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I am confused. Why are we retroactively changing the main charters name for a second time?
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...because I needed to move the section anyway, since it has to lead into Meadowsweet's actual pregnancy thing, which didn't happen until after Rachel had his way with her? So I might as well pick a good name for her instead of Megan? I'm only retroactively changing it once, anyway. The second change is part of the story.
Honestly, I don’t get where this is coming from. How did she not figure out where this came from? Forgot she had another name like Aaron? It’s in recent enough memory, and had been used frequently enough (after rescue) to correctly commit to memory. They slipped up and used it intermittently.
Browsing past the smut, how has she not guessed stallions to be more common than the initial convention would make it seem? That abroad, they aren’t nearly as scarce as the hotel they were in would deceive? She has often made not so passing remarks about them all being scarce, and damn near crisis territory, even though thee told me they are quite common, contrary to that particular setting. She’s stated nearly all of them are worn out just from the alleged scarcity, and comparative saturation they must face. Is she truly this oblivious her mind is this prone to generalization and subsequent exaggeration? Sure it would carry its own inherent problems, but it would seem she’s likely overlooking very large groups of people.
And I’m guessing ponies have no susceptibility to disease whatever, so they may do whatever reckless things they want without fear of any contagious consequences.
In spite of this, TS has left everypony outside of that con hanging on a slim thread, which is cruel. Little control of motor functions without expectation of this nor a guide, crippling worldwide utilities, thus access to water and food, amongst other things, and overall causing a sudden shock to the entire populace that’ll have its own fallout. I don’t give a damn what reason there’d be for it, that’s plain evil.
And once again, her dislike, nay, detest for men shows itself in the end result. No doubt their near total eradication was intentional. It’s nice to remove physical ailments as a side effect, but that doesn’t remove psychological illness. In fact, it may make many if not most people mad. Even more so when high percentages of adults are given prepubescent bodies, and androgen is highly selected against. Maybe not as much as Meadowsweet thinks, but surely enough for there to be some significant issues. If this is not reversed, or worse, is irreversible anyway, it will result in some serious regression unless Equestrians step in and lend a hoof, more than this measly group of fanboys can offer, who are barely back on their “toes” themselves. Mass communal lifestyles to be optimistic. To be realistic, the exact kind of scenario seen in PAP or FF or Quarantine. Regression to primitive tribal or even medieval living.
Of course, this is labeled as comedy. It’s clearly not intended to be especially immersive, and thee said so. Maybe I shouldn’t think this through so thoroughly.
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To her credit, it has been a few months since anyone reminded her what her old name was. She got captured, then rescued then lived at the barn. The last time she had to remember she used to be called another name was when first meeting Twilight Sparkle at the barn, and even then just only for a moment.
But mostly Meadowsweet is just a total ditz.
Because they're... not? I mean I haven't gotten to describing the town's sex ratio yet, but I suppose she'd want to go take a random sampling at some point, so I could add that in.
Anyway none of her three boyfriends are from the town.
Well... she's not a stallion, so she doesn't really know how the stallions are doing. It's just what she thinks is happening. Do any of the guys she directly interacts with seem worn out from all the mares flocking to their hooves? I mean Nick did, for a while, but there was a reason for that besides just getting worn out from having too much sex.
Indeed, it's certainly unfair of her to turn the entire world into ponies just for the heck of it. One would think this mare might possibly be in a certain sense "an evil villain."
Heh, good thing Ainsworth doesn't have a mental hospital.
Or if they do have a mental ward, I'm just pretending that they don't.
Oh, I'm sure people are very angry about it! Perhaps even peeved! Oh wait, you meant mad mad.
Ugh, I really need to advance this plot... I swear the next 4 chapters are totally necessary for character development, and not smutty filler whatsoever!
Oh go ahead and think it through so thoroughly. You do come up with some interesting ideas, and comedy is no excuse for me to rely on lazy plot devices to make everything work if avoidable. Honestly I'd mark this story as both Comedy and Tragedy if I could, because like most of my work, I feel the best story is a balance of both of those elements. I do lean on Comedy a little heavily though, it's true. I guess I'm just not confident enough in my own ability to put forth a world that people could take seriously.
I lose track of my own plots, get characters mixed up, write things out of order on accident, and forget what's going on in each of the chapters of my own story. I can't come close to an author like Starscribe, who's got a brilliant mind capable of practically writing a history novel, and nobody'll even think about poking holes in it because there aren't any, yet still writing about magical cartoon ponies. My mind's just kind of flaky and faulty, and I feel so hopeless all the time that I'm rarely even coherent enough to try to get better. My stories really are all I've got going for me, and that's not very much going for me at all.
So, forgive me if I don't take myself or my stories too seriously. It hurts less when you can laugh at your failures, and to be honest, I could really use some less hurting.
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I should mention our numbers in reality have exploded above and beyond the exponential curve. It would have happened much sooner, and with more stress on resources had we had this kind of sex ratio in reality. Our habits in screwing would not likely change, and pregnancy would be even more common what with their being far more wombs than we need walking around. More simultaneous births than the world can handle, and we’d hit the critical point much faster that way. Male births are favored for a reason. There’s more people than there absolutely needs to be, and all of them need to eat. Perhaps that’s why there are as many men as there are. Nature selected for an even balance, or there’d be a severe imbalance from the explosive growth until eventual equilibrium. Unless of course we are like ants, bees and termites: A colony where most of us are sterile scouts that exist for no purpose than to gather and stock up on food and building supplies.
Besides, incest is inevitable. We’re all related in reality. The thing is, incest between siblings and first cousins tends to produce more birth defects and so on than between distant cousins, which most of us are to one another. You don’t need to look out for that very much now. In a world where there’s only one male for eleven females, you’d have to be more aware of this, unless ponies defy all laws of biology, and aren’t susceptible to viruses or birth defects. It’d be naive to deny there’d be an increase in that probability, even if slight.
You said it wasn’t that big of a gap in our private conversations, it only seems such. But here, you are implying it is indeed more extreme a difference than in your other fics. Which is it? Is it reasonable or unreasonable? You say stallions aren’t so rare in private mail, but Meadowsweet frequently gets on a soapbox how there’s a severe crisis in stallion shortage. Are they rare or aren’t they? You pretty quickly dispelled that myth in the other tale. Yet you seem to perpetuate it here.
Also, for a biology lesson, sex is only necessary for eukaryotes. Outside of animal and plant lifeforms, male/female reproduction is not a thing. In fact, meiosis (splitting in two, four, eight, onward, then growing, then repeating the process) is actually how most things go about it, and have since before the first animal or plant existed, and will continue to do in our absence. It is they that really dominate the world. Our reign is an illusion.
If they are indeed truly scarce, I’d say that was blatant misandry. Maybe ponies can learn to be like bacteria and protists, and rely on meiosis. It seems to work just fine with them. If they can eat hay and meat without ill effect, show no sign of disease bearing, and all be able bodied if uncoordinated by recent novelty, no time to adjust, they can break more rules. They can all be invulnerable and ageless, thus not need to reproduce. They can be literal machines made from tissue. Or you could ignore my entire ramble if I made no sense with this comment. I just think there’s a good reason most things aren’t eukaryotes. And a good reason nature selected to limit the number of offspring we can have. Too many wombs would allow faster population explosion, plus increased incest risk.
