I would say, given any anthro character, there’s a good chance a furry or some furries want to fuck them, but most furries don’t.

A large subset of furries want to be an anthro, though, and likely have specific characters they aspire to.

Dr. Dan McClellan has a great segment on Data Over Dogma about Prototype Theory ( On YouTube, time counter at 35:17), in which he points out dictionaries aren’t authoritative in telling us what words mean, rather they tell us what words have been used to mean so far.

He brings up the word furniture as an example talking about prototype theory, and talks about how we have a general sense of what furniture is ( we know it when we see it ) but we cannot define a set of features that includes all furniture and excludes all things not furniture.

Babs Bunny is a known nexus of this controversy, having been drawn a variety of ways from more chibi to more realistic and with various degrees of adult sexual characteristics.

To be fair, there’s been more public freak out over the green M&M redesigns.

This very much sounds like a mushroom (psilocybin) moment.

Though full disclosure, the one time I tried mushrooms, I didn’t experience anything that I could actually attribute to an altered brain-state.

The rule of law is not dependent on democracy, but it’s super easy for the elite to circumvent the rule of law, even in democracy.

An example would be the Napoleonic code. Even after Napoleon Bonaparte declared himself Emperor of France, he established the Napoleonic code which declared that the same laws that applied to the commons also applied to bourgeoisie and even the emperor, himself.

Of course, the same thing that happens here in the states happened in post-revolutionary France, that those with means could muster a defense where those without could not, so the law could be circumvented with money and resources (and sometimes the power of force).

So it’s a mess.

The rule of law – that the law is applied equally to everyone, – is an ideal that societies strive for, typically only with limited success. The challenges include yoking in those with ostentatious means who are able to escape justice or hire strong defenders, and elevating the destitute and the contemptible^† so that they can get true due process. In the US, since convictions advance careers (contrast, fair adjudications), prosecutors and judges tend to favor false convictions over ruling out innocent suspects brought to trial, which has created the plea-bargain epidemic throughout the US today.

† Suspects of heinous crimes often end up the subject of abuse, or of illegal search. The only way we enforce the protections provided by the fourth and fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States (Wikipedia: Fourth; Fifth ) is by penalizing the state by allowing mistreated suspects to go free. And it’s particularly odious when we know that the walking perp is guilty of baking children into pies. (We’ve also seen potential misuse of this when the justice system doesn’t really want to convict someone, say a favored entertainer who is guilty of sexual misconduct. Ooops. )

As a result, police techniques that would constitute an illegal search become legal by precedent for having been used to bring in the most contemptible criminals and are then applied to people guilty of possession of controlled substances, and we end up with SWAT raids on black-community barbershops for their haircut licenses being out of order. We also get people convicted for eating jelly donuts because the $2 field drug test that reacts to cocaine also reacts to glazed sugar.

So rule of law is not only difficult to attain and preserve, but it very quickly deteriorates.

So, in the 1970s, climatologists just said +2.0℃ is going to kill us. The reason the Paris Accord chose +1.5℃ is because everything above +1.5℃ is expected to get pretty exciting and it’s difficult for labs to R&D or to include mitigation projects in the budget when your coasts are being hammered with hurricanes yearly, and your mountains are burning all the time.

Nowadays when we ask climatologists what happens if we let the global mean temperature go above +2.0℃, they like to say it won’t be good or even it’s going to suck but few actually talk about what will actually happen, and I think this is partly because no climatologist really wants to be discredited as alarmist because what they’d say is pretty extreme.

So here’s the gist, because I wanted some solid dick from an Iron Man:

We’re running out of water. An example would be in southern California, where acres of choice land are owned by the Saudi family and are used to grow alfalfa using water pumped up from the water table. All this alfalfa is then shipped to their cattle ranches and fed to cows. Alfalfa is incredibly water dependent, and the water table in question is getting low, which is a concern locally, but since the Saudis control water rights there, there’s not a thing they can do about it. Eventually all the water will be extracted and all those farms will either depend on some other source (like the Colorado River) or will go dry and stop growing things.

