Reveal Your Uncool Conservative Beliefs Here

the weird semen smell from whatever tree that is, it's not offensive but I don't enjoy it

The linden tree? Per that Mitchell and Webb sketch? I never got that at all. Those smells have nothing in common.

I don't know if it's the linden, it really does smell like fruity cum though

it's the bradford pear tree, big tree with white flowers all over in the spring

This is a bit of a tangent but I was really confused when I found out Brits call linden tea 'lime flower tea'. I mean, lime trees are something else entirely.

Was confused about this in a book I just read (Bringing Up the Bodies, maybe):

Tilia is a genus of about 30 species of trees or bushes, native throughout most of the temperate Northern Hemisphere. The tree is known as linden for the European species, and basswood for North American species. In Britain and Ireland they are commonly called lime trees or lime bushes, although they are not closely related to the tree that produces the lime fruit.

semen and weed both smell amazing sheesh

i mean they gotta be fresh otherwise yeah they smell bad

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/under-the-yum-yum-tree/

Male gingko trees, when fruiting, can smell pretty nastily of sex.

As for

It smells good when you're smoking it, terrible when you're not.

This is true of most smokables and most smokers ime. When you're smoking something, it's on fire right underneath your nose. So it smells fine to you because you immediately become nose-blind to it. Everyone around you? Not so much.

Hence, smokers frequently don't understand why nonsmokers are annoyed by the smell of smoke
And nonsmokers don't understand why smokers don't understand their annoyance.

It smells good when you're smoking it, terrible when you're not.

i prefer the smell when someone else is smoking it, especially at a distance. it's sweeter? and i love the smell of weed itself (like, not being smoked) best

Flopson, in my youth I loved the smell of pipe tobacco, but only when someone else was smoking - when I smoked a pipe myself it wasn't nearly as nice (because of the nise-blind phenomenon). My college roommate and I would sometimes take turns for precisely that reason.

Also I have always loved the smell of cigarettes before they're burned. I used to live in a city where when the wind was right you could smell the tobacco drying in barns and it was lovely.

tobacco pre-burnt smells like raisins to me

It's the sweet chestnut that smells of semen. Around June/July, when they're flowering, the woods fair reek of jizz.

there are too many people on the planet.

this one really seems to rile up left-leaning people but i just don't see how it's not true. yes, we have immense capacity for reducing our footprints. yes, often the next step taken from this baseline statement is to start talking about how to reduce that population, which is An Unspeakable Sin, Apparently. but i just think it's so hubristic to deny it. we are animals. the same rules apply to us as other animal populations, broadly speaking.

the most egalitarian way to address this would be to start pushing male birth control hard, but since most of the world seems to be driven by men having unbridled access to women's bodies as property, it seems a change of heart there is unlikely. so capitalism interlocking with colonialism and racism is going to do the "thinnning out" in a very not-egalitarian fashion for us.

Population decline tends to take care of itself.

The reason people yell at you is that any policy measures aimed at population control have a pretty eugenicist stink on them. It's not like it'd be less racist.

It is very funny and strange to me that declining birth rates make economists upset

But yeah when the earth's carrying capacity for humans declines you will have fewer humans, also fertility has been declining globally for decades already https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/worlds-population-is-projected-to-nearly-stop-growing-by-the-end-of-the-century/

the malthusian issue will only come into play if we actually make the radical changes to our way of life that are required by climate change and then that's the issue that is left over. as that is not going to happen people should have all the kids they want.

just be aware that they live til they're old things will probably suck ass (i kind of want to have a kid despite this)

lol map I appreciate you not beefing with me on FB regarding this, I hear what u are saying but yeah fertility just keeps going down, nature bats last, etc.

Adults shouldn’t use slang.

that sentence slaps

calm

I can't enjoy the deaths of even the very worst murderers and the celebrations online make me feel really queasy.

If they are evil politicians, otoh, I can wholeheartedly join in with the fun.

tbf the worst murderers fail to kill anyone. evil politicians succeed.

if you want to listen to or watch something on public transport you should wear headphones

ppl blasting stuff out of their cars I'm ok with tho

I don't think it's particularly conservative to want people to be baseline courteous when everyone around them is trapped in a tiny box. We even have explicit rules against that behavior on our public transport.

Does it make me conservative to say 95% of the time I hate the music blasting out of cars though? I live in a neighborhood where just the worst garbage driveltunes are blasted to the max with an inverse relationship between taste and volume. Coupled with all those modifications to also make the car itself (engine) as loud as possible as well.

