Nothing in my life, no physical characteristics I have, have been more detrimental to my mental health and self-image than my below average penis size. And it’s like I’m physically gifted elsewhere, I’m fat, not tall (5’8), and not incredibly good looking. But none of this ruined my mental health like my bottom 1% penis.

It’s not hard to find accounts of other small/micro men with horrific dating experiences, terrible mental health and body image, and severe depression, all stemming from their penis.

For me, it completely ruined my confidence. Even though my length is average, my circumference is not. And that was enough to kill me. I’ve never dated, have no experience etc and have no intention to as a result. I’m 22, and can only see myself being alone forever. It’s just too embarrassing.

Now I know there are some physical characteristics worse. Like being really ugly, or some awful life changing conditions, but I still think a micro/small one is up there in terms of how significantly it impacts your life. It’s such a small part of your body, but it changes how you experience intimacy to such an unparalleled degree.

And I do believe it is a big deal. Women would (typically) like something average or around that. When you’re so far outside the norm either side, it’s not good. It’s not shallow to value your sexual experience and so people like me are normally not desired.

I’ll continue to reject women and not pursue women for my entire life.

Change my view.

EDIT:

Thanks guys, I’ve got a lot of interesting perspectives from many people.

I won’t lie and say I’m fixed, and feel confident in my body again. I won’t lie and say tomorrow I’ll wake up and start asking women out. The reality is I’ll still be insecure about my size.

But this post has made some cracks in my views. It’s definitely not the worst thing a man could have (albeit definitely not good), and it’s definitely possible to date with it, although I’m a long way away from that.

I’ll try to lose the weight (apparently 190lbs at 5’8 is near obese) so maybe it’ll help me feel more confident. I’ll keep socialising and mingling with people.

Some people mentioned therapy and BDD. I just want to say that I did try therapy about half a year ago, but it didn’t work. The woman I think was out of her depth, she didn’t really seem to understand how to help at all. Just let me vent. I have also been referred to see a psychologist for potential BDD, but I never went, which I know is probably stupid.

I guess I just wanted to say thanks. I’m a little less insecure about my mini friend. My life won’t drastically change but I at least can stand a little bit straighter. Maybe one day I’ll feel confident enough to date and show it, but it’ll be a long road.

Goodnight.

This is not about AI's merits as a technology. This is about the current financial environment surrounding it.

To the best of my knowledge, currently AI buildouts are being funded by circular debt.

AI Circular Deals: How Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia Keep Paying Each Other

Which will only work if there is never a break in the chain of "I invest in your buildout of a data center, you buy my chips to build it."

Even ignoring that, the companies do not appear to be making enough money to cover their debts.

CoreWeave's slump puts spotlight on debt behind AI boom | Reuters

There are some companies like Microsoft that seem to be funding things with less debt:

Why Alphabet and Microsoft Suffer Less If AI CapEx Goes Wrong

But they are still spending a lot more than the AI seems to produce for it in revenue.

PYMNTS | AI Is Fueling Microsoft’s Growth. Can It Sustain the Costs?

Put this all together and it seems financially that the technology has potential value, but not as much as it costs.

I'm not trying to discount how significant of a victory this is for gun rights advocates.

But I think that the political capital used to accomplish this feat might have been better used to adjust the Pittman-Robertson Act.

For those who don't know, the Pittman-Robertson Act was passed in the late 1930's and levies an 11% tax on firearms, ammunition and archery equipment in order to fund wildlife conservation efforts. As a result, about $1 billion a year is taxed and used for wildlife conservation efforts.

I believe that we should be able to either reduce budgetary expenditures in the federal budget and use those budget savings to contribute a similar amount of money to wildlife conservation, we could also place taxes on other items instead like luxury items or we could do a combination of both.

Almost every gun owner buys firearms and ammunition while only a small minority of gun owners own NFA items. Ammunition in particular has significantly increased in price in the past few years and while firearms haven't seen a similar and lasting price increase, guns can still be a significant expense for the poorest of Americans.

Pistol braces have not been legally classified as stocks recently and they're a lot like stocks and are used a lot like stocks, so SBR's are kinda pointless with that in mind. Shotguns themselves have become a pretty niche category of firearms, and short barrel shotguns are an even more niche category within that. According to some estimates, there are about 6.5 million registered suppressors, 1.2 million SBR's, and 210,000 SBS's. That is still a lot of NFA items in use, but considering how almost 100 million Americans own a gun, NFA items are not owned by a significant majority of American gun owners.