This is a problem all over the world. We’ve been pulling up bunches of water, or using the various rivers which have been getting progressively lower (and letting all the ecosystems dry up) and there will be a point where it will all run out.

And at that point, when there’s not enough water to grow stuff, we’re not going to have enough food for everyone. Famine will follow. Those who don’t want to die from famine who have guns will try to take from other people who might or might not have guns, and war will follow.

In our best case scenarios (Imagine if everyone in the world took action today ) we’ll have enough food for about a billion people. Contrast eight billion who are alive today.

But we’re not doing anything. We watching the water get pumped, we’re still growing alfalfa and feeding cows. We’re still burning fossil fuels and coal and polluting the sky faster than ever. So it’s not going to settle at a sustainable population of one billion, it’s going to settle at much much less. So instead of one out of eight of us dying, it’s going to be one out of eighty, or eight hundred. We don’t know because we don’t know at what point we turn around and take it seriously, and if that’s in time.

Big picture time: Homo-Erectus as a species lasted two million years (roughly) or eight times the 250K we homo-sapiens survived. However, there was at least one period in which the total H-Erectus population was less than ten thousand, and they survived under stark conditions until the conditions improved enough to multiply again. Eventually H-Erectus would be out-competed by its smarter, more social cousins. We, too, may survive by a dwindling, lingering number if we don’t completely wipe ourselves out. Since we’re navigating not just the climate great filter, but also the plastic great filter, we might be screwed already. But we don’t know.

At any rate, all the culture that exists today is at risk. From Beethoven’s symphonies to the Words of Lao Tzu to the Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems, all our culture is in jeopardy. It’s likely that the next chance we get to try our hand at global civilization will have little to nothing to do with what exists today, for better or worse.

[LONG RAMBLE]

TLDR: Atheism wasn’t really regarded as a threat (other than the thing that USSR enforced) until the aughts and the New Atheism movement, at which point right-wing religious ministries turned from hating on other ministries to hating on atheists and secularists.

Atheism has some fascinating recent history. In the 1970s and 1980s atheists were disregarded almost entirely since it was an asserted position mostly by hard-line scientists and philosophers. Most of the none population instead went to (or at least associated with) left-wing churches. My parents (my Dad who is a rocket scientist and was atheist except in name) joined my mom and I at the Church of Religious Science (later the Science of Mind Church) which is pretty darned lax and easy to accept as religions go.

And the religious right (then, the Southern Baptist Church and the rising Evangelical movement) hated us and declared us false. They also did this to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (still regarded as a dangerous cult) and the Roman Catholic Church. John F. Kennedy got a lot of flack for being Catholic, and Republicans insisted he’d be beholden to the Holy See – and they tried to pressure him! – but he demonstrated he could serve the US as president and keep the Vatican at arm’s reach. Romney was still getting crap for his Mormonism in his 2012 presidential run, but it blended seamlessly into all sorts of other biographical anomalies that suggested character problems.

I should add there was a pro-religion sentiment in the US that was really anti-USSR. Marx recognized religion as the opiate of the people a symptom that the masses were suffering from precarity or scarcity, but Marx was saying the response of the community should be to feed them and keep them free of want, and as the dispair fades the need for religious practice will fade as well. (We’re not sure if he’s completely right.) So Lenin and Stalin’s response was to ban religion, which didn’t actually address the issue, but it gave the US justification to push church-going in the mid 20th century as a thing that pinko commies didn’t do.

Anyway, atheism became significant movement thing due to two factors. One was the new atheist movement which orbited Richard Dawkins and the top atheist guns. Dawkins motivation (as he tells it) was the 9/11 attacks, which showcased the power of religion as a force multiplier in violent conflict. But there was also a certain privilege that religious movements and religious institutions were given that secular ones were not, which was a favored topic of Douglas Adams. And so bringing atheist and secular organizations to equal status as churches was a big early goal of the new atheist movement.

The other factor bringing the rise of popular atheism was the rise of the internet which allowed us all to actually talk about things and confront that a lot of us already had awkward relationships with our respective religious institutions. Myself, this was a period for me to naturalism, ruling out supernatural elements until one comes and bites me on the butt. (This is the dream for IRL ghost hunters, to have a poltergeist beat them with their own duffel. Pain is temporary but evidence lives forever on the internet!)