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I think it would be a very complicated situation, with no clear outcome I can make from speculation. But I do know that as women get access to things like birth control, and raping and imprisoning them is stopped, the birth rate pretty much immediately levels off, and may even be at risk of declining. Though much of that might be because the first world is so hostile to friendship, corporations isolating people in their life-cubicles, which reduces the opportunity for sex. But I can definitely tell you that not every woman gives birth, then immediately concludes that she wants to do that again.
So a gender ratio skewed towards females would give females more power on the lowest levels, just from strength in numbers. And the lowest levels of society are where the vast majority of population growth happens. So I don't think it would particularly hurt our chances of staving off overpopulation, if most of us turned into girls. It would make our population more robust, and able to quickly recover from underpopulation, but in the absence of artificial population inflaters like warlords, commercial marketing and religions, I think humans self-regulate their population pretty well, whether we all are potential child bearers or not.
...Ah, huh, a surprise non-integer number of chapters! Well. I guess I'll be commenting on these here? Said comments might be a little sparser on these due to time constraints, but we'll see what I come up with!
(I'm also planning to put any comments on the new part of 18 in the same comment post here, partly to keep these together and partly because I'm not entirely sure that the newest version is newer than the most recent version I read (though I think it is).)
(Oh, and, uh... if you didn't notice, you still have the off-by-one error on your website for this story, at least linking from the automated log (the News page appears to link properly). The link from the log, uh, hm, usually those have been 404s when I've hit them, I think, but this leads to a page starting (I'm not scrolling down at the moment for fear of spoilers and/or unfinished work I shouldn't be reading now) with what I think is a scene that I read before when it was in a different chapter.)
(...But I'm planning to do the reading on FIMFiction this time anyway, so... well, it wouldn't have been a reading-stopping problem for me anyway... okay, not sure where I'm going with this, on to reading!)
...And right away I change plans, because I think I'll read the 18 bit on your website since the 19 opening note on your website links to the start of the changed version. I guess I could go there, then search down to that spot in FIMFiction 18, but eh; the chapters should be the same, yes? Though I do notice that the 19 opening note seems to be different between FIMFiction and your website; is that just because of the differing linking abilities, so you went into more detail in the FIMFiction note?
Anyway, (part of) 18!
"“L-like mine, right...” I reply, trying not to wince in front of her joy."
I was going to comment on this, but then Meadowsweet beat me to it. :)
"because there’s no way any parents would ever name a boy Meadowsweet"
...That I don't know about, though. Honestly, I'd guess that there are stranger names parents have given out there.
"Meadowsweet just fits me so perfectly, it might as well have been the name I was born with."
Now, this is an interesting line, on several levels. The first thing I noticed was that, depending on what one considers "birth", it might indeed be the name she was born (into her current life/form) with. But then I realized: this demonstrates the assumption that names given at birth will fit adults... which, for humans, is certainly possible (particularly considering that one might consciously try to fit a cultural perception for the name), but is far from a given. For ponies, however, unless we're using ponies who change names to suit their talents... well. And she doesn't even notice.
...Yikes, I'm only three paragraphs in. And the above are only the comments I wrote, not all the ones I thought about. Er, yeah, going to try and clamp down a bit harder on comments, sorry, given I do have other things to do tonight. :D
"We spend a lot of time in that corn field. ♥"
Yes, very good job staying on task there; surely you'll have a name in no time, with being so good at not getting distracted. :D
"I can definitely see Sue fucking her, if she can hold up his weight at least."
...I'm not sure if that bit at the end is sober consideration, or Meadowsweet, probably subconsciously if she is doing it, running an internal competition. Probably not much competition, since she seems pretty well-disposed towards Lucy, but I'm not sure there's none.
"And not call out every little thing I’m doing like some kinda anime."
I wonder, is there a basket weaving anime out there?
[does a bit of research]
Eh, I'm only finding an April Fools joke.
...Aaaand also getting distracted again...
(This bit I've read before, I think, though there may be changes later on, and I think the previous bit was new to me. ...Well, not that I never get distracted reading new-to-me stories either.)
"but she cuts me off, saying,
“No, wait wait!” she shouts in excitement"
The speech is double tagged. Maybe replace the ", saying," with a period? Though that loses some of the connection, and maybe some of the flow. Well, up to you.
"Still, I can work twice as fast like this. Thanks!"
She's gone from four to sixteen; wouldn't it be four times as fast?
(Though I seem to recall her topping out at eight in the previous version I read, which may be where this came from.)
"she’s open and inquisitive about it, in ways that Twilight Sparkle never was."
Well, I think that that's a bit of an assumption. I mean, she wasn't open about it with you, sure, but even if we take that as a boolean AND feeding "in ways that..." (such that it would still be false if she was being inquisitive but not open around you), you don't know that she hasn't been open && inquisitive when she wasn't around you. I mean, she was presumably a foal once (though for all we know, she was decanted as a full adult, just one of an army of millions of vat-grown Twilight Sparkle clones).
"Tomatoes laden with budding green fruits."
"Tomato plants laden with budding green fruits."?
Though this may be just part of Meadowsweet's narration.
And finished with that chapter! On to the current one, on FIMFiction!
(Though, in both versions:)
"There was some major changes to chapter 18"
"There were some major changes to chapter 18"?
"It’s just that the more I get to know a stallion, the more it feels... safer when I’ve got his penis inside me."
Hm. Safer? Interesting choice of word...
"I mean, it’s wrong that a guy can just... be like this. I’m not supposed to be able to do whatever I want with a girl’s body, even if it’s my own body."
...Oooookay... I mean, I can think of a variety of things that could be behind that, including just varying definitions of "whatever I want", but I suspect Meadowsweet hasn't really examined this...
"I’m not really a girl, and I shouldn’t lift my tail for every stallion who so much as smiles at me! Girls don’t do that!"
Ah, I see. So you're not a girl, and therefore you shouldn't do a thing that girls don't do. Makes perfect sense!
(I think that Meadowseet's thoughts may be a bit confused at the moment.)
"bluehead"
:)
"and I could care less for niceties"
"and I couldn't care less for niceties"?
"Sweat trickles down my side as we"
"Sweat trickles down my sides as we"?
"Oh god I’ve been cheating on Twilight this whole time!"
...Okay, now I think you're carrying this line of thought a little too far.
"“No, no it’s just...” Pee. “Complicated."
I assume she was thinking of the urine thing with Sue there, not actually urinating? It seems pretty clear, but was not entirely to me. Still, seems like a safe assumption, and probably one I'd just passively make if I wasn't commenting already.
...
Which probably means this is one of those comments I should have stifled, and it's already been about two hours since I started this reading and I'm not even halfway through the chapter yet. Oops. :D
"Then she pulls the cows head her direction again"
"Then she pulls the cow's head her direction again"?
"and not entirely failing to do so!."
"and not entirely failing to do so!"?
"The one’s horn glows, and then a bright"
"Then one’s horn glows, and then a bright"?
"It’s really just a sine wave, the energy transmitting down the rope. So by figuring out the waveform that’ll get the loop at the end to snap up into the air and go soaring around the other mare’s neck, it’s pretty straightforward."
Hmmmmmmmm. Yeah... but I'm not sure it'd be so straightforward to a non-earth-pony...
"out of the way if the cow desides to charge forward"
"out of the way if the cow decides to charge forward"?
"Life goes on, and I’m not sure if it’s Rachel, Nick, or... probably Sue."
Given the unknowns of pony biology, I don't think "and" can be completely ruled out yet, either.
"Not to say I spend that whole year moping about how my life’s basically over."