I understand that reducing the tax stamp for $0 has opened up the possibility of certain NFA items being deregulated all together. For suppressors, this could be huge as it could possibly allow a valuable piece of noise reducing personal protective equipment to become more widely used and affordable.

But I feel like my previously mentioned points are worth seriously considering.

TL;DR

Making guns, ammo and archery equipment cheaper for everyone would have been a better move to make first than making SBS's, SBR's, AOW's and suppressors cheaper.

Rather than trying to benefit all gun owners, Congress threw a bone to the more passionate and well to do gun owners to keep single issue gun rights voters satisfied.

It seems giving ultimatums in a relationship has a bad connotation, but boundaries have a good, healthy connotation. I find that odd because i believe they ultimately function the same way. When people point out the difference between them, I find that it’s usually just semantics. “I will not be in a relationship with someone who sleeps with other people” functions the same way as “if you sleep with that person we are breaking up.“

I don’t think many would argue against that particular ultimatum but in general ultimatums seem to have a bad connotation that you should avoid in relationship conflict whereas boundaries are considered healthy. In both cases you’re making it clear to your partner that if they take an action there will be consequences.

To change my view I think I’d need you to show how they fundamentally differ in function beyond semantics. Maybe I’d change it with an outlier case but I’d prefer an explanation as to how they are all inherently functionally different.

Edit: At the gym right so only reading the smaller replies at the moment while I rest between sets. However I skimmed some longer ones that look like theyd had good points so I’ll try to really digest them and dole out some deltas later.

Did you know that out of the 13 states where black people made up +10% of the population, 11 states voted against the Civil Rights Act in Congress? The bill has passed because of states with tiny black populations that weren't affected much by desegregation and weren't threatened by the small presence of black people. There is a historical correlation in the US where the higher black population proportion is, the higher white supremacy gets, hence why thevsouth is perceived as the most racist and New England as a progressive haven (where black people barely exist) so i just think that the civil rights movement's success was a product of the states playing moral superiority knowing that their black populations were tiny anyway.

(I'm not 90 I promise.)

It seems to me like modern youth Internet memes (like "six seven", "italian brainrot," etc) are popular and viral purely because they don't make sense and are weird. Nobody actually knows what they mean, they just pass it around because everyone else is doing it and when asked what it is they just shrug. Occasionally, things have very vague meanings, like "skibidi" generally meaning something... good? But it can also mean something bad. And generally the meanings of these words don't really get more specific than that.

I feel like this is actually the purpose of these memes. People like them because they're incomprehensible. Obviously group psychology 101 plays into this too, and that's been true since the dawn of time - if everyone else likes this, I do too. But as for how these start, and why some perpetuate while some die, I think kids just equate weird = good these days. In earlier times, jokes (and often people) would become popular because they're witty and funny, and slang would become popular because it filled a common and important role in speech. "Rad" meant something was cool. That's already 900% more specific than "tung tung tung sahur", which literally means nothing.

I know the immediate response is that it's like this for every generation, we are all doomed just to not get it. I think that's probably true to some extent, but I really think especially due to Internet, AI, and social media culture, plus just people growing up on iPads and not recognizing good humor anymore, memes actually are worse in this way.

Change my view that the reason people like "six seven" and friends isn't just because they make no sense and that's the point, or that making no sense is good enough to pass as comedy.

All over TikTok and YouTube, GIFs of teen suicides are being posted, and people are sharing them, and the companies are doing nothing about it!

Ivee seen videos of people explaining there cercamstances and though iv never seen them i this that is just wrong imagine you death being imortalized and laught at all over the internet.

Not that I understand how some people know that KOSHA is a ploy to cancel free speech. But what would you rather have?

Kids lacking basic human empathy because of gifs of things that DEFFANELY shouldn't be seeing?

or

Having to word some things differently on a post to not get it deleted?

I’ll start off by saying I’m very pro Palestinian but that I would like to create this post as it Israel is 100% in the right today. It’s a debate on the efficacy of pro Israeli PR strategy, not morality.

I think we can all agree that Israel has gone way down in popularity over the years. Zionists will essentially blame what they deem "blood libel." Pro Palestinians will blame the IDF's actions in Gaza and treatment of Palestinians in the WB.

I lean pro Palesitnian but the truth is that it's neither. I'd love it if Americans were able to get angry about the suffering of Gazans and WB residents, but in reality, I don't think there's anything the IDF could do that has caused or would cause a serious drop in popularity for that alone. And alone is the key word there, so what do I think Israel did that caused such a precipitous drop in their favorability?

