ariana Grande's concert kill anyone who had anorexia and wanted to die?
I already used the post title, "Villains by Necessity", on 24 Jun 2012. I read this book once, probably less than a year or two after it was written (so my age when I read it can be inferred). I chose to read it almost entirely based off of its cover: it appeared in a list of other books, maybe in something like Dragon Magazine or Discover Magazine. Again, I think it's significant that it was written by a female author, who went on to write only one other book; I hope she is doing well and has a good life, even if it did not involve writing more books. (Note how platforms like YouTube are heavily reliant on consistent content generation for creators to reach a wide audience.)
Finding a title means the post is done. Communication: if someone doesn't know you exist, you can't lie to them. If you they know you exist, and you don't communicate with them, you can't lie to them. If someone won't talk to me, it makes sense for me not try to communicate with them. Discworld: the novel Lords and Ladies, the character Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully sent letters to the character Esmerelda Weatherwax when they were young. She never replied, and eventually he stopped sending letters. Did he stop because he no longer cared about her? The lack of communication created this ambiguity. Until they met in the course of the events shown in that novel, she might not have known the answer to this question.
This is why I continued to send emails to Mei when she was in Japan, even after it was clear she was not going to reply, and why I am not currently trying to communicate with anyone who isn't talking to me, no matter who they are and how much influence they might have.