Yeah this no headphones in public thing is getting horrible

The Guardian sends two people on a blind date to a restaurant every week and then asks them about it, this was this week's

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/oct/16/blind-date-andrew-marta

Any awkward moments?
A man on the next table was watching a horror film loudly on his laptop. The constant screams were a tad awkward.

was sat at a restaurant once with a guy watching porn videos on his phone at the next table, that was in guangzhou though so doesn't really count

We even have explicit rules against that behavior on our public transport.

I wish we had. It used to be kids who did this but, where I am anyway, it's now almost overwhelmingly adults - and I mean people in their 30s/40s/50s.

I don't like people driving around playing loud music driving through neighborhoods at night (like my son's friends who roll up to the house at 10:30 pm to hang out) but I enjoy pulling up to someone in traffic who has something loud on. It doesn't even have to be (and usually isn't) music I like, but it's good atmosphere for me.

Also wanted to mention that I think people blast music in cars way less than they used to, but it may just be my own experience. Can anyone confirm?

When terrestrial radio was still a thing, I used it as a gauge. The last time I got a thrill was early April 2020 at the peak of lockdown when the car beside me at the stoplight blasted Dua Lipa's "Levitating" and I thought, yeah.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvDazrJuSdA

Yeah this no headphones in public thing is getting horrible

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown),

Yeah I'm not into that

Also not into those portable blutooth speakers especially in the park, at the beach

Don't really mind music blasting from cars as long as they're moving and not standing or idling l

Yeah this no headphones in public thing is getting horrible

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, October 21, 2021 12:26 PM bookmarkflaglink

I used to hate Sia's "Chandelier" because before boarding a Megabus, this kid in the seat across from me kept playing the chorus and only the chorus on her handheld device. Loudly. At 6 in the morning.

BLOT: if u don't wear headphones I'll meet you off the bus

actively pro bluetooth speakers at the park, beach, etc, that's literally what they're for, just keep the volume courteous imo

having a conversation over speaker phone in public is absolutely depraved, however

park/beach definitely. I have a tiny little bluetooth speaker for that type of thing, was really affordable from Oontz

speakerphone in public i'm tempted to join in the convo but I don't because the person on speaker didn't choose to be on speaker but part of me wants to alert them to the fact that they're on it and their convo isn't private

i probably posted upthread about this but someone at the airport once had a speakerphone convo about their debauched hen party weekend with someone, very loudly, and it seemed pretty apparent that a) the person on the other end probably would not have said what they were saying if they knew it was v much in public and b) the person on my end (in the airport terminal) was enjoying the exhibitionism, she kept looking around to see if anyone was listening

Think about how they’re not blasting their ears using headphones & feel good for them

having a conversation over speaker phone in public is absolutely depraved, however

― gbx, Thursday, October 21, 2021 2:53 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

i'm pretty sure that this "pizza talking" speakerphone thing is 100% the result of people emulating reality tv shows where everything had to be on speakerphone for the cameras

C/D: holding a phone in front of your face as if it were a slice of pizza

i was thinking a bit today about the fentanyl flood, mostly because i saw a dude just cold zonk out standing up at the sandwich place and smack his head on the corner of a table.

anyway, one of the fever swamp theories is that the chinese govt is pumping the US full of cheap fentanyl just to nakedly weaken and kill americans, and/or for the money. there's no good reason at all to believe this, but if somehow it turned out to be true i wouldn't be at all surprised. why not? it is exactly what the british empire did to china, and what US intelligence did to americans more than once

the recent nyt story about this (relying on a book by Ben Westhoff i haven't read) only identifies china as the source, or source of the raw materials that go into it. trump pressured china to ban all varieties of fentanyl, which apparently they did, but china is still named as the ultimate source of the ingredients. the nyt story says nothing on this point, but the invitation is there to suppose that if the precursors were still being exported to the same suppliers with a wink, the chinese state would have to know about it

i'm extremely skeptical of major US journalism about china these days. just something that came to mind.

Probably my most hardcore, far-right opinion:

https://www.methodsman.com/blog/gas-stove-statistics?fbclid=IwAR1ZH3rDX3-f9XFl3CHBcC7jLKNFwsAiGNgkR2TLyFhKgRHSuf19igCEKdA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1LjDgzntvI

idk you also were toying with the notion of buying guns to defend your suburban homestead from imagined home invaders