TBH it might continue like this until the rest of the world legalises cocaine and it can be produced by businesses instead. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen.

Isn’t there no soil there now?

Right, this story about a woman being drugged and raped repeatedly by strangers for years - and people are taking issue with the fuckin semantics on one sign in a crowd photo? Yeah, that’s the problem, right there.

I didn’t even look at the thumbnail. I’m a man btw. If I had to rewrite that sign it might say ‘NOT ALL MEN - JUST TOO MANY’. Or, I dunno, something like that.

I kinda feel like, for blokes there are two important things we can do. Aside from stop having arguments about who’s the bigger victim (it’s women). First is just don’t do that shit. Just don’t. It’s actually easy and rewarding to not be a bad person. Second is don’t let any other guys get away with even talking like that. Even if they’re mates, step the fuck up and let them know that talk is not okay. Let’s be honest, many of us have heard our mates talk about women in a way we weren’t quite comfy with and afterwards thought we should have said something. Say something.

Yeah Western Europe culturally not looking too clever these days re right wing shit. Not that America is doing any better mind.

Why? Cos I’m pretty sure it’s going to be lower than the number committed by men.

Cheers, yeah I’ve kinda grown into my own shit. It’s caused me a lot of problems over the years, but I’m getting old now and I’m okay with stuff.

I’m just saying that anyone can get hurt like that, but it’s mostly women getting hurt and it’s mostly men doing the hurting. We’ve got to fuckin stop doing that because it is profoundly wrong.

Yeah exactly. I’m a man who was assaulted as a kid by a woman. Shit happens. But looking at what shit happens most often - it’s sexual violence perpetrated by men against women.

I don’t know how we change that. Maybe by continuing to level up the power dynamic between men and women, I feel like we’ve been making some progress with that over the past century. Finally. But it’s more than that, there are too many idiot arseholes who think they can have anything their fists can beat down. Almost all of them are men.

Pretty much every girlfriend and female friend I’ve ever had has had bad experiences with men. Women I have cared about over the years have had experiences across the spectrum from cat calling and comments back when they were kids in school uniforms all the way through to stranger rape. Domestic violence isn’t uncommon either.

I dunno, I wish I had a solution. It fuckin breaks my heart - when a close friend or a partner opens up about what happened to her and there’s nothing you can do, it’s years too late, you have these thoughts like if I’d been there I could have stopped it- but it happened years ago and you are fuckin helpless to do anything except maybe hug her if she’s comfortable with that, or if not try to tell her it’s over, she’s safe and stronger now, whatever you think might help.

You don’t realise how harmful sexual assault is until you’ve been unable to help someone you love. The key word isn’t ‘sexual’, it’s ‘assault’.

Shit like that makes me fuckin ashamed to be a bloke. I don’t know how we fix this, but I’ve got two suggestions for a good start - firstly, we don’t do that shit. Never, there’s never an excuse. Secondly, we fuckin shut down other guys, even if they’re our mates, if they start with that sort of talk.

Yeah, there’s wrong uns in whatever gender. But in terms of atrocity it’s us men well in the lead. We gotta change that. I think we can at least fuckin try.

I think that’s exactly what the conservatives will do. Unfortunately I’m not optimistic enough to believe that this will prevent their being reelected. Didn’t stop trump, after all.

I’m old enough to remember when Thatcher first became PM and from what I’ve seen Britain’s long term memory is pretty shit.

Yeah, FPTP is a shitty system and needs to be changed. But it’s disconcerting to consider how many hard right Reform MPs we’d have now if we had proportional representation.

Has a modern military ever gone up against an enemy using lots of small cheap drones though? I’m sure they have plans in place, just can’t recall if they’ve ever really been tested, aside from Russia with the results we see.

Yeah fair point. I’m just thinking I’d call it a mental health issue more than an actual addiction. Extreme phobias are psychological and this stuff sounds kinda like the opposite of a porn phobia.

I suppose the feeling is that no actual children are harmed in making AI porn. It’s still something that sexualises kids though so I’m not sure how valid that argument is.

I kind of feel that the term ‘addiction’ is being used a bit freely these days. If you’re addicted to heroin, for example, and you’re unable to access the drug you are sick as fuck for a week. That’s not just a psychological phenomenon, it’s physical too. If a porn addict is unable to access porn I find it hard to believe that they suffer similarly. That said, people manage to mess up their lives pretty profoundly with gambling so perhaps it’s better to define addiction based on the harm done to someone life rather than the consequences of withdrawal.

The problem with democracy is that to really work it requires an informed electorate, and a lot of the information the electorate get is propaganda. But like you say, I don’t have a better alternative to offer.

Hate speech can also incite violence against targeted groups. I’m fine with freedom of speech but there’s got to be a line somewhere. I’m not sure whether this legislation is over the line or not, we’ll see how it’s enforced.