You are welcome :3
It’s long as hell, so I’m glad it wasn’t pointless, haha.

The issue inherent to it is when you have people giving seemingly literal agreement to satirical statements,

I will just take this at face value: what makes this an issue?

I don’t know if my neighbor has double-locked their front door, should I go and check?

this discussion isn’t just about visual shorthand of a comic, it has some amount of real world investment.

Yes, I am aware that jokes are political.

My reading is that this is yet another rearing of the man vs. bear debate. Our eternal prison.

so I can’t tell you in definite terms what a reasonable suspicion is,

I’m not asking for definite terms, I’m suggesting that women have more experience dealing with men and danger and dangerous men than men do. Men do have a lot of opinions about it, though.

If we’re using the example of the hotel room […] If you start getting into hiding, configuring contraptions, barring the door with chairs,

In the comic, she just engages the deadbolt.

It has been some hours since I last looked at this thread, but I imagine that men are not upset she’s being overly cautious, but rather that the comic is suggesting that they—they are taking this personally—are scarier people than women are. They are responding to hurt feelings.

It’s not “wrong” for an imposter to kill a crewmate because that’s how they play.

This analogy is specifically from the perspective of crewmates. It is wrong for crewmates to die, actually, because this brings your team closer to defeat.

I think you might also think that I view the crewmates as women? No. The divide drawn here is between cooperative and uncooperative. Citizen and villain. The presence of imposters makes all crewmates less safe to be around. Unless you have ways of managing risk.

So it would be like green crewmates assuming a red crewmate is an imposter on the basis of them being red,

If the game were programmed such that red crewmates were exclusively the ones chosen to be imposters, regardless of how this might damage the video game’s fun, don’t you think that being near a red crew member would set off some alarm bells? Wouldn’t you think of green crew members as more safe?

I’ve played plenty of RPGs where certain kinds of treasure chest, and certain kinds of treasure chest alone, require a degree of caution because I cannot know if they are mimics.

The issue I think most men have to this isn’t reasonable suspicion or reasonable caution,

What level of suspicion is reasonable?

Granted, I will not pretend that women are somehow above being very superstitious and silly. I’ve seen armored SUVs marketed to suburban house moms that are beyond parody. But still, for a demographic of people who largely do not have to deal with predatory men, being men themselves, how do men know what a reasonable degree of caution looks like?

but relating to a comic about seeing a spam notification about singles in your area and locking your door is ridiculous.

Well, this comic is… comedy. It has to be a little silly for the joke to land.

Locking the door with a common deadbolt has less to do with actually protecting anyone and more to do with being visual shorthand for a comedic sentiment.

I sense the argument coming, so I want to put something out there.

Let’s think about this using the game Among Us for a moment, hm? Forget about the gender war for a second, just think about Among Us.

In Among Us, there are, let’s say, ten people trapped on a space station, but one or two of them are actually aliens pretending to be human. Their job, naturally, is to eat the other humans, in addition to creating enough plausible deniability that they won’t be caught.

Now, some common arguments.

“Not all colorful little human beans are aliens trying to eat you.”
Well, we know that some of them are, and they really don’t want to be noticed. So, how do you avoid being eaten, then? That’s right, a little bit of paranoia. In this environment, a lack of trust becomes a survival skill by necessity.

“The ‘alien’ problem is overblown. In fact, I think they barely exist.”
Well, we know, in this video game, that they do exist. The tic-tac people are not going to survive the game by pretending the aliens aren’t there. In fact, by refusing to accuse any of your friends, you are enabling the aliens to eat more of your people without consequence.

“I agree that aliens are a problem, but why does it have to include me? I’m not one of them.”
Well, in Among Us, it is not possible to know who is or is not an alien on sight alone. You are forced to, by the game itself, demonstrate to other players that you are safe even in cases where you were never dangerous to begin with. Some kind of social etiquette is necessary when our other senses, our eyes for instance, cannot help us.

“Thinking all your friends are aliens trying to eat you is prejudice. It’s kind of like being racist to black people.”
Well, unfortunately, in this video game, we know with certainty there are secret aliens trying to eat people. As with the point above, we’re not going to solve this problem by pretending they don’t exist. Is it a little bit unfair that other players are forced to distrust you? Maybe. But, you just can’t build trust on this space station without somehow pacifying the alien threat that is built into the game. Every player understands this dynamic.

In real life, let’s imagine we have no idea whatsoever how often male aggression presents itself. We don’t know if there are or are not aliens.

We can agree, I would hope, that being an alien would be a bad thing, though, right? So, is it not enough to say “I will not be one of those men, and I will stop other people from being one of those men,” whether or not those men actually exist? At worst, you’ve committed to a fight that will never ask you to do any fighting.

You do not have to buy into the idea that most men are monsters to be an enemy of monstrous men. You do not need to concede that you are a monster to be an enemy of monstrous men.

If you insist on fighting about this, I have one or two ideas about that.

You don’t believe that monstrous men exist at all, so the paranoia is unjustified. Okay. I think that you’re in denial. Talk to some of the women in your life. Ask them about what they’ve dealt with.

You feel insecure and lonely because people naturally distrust you. I get that. That’s hard. Especially in a world where you can barely make friends without a car or money, that’s really tough. To a point I’ve made twice, though, if monstrous men are real, if they really exist, then this unfairness you’re subject to will not go away unless the thing that’s causing it is dealt with. This is a non-negotiable bit of math that you need to come to terms with.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

I removed all of the unnecessary detail for you.

Nobody:
_druid for some reason: 😡

I’ll take your word for it, man. I just don’t want to see people clinging to the driftwood around them because it’s the only thing they have imagination for.

If Jon Stewart runs and wins, I need him, I need him, to be unfair to the right wing. We are past bipartisanship. We can no longer take 4 entire years to arrest the architects of Jan 6.

The cliff I’m referring to, by the way, is not just Trump’s government. There are a lot of reasons we are in the place we’re in right now.

This is true. Jon Stewart held that extremely cringe march to restore sanity some time ago. And if I recall, he later said that calling the Republicans fascists was a step too far.

Look, I’d vote for him if he was the only option, but he does not represent the anger burning at the heart of the American left-of-center. I believe, much like Biden, Harris, Clinton, Obama, the other Clinton, who are all flavors of the same exact person, he would naively want to make peace with Republicans, to heal the divide, when what we need is to punt them out of congress entirely.

I mean, has he signaled anything different? Does he recognize the cliff the US is being steered over?

Literacy what? Just let me watch something funny.

This is like the most pro-illiteracy thing I’ve ever read.

Do you feel you’ve become more stupid?

My muscles were weaker until I started training. As it turns out, the modern convenience that allows me to sit around all day doesn’t actually make me stronger by itself.

It is people that are increasing inequality.

Yes, what if the billionaires simply chose not to, hm? Have I ever thought of that? Probably not, I’m very stupid.

I would like to point out that the likes of walmart and amazon have, like the mosquitos they are, sucked dry the money that used to circulate around smaller towns, and that might otherwise be used for a swim center or something.

I say this because step number one to fixing these places is bringing the money back.

Step two might be price locking rent and/or just taking land out of the hands of landlords and housing firms.