@texzenguy wrote, "I don't know how to measure it, but I can't help thinking a culture that fosters healthy platonic touch would be happier than one that discourages it."
I very much agree with this. I've found this in myself, certainly. Since learning about and fostering healthy, platonic touch intentionally in my own life, I've become a happier person.
The US gets credit for not being a backwards theocracy.
Wow. That's such a ringing endorsement that, if you don't mind, I'd like to use that for the title of my Independence Day thread:
Hey, at least we're not a backwards theocracy!
@TxTom Of course you can use it. All I did was paraphrase what you said.
@TxTom Whoa there!! Your title should be “Hey, at least we’re not a backwards theocracy… yet”
There is a tiny, fringe minority of extremists (about 70% of the U.S. public according to a 2023 Gallup poll) who think women’s sports should be reserved for biological women. If that tiny, 70% minority ever grows into a majority the U.S. will quickly become a backward theocracy.
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/americans-oppose-inclusion-trans-athletes-sports-poll-finds-rcna88940
If that tiny, 70% minority ever grows into a majority the U.S. will quickly become a backward theocracy.
It will eventually change as the old farts die off and the younger, more empathetic generations take their place. Eight out of ten Americans opposed integration in baseball in the 1920s then everything changed 20 years later. What is a popular opinion now is subject to change and it has always been that way in this country. Who thought weed would be legal in my lifetime when at one point it could land you in an FBI file in the 1960s.
Change is always inevitable.
@TheFunCartel
"Change is always inevitable."
Agreed-But growth is always optional.
@TheFunCartel Change is always inevitable.
True words, and words that unfortunately some people are incapable of grasping. Plus, "this is how it is" is not the same as "this is how it should be", unless you're very averse to change and/or enjoying people suffering.
But I wasn’t talking about growth. But your point is implicit in my statement “t will eventually change as the old farts die off” as I really don’t see the majority of my generation engaging in social growth. As such growth is optional.
@JohnR1972
Having led departments in a corporate environment, I am a big believer in celebrating improvement / success. One of my mantras was “Don’t let perfection be the enemy of progress” (not my original thought but I don’t remember who said it first). When you celebrate improvement / progress I believe (from experience) that you encourage and motivate people to keep making progress but when you verbally beat people up for not making enough progress as fast as someone else wants, people often become cynical and basically say “screw it.”
I'm going to DM you a link to a podcast episode I listened to today with Neil DeGrasse Tyson in it because I think you might find it enjoyable. He talks about this same idea, as well some of the other things you've talked about recently. I think his perspective offers a pretty balanced approach to these sorts of things, and at one point in the episode he makes a point very similar to the one you just made here.
He also made a point that pretty much everything in life is on a scale, rather than a binary. I think that binary approach is one reason why people disagree so much in recent years.
It fascinates me, because one thing I've never understood is how to motivate people to keep pushing themselves out of their comfort zones...possibly because I have so much trouble doing it myself.
article
As far as the article you posted, I actually found so much more interesting in that article fascinating beyond the headline 70% number. One thing that jumped out to me was how much someone's opinion changed if they knew a trans person personally. That lines up very well with a point cuddlefaery made in your other thread about people having a hard time understanding those very different from them.
When people get to know someone and care about them (despite certain differences), and they hear their story, I think they see how the issue becomes personal, and it helps people understand the issue more.
That's why I believe it's so important to try to foster environments where people feel comfortable expressing their true selves, because the more people do that, the more it allows other people to see the full picture, and I think that's where a lot of progress happens. It allows people to see the humanity in others.
The other thing I found interesting was the point about the younger generation having a different percentage than the entire one. Again, this makes sense, lining up with what others have already said. But I found it interesting how the article mentioned how these are the people actually playing the sports for the most part, rather than those just watching.
@texzenguy
I certainly agree with that idea. I wonder if the TYPE of touch makes a big difference or not, though. Like I mentioned, I earlier, everything is on a scale.
@TheFunCartel I agree and my point was more for the community. At points in our lives- we all choose the option to not engage in growth even in the midst of inevitable change. Awareness of our weakness and acknowledgement of our decision to stay stagnant-vs-Ignorance of our weakness and denial. Whose to say which is better? Ignorance can indeed be Bliss.
@BrianOcean
Awareness of our weakness and acknowledgement of our decision to stay stagnant-vs-Ignorance of our weakness >!and >>denial. Whose to say which is better? Ignorance can indeed be Bliss.
I think one main idea behind this is that there are SO many areas in life to focus on growing, and we only have so much time and so much energy. Particularly if we have other things on our minds.
But I think that's why it's important to organize things in our minds. Determine which things we truly do believe are flaws and areas of growth, and which ones we do not even if others do.
