What’s going to hit will be a bit dependent on where your soft spots are.

Kids: Grave of the Fireflies or Bridge to Teribithea or My Girl or The Cure

Romantic love: The Fountain

Existential trauma: Psycho-Pass (series) or A.I.

Dogs: Marley & Me or Hachi

Loss: Up

Also:

River

Works… until they die.

Derek doesn’t look like that at night. You’re seeing him because he’s out during the day after a full work shift. How good are you going to look if you have to stay up until 03:00 for an appointment?

Making intentions known is necessary. Flirting is just one of the preocesses by which intention is established. In that way, it is not strictly necessary, in the same way that cake is not necessary, but food is.

Flirting is a process which intentionally leaves ambiguity because it lets people avoid embarrassment. Being rejected, in many cultures, is embarrassing. By attempting flirting, a person can show interest indirectly, and the other person can show interest in return or show disinterest with quiet cues that let the instigator pull back without having to do something as vulnerable as explicitly stating intentions or experience embarrassment at being directly rejected.

Flirting, like anything else, can also be used as a display of quality, the verbal/intellectual equivalent of peacock feather displays.

How necessary these elements are is entirely contextual. Some partners despise the pretense of it. Others view it as incredibly fun. Some are deeply embarassed by the prospect of rejection. Some are not bothered by it at all.

I’m not such a fan of this view anymorr. Many of the people who go into the military actually believe they are going to do good things for the world but are ignorant of how much evil they will be asked to do most of the time, or like the idea of being of service but can’t get into other, better forms of service because those organizations prefer those who have gone to a university or work on a volunteer basis.

Basically the only thing that really bothers me is a lack of epistemological humility, people pretending their views are objectively true.

The short of it is: western society has been pretending human behaviour is simple and easy to understand for ages, but can’t anymore, and that’s leading to a fight over how to think about it all.

Homosexuality was viewed as a choice. Gender was viewed as natural rather than cultural. Criminals were just evil. Addicts were just irresponsible. Etc. Etc. In the last century, the democratization of expression and the shift to individualism has shattered that illusion of homogeneous simplicity.

This combines with a primitive delusion of semantic authority (this word has a specific defined meaning, and it is the one in the dictionary/my head) so that people think the object is determined by it’s descriptors rather than the descriptor is defined by its context. People hear a word (e.g. man) and assume all the common entailments are mandatorily part of the definition. (e.g. penis, taller and broader than average, likes to have sex with women, likes to hunt/fight/sport, wants to be a father and provider, insert other cultural signifier of masculinity here) So, when someone sees a word being applied to someone, but doesn’t feel like the definition in their head matches, they feel it’s wrong. (e.g. He likes men. That doesn’t match my definition of ‘man.’ Could my understanding of the word ‘man’ be wrong? Of course not. They must be something else. ‘You there, stop calling yourself a man. You’re not.’)

The current battle is a battle to define what the next concensus will be for the definition of various words. Traditionalists want to go back to a more familiar way of defining things. (e.g. It had a penis at birth? Man. And he better act like one.) And they are willing to happily ignore the preferences of people who don’t feel like that definition matches theirs. Neogenderists (for lack of a better term) believe something is wrong with the gender concepts and want to change them, whether that means adding one neuter gender, adding 100 genders, limiting us to the traditional two genders but removing physical sex as a characteristic in favor of just the cultural elements/secondary characteristics, or seeking to abolish gender entirely. Some people are interested in making the language match people’s self-conceptions, some are not.

And all of this is still in flux. Who knows which group will be most prominent in 10, 20, 30, 100, or 1000 years? We could have a time in the future where people will die to fight for the idea that there are exactly four genders, ‘man,’ ‘woman,’ ‘human,’ and ‘steve,’ differentiated mostly by hair color, with entailments regarding preferences for spicy foods, appropriate toenail length, and room temperature, and that the people who want to dye their hair are transchromists. We’d all like to believe humanity would have the wisdom to avoid it, but looking around doesn’t inspire much hope.

Hold on, there. You’re telling me there are other people, on the internet, sending you messages, personally, not as part of a mailing list, just sending you messages? Is that a thing? Is that even legal?

Never heard of those two being opposed.

The trade-off of security is widely known to be convenience, not privacy.

And, lo, the Bob was chill.

People might not assign Bobs magical properties, but they do just fine in getting people killed.

Robert E Lee - Confederate general

Sir Robert Peel - ‘Father’ of modern policing

Robert Mugabe - Former revolutionary and president of Zimbabwe

Baron Robert Clive - helped set up East India Trading Co

Various Kings and would-be Kings Robert - found all over Europe, can’t even guess how many literally died ‘in the name of’ these Bobs

Etc.