"women are drawn to toxic abusers" is very, very wrong. It indicates a wish/desire/need to be abused. No, they are not drawn to that. Many abusers know how to look nice and perfect and are great at manipulation.
Also, there may just be a lot of bad men in your social peer group.
> "women are drawn to toxic abusers" is very, very wrong. It indicates a wish/desire/need to be abused.
It doesn't have to indicate that. I think it's more likely that those traits that those women find attractive are the same traits that toxic abusers have.
> Don't make it sound like it's the womens fault.
I don't think he was doing that - people can't help what traits they find attractive.
It's pretty well established at this point that victims of childhood abuse are much more likely to enter into relationships that involve violence from their intimate partners.
One of the best predictors for someone entering a abusive relationship is whether ot not that person has previously been in one and whether they have processed it therapeutically.
I understand your instinct to defend people who have been hurt but this isn't a matter of assigning blame to them. It's about identifying patterns and finding ways to break them.
Sure, and so is Stockholm Syndrome - except in that case we know the concept was made up by a criminologist working with the local police to help them come up with a psychological explanation for why the hostages stopped trusting them after they had horribly mishandled the hostage crisis and endangered their lives.
Note that most "well-known" examples of "hybristophilia" are parasocial or only exist as distance relationships, especially when the subject of attraction is incarcerated. Being incarcerated literally limits the potential for abuse and especially violent abuse which further contributes to an illusion of safety and control which the abuser can take advantage of by engaging in psychological manipulation tactics like lovebombing.
You don't have to subscribe to pseudoscientific explanations like evopsych or some inherent trait in women making them naturally predisposed to seeking out people who harm them in order to figure out what can cause these phenomena. In fact, I find just-so "explanations" (like you seem to imply by pointing at a term like this as if it in itself holds explanatory power) extremely unsatisfying because they're little more than thought-terminating clichés.
It's also worth pointing out the term was coined by the guy who is best known for promoting chemical castration (which aside from having motivated Alan Turing to take his own life is still a contested issue in the scientific community due to studies showing serious side-effects and the efficacy being questionable as it may heavily suffer from selection bias) and the one time he forced sexual reassignment surgery on a male infant (David Reimer) after a botched circumcision. Reimer later "detransitioned" upon learning of what had been done to him. Incidentally Reimer also accused him of having forced him - when Reimer was a child - to engage in pretend sexual activity with his brother and to watch pornography. Oh, and the guy also considered relationships between children and full adults morally defensible in principle, while also dismissing critics as "right-wing" despite much of the criticism coming from intersex and transgender people.
It's not very wrong unfortunately. Do you remember back in school that the nice, timid guys were friendzoned but the assholes always had girls after them ?
There must be some evolutionary justification, but we have to live with that unfortunate reality..
The tell-tale phrase of a soon-to-be victim in a relationship with an abuser is "he's not like that when we're alone", not "I can fix him".
There's a difference between confidence and dominance. It's difficult to grasp given how much our culture tends to conflate them as desirable traits in men but the main distinction is that one is about resilience and the other is about abuse.
Confidence is attractive. Unless you're deeply insecure (and abusers often are insecure even if they try to mask it in displays of dominance) you're likely attracted to confidence in potential partners - yes, even as a straight guy. Just like an insecure person can use dominance to mask their insecurity, a confident person can also act submissively. This isn't just true in BDSM, it's actually a social dynamic many people engage in completely naturally.
An abuser (or I guess the pop-psych term is usually "narcissist" but let's not open the can of worms on whether that is ever applied "correctly") will often seek out a confident partner they can manipulate into a position of vulnerability they can take advantage of to control them.
The problem with power is that it is nearly inseparable from abuse. Abuse will inevitable arise from any power imbalance because the mere circumstance of being in a position of power can easily lead to absuses of power unless you're extremely diligent about your use of it. A healthy social dynamic always requires a balance of power - even if there may be a local imbalance in any one-on-one dynamic it can be offset by the wider network if it is stable and strong enough. If you look at powerful men in modern society almost none of them are actually confident. The few who are tend to paradoxically stand out for their humility and deference (i.e. taking credit for their losses and sharing credit for their accomplishments). But this is of course much more difficult than starting out from a position of power and fearfully lashing out at any potential rival.