...Uh, huh, we appear to be making a rather large timeskip here.
A bit later:
Or, uh. Not? I'm confused. When are we? Are we jumping a year ahead or not, here?
If not, perhaps something like "to say I was going to spend that whole year moping"?
"Whatever it is, it’s some seriously scientifically processed space food"
Yup, definitely. I mean, it was invented around two thousand years ago at least according to Wikipedia, but that was just the Chinese wanting to get a really big head start on their space program. I mean, what did you think they invented rockets for? :)
"Michelle Ma Bell."
...Sorry, Meadowsweet, I don't get it either.
"“That’s an understatement. I thought Christmas was about the coming of Santa Claus until I was 12!”"
And then I got distracted looking up the Mexican Santa Claus movie.
(Though that is, at least, a slightly more related distraction than, say, steam-electric locomotive design.)
"I say with a one-armed shrug, since my tail’s sideways at the moment"
:)
"just I remember everyone calling me Meadowsweet, because it was just my name"
...Hm. I wonder if she has any memories featuring her name being ranked in alphabetical order? There's at least the potential for a significant difference there, but I expect that, if it would have come up at all, Twilight's magic took care of it.
"like ten months left"
Ah, okay, that's about when we are.
"“Have you thought of any good names?”"
Any concern about this phrasing being repetitive with her asking before about Holly's own name? Not sure that there's a problem, but I thought that I'd point it out for you.
"“I think they’re called foals for ponies, not calves,” Holly postulates"
...I can't tell if she's seriously speculating or deliberately punning. Or both at once. :)
"...
“N-no,” I reply nervously, “I did not.”"
Smoooth. :D
"I’d just... fluttershy out."
...Hm. I'm not sure whether her name should still be capitalized when it's turned into as a verb like this... Eh. Shouldn't be too bad either way.
"for a bedroom community"
Er. Is it? I thought it was a rural farming town. What is it a satellite of?
"So in theory some people might’ve had some hours warning."
"So in theory some people might’ve had some hours' warning."?
"And that means all the commuters"
...Huh. I guess it is.
Okay, so, Ainsworth, Nebraska, the leading candidate, from looking at some old comments (and I think it still is... or was until this?). And looking down a bit seems to suggest they were commuting by car. Might be bus, but that's still on the roads. It used to have a railroad, but while I think I may have found, on Google Maps, where it used to be, it doesn't seem to be there anyone (not just no station, but no track). There's a regional airport, but it seems like we'd have heard of more wealth here if a fair chunk of the population commuted regularly by plane. So, road vehicles. Nearest big cities look to be Omaha, Sioux City, and Rapid City. Looks like, says Google, about 4.5-5 hours to Omaha, 3.5-4 hours to Sioux City, and 4-4.5 hours to Rapid City. Which is apparently in a different timezone, but I don't think that should affect the trip duration given. So that's... a seven hour commute, at least? Good grief, even if they only have weekend homes here (and, again, seems like there should be more wealth about if this was that sort of place)... This would seem to suggest I've the wrong Ainsworth, but I think the other candidates I found were worse. Maybe it's not a satellite of a major city, but of a... factory, or something? I don't see anything that that, though, and... hm. Yeah, I don't know. Really curious about this, though. Maybe it's a sign of this being a more alternate universe than I thought?
"a dinky little out-of-the-way town like this"
...Which... does seem to conflict with it being a commuter community...
(Hm, the website of the Ainsworth Area Chamber of Commerce also mentions Grand Island, North Platte, Kearney, and Norfolk as being 2-3 hours away. So that's at least a four hour commute, but one or more of them... might be it? Looks like Union Pacific has a big facility in North Platte, and Kearney and Norfolk at least have some factories. And Grand Island has a population of nearly fifty thousand. So... maybe that's it? None of these are huge places, though... eh.)
[looks at clock]
Yeah, uh... yikes. Well, nearly done, but striking a few things off my schedule for the night there, given I was originally to be going to bed an hour ago. Aaaaand really need to focus here!
"going around and tell everyone that if they"
"going around and telling everyone that if they"?
"There’s a reservoir north of town, but it’s kind of... contaminated by the copious amounts of feces produced by the cows in the feedlot north of town."
...
Aaaaand there I go back to the maps...
...Hmmm. Inconclusive. There are enough similar features for me to not say this has to be a different town and/or an alternate universe, or something like that, but it's also not clearly in agreement with the text. Interesting.
(...Hm. Looks like they've also got some sort of canal system there and... I... really should try not to get distracted by that right now!)
I think my current leading hypothesis is "It's Ainsworth, Nebraska, but this already-known-to-be-alternate universe includes some changes to it, too". Though I'm still curious just what's going on with the commuting.
...Though. Hm. I wonder if the rail line's still active in this universe? Right, looks like that was the Fremont, Elkhorn & Missouri Valley Railroad, at least initially (and yeah, that bit of track now seems to be a rail trail, as I'd guessed from the overhead photographs). Looks like the track between Norfolk and Chadron, which Ainsworth was on, wasn't abandoned until 1992. Good! I think that the branch from Chadron to Rapid City might still be operating, even, though presumably only freight. And I think the track going between Norfolk and at least Fremont, near Omaha, wasn't dismantled until 1988. So it might actually be possible for a relatively recent and minor divergence to result in that rail line still being active and carrying passengers, which might still make the commute to and from Ainsworth somewhat long but would, I think, make it more plausible. And locomotives would still count as we-don't-know-how-to-do-this-with-hooves vehicles satisfying the wording of the text. And I don't think said text has really said anything for or against this...
[looks at clock again]
Eep.
"since nobody really knows how you would herd them as a pony"
I guess the one-pony-per-cow rope thing from ealier doesn't scale well, but maybe pegasi and bat ponies flying around?
...I don't know much about herding cows.
"Someone’s house fell down by the time we get there, just because a bunch of cows panicked next to it, and... kablam."
...Not following this. First, what does "by the time we get there" mean? Second... why would the cows knock the house down? If they panicked, wouldn't they try to go away from or around it? Is this a thing cows do, just... run into the walls of buildings?
"Certainly nothing the local police haven’t been able to handle."
You know, I think our Ainsworth, at least, might only have four police officers? If I'm reading the chamber of commerce website correctly, at least. Guess there's a good chance however many they had for humans will still work for about the same number of ponies, though.
(Hm, it just occurred to me to wonder how large that Bronycon was; did they really smuggle out a few thousand people and house them at that farm, until Twilight revealed herself and ponies started drifting away, or was this one rather small? Hm, bother, did we ever get an exact year for this story's setting? I don't think so.)
"Brown County Hospital"
Definitely evidence for it be an Ainsworth, Nebraska. Hm, and that does in fact exist on the maps and overhead pictures, so stronger evidence for it being an Ainsworth, Nebraska, but not saying much about whether it's ours.
"and holding my hooves up um... not-harmingly"
:)
"I say continuing to tug nervously on one of the bouncy"
"I say, continuing to tug nervously on one of the bouncy"?
And end of the chapter! Seen that one before, actually, but apparently this is where it got to. :)
Oh, right, and do I have a reply to the related news post...