I think it more has to do with the way they opinion policed Americans with such an iron fist.

The one thing about Zionists is they love to claim they don‘t care what people who oppose them think but it’s horrifically untrue. If they didn’t care, the ability to accept our disagreements and move on was and is there.

And what I’ll say is that I do think all things equal, if you de-identified Israel and Palestine and just discussed the situation as is, most would indeed support Israel. The logic here is that most people support an overwhelming defensive response to an attack.

Now, if you add the history to it, I think that a huge portion of people switch, but it would remain as most people in favor of Israel.

I think what happened is that the fact Israel cared this much about perception alone started to cause the massive drop in perception. I think it’s important to think about our own culture, which is one of an exceptional free speech.

We (from an American perspective) have one of the world’s broadest, if not the broadest, free speech protections and also free speech cultures in the world.

And the fatal mistake of Israel’s official and unofficial PR team is that they underestimated that. On top of that, regardless of if one thinks the focus on Israel is fair or not or the criticisms of Israel are unfair or not, people are much, much less willing to entertain the idea that criticism of a foreign nation is either “unfair” and/or “bigotry.”

People at a baseline just have a very high bar, if not insurmountable, to being open to the idea that being against a country is bigoted, which is a huge issue when Zionists’ claim, and Israel itself’s claim, is that being against the country is bigoted.

A lot of it comes down to the fact words are just that, words. Me or anyone else wanting anything from no new settlements to one state solution isn’t actually changing Israel’s capabilities. Therefore, if Zionists come down hard on words, it’s very hard to find a reason for this except their own insecurity.

A good example of this could be Tom Brady. If Tom Brady started going after randoms and tabloids that insulted and name called him, he’d rightfully look insane 99% of the time. Sure, there’s that 1% of the time where Brady might sue you if it’s demonstrably false, but a) it’s an exceptionally high bar and b) we all know even the most conservative of justices aren’t going to take the case of “Nation of Israel vs random tabloid.”

So, then, the question becomes “why do Israel and Zionists care if we accuse them of apartheid and/or genocide?”

Literally, that’s all you have to do.

If Israel and Zionists truly believed it was not a genocide, they would just ignore us. Israel is already very powerful militarily. There’s no reason they should care about whether you or I think it’s a genocide or whether the WB and settlements are a form of apartheid. But, they very much do care, like a lot, so we have to ask why.

And while I can’t mind read Zionists, the likeliest reason is that they know we’re right, so they lash out at us in a form of moral insecurity. Because remember, ignoring us = them genuinely not believing it’s genocide and apartheid (even if they’d be very wrong about that from our perspective). And they are doing just about the opposite, so you can do the math.

To be clear, Israel can use their own microphones and they tend to have stable PR when they do that. It’s when they start taking/trying to take others’ microphones away that their PR suffers.

It’s essentially a perfect Streisand effect. You have this pro Palestinian minority that are somewhat silenced, but generally left alone in an “agree to disagree” manner. Then, Zionists use an acute increase in intensity of the conflict to try and end that “agree to disagree” attitude people had towards pro Palestinians, and you have a rebound effect where people actually start agreeing with some pro Palestinian points.

In terms of what I think the actual conflict has done for Israeli PR, I’d say the war in Gaza has probably had minimal effect and the WB settlements probably have a “somewhat noticeably negative” effect, but nowhere near the effect Zionists’ direct treatment of Western dissenters has caused. The settlements cause some negative PR but ultimately, much like how gas prices and elections work, many people look at Zionists’ treatment of Western dissenters first and foremost in terms of having an opinion on Israel itself.

This does not apply to criminal law or civil law. I'm not saying you can't sue a senator for slander, or that the government shouldn't be able to arraign a representative for robbery. But when it comes to administrative suits, where there's no victim per se, without impeachment proceedings there should really be no government action taken. For example, if a representative were discovered to have committed immigration fraud in such a way as to potentially invalidate their citizenship, the government should have to just ignore it completely as long as they remain in office. Newspapers could report on it and embarrass them, as long as they aren't papers that take any government money which could plausibly make them state actors. Congress could choose to impeach, although in practice Congress rarely impeaches Congresscritters. But if Congress doesn't impeach, then the remainder of the government should have zero power to do anything to a sitting Congresscritter if the basis is administrative.