But then again remember the incredible amounts of fan mail serial killers and serial rapists get while in prison. (this is taking it to the extreme of course)
It is the same like guys finding toxic sociopaths attractive, against our better judgement.
No, I do not remember that because I've seen different things.
There is a lot of different things going on, like perceived confidence. This is just myth.
There is no woman out there who wants to live in fear.
It’s not a myth. What convinced you that there is a myth?? Almost everyone seems to agree it’s a real thing from what I see online. I recommend you watch this video by YouTube channel @Elephantintheroom https://youtu.be/Gvj8hG2UvbA?si=qz_7aC4jYq2CBfJl
Apparently it’s much worse than what we see around us. Women literally fall in love with monsters.
People are weird. Men are probably even worse if you really dig deep down what we are interested in on a woman. The kind of thing we prefer not to even think about. What we evolved to like is not always “appropriate “ in a modern society.
The second most recent video from the YouTube channel you linked uses a "triggered feminist" meme image from 2016.
The image itself is a still image from a video posted on Alex Jones' YouTube channel covering a protest against Trump supporters. If you actually watch the part of the original video the image was taken from, you quickly realize the woman in question just has the misfortune of having very naturally emotive facial expressions and the still is taken from an argument between her and a Trump supporter about the alleged concern of immigrant sex abusers and that if you consider the fact they have to yell at each other to overcome the noisy environment she doesn't actually appear at all outraged or angry.
I don't explain this to dunk on the channel - it easily does that by itself. I explain this because the fact that the channel you cited a video from uses this meme in 2026 (10 years after it was first taken, i.e. enough time to learn about its origin and move on) is extremely symbolic of the approach you seem to favor for finding explanations to social phenomena. Yes, "it's just a meme", but that's the point: memes are shorthands that carry cultural context (or in this case entire fossil records of cultural history), they're not just funny pictures.
_That_ isn't "what we evolved to like". "Men" aren't "probably worse". Don't sell yourself short. You exist downstream from tens of thousands of years of human history and at least a hundred thousand years of prehistory. We had already developed tool-making and cooking before we even became _Homo sapiens_ so in all likelihood you can expand that prehistory into the millions of years of _Homo erectus_.
Science has moved on well past the mythology of barter economies or "hunter gatherer" societies where the cavewife tending towards the babies with her oldest daughters while cavehusband and the boys were out hunting the mammoth.
We know that the thing that allowed us to survive as a species was not just our big brain but our close-knit society that cared for its injured, elderly and disabled and was at times so welcoming we now know that early Homo sapiens at times even interbred with our closer extinct sibling species. In fact, our big brains had to come downstream from this because it made childbirth dangerous and arduous while also requiring us to spend the first years of our lives unable to defend ourselves and the first months in fact so reliant on others to help us survive that disruption of those early bonds can traumatize us for life or in extreme cases even cause us to die. Even as adults "touch starvation" has serious mental health implications.
If you think "what we evolved to like" is not "appropriate", chances are the problem isn't what we evolved to like - e.g. ripe fruits - but what systems the modern social order has put in place to make exploitation of those preferences useful for those in positions of power (or extreme wealth, but I repeat myself) even when doing so will harm you - e.g. abundant high fructose corn syrup in every part of your diet so you think food is tasty and crave more of it although it doesn't satiate you.
There's a reason why "nice guy"
is a stereotype. The people who describe themselves like this aren't nice or timid, but insecure, angry and judgmental. They tell stories like "women like assholes" to avoid coming to terms with the idea that they're unlikable.
Both the "nice guy" and the "asshole" are insecure. The latter is just better at masking their insecurities in such a way that others mistake it for confidence.
This is especially true when eveyone involved is young enough not to have a wide enough frame of reference to gauge what's an indication of actual confidence versus abuse and has a brain undergoing massive hormonal shifts that intensify emotions, encourage risk taking and make them seek out novelty. Let's remember that most of the "nice guy" stories people like to tell are about early adulthood or more often than not their late teens.
The non-wifebeating, non-drug-abusing, non-raping men and boring and unlikeable. It's actually their fault that women fall for the motorcycle riding drug dealers. Got it.
Anyone who thinks like this is absolutely the kind of awful, toxic person who has to make up stories to avoid coming to terms that they are the problem.