Yeah, I think trying to cut down the sex scenes is a good idea, unless one comes up in which they try something really novel, or have an important conversation during it, or something. Your sex scenes aren't bad (and a certain other story, non-pony, comes to mind, which I enjoy a number of aspects of but which tends to have sex scenes make me go "Oh no, how many words is this going to eat up?", so I know I have at least one point of comparison (though, honestly, those probably aren't bad either, but they don't really interest me and in some places actively disinterest me)), but, as you say, they can get a bit repetitive for the reader. Hm. Though I'm not really sure where to draw the line between "novel and/or important enough to include details" and "can be summed up by "and then we had sex" without too much loss", so... I don't know. Well, your current balance doesn't seem really a problem, at least, even if it could potentially be improved.
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9136404
I think Ciber was referring to Meadowsweet's non-Meadowsweet name.
And regarding that, I don't think it's been retroactively changed either time; I just think Meadowsweet isn't remembering it correctly.
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"It hurts less when you can laugh at your failures, and to be honest, I could really use some less hurting."
Sorry, ferret.
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"Though much of that might be because the first world is so hostile to friendship, corporations isolating people in their life-cubicles, which reduces the opportunity for sex."
Don't forget to an extent being hostile, with varying degrees of subtlety, to having children itself. If a child is seen as an economic asset in addition to positive emotional factors and biological drives, there's a much stronger incentive to have children than if those positive emotional factors and biological drives are competing against children being seen as economic liabilities. And since most people don't have family farms or shops the children can work in, and it's illegal to send them out to work in factories or down chimneys or the like even if the parents were inclined to, while the cost of properly making a baby a "productive citizen" (which means buying these books, and this food, and all these toys, and then these expensive electronics, and then they're a teenager (so no more having to either stay home to watch them, missing out on potential earnings, or hiring someone else to do it, but:) and want designer clothing, and a car, and you want to help them pay for college, right?) has ballooned greatly...
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Refer to final paragraph of previous user.
As for me, your responses seem to be laced with blind faith in a system like this, like it would inevitably end in more good than harm, and there is little to no downsides to it. Consequently, having an even split is intrinsically bad, and leads to sure misery, more than is needed, and outside influence has nothing to do with it. The flaw in this is it is purely speculative, and cannot be proven unless you can forcefully alter the physical form of every being on Earth. There’s no hard evidence as psychology plays far more role in your idealized setting than it should. You seem so certain of it. It overlooks the biological and purely physical aspects of it, and disproportionately on sociological aspects.
What you overlook is as biological beings, and moreover as mortals, all of us are intrinsically pressured to reproduce whether we like it or not (and I think most of us do). You said in some previous comments not everybody or even most people make sound decisions. That some people need to be regulated by outside force. This contradicts that.
Besides all of that, I have said sapient life doesn’t actually need to exist. The fact is, fungi, bacteria, and protists are the real dominants of the world, and they would not miss us if we all died out, considering they were here first, and will be here should we die off. And none of them need any man to survive. Proof that sex isn’t intrinsically necessary as you tote it. Also, there are early plants like fern and moss, which act as the sole exception to the rule I mentioned.
You claim we need the power to bounce back and rapidly repopulate. Why? Just what’s so great about humanity all life needs us to continue existing? I’d say less people is better anyway. More people need to eat more, and they produce waste. Let’s say no one has been able to conceive in twenty years like in Children of Men. We are on an extinction course, but all other life is as fertile as ever. Would our eventual die off kill all else in your hypothesis? Are we that essential to all ecosystems?
Also, remember what I said about incest. When it’s like this, if you don’t watch yourself, you may end up sleeping with a sibling or first generation cousin if you don’t watch what you are doing, especially if you are born into a world like this. Where we live, there’s no bottleneck like this.
Remember what I said about previous writing? You told me stallions aren’t rare there. They were actually quite common. Why are they so rare here? You dispelled the myth about stallion scarcity in Bloom Filter, and it wasn’t even ranted about in that one, only that females are favored by genetics. Here, it is mentioned a number of times stallions are very, very rare indeed. It is made to sound like even finding one is a challenge, and all of them occupied near constantly. Sounds to me stallions don’t have much freedom themselves. Are they treated as objects even more so than women? Are they actually scarce here, and unlike Bloom Filter, or Is it like that story, and they are actually common enough to not fret over the shortage of?
9137597
(I admit to having gotten a bit confused as to what your conversation with Ferret has even been about as it has dragged out over time. Sorry if the following ends up being a non-sequitur.)
Established pony societies would probably not have an extremely lopsided sex ratio. Google "Fisher's Principle sex ratio" for a better explanation than I can give for what happens to most instances where sexually-reproducing populations are sexually out of balance. However, sex ratio as currently present in this story is created by Twilight Sparkle (and possibly her biases), not a population that has existed over time. If the population thus created is not already 1:1, it will become roughly 1:1 over the course of several generations.
As far as population control, you're completely right--it's resources, especially food. Food is a major issue in the story, so as much as every single goddamn pony in this story wants to bone until the planet is neck-deep in foals, that can't actually happen. This has nothing to do with sex ratio and everything to do with how we've actually seen Meadowsweet's first pregnancy fail due to deprivation (and probably other stresses imposed by her captivity). This lines up with how starving women don't successfully reproduce much in real life either.
So if ponies can't control themselves, the consequences will.
As far as real life history and reproduction... the information we have is pretty clear. People's reproduction is in fact constrained by how much of a resource sink living children are. And I must emphasize living, because we're not actually that far off the family sizes you'd see centuries ago. It just used to take a lot more tries to get 2.4 children past the filters of disease and other causes of in utero, infant, and other early mortality, especially in early industrial cities (which happened to be festering pits of disease). In developed societies, these filters are a lot less stringent--and after an initial population surge, things generally level off, or you'd be seeing a lot more than 2.4 children per family unit and people wouldn't be reporting continuously declining birth rates.
We haven't fundamentally changed--it hasn't been long enough since pre-industrial times for our reproductive instincts and social pressures to change that much. Generally speaking, we do want to bang, and we do want children. But we stopped having population-explosion numbers of children because the vast majority of people just don't have the resources for them, not because of humanity's rough overall 1:1 sex ratio. The same will happen for a pony population of any sex ratio.
9138225 Agreed. It’d still be best to not conceive and miscarry then to do so and make a life that won’t last for more than a month or two. Or one that would become a financial strain in a world where just holding a job of any kind whatever is a failure in making. You wouldn’t want to raise them in a place like this.
I would agree with this, yet pseudo science tends to find its way to those who wish to find it. There’s nothing wrong with fantasizing, but he honestly thinks that can and would work in reality. What worked in other tales where things were skewed was one thing, as there was clear favor for females, but males weren’t all that scarce. This is the first time it has been all but stated they are very rare indeed. Like one in a dozen as opposed to one in four. Possibly even greater.
Why she has such great misandry is anyone’s guess, and only Ferret could tell us since he has created this misandric mare.
9137545
Sure, thanks.
I'll check that later...
Should be, yes.
ye
Meadowsweet is unaware of Frank Zappa.
She’s so precious.
Well, Sue is pretty heavy to be fair, but Meadowsweet also seems to be comparing her own figure with that of a duck.
I forgot she also has to levitate the pot, which isn't similar enough to levitating straw. So she'd really only got 4 threads she can devote to straw. Now, if she had thought to set down the pot on the ground while she worked...
Well, I think this is a case where "never, ever" is significant, because "around me, in my perception, that I've been able to observe" is usually implied. Like "I waited there for ten minutes, waiting for the meteors to streak across the sky, but they never did." You wouldn't chastize that person, saying, "You're seriously denying that there's been any meteors falling in the history of the entire planet?" because obviously they're not.
