I watched a video (can’t remember who or what it was called) that looked into the early days of radio. In the early 1900s it was a massive craze, especially among teenage boys, and quickly resulted in kids transmitting “obscene messages” and calling in fake commands and reports to naval radio operators. At the time there was no encryption or restriction on amateur radio use, and it lead to some embarrassing and dangerous moments for the navy.

The government finally acted in 1912 by forcing amateur radio to be restricted to the shortwave frequencies, decimating the hobby. This was partly driven by an incorrect rumor that these radio trolls had been responsible for, or interfered with the rescue of, the Titanic a few months earlier.

It was interesting to learn that trolls have always been with us, and also that the government could so decisively shape a new form of communication. If the 1980s giverments had banned use of the Internet by anyone outside the military and a small number of commercial or academic licence holders, things would be very different. Sure, the technology would be there and people would run amateur ip networks, or secretly piggyback of official uses, but it would be more like the dark net / tor than what actually happened.

I think you are completely misrepresenting the literature in the field. There has been decades of research on inner monologues, but whether anyone truly has no inner monologue is still a matter of debate, and suggesting that it could be as much as 50% is absolutely wild.

One recent example is Nedergaard and Lupyan (2024), who used questionnaires on 1,037 participants and found no one who reported a complete lack of inner speech. They did show a link between lower frequency of internal speech and lower performance on sole verbal cognitive tasks.

But this was frequently misreported in popular science news, which may be where you got the idea. For example, Science Daily’s headline “People without an inner voice have poorer verbal memory” and subheading “Between 5-10 per cent of the population do not experience an inner voice” certainly make some bold claims (although still well below your “up to 50%” statistic). But just a few lines into the article it’s been rephrase as “between 5-10 per cent of the population do not have the same experience of an inner voice”. This is more accurate, as all studies agree that there is a variety of experiences of inner voices / monologues, but a different experience is not the same as an absence.

In another comment you make reference to the experience sampling study (where a buzzer would sound and participants would record whether they were experiencing an inner monologue) which I assume is the work of Heavey and Hurlburt. It’s true that they claim that 5 of their 30 participants recorded no instances of inner voice, but let’s be clear about what the experimental procedure was: the participant would turn on the buzzer, which would buzz at a random time (an average of every 30 minutes) and the study was based on two periods of five samples. So, ten data points collected over approx five hours.

Even people with strong inner monologues report different frequencies of inner speech depending on their activities. Many people do not experience inner speech when actively engaging in other verbal activity - talking with friends, watching a video; while quiet focused activities such as golf show much higher reporting of inner speech. So the absence for five individuals of any inner speech during those ten particular samples is in no sense equievlant to “16% of peole have no inner monologue”. Indeed even the study’s authors acknowledge “it is possible that these participants may all have actually had quite similar inner experiences; it is merely the reports of those experiences that differed.”

Tldr: I think you’re making some very wild claims about this subject, without posting sources. No significant study I know of claims that any sizable percentage of the population have no inner voice, (although there certainly is an interesting variety in how frequent and clearly it is experienced.)

Antedilluvian

I think it’s been a very long time (if ever) that YouTube searches weren’t somewhat localised. If you live in an anglophone country you might not notice it, but YouTube wouldn’t have got very far if Germans got rodents instead of advice when searching “rat”.

Most salad dressings are just savoury cocktails

Those bastards!

Nope

I could get a copy of the original “White Box” Dungeons & Dragons set, although not an actual first print run copy, because those go for $20k. But I’d probably buy the last few Planescape products I’m missing, which are also unreasonably expensive for rpg books but not in the same league as the original dnd sets, and much more enjoyable to read.

Northern Exposure is an amazing and very gentle show, if you can handle 90s tv.

Life, uh, finds a way.

It’s not something you need to get rid of, but if you really want to move past it the best way is to actually explore it psychologically. You say you like humiliation play because you love feeling like you’re worthless. Makes sense, sure, but why? What is it about feeling worthless that feels good?

Is it genuine worry in real life that you can safely explore in a sexual fantasy? Do you feel sometimes inadequate but can’t talk to friends openly about it, so having someone attractive criticise you but still not leave you relieves a fundamental rejection anxiety?

Is it that part of you is arrogant and looks down on some others as losers, but you don’t consciously approve of that behaviour, so the kink lets you ‘play the victim’ and feel better about your elitism?

If you spend a bit of time actually confronting the deeper thoughts behind a kink, it can remove a bit of the forbidden tension, and leave it as something you can still enjoy if you want, or move beyond, or find a more acceptable form that still presses the same buttons. Or just find a girlfriend who’s into it!

If we’re just talking “don’t worry about money day to day” then I’m that, but that’s more about being a couple who both work with low expenses (no kids). I never really think about how much money I have in my account, or worry about bills or rent or anything. I can’t afford to buy super expensive stuff all the time, but it doesn’t feel like a hardship to not buy the latest flagship or constantly upgrade stuff, and if I do want something I just get it.