I run a small science club where the kids learn and experiment in small groups guided by tutors who enjoy the stuff. And I'm running out of money fast: I cannot charge much for the courses and workshops (those without money run along free of charge anyway) and I need to spend money on rent, materials and especially the tutors. And the last expenditure is growing linear with the amount of classes I offer and is easily the biggest.
People in business, especially in tech business, try to set things up in a way where you can automate stuff away and it's easy to see schools and classroom education as a great opportunity to try the same approach.
I'm interested as well. I run a small science club for kids, mainly coding and electronics. Accessibility and being more inclusive is a very old bullet point on my long list of things to do, but I never found a place to start. Do you have any recommendation on where to learn this?
Hard question, because the field so diverse. In a sense, accessibility is much more then just trying to make computers useable for the blind. At a fundamental level, it is about making software flexible enough to be used in different modalities. People with very little motor capabilities are quite capable of looking at a screen, but they need help moving the mouse and perhaps a good predictive onscreen keyboard to be able to type. Blind people on the other hand are mostly quite content with a standard keyboard, but they need a totally different way of output, like tactile braille or synthesized speech. For the output part, it boils down to having an API which makes a third party app (like a screen reader) able to traverse the logical structure of what the application is presenting on-screen. That is mostly a sort of tree which reflects which widget contains what, and the different types of content. Such an API, however, is not only required for screen readers, but also very useful for things like automated testing, for instance. So a web automation or testing framework could actually be written on top of the accessibility APIs, and sometimes actually is. I am rumbling about this to get you in the right mindset. Its so hard to not see the forest because of all the trees around...
That said, if we're talking about web accessibility, the obvious recommendation is the WAI WCAG. Maybe not the best reference for learning on how to implement things, but its a good start.
Depending on the platform you're at home with, there are screen readers (NVDA, Orca, BRLTTY) which are open source and can be studied. On the user side, and on the "how is this implemented" side.
Installing NVDA on Windows and turning the monitor off is a good way to get your feet wet. It might feel strange at first, but you will notice that things can actually get done this way. Its also a good way to test a website if you have no specific accessibility knowhow yet. Just try to navigate and read its contents.
> [...] and turning the monitor off is a good way to get your feet wet.
Is it weird that I, as someone with normal sight, had never thought of that as a simple way of testing whether your software (and the whole operating system together with it) works correctly with screen readers? It's like there's some sort of unconscious bias which links typing on a computer with its monitor being turned on.
And I lived through the times when most computers didn't come with any pointing device, which led to most software back then being accessible to keyboard-only users (notable exceptions being things like Paintbrush, which required a mouse), so I understand the link between the lack of a device and software being designed to work well without that device.
There seems to be a quite widespread confusion regarding input and output devices when it comes to assistive technologies for the blind. I am being asked a lot how my "braille keyboard" works. Even by people from the tech industry. Thats when I typically gently explain that a good secretary doesn't need to look at their keyboard, the faster you type, the more you need to type blindly. Most assistive technologies for the blind are about output, and not about input... But it is frequently being confused.
> In a sense, accessibility is much more then just trying to make computers useable for the blind. At a fundamental level, it is about making software flexible enough to be used in different modalities. [...] For the output part, it boils down to having an API which makes a third party app (like a screen reader) able to traverse the logical structure of what the application is presenting on-screen. [...] So a web automation or testing framework could actually be written on top of the accessibility APIs, and sometimes actually is.
I agree. If the features are well-designed, then they can be good for many uses, whether or not you are blind.
You could also add pronouncing file (especially if a document is using unusual words), it is useful if you are blind and using synthesized speech, but also if you are not blind and do not know how is the word pronounced then you can easily learn. (Likewise, if you watch television then you can put on caption in case you do not know how to spell some unuusal word (such as someone's name). Captions could also be useful for a "caption scrollback" menu to display prior captions in a list, although I have never seen this implemented, but I think it would be useful.)
Another situation where speech synthesis is often used (by people who are not blind) is GPS-based navigation systems. They often pronounce the street names wrong, so adding data for pronouncing, and then implementing that properly, would be better.