So if Meadowsweet really wanted to claim Twilight Sparkle had never, ever been inquisitive, even when she wasn't around Meadowsweet, even as a young foal, she'd have to say "like Twilight never, ever did," as opposed to "like Twilight never did." Or maybe even "had never, ever done" which adds a more "I assume her distant past"y connotation, or "had never, ever done in her whole life even as a young foal I bet" you get the picture?
I hate English...
Meadowsweet is a very... unique individual. ♥
I could care less about English...
Meadowsweet is a very... unique individual. ♥
Oh no, I need to immediately add a paragraph of detailed explanation, thus totally ruining the image of a sudden panicked thought barely flashing into her head before getting buried back under a mountain of euphemistic denial!
A the they fukd
Pff, it’s just multiple systems of infinite sums of transcendental functions. It’s practically basic Algebra!
“Congratulations! You have twins! Oops, I mean triplets! Woah, you’re still going?”
“DAMMIT TWILIGHT”
Is she giving birth, or not?
I thought it was obvious. She was just talking about the year it would take to bear a foal. She doesn’t have to wait the entire year before she stops moping about it. Sure if she said, “I spend the entire year moping,” it would imply a timeskip, but she said that she didn’t say that! That’s what “not to say” means!
When you think about it, how the heck did we get the crazy futuristic technology to turn our wheat into caramelized grain foam? Ancient aliens is the only explanation!
Congratulations, you don’t have a terrible sense of humor!
I can’t imagine she doesn’t. “Aaron” is pretty much the first name said whenever anyone does that.
Besides the fact that it works perfectly for both connotations?
Meadowsweet is a very... unique individual. ♥
...farms? I thought a bedroom community was a place where there wasn’t any community, because people left every day to go to work all day. I mean, typically that work is in a big city, but there’s 1000 people living in Answorth somehow! I thought they’d just be commuting out to whatever giant factory farm they were working at, or the feedlot if they’re lucky.
I thought about calling it a retirement community, but... the feedlot. Nobody’s gonna wanna retire there.
Well... you don’t have to commute to a big city. Just to the nearest place who’ll pay you the money the government requires. Maybe a few hundred people would get to work in the local stores, if you’re really generous about employment there. There is a hospital, and the feedlot. But... otherwise yeah I think people are gonna have to go down highway 20 to get work.
Quite honestly, Ainsworth is about as close to the middle of nowhere as it’s possible to get in the continental USA so anyone who lives there’s gonna have to commute pretty far to get... anywhere.
Well, ideally I’d like not to be forced to set my story in Townsville, Somestate just to keep people from protesting that my story’s not realistic enough. If you can recommend a more fitting location, I’ll happily upset literally everyone by rewriting my story to work with it.
Yeah, because I totally am building an alternate universe with a deliberate rewriting of history to enable rail lines to continue functioning. Clearly I could easily use an existing municipality, but I choose not to deliberately, for I have a mysterious purpose to this which will all come clear when the ancient aliens arrive.
Well um... they’ll avoid you if you move closer to them, so do that until they jostle the rest of the herd into going wherever you want them to go. Of course it only works if you are bigger than a cow, but a human on horseback meets that requirement. To a small degree they’ll follow the direction of a leading human on horseback, provided the herd’s already headed that way. There’s not much to it far as I can tell, so doing it right is more of an art than a science. You have to be able to arouse them enough to avoid you, but move slow enough that they don’t try to defend themselves, or get spooked into stampeding.
It is possible to do it if you’re roughly the size of a border collie. After you position yourself in the direction they’re supposed to go, you get their attention by trying to bite their nose, and when they leap in the air to stomp you to death you somehow get behind them, so they can just run away from you. That’s a little bit trickier than being a human on horseback though, and almost never done AFAIK. Collies are better at herding smaller animals like sheep or goats.
For a thousand people? Seems about right. People are pretty peaceful in general.
Well, as far as they know, they were all being penned in a quarantine area, when appearing among them, Twilight helped them all escape and conveniently reach an isolated farm undetected. Then they went about rescuing all the ones who were being detained and interrogated. So, do you think that was all of the people in Bronycon?
Good, well I’ll strive to improve as much as possible.
Yeah, those pesky “No selling your child into slave labor” laws really do discourage people from having a lot of kids. And it’s true parents are such gullible morons that they believe Doctor Schlock or whoever telling them that there’s anything more to parenting than being available, not abusing them, providing food, and unsupervised playtime. It’s sad because a lot of this stuff which is supposedly good for our children is either an expensive waste of time (like dolls), or actually harmful to their development (like supervised playtime).
I think the saddest thing is corporations are basically allowed to use mind control techniques to get kids addicted to their products, with little to no regulation of that. Children who’d practically raise themselves now have to be collared and leashed to prevent them from wasting away with their eyes glued to the glowing monitor.
But on the other hand, I imagine when you’re making out in bed, after having been totally lawfully wedded by a proper Christian ceremony with both families present and approving, the thought of “How am I gonna pay for my child’s cell phone” probably doesn’t really come to mind until he’s already inseminated you. Assuming he even gives you a choice. So I don’t really think the terrible cost of designer clothing prevents people from having kids. But maybe people are more coldly rational and logical about sex than I thought.
“Oh, yes! Cum inside me—wait, wait no. I just realized this would put us over budget.”
9138245
I don't understand at all what misandry has to do with any of this. Unless you're implying that Twilight Sparkle is a misandrist and set the sex ratio where it is because of that, which... in this story I would believe. I also have an hypothesis that ponies are as sexual as they are because of this Twilight's demonstrated negative attitude towards sex (and humans), so her being misandrist fits.
9138374
Precisely. She pretty transparently detests men here.
9138296
"Sure, thanks. "
Oh, you're welcome. :)
"ye"
:D
(Thanks. :))
"Meadowsweet is unaware of Frank Zappa."
Hm, I've heard of him before, but I don't actually know much about him.
"Well, Sue is pretty heavy to be fair, but Meadowsweet also seems to be comparing her own figure with that of a duck. "
Ah, yes, good point.
"I forgot she also has to levitate the pot, which isn't similar enough to levitating straw. So she'd really only got 4 threads she can devote to straw. Now, if she had thought to set down the pot on the ground while she worked..."
Ahh, thanks.
(I wonder if she could work on two pots at once?)
"you get the picture?"
Okay, okay, yes, good point. :D
"I hate English... "
Sorry. :)
"I could care less about English... "
[glares]
"Oh no, I need to immediately add a paragraph of detailed explanation, thus totally ruining the image of a sudden panicked thought barely flashing into her head before getting buried back under a mountain of euphemistic denial! "
Good point! :D
"A the they fukd"
:D
"Pff, it’s just multiple systems of infinite sums of transcendental functions. It’s practically basic Algebra!"
Oh, right, of course. :)
"“Congratulations! You have twins! Oops, I mean triplets! Woah, you’re still going?”
“DAMMIT TWILIGHT”"
Oh, I meant heteropaternal superfecundation, not just a large number, but, hey, don't know that either, true!
...Huh, which has on rare occasions apparently happened with humans. Didn't know that (until checking now to be sure I was spelling it correctly); I thought only some other animals had it.
"She was just talking about the year it would take to bear a foal. She doesn’t have to wait the entire year before she stops moping about it. Sure if she said, “I spend the entire year moping,” it would imply a timeskip, but she said that she didn’t say that! That’s what “not to say” means!"