Once we do recognize our flaws, which ones are ones that will never change, and which ones are ones that we can change?
And then, out of the ones we can change and work on, which are the most important to us.
This is something I've been thinking about a lot over the past year or so. From so many different sources, they all point to the fact that staying stagnant can only keep us satisfied for so long. And I mean if we stay stagnant in EVERYTHING. Because our minds adjust to where we are and we stop being satisfied.
Basically, that everything that ends up being satisfying in life takes some discomfort. We need the bad to enjoy the good. We have to have something to work towards, some kind of hope, some kind of purpose. I think about this a lot. Everything single thing that's good in my life at one point had some kind of discomfort to it.
But that purpose could be all kinds of different things, even if they're just little things. But if it's NOTHING, then ultimately we won't feel any kind of satisfaction, because of how our minds adjust.
It's one of those things that I can't truly speak for anyone else because everyone is at a different place in their lives. I just find it interesting when I see so many different sources (with people from a variety of backgrounds) point to some of those same concepts, it kind of resonates with me in particular.
@Will564 Completely Agree
@TheFunCartel You obviously didn’t read the article. The percentage of Americans who want women’s sports reserved for biological women is increasing, not decreasing. From the NBC News article linked above..
“The survey — conducted from May 1 to May 24 via telephone interviews with roughly 1,000 adults living in the U.S. — found that 69% of people say that transgender athletes should only be allowed to compete on sports teams that correspond with the sex they were assigned at birth, compared with 62% in 2021.”
What was the geographic distribution of those one thousand people? Which, by the way, 1000 represents 0.0003% of the population.
It's trivial to force the answer for things like this.
While I don't want to put words in the mouth of @TheFunCartel , there are parts in the article that argue that this opinion is still valid.
(For the sake of it, we can assume the study is representative of the larger populations, but how accurate that is is hard to say without doing more research. But for simplicity's sake, let's say it is)
The longterm direction a pattern goes in can be different than any given smaller interval. I actually think about this a lot in terms of something like the US stock market, which has gone up as a whole over the course of its existence. But there are times, sometimes over many years, when it goes down. If we only focus on that part where it goes down, and apply it to the whole pattern, we can miss the big picture.
The article is only talking about that trajectory going up over a 3 year period, which is small in the grand scheme of things. It doesn't have to represent the long term pattern.
That's why the person quoted mentioned the ebbs and flows of people's opinions about gay marriage in the early 90s.
That is not to say that we can definitely say one way or the other what the long term pattern is. It's ok to say we don't know. Perhaps it is up, perhaps it is down.
But, in my mind, based on three things, my mind tends to believe the long term trajectory of % of people against it is going down. (A) This tends to happen in general, as exposure to new ideas (especially with the internet now) tends to make people more open to them, (b) the idea I mentioned earlier about people being more open to it when they have a personal relationship to them, and (c) the idea that the younger people's percentage of being against it is going down, and as time passes, older people are replaced by younger people.
@Unscented_Lemon
Would it really matter what statistic @JohnR1972 were to respond with?
Would you not counter it in some way and suggest all who opposed Biological Males participating in women's sports were Transphobic?
You are more than welcome to give your definition of Transphobia- and we are welcome to disagree with you.
And I guess you are then welcome to call us Transphobes as seems to be the pattern.
I'll also note that it was @JohnR1972 who chose to turn this thread into a conversation about trans women in sports. Perhaps we should be back to discussion touch starvation and male to male touch.
One of the most fascinating things I've found about cuddling over the last year is seeing how intricately it's connected to other social issues.
I honestly think that is a big reason why so many threads have the potential to steer in that direction, and then seeing the way that they do. One person's comment leads to another, which then leads to another, then leads to another.
What makes it so unique is unlike other areas where people tend to group together based on beliefs, the need for cuddling is more universal. So we end up getting all kinds of different people talking about a topic that always has the chance to morph into a conversation that can be difficult to have without emotions and disagreements popping up.
My only issue with that is I don't want people who would like to talk about the original topic feeling like they no longer have the chance to do so.
What's hard to say is when a thread has kind of maxed out the original topic. When it has the derailing doesn't bother me as much. But when it hasn't, I'd rather it not.
@Unscented_Lemon It was a national poll by Gallup, one of the most respected polling organizations in the country. They use a robust sampling methodology.
If you want to debate statistics with me, be my guest, but data analysis is a huge part of what I do for a living.
For a binomial probability distribution (i.e. there are only 2 possible responses such as “support” and “don’t support”) given an n=1,000 and 690 responses who only want biological women in women’s sports, the observed proportion is 69%. At a 95% confidence level, the confidence interval would be between 66.03% and 71.86%. In other words, their poll has a margin of error of approximately +/- 3%.