That said the aughts marked the spread of atheism (and the consequential collapse of left-wing church attendance. Right wing church attendance has been falling less quickly but noticeably, and ministries continue to be in panic about it. And this was when anti-atheist pro-Christian and pro-Muslim movements (who absolutely don’t ally) started organizing to scare everyone how terrible we godless folk are, as if our interest in intellectual exercise and not the hypocrisy endemic to right-wing Christian ministries is what is driving parishioners from their pews.

[/LONG RAMBLE]

TIL game cheats is a category of deplorable that belongs with pirates sofware and warez.

I remember looking on line to unlock game cheats for Saints Row IV specifically to turn off the downstage pixellation effect and found that this was the most common SR4 cheat in use.

One of the things I find myself reminding others about LGBT+ folk, is that we aren’t intrinsically good, just normal. It took into the late 2010s before trans folk got to eat at the same table as LGB; gays can be prejudice and bigoted too, with people like Peter Theil being current extreme examples. (Granted, being LGBT+ gives folks more experience and perspective on what it is to be regarded as a second-class member of society, so they tend to have empathy, but this isn’t always the rule, and as the gold-star lesbian movement has shown us, they can form their own classifications of prejudice.)

There are far right furry factions just as there are blacks and other non-whites in the transnational white power movement that is a superset of the White Christian Nationalist Movement. They exist, though they don’t represent furries, even if they are eager for leopards to eat their own faces.

Humans are odd, and to me at the moment, looking at the 2024 US election results, indecipherable, and I hope that doesn’t mean they’re just extremely manipulable and short-sighted or vindictive (which is as it appears). But people often exert their political power against their own interests, and that will sometimes include furries.

Um, a mental illness is defined by being dysfunctional to the patient (and doing things that are odd enough that society throws rocks at them doesn’t count). So if the patient is spending her rent money on furry comics, or is consuming furry media to the neglect of food and sleep, you might have an argument that it’s a mental illness. (And then, in the 2010s, the psychiatric community has been having to consider that exposure to toxic circumstances: overmonitoring at work environments, bad bosses, not earning a living wage, excess rent, may be factors that drive dysfunction externally, figuring more largely in mental illness than internal factors like heredity. But that is bleeding edge still.)

But just a fanatic obsession of cute furry anthros, even if it is extreme, is not a mental illness, in exactly the same way that a man who is sexually and romantically attracted to other men is not a mental illness. Or if we want to get Victorian about it, exactly the same way a woman who refuses to accept her limited place in society is not a mental illness.

So I can assure you from here, the way mental illnesses have been defined since the 1990s, being a furry is not a mental illness.

Mental illness is normal in 2024, especially in the United States, which continues to go though a mental illness epidemic. The mental health sector of the world is looking at the results of the 2024 general election and noting the corellation not just of social and family dysfunction but intergenerational mental illness handed down through abuse and isolation, as a possible factor in the election results elevating a known threat to US democratic features to President of the United States.

While there may be correlation between mental illness and furry identity (I haven’t seen any data based assertion this is true) that still would not indicate causality. Interest in TTRPGs correlates since gaming can serve to aleviate symptoms, distract from trauma, and give people with social deficiencies a mechanism by which to express themselves safely.

Besides, there is a notable similarity when calling furry identity a mental illness is juxtaposed to the classic assumtion that LGBT+ identities were indicative of mental illness.

That said, some of us are actually diagnosed and contend with symptoms like suicidality and interpersonal dysfunction, so please don’t use mental illness as a subject of derision or contempt. We aren’t 1980s era slasher antagonists.

What? The reference is pre-Disney.

I’m the one who thinks the scream-extractor is a good symbol for capitalism. Also Buy N Large.

And besides which, do you have a problem with adults who are big into Disney?

Why? If someone’s identity as a furry is as much a part of them as your identity as gay, or for that matter, Marcus’ identity as black, isn’t it similar enough a violation that society deems you can’t be that and be a full equal?

This, to me, is the problem. Mystique shouldn’t have to hide her mutant status even though she could.