...Hm. You know, you're right! Neat! :D
Thanks. :)
"When you think about it, how the heck did we get the crazy futuristic technology to turn our wheat into caramelized grain foam? Ancient aliens is the only explanation!"
:D
"Congratulations, you don’t have a terrible sense of humor!"
Oh, well... good? :)
"I can’t imagine she doesn’t. “Aaron” is pretty much the first name said whenever anyone does that."
Oh, hey, and it looks like the name actually was correctly remembered that time; I just assumed she was getting it wrong again until I checked just now.
So, yeah, I wonder what happened to those memories?
"Besides the fact that it works perfectly for both connotations?"
Well, I don't think that's a problem. :)
"...farms? I thought a bedroom community was a place where there wasn’t any community, because people left every day to go to work all day. I mean, typically that work is in a big city, but there’s 1000 people living in Answorth somehow! I thought they’d just be commuting out to whatever giant factory farm they were working at, or the feedlot if they’re lucky."
Ehhh... I'm rather skeptical that counts. I mean, sure, maybe the farms technically aren't in town, but they also start right outside it. And if there was a factory ten centimeters beyond the official town limits, and that was the major employer, it'd still be a factory town rather than a commuter town, right?
"Well... you don’t have to commute to a big city. Just to the nearest place who’ll pay you the money the government requires."
Sure, but I think you and I may be having different perceptions of the boundaries of the phrase "bedroom community".
"Well, ideally I’d like not to be forced to set my story in Townsville, Somestate just to keep people from protesting that my story’s not realistic enough. If you can recommend a more fitting location, I’ll happily upset literally everyone by rewriting my story to work with it."
Well, hey, I did enjoy trying to puzzle that out. And I was learning some geography and history; it's educational! :D
"Yeah, because I totally am building an alternate universe with a deliberate rewriting of history to enable rail lines to continue functioning. Clearly I could easily use an existing municipality, but I choose not to deliberately, for I have a mysterious purpose to this which will all come clear when the ancient aliens arrive. "
Heh, sorry. :)
(I hope you don't mind me doing this sort of thing, by the way? It occurs to me it might get annoying.)
re cow herding:
Ah, thanks.
"Well, as far as they know, they were all being penned in a quarantine area, when appearing among them, Twilight helped them all escape and conveniently reach an isolated farm undetected. Then they went about rescuing all the ones who were being detained and interrogated. So, do you think that was all of the people in Bronycon?"
...
Gooood point.
Well, there's another thing to wonder about...
Hm, I wonder how the selection was made, though? And it seems fairly likely we'd have heard about it if, say someone was present at the farm but their sibling or close friend or something who'd also been at the convention was missing. Though I suppose the explanation might have been that they'd escaped and, since they and their potential seekers were both trying to stay hidden, trying to find them would be too difficult.
"Good, well I’ll strive to improve as much as possible."
Good luck.
"Yeah, those pesky “No selling your child into slave labor” laws really do discourage people from having a lot of kids."
Yeah, not all of the reasons are bad ones, but that still does cut down the birth rate.
(And, I mean, there are also good reasons like "there's only so much space on the planet", but I get the impression that relatively very few people are actually having fewer children because of that specifically.)
"And it’s true parents are such gullible morons that they believe Doctor Schlock or whoever telling them that there’s anything more to parenting than being available, not abusing them, providing food, and unsupervised playtime. It’s sad because a lot of this stuff which is supposedly good for our children is either an expensive waste of time (like dolls), or actually harmful to their development (like supervised playtime)."
Well, I would also add "teaching them things that might be too dangerous to risk them experimenting with themselves", such as firearms safety, sifting through media lies, and dealing with the financial system, but I can also see how the edges of that are blurry at it could lead into "Now, I know you want to go down that playground slide, dear, but let me put a pillow at the bottom and put this harness on you so I can lower you down slowly and safely with a rope". That's exaggerated (I hope), but you know what I mean.
"Children who’d practically raise themselves now have to be collared and leashed to prevent them from wasting away with their eyes glued to the glowing monitor."
And then, of course, the corporations try to point out how much easier to manage the children are when they're poking quietly at a screen (pay no attention to your credit card bill), and maybe it would be better to attach that leash somewhere... better lit?
"But maybe people are more coldly rational and logical about sex than I thought."
I think it's more that there are a lot of was around having to deal with it in that moment, when, yeah, not the best time. But there's avoiding an encounter in the first place, there are varieties of contraception that can be applied minutes or hours before, and there are even some, as I recall, that can be applied after. So it takes more than only in the moment not thinking about the problems.
9138225
Incidentally, I'm not sure I know much about Fisher's Principle, but it always seemed kind of unsatisfying an explanation to me. Makes more sense that animals just happened to have a 1:1 birth ratio, and evolved to work around that, making males more disposable and risk-taking, since you're gonna kill off a bunch of them anyway. Maybe there's something about multiple sex chromosomes being too wasteful compared to a pair. Maybe it's that meiosis divides chromosomes pairs into 2, so that causes a mechanical advantage for 2 sex chromosomes for some reason. But Fisher's Principle?
Really? Because every male has one female gene. So on average, the males would pass on their male gene 50% of the time, and their female gene 50% of the time, with women passing on their female gene 100% of the time. Thus, an X chromosome can expect to reproduce itself more. Therefore by the same argument as Fisher's principle, parents genetically predisposed to reproduce X chromosomes are more likely to pass on their gene to the next generation, and X-chromosome producing tendencies would spread, making male births less common.
So, it just seems like a really flaky argument to me. I don't know why like every animal has a 1:1 sex ratio, even when it results in like 40% of their offspring dying without reproducing, but I don't think the answer is as obvious as "With fewer males, they'd be more valuable, therefore ppl would have more male babies," since the worth of males doesn't appreciably increase until you get to the point that there are females unable to find a reproductive partner.
9139248
Frank Zappa named his two daughters "Moon Unit" and "Diva," and his 2 sons "Dweezil" and "Ahmet."
I always thought of bedroom communities as a consequence of the interstate highways and car culture, more than fleeing dense urban areas. I think the word you're looking for is "Suburbia." "Bedroom community" implies a community that consists mostly of nothing but bedrooms. "Suburbia" implies a community that is sub-urban, or a satellite to an urban area.
Heteropaternal superfecundation can only happen when there's multiple eggs to fertilize, and multiple offspring in a litter. If two sperm fertilize one egg, the second one just fails to work since the DNA's already diploidified.
I'm really leery of parents doing stuff like this. Parents are extremely poor judges at what's too dangerous to experiment with, and forcing someone to agree to something while denying them the ability to check if your advice is legit is pretty much the reason why every church has a daycare center for young children. You can coerce people into believing stuff that's demonstrably, even dangerously false, and parents (and churches) do that a lot.
Even outside of outright brainwashing, too many people try to protect their children, rather than prepare them. Parents are actually really bad about it, locking up their firearms, putting child safe filters on their Internet, not allowing them to walk home through bad neighborhoods, or walk home at all. I'd really think that at least in our current society, a professional educator would be the one who could best teach children about stuff like firearms and electricity. Frankly I think preschool oughta be mandatory, and should have live demonstrations of firearms and electrical malfunctions.
Yeah that'd teach those little shits.So yeah, teach your kids not to touch the hot iron if you can, or better yet let them angrily defy you, and keep a bucket of ice water ready. But it's really not a parent's responsibility to do so, as much as it's a kid's responsibility to learn, from someone, or from experimentation. So I dunno about teaching them safety, when it'd be taught better by someone who doesn't freak out at their baby getting a boo boo, but I'd certainly teach my kids how to experiment, if I could have ever had children.