The size of the population (N) from which the sample (n) was drawn is completely irrelevant. It is only the size of the sample that matters.
@JohnR1972 Does not matter if it’s expanding. It is irrelevant when twenty years from now the inverse could be very possible. Polls are only a snapshot of people’s opinions at a moment in time, not an immutable fact. Heck, a crap ton of people believed Y2K was the apocalypse and the number grew the closer it got. The people who thought that have amnesia these days.
@TheFunCartel Fair point. I remember the hysteria around Y2K, some people were predicting airplanes falling out of the sky, elevators getting stuck between floors, dogs and cars living together, wait, that last one was from Ghost Busters. But yes, Y2K was greatly overhyped.
I was doing Y2K fixes on computer systems in the late 90s...
@Sooson - What was the biggest “glitch” you remember actually happening as a result of Y2K bugs?
I was a practicing EE at the time and I wrote some code (a small part of my job back then) but some people I knew were really worried about it. I told them I really didn’t expect any huge disasters but maybe a few minor inconveniences.
@JohnR1972 Since all our work was done in the late 90s and therefore was preemptive, I have not dealt with RT glitches. I think I was done with Y2K by the middle 99'. The issue was with the Year portion of the Date field being only 2 digits with the automatic addition of "19" to the left for the sake of displaying data, and worse, for calculation purposes. saving storage space back then was a big deal and many also believed the systems will become obsolete by the turn of the millennium therefore programming was date lazy.
There were two solution we offered: the more extensive (and more expensive) one was to expend every year field to 4 digits. this also required modification of the data bases. the lazier and cheaper solution was to offer the owner of the system to select a pivot year that will determine which is added to the left, "19" or "20". for example, if they chose 60 as the pivot year, then the assumption was that any year value of 60 or over would be handled as 1900s and any value under 60 would be handled as 2000s. so if they year value is 78 that year would be treated as 1978, if the year value was 11, that year would be assumed to be 2011
I told them I really didn’t expect any huge disasters but maybe a few minor inconveniences.
that was my estimation as well once I got to see glitches in a test environment.
But here are few "glitches" from these exiting times -We were working as contractors at the Ford Motor Company offices in Dearborn for a about a tear. I was driving a Chevy Monte Carlo. My boss didn't like it but was like ok at least it's not a Japanese car so I got away. -We were reporting to George Surdu over there. Not exactly a celebrity but well knows in the industry. My clown of a project manager almost got fired twice: once after getting caught by one of George's assistants reading a book at this desk, and another time for suggesting to take George to a strip club when one of the VPs of my company visited us on site and inquired about treating George for dinner. - A Local Detroit TV station was on site one day filming, as part of a Y2K story they were going to air. When they made it to our area, one of my teams members who was Russian, disappeared. He was afraid to be seen on TV.
@Sooson - I had a co-worker like that early in my career, always looking for an excuse to go from the component division we worked for to the GM Tech Center so he could go across the border in the evenings to the “Canadian Ballet” as he called it in Windsor, Canada.
@JohnR1972 Yea I completely forgot about Windsor. fun little town. I once walked out of the Casino in Windsor back to my car to head back home to Ann Arbor and was approached by a man and two women asking me if I want to "join then"
@JohnR1972 @Sooson You both probably remember the Nike Y2K Jogger commercial.
It's hard for me to talk with someone without touching them. It's because I want to make a connection that lasts and show I care. I have no problems hugging men, especially men I revere. If I'm coming up from behind, they're getting a brief shoulder rub. Strangely, I've only ever ended up with a bunch of touchmenots in my home life.
I go to a weekly shamanic circle. It tends to be 60% men, with many of them being grandfatherly types. I hug most of them every week. And at the end we hold hands in a circle. I enjoy that too. I also get as much support, guidance, and advice from them as I ask for. It's really great and goes a long way to helping me stay on track.
At the same time, for me, it's not the same kind of support or closeness that I experience with women. They are very, very different. Both are great and necessary, but I couldn't get all of what I need from just men. And I wouldn't want to cuddle these men either.
I was noticing just this past Wednesday, how different the woman's hand in my left hand felt to the man's hand in my right. Both were great and welcome. And like I said here before, as abusive as my dad was, he also showed me that he loved me. With that same energy I get from the guys in my group. But my mom didn't show me she loved me. And so when I get to hold a woman's hand or share a hug, it goes deeper. Like a parched person getting a much needed drink of water. Sometimes it feels like a mother, grandmother, sister or friend. But it's never sexual, even though it's with a person of the opposite sex.