ZDL

Also I have found that screaming at, and making aggressive postures and gestures toward men does in fact scare a good number off them off.

Sadly this doesn't work for me. Which is why I have a knife or two on my person at all times. Just in case. (Dad prepared me well for the world.)

Come back when you're ready to talk in good faith.

Right now you're just being a troll. And not even a particularly clever one.

(Hint: A reading in good faith involves reading ALL of the words of the thought experiment.)

But generalizing the problem to all men is the biggest reason men who might otherwise be allies are pushing back.

Except, of course, nobody's¹ doing that. Hell, I said the precise opposite:

Men are for the most part decent human beings. Most men you meet will not be monsters.

This doesn't stop "men who might otherwise be allies" from reading it as a personal attack on "all men". Despite, as I just quoted here, me saying exactly the God-damned opposite.

Which leads me to believe they are not actually men who would otherwise be allies since they can't even muster up enough respect to read the words that are actually there choosing instead to beat the stuffing out of straw men.

¹ Before you trot out someone who did say that, do a quick count and a slight division to see if the proportion who you can find actually saying that are large enough to count as anything but a rounding error. Believe it or not, most of the women who would choose "bear" in the thought experiment have men in their lives.

It's fun watching how many people aren't reading the rules before they comment.

Rule #1 isn't all that unclear.

Tell me you didn't read the thought experiment all the way without using those words.

Yes. If you change all the terms of the thought experiment the outcome is different.

What an unexpected result!

It is truly amazing to me how few people understand even the elementary aspects of risk management.

A known danger is easier to manage than an unknown one.

Bears are dangerous, but largely predictable. They usually don't go after humans at all (and indeed usually go the other direction). And if they seem angry, there's simple things you can do (it rhymes with "back away slowly" because identical rhymes are still rhymes) that will defuse the situation almost immediately.

Men are for the most part decent human beings. Most men you meet will not be monsters. The problem is that there's really no way to distinguish the monsters from the decent men until it's way too late. And extricating yourself from an interaction with a strange man in the forest is not as straightforward as it is for a bear. Backing away slowly might work, or it might trigger that silicon chip inside their brain and slip it to "overload" and make them get angry that you don't trust them. And the penalty for making a bad choice is serious bodily harm as the good outcome. There are worse ones after that.

So just from straightforward risk assessment it's better to meet a bear in the woods than a strange man. Because a bear is more predictable and easier to manage.

I thought Edmonton was my home. All my conscious life I was in Edmonton. (I'd actually moved there from Germany at the age of 18 months but of course have no memory of this.)

Then in 1975 I had all that torn away. The tender roots I'd been forming, ripped out of me. I spent the next decade or so of my life bouncing around both inside and outside of Canada.

I have no hometown now. Nowhere that I can return to. My family is scattered across three continents and I hardly ever see any of them.

That's the bad side.

The good side is that I'm very independent. Kidnap me and drop me off blind-folded anywhere in the world and I'll make a place for myself.

The Republic.

Orchestrate Nazis? Musk's Empty Lies Orchestrate Nazis? MELON?

I've been working on something to spell out MELON. So far I've got Musk's Empty Lies, but I can't find anything yet for the ON part. Still working.

Smoking.