I agree, when even just contraception is readily available, the amount of unplanned pregnancies goes way down. But as for avoiding the encounter in the first place, I can think of not many vile, despicable scumbags worse than the ones who promote abstinence only education. Virginity pledges are disgusting and kind of evil, and looking down on people for doing the most fun thing ever is stupid.
9139374
"Frank Zappa named his two daughters "Moon Unit" and "Diva," and his 2 sons "Dweezil" and "Ahmet.""
...
Uh, wow.
Okay, yeah, I see what you mean. :D
"I always thought of bedroom communities as a consequence of the interstate highways and car culture, more than fleeing dense urban areas. I think the word you're looking for is "Suburbia." "Bedroom community" implies a community that consists mostly of nothing but bedrooms. "Suburbia" implies a community that is sub-urban, or a satellite to an urban area."
Interesting. See, I think of suburbia as the consequence of car culture, while a bedroom community could operate without cars and all, using some other transportation system, such as rail, to shift commuters back and forth.
"Heteropaternal superfecundation can only happen when there's multiple eggs to fertilize, and multiple offspring in a litter."
...Yes?
"If two sperm fertilize one egg, the second one just fails to work since the DNA's already diploidified."
...Right. I... think... no, I'm not sure what's going on here. Are we having two different conversations?
My original joke here, to clarify, was that, for all they know about pony biology, we don't know that she isn't having a pair of half siblings at once. (Probably not three, though, given she only has the two teats, so unless pony foal litters usually fight to the death until only two or fewer remain, it seems unlikely that these ponies commonly produce more than two young at a time.)
I think you may be talking about a single foal, looking again? Which I can sort of see the reason for, since that's what she seems to be assuming she has and perhaps as the author you know that that is what she has, but she and we don't have particularly good evidence of that at this point.
"I'm really leery of parents doing stuff like this."
Aye, it's one of those difficult things.
"I'd really think that at least in our current society, a professional educator would be the one who could best teach children about stuff like firearms and electricity."
Ah, hm, yeah, if there's a replacement, the parents might not need to do it. I'm not sure which is better, though; you did specify our current society there, but in general, anyone responsible for that has opportunities to insert their own views and priorities. And as the number of children for each hazard-educator rises, the effects of an individual hazard educator going wrong somehow increase. Of course, they may also be easier to monitor, but as the ability to keep them in line grows, so does the power of whoever sets the lines... It's not a simple thing. At one end, a bunch of different groups of around five or fewer children getting pulled in all sorts of different directions and getting fed all sorts of different things, many of which are probably harmful; at the other, an efficient and effective educational system using a single system that one really hopes is good because if it isn't a few million or more children are going to be hit. Good point's probably somewhere between the two.
"So I dunno about teaching them safety, when it'd be taught better by someone who doesn't freak out at their baby getting a boo boo"
Right, there are a lot of things better learned through experimentation. It's just that there are also some things where experimentation has a fairly high chance of not going right the first time and where going wrong has the possibility to be lethal, thus cutting short any further experimentation. Even if a society wanted to take a social darwinist view and thinks that a lot of lethal mistakes should end in death, unless they're trying to select for luck, there are presumably still some things they'd want to prevent.
"But as for avoiding the encounter in the first place, I can think of not many vile, despicable scumbags worse than the ones who promote abstinence only education."
Yeah, abstinence only education is terrible. If you have concerns about disease and pregnancy and such, sure, you can point out that abstinence has benefits there, but, well, shockingly, teenagers don't always hang on every word adults say. So since it's pretty much a given that some of them will be trying sex anyway, at least tell them what else they can do to prevent disease and pregnancy and such. On the other hand, if you think sex is itself bad... say that, at least. Don't lie fake disease transmission rates or whatever, just tell the students that sex, in your view, will drain vital essence, or imperil their souls, or whatever, or just that it'll be really unpopular in their community, so that they can evaluate that. It's like wanting kids not to shoplift, but for some reason you don't want to say that you think the problem is walking out with something without paying, so instead you tell them that walking out with something without stopping by the counter will turn their socks really scratchy and their least favorite color. Then one kid gets the bright idea to not wear socks to the store and gets really surprised when he gets arrested.
...Maybe it's like that. I think that may have gotten away from me at the end there.
"and looking down on people for doing the most fun thing ever is stupid. "
...
And now I have in my head the words "Pinkie Pie teaches sex ed". :)
9139486
Thus the need for triplets, quadruplets and such.
I would much rather our children's minds be poisoned by a public educator under heavy scrutiny with complete transparency, than some random parent thinking they know what's best for a child and hiding what they're doing to their kid. If it means I don't get to force my child to love My Little Pony, it's a small price to pay for everyone else losing their privilege to train their children to be bigots, bullies and sheep.
But we are talking about safety education, not the moral instillment of core values. So even if you want parents to decide what those values are gonna be, you could still support school activities teaching kids about what's dangerous and how to avoid it.
There is no other way to learn besides experimentation. Otherwise you're just pretending you know something, when you're just obeying the people who claim they do, without verifying their claim at all. Sure you might get hurt sometimes, but there's just no way to tell fact from fiction without doing some kind of experiment, either on the fact itself, or on the person you're trusting, to verify that they're not full of shit.
It's not terrible though, because you can experiment on people, doing random checks to see whether the results of their experiments are lies or not. So you only have to find a chain of trustworthy individuals, back to the one who discovered that uranium is dangerous. That's why trust networks are so vitally important, and why our society is in the shitter because our individual trust networks have been destroyed, and we're all blindly trusting big governments and corporations because we don't have any other choice.
Religious people know that they're fulla shit, and they know that being honest won't work. They don't care if they lie to you or not, because they think you have bad judgement, and deceiving you is for your own good. If you had good judgement, you'd want to save your soul, which they've been taught is vitally important to not being eternally damned, without verifying that teaching as true or not. If I seriously thought that you'd get tortured for eternity just by killing off a few cells, but I couldn't prove it to anyone else, then I'd lie my head off to save people from that terrible fate.
Of course any time I know something is true, but can't convince anyone else of the truth, I immediately start questioning whether I'm fulla shit, and if everyone in my safe space all claims to be convinced of the truth, but I can't verify any of their claims, I immediately start questioning whether they're fulla shit, but that's something you have to be taught, from as young an age as possible.
9139258
As not-a-biologist I have no informed comment on this, sorry.
9140626
Sorry, it just was something that bugs me. I like playing around with gender ratios a lot, and I hate it when people tell me, "No that could never happen because reasons!" You don't have to be a biologist to appreciate how the more aroused a female bird becomes, the more likely she is to give birth to male chicks. It actually changes the gender ratio of her brood, depending on how much of a hottie is fertilizing her. That stuff's just fascinating to me, and I like the weird sexual biology I've been messing with in ponies.
And yeah... I like biology so much, I went into biological sciences out of high school. Probably would have ended up as some sort of biologist, if I hadn't been so bad at it. So I can get kind of chatty about that stuff.
9140685
Are you applying this to ponies? If so, I foresee a lot of male foals soon in this story.
9140700
No, it's just one example of how weird sex determination can get. There are reptiles whose sex is determined by the temperature of their egg, like sea turtles. If the sand's too cool, they could end up with their entire clutch of eggs being male.