Not stressing about money is fucking amazing, ngl. It creates this relaxed sense of calm, even when things are difficult. I certainly didn’t always feel like this, I’ve been unemployed, and so broke that I’ve been starving and wandering the street in the hope to find a coin that someone dropped so I could buy something to eat. When you don’t have enough money everything is difficult and any new crises is anxiety inducing.

Now, if something goes wrong while travelling, I just book into a hotel, while before I’ve had to sleep rough because I missed a flight and couldn’t afford a room. I never worry about the price of a restaurant or how overpriced a drink is (partly because I rarely eat / drink out so it’s not a big expense) . But that attitude of not having to check prices, or order the cheapest options, is so liberating. I think people who’ve never been poor have no idea how exhausting and stressful it is to constantly be on your guard and how feeling guilty about the cost can even ruin the enjoyment of the treats you do allow yourself.

Is it just a sacred cow? “you can’t change anything about voting”? Or do they believe in some specific obstacle? I was discussing this with a friend recently, and the only guess as to why it wouldn’t work in America is that it requires a reasonable number of volunteers, and maybe Americans are too busy working insane hours and surviving to add civic responsibilities.

It’s not the size of virtue, but how you use it. Or so I’m told.

I don’t understand why it’s so difficult. In France voting is done entirely on paper and results are often released later that night, and almost all the results are in by the next day. Same in the UK, although it generally takes them a few hours longer, probably because the polls close later in the evening.

It’s the dates they’re laid!

Looking through their post history, they don’t seem very concerned with being inspirational. Mostly being antagonistic, and racist of about romani people.

Normally like this, but we ate them all yesterday.

I think this is a pretty dumb topic, because it really involves a lot of stereotyping and bullshit (like the other comment suggesting that fancy cars aren’t linked to penis size anxiety) but anyway…

If we take “penis size” as a metric that men believe is important to their sexual attractiveness, and the assumption that they buy expensive cars to compensate, then we could see the goal as increasing their diminished sexual value in an alternative way. A rich man with a small penis may (in this silly logic) be as sexually attractive as a poor man with a large penis.

So for women, what is a stereotypical number that they could worry about and try and compensate for? The two that spring to mind (in this clichéd view of the sexual economy) are age and weight. Weight feels different, as there are methods of managing it that are more effective than “this secret ancient method will grow your dong 3 inches!” but for many people it is not an easily controlled factor. Age is, chronologically at least, a one way street. For both of these, make-up and grooming are pretty effective at reducing the “negatives” (bleurgh!) of being old / overweight, but that would be the equivalent of men stuffing socks and salami down their pants. What is the equivalent of “I’m not conventionally sexually attractive, but I have other redeeming qualities, like a willingness to waste money trying to impress women”? I wonder if it’s “being kinda slutty”?

When I think of the equivalent to the cliché of the needy middle-aged businessman in his sports car, I think of the stereotype of the middle-aged, overweight, divorcée wearing too much makeup and dressing too young/slutty. She’s not really trying to pretend she’s young and hot, she’s visibly demonstrating that’s she’s willing to make an effort to attract a man “if I’m willing to look like this in public, think how much of an effort I’ll make on the sack!”

But I think this is a pretty silly topic, and making stereotyped judgements about other people is pretty bad. The “facists have small dicks” memes that kick about are kinda funny, but are really just reinforcing a body image problem that exists much more in society and the minds of men than it does in the tastes of their actual sexual partners. And women can be whatever age, weight or whatever else they want, and dress how they like. Some people just love leopard print! No need to project society’s ills onto them!

Do you perhaps mean self-individuation? That’s what jung talks about the most. As I understood it, it’s the process of facing up to who you really are and coming to terms with that. Jung’s theory of the self proposes that our conscious self is only part of what’s going on in our brains, and there’s all these instinctual, repressed or just ignored parts of us that influence our decisions and reactions. The process of individuation is exploring, confronting and integrating all those parts, so that we understand and better manage their influence on us.

The idea is that while we grow up parents, teachers, other kids or adults, all teach us (intentionally or not) what is good and what is unacceptable for us to be. Some traits are not right for us, but still acceptable to society, and they often become part of our projection onto romantic figures, because we want to have those traits indirectly through them. So if you’ve been told to bottle up your feelings, and never express emotions you might be attracted to a parter who is kind and intuitive and emotionally aware. Or if you’ve been taught to always follow the rules and behave, you might find a wild, freespirit type strongly appealing.

Other traits are perceived very negatively, and so we don’t consciously identify with or want them. But they’re still there inside of us, and Jung argues these still influence us, however hard we try to suppress them. As is seen in how people project their negative traits onto other groups, and then punish those others rather than face the reality that those traits are inside all of us. This is called projection, and I sure you can probably think of some examples in contemporary life…

The process of individuation is learning to spot these traits in our subconscious, and bring them into conciousness and figure out how to integrate them into ourselves. By doing this we become deeper and more rounded individuals, gaining skills and qualities that we’d previously denied ourselves because “feelings are for girls” or “standing up for yourself is too aggressive and gross, and I hate violence so I’m not going to argue with this person instead I’ll just go home and be passive-aggressive to my family”.