True. I didn’t have that drive, but my wife did. I’m very happy I have children, but I didn’t feel compelled.

Some of my women friends have shared that they definitely felt a need/pang/drive to have kids. Not all of them listened based on the other things they decided to do with their lives or their bodies’ ability, but it doesn’t mean the feeling isn’t there. I wouldn’t conclude from my anecdotal information that that drive extends to all women, but I would guess that many women feel it given how prevalent the discussion is.

The choice of whether to have kids at all is important, but doesn’t rule out the presence of some evolutionary biological drive. Although, it’s possible it’s not some genetic instinct and is instead some cultural thing that becomes more powerful during certain hormonal shifts that occur across a woman’s life cycle. I’ve never studied such things, but I’m open to different possibilities.

My kids often don’t listen, struggle with lying, have no regard for consent of others or personal property, and a host of other issues. Expressing love is not one of them. My kids (still young) show me they love me (and my wife) nearly continuously. The rest they’re learning.

My neighbor’s cat is mostly deaf. Because of this, he is so loud when he meows. When he’s outside, we occasionally hear him meowing. He’s seeing who will come and entertain him. The first time I heard it, I went to make sure he was okay. He was just chilling. He didn’t want me to pet him, but he also didn’t want me to leave.

I agree that some connections may be made, but also that sometimes we expect there to be something later, and there isn’t. So, that goes both ways.

I think those connections get made with multiple readings. No one is memorizing 400 pages and match small details to later events on a first read.

I’m replying regardless of what I do or don’t believe just to engage with the premise.

If Jesus is the son of God and Heaven exists, he might do it to help us. He went through it once to help us. This time at least he’d know what he was getting himself into. If we are using the Buddy Christ universe from Dogma, the first time he only learned of what was to happen shortly before it did and those years were a struggle for him and went undocumented. Now he would have 2000 years to prepare for it. Regardless, if your torture and murder could makes lives better and save the souls of millions or billions, you might consider it. We’re told he did once. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

I was young, white, and male with a good support system. So, my life was close to best case scenario. I was too young to vote in 2000, but I voted against him in 2004. I was naive to the importance of elections outside of the general election. I’m not sure why my parents didn’t educate us more on that. My kids are more than a decade from voting and we are already discussing how we look up information to inform our votes. We vote in every election and we get the kids excited about it (they love the voted stickers!).

That was the Bush era as an American (mostly just the white men, I would imagine), perhaps, but in some other places around the world probably felt pretty dystopian because of the Bush administration. Beyond the usual complaints, there was the Global Gag rule (don’t say abortion or even think about saying it!) and the stop-loss policy (sure, let’s extend your military service requirement to 100 years!). Those things, among many others probably felt pretty dystopian during the Bush era.

ⁿ ⬅️I can’t any shorter than this.

Edit: Someone already made my joke.

Well, it’s one of their problems. It’s a problem that sometimes works to our advantage given one of their other problems–being evil (i.e., a lack of empathy, selfish-ness, and inflated sense of self).

Because the cat knew that is where the human would want to sit, and cats continuously try to be wherever is least convenient for their human to show that they are thinking about them.

There is/was a plugin for CCC on chrome to do that, too.

How does that compare with camelcamelcamel? I used to hear about CCC a lot and now I never do, which makes me think bad things were found out about it.

They can sting, but they (anecdotally) sting less readily than some other species of wasps. I’ve been around them all my life and never have been stung. But, I’ve never intentionally messed with them. On the other hand, I’ve been stung by a couple other species that were far less patient with my presence in their general area.

If I am understanding the chart here correctly, bees are not a type of wasp. Bees, wasps, ants, and sawflies are all Hymenopterans, but distinct from each other.

That was all for show.

No, they let them fall to their doom.

How is parasitism any worse than straight up eating something else? Also, house cats kill for fun. Should they go extinct?