(I have mentioned before that I think that adding a "ARIA view" (with user-defined CSS) might be a best way to make a consistent visual display which uses ARIA instead of the visual styles defined by the web page author (widgets, etc can also be used, and would also be consistent instead of each web page having its own widget styles). However, I have not seen such a thing implemented in a good way.)
I'm currently debating with myself whether I should create GUI programs (with the main code written in Rust) using Qt or Tauri. Tauri is a Rust based GUI framework based on a webview, similar to Electron, although it can use the OS's native web renderer [1]. Do you think one would be better than the other with regards to accessibility? Or is it mostly a question of how I, as a programmer, make use of the tools? For context, those are currently just small tools and utilities I make on my own and provide as Open Source.
I don't currently have Windows. Is there a good way for me to test accessibility on Linux? As a fallback, I will get myself Windows once I port the tools to Windows, so I could test accessibility then.
I have no experience with webview based local apps and their accessibiility, nor did I ever look at Tauri. So to assess if it works, I'd have to check. I am a bit reluctant to recommend Qt because they have let me down in the past at times, but all in all, Qt is mostly accessible, even cross-platform.
Which brings me to your second question. Linux has a GUI accessibility API as well, the AT-SPI. GNOME Orca is the screen reader to use on Linux. If your distro configures things right by default, you should be able to access your Qt application with Orca as a screen reader on Linux.
I recommend taking a look at https://teachaccess.org/ as a starting point. They are non profit focused on bridging the gap between accessibility and education.
I think they are mostly focused on college level exercises, but if your kids are doing coding I'd imagine their tutorials would be something to take a look at: https://teachaccess.org/initiatives/tutorial/
As a complete aside for anyone reading this post, I think of improving accessibility as the "curb-cut effect", curb cuts (those ramps on sidewalks while cross streets) were created to improve urban access for those in wheel chairs, but also make it easier to use strollers, bikes, carts, and really for everyone walking in a built environment. When we as technologists make design decisions to make things more accessible I believe we end up with better products for everyone.
This article makes me furious. What does the author want to tell us? That everyone who feels like an imposter, and talks about it, is an arrogant arse that only wants to brag? Maybe he is and all the people he meets are.
But me as well as many of my close friends (none of them arrogant, I assure you) do feel like an imposter at their specific jobs from time to time. It's a thing that holds us back, a personal insecurity that we just carry around. We have learned to live with it and accept it as just something completely normal, especially because we talked about it.
I don't find the humor in diminishing a non-trivial mental health issue and making fun of the people suffering from it, and I don't think I'm alone in that.
The PCR-test is the best test we currently have to test the population in a useful and generally reliable way.
While it is true that the test can remain positive after a few weeks after the infection or onset of symptoms, the percentage is close to 0 after about 6 weeks. [1]
So as it's the end of April, the January infections will not have any false-positive influence on the current wave.
I did my PhD in cell biology a few years ago and I am seriously sceptical about the Kickstarter campaign. There are too many questions and way too few control experiments.
What you can see about their preliminary research is the rotation device and the pictures of the cells. From what I have learned during my studies is that it is easy to kill cell cultures and it is difficult to compare different cell lines. For example, most cells need a very controlled environment (temperature, growth medium, pH, a specific amount of cells per area and not too many or too few neighbouring cells etc.)
This rotation device appears to be at room temperature and creates a shear flow, which is enough to kill most cell cultures. The picture they show is not helpful at all, as they just show dying cells.
As others stated: you need more control experiments. One would be to keekp a bottle of cells in the machine, without rotation. That's really cheap and easy to compare, which they did not.
(not addressing the issue that that's not real microgravity)
I hope to find time later to find their publications, until then I don't believe this to be real.
Edit: I cannot find anything that's even looking like research. News articles all referring Chou, but nothing to show for it. No paper or data. Now it looks even worse.
I thought any of these experiments are carried out on two sets of cells. One normal and the other cancerous. Both exposed to the same test environment and treatment -- shear in this case. And when they claim "70% of cancerous cells died" they mean 70% more of the cancerous cells died than that of the normal cells, where "more" is defined in some acceptable standard.
Yes, but it is not what they say or show. And as long as they don't publish anything more you should be far more sceptical than those journalists were.
It is, but you'd need to verify the difference somehow, with fluorescent markers for example. But they appear to have only counted the surviving cells.
Don't make it sound like it's the womens fault.
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