So in recent weeks I’ve learned that furries are a lot more shunned than I thought, and it’s one of those things like Bronies where it’s not the subject of their obsession but the enthusiasm they have for the subject of their fandom.

I grew up with Disney and Warner Brothers classics, read the Albedo comic anthology and a few others, but don’t see myself as a furry enthusiast (contrast my enthusiasm for late 20th century are we the real monsters? science fiction). Furry porn and furry-themed sex fantasies aren’t particularly my scene, but this is true for the majority of furries as well.

But our society has gotten weird about furries and anthros, which I guess became evident when the US right-wing started spreading the litter-boxes in schools canard. Curiously, in the porn media community, animal genital shapes are a controversy, and mainstream media platforms that sell furry porn will not allow for anthros with canine or equine genitals. I think VISA specifically will not allow transactions for such works, which is stunning interventionism both in its overreach and specificity.

And then some social media sites have special rules for furry content, that even SFW furry content can only appear inside furry-inclusive perimeters… unless it’s classical like Warner or Hanna Barbara. Wikipedia refuses to acknowledge Freefall (1998-present) one of the long-running fairly-hard-science-fiction webcomics (that gets into space-travel culture and robot culture), specifically because it has an anthro as a main character, more precisely, a genetically engineered wolf, next to a robot and a non-human trader.

It’s not that furries are weird. It’s that society is weird about furries.

I had an idea that the paws salute should become the official salute of the new resistance (since furries have been marked as a target for fascist enemy within rhetoric), but then trying to do some basic web searches, I couldn’t find a proper conventional name for the pose, nor easy-to-find art of it, even though I’ve seen the gesture made by catgirls often enough to know it’s a thing, and one of the salutes I might consider when standing before the firing squad.

In the last few years, I went from being resignedly a man to being enby, having become disgusted with how dudes obsessed with manhood have conducted themselves in our society. Before, I didn’t care that much, and my own notions of what it was to be a man turned into adulting in the 2010s (take care of business; make sure rent and utilities are paid; don’t do violence, especially when nuclear weapons are involved). Now men look like Matt Walsh and Donald Trump.

I’m not a furry or otherkin (yet), but considering how the furry community is among the untermenschen, I’m half-inclined to develop a fursona for sake of solidarity.

And I still think the paws salute should be the sign of the resistance.

All countries need official moës as well. If not, moës will be made for them.

It absolutely is, but my take on that is we’re just bad at doing community-based government and need more practice.

I also noted this was a problem with the Rebel Alliance (who just supports a republic of oligarchs), and was called a centrist for my efforts.

It’s something that really bothers me about communism and socialism being derisive in the US, even in 2024, about 35 years after USSR fell.

The alternative to community-centric society is autocracy, typically devolving into monarchism.

Death to monarchists!

That is the way that the police work in the United States yes.

We’re not talking about the police, we’re talking about the Secret Service protecting the President-Elect of the United States… at a golf park Not only that, but a park where people have to be super rich since access to Trump (leader of the GOP and now President-elect) is figured into the membership fee.

And while the police are happy to gun down the rest of us shlubs, they treat rich people like they treated OJ Simpson after he hacked up Nicole Brown. When they don’t and they actually shoot a rich person, then high-powered (blue-haired) lawyers come and sue the precinct and county for enough money to collapse the GDP.

But I do hear you. Police in the US are bastards to the last.

Some basic information about teen sex in the United States:

All 50 states have Romeo & Juliette laws allowing exceptions for statutory sexual assault crimes when sexual activity is between peers of similar age. The typical threshold is 5 years.

However, the floor of R&J statutes is typically 14 or 15. So a 13 year-old having sex is conspicuous. But also, teenage dating and boyfriend / girlfriend relationships often do not feature or even imply a sexual relationship. (When I was fourteen, I and a 10 year old family-friend decided we were bf/gf, even bathing together and having sleepovers, though doing nothing more risqué than Parcheesi.)

As a note, R&J laws often omit allowing for same sex intimacy. So if you’re a teen exploring your LGBT+ side and want to keep it legal, check your state and county ordinances to see what is allowed.