9140465
(Sorry if these responses aren't the best, but I'm tired, was putting this off to see if maybe I'd get less tired and think of better things to say, and decided to just get something down.)
"Thus the need for triplets, quadruplets and such."
Right.
I'm not sure where the confusion came from there...
"with complete transparency, than some random parent thinking they know what's best for a child and hiding what they're doing to their kid"
Ahh, yes, good point about it being harder to hide it, whatever "it" is.
"But we are talking about safety education, not the moral instillment of core values. So even if you want parents to decide what those values are gonna be, you could still support school activities teaching kids about what's dangerous and how to avoid it."
Aye.
"without doing some kind of experiment, either on the fact itself, or on the person you're trusting, to verify that they're not full of shit"
Ah, yes, my wording was poor, sorry. I was thinking only of more unfocused, not-even-aware-there's-a-danger experimentation, rather that attempts to confirm (or disprove) or learn more about a danger one's been told is present.
"That's why trust networks are so vitally important"
Aye.
(Argh, and I made a typo in the previous comment, looks like. Oh well.)
"They don't care if they lie to you or not, because they think you have bad judgement, and deceiving you is for your own good. If you had good judgement, you'd want to save your soul, which they've been taught is vitally important to not being eternally damned, without verifying that teaching as true or not."
Hm. I'm still skeptical. We're referring to a diverse group here, so maybe some are guided by that, but I'd expect many to, if genuinely driven by religion, have major problems with the lying aspect for one reason or another. Harm to their own souls, it not even working because their god enthusiastically uses voluntarism and the student's celibacy doesn't count because it was for the wrong reasons...
I suspect much of it to be for secular reasons cloaked in religion, a concern for social status and temporal power rather than actual concern for the supernatural wellbeing of others (or the self).
"If I seriously thought that you'd get tortured for eternity just by killing off a few cells, but I couldn't prove it to anyone else, then I'd lie my head off to save people from that terrible fate."
Thanks, I think. :)
(Though I have sometimes wondered, in highly amateur theology for a set of religions I don't belong to, so a number of grains of salt, whether it's not Hell that's the lie. I mean, it would resolve the problem of why a supposedly omnibenevolent god tortures people for sempiternity: he doesn't, but decided it would be useful to claim to the living he did. No idea how well that would fit with actual Abrahamic theology, but it seemed an interesting concept, maybe for a new heresy in an alternate universe story or something.)
"Of course any time I know something is true, but can't convince anyone else of the truth, I immediately start questioning whether I'm fulla shit, and if everyone in my safe space all claims to be convinced of the truth, but I can't verify any of their claims, I immediately start questioning whether they're fulla shit"
Aye, seems a wise policy.
"but that's something you have to be taught, from as young an age as possible"
In most cases, yeah, and the people who would figure it out on their own still might not if taught against that.
9140685
Neat. :)
9141315
Well, okay, fair enough. But the religious people who trust your judgement in deciding not to believe in their god aren't going to lie about fake disease transmission rates. They're just gonna say, "Well I think you are going to hell, but maybe I'm wrong. No earthly reason for you not to have sex responsibly."
So I guess there's a few categories of religious people here
1) The ones who know they're fulla shit, but think it's their moral obligation to lie in order to save you from your delusion that their doctrine isn't true.
2) The ones fooled by (1) who think that sex is as dangerous and destructive as (1) like to holler about, who holler along with them.
3) The ones who think (1) and (2) are fulla shit, and you can have sex however you want, if you want to bet on their doctrine not being the God given truth.
4) The goddamned athiests running the religion, who know the doctrine is fake, lying to (1) in order to get them to buy into the scam.
You think Hell is the lie? Why not the whole thing!
If I were Satan with supernatural power to bamboozle mortals, why wouldn't I be the one writing the Holy Bible as the exact opposite of what God wants? Fooling people into believing something, threatening people into believing it, and killing people for refusing, with no reason at all to believe it without that coercion, that definitely sounds like the devil's work.
I would think that religion is a test to see if mortals are smart enough not to fall for something that's totally, ridiculously fake, despite mysterious support for it arising faster than you can say "all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him."
Well, I would if I wasn't a devout Celestian, that is.
9142708
"But the religious people who trust your judgement in deciding not to believe in their god aren't going to lie about fake disease transmission rates."
Right.
"They're just gonna say, "Well I think you are going to hell, but maybe I'm wrong. No earthly reason for you not to have sex responsibly.""
Or, if they were forbidden from doing that, just try not to touch the thing at all and leave that to others. (Or, in some places in historical spacetime, visited the appropriate sort of violence upon the unbelievers, but fortunately we don't... quite live in one of them.)
"1) The ones who know they're fulla shit, but think it's their moral obligation to lie in order to save you from your delusion that their doctrine isn't true."
If they know that they're repositories of excrement, though, why would they still genuinely think they had such a moral obligation? Where would that come from?
I'd at least add 1a) Those who don't believe in the actual reasons they're given but also don't disagree enough to think it's worth giving up what they get from the hollerers by going along with them. Hm, or would that be (2a)?
Other than that, that seems fairly sound at least for the subset of religious people I'm actively test-applying it to at the moment. Though I do think that the leadership isn't always (4); (4) may generally be scheming to get power and may often achieve it, but I'm pretty sure they don't have a 100% success rate. Of course, it's harder to spot their failures than their successes; someone who's genuinely religious at the top isn't going to be pretending otherwise and might be hard to tell from someone who's just really good at pretending, but someone who isn't religious probably is pretending... and might be really, really bad at it, or in extreme cases not even bother to make more than the barest pretence. I mean, look at some of the renaissance popes, for one.
"If I were Satan with supernatural power to bamboozle mortals, why wouldn't I be the one writing the Holy Bible as the exact opposite of what God wants?"
Hah! Another neat idea! :D
...Solves the problem of evil pretty nicely, too. No, no, all the suffering's not a bug, it's a feature, and you're just wrong about what the world is actually supposed to do.
Of course, there there's probably a bunch of murder as both sides accuse each other of being Satanists... but hey, story fodder!
"Well, I would if I wasn't a devout [url=]Celestian, that is. "
:)
("then allowed her to pursue her own path in... high school for some reason."
Well, apparently one thing they have in common is working in mysterious ways sometimes...)
9142816
(1) know they're fulla shit saying people will get diseased or that vaccines are evil or whatever, but they believe their doctrine is totally true. They only have to lie because the stupid heathens can't handle the truth.
I may be a teeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeny bit cynical.
Fact is (4) are really good at concealing their hypocrisy, so I can't tell how many are legit. I like to think many in (4) died a long time ago, and the ones left are all (1)s blindly maintaining the doctrine, but a religion led only by (1)s would be unpopular and poorly marketed, because on average people have very little influence and power. It’s not a coincidence that a big church’s leadership are extremely wealthy. There have to be some (4)s getting in there looking to scam some (1)s, or the church’s gonna be some dumpy unsanctioned hippie church that nobody ever hears about.
That's... a little unfair to say, I think. People are not idiots for going along with it, because they suffer and die without what they get from the hollerers. Like seriously. Have you ever talked to ex-Mormons? The ones I’ve talked to paint this really chilling scenario.
Churches like this keep their members so naive, they’re open and honest about trying to leave, then shocked when even their family turns against them. Members are led to have no support outside their church, so any one who leaves is screwed. Those churches also teach their members that anyone who truly leaves is the enemy, and no act is too despicable to get them to return to the church, since their soul is on the line. In the face of that kind of hostility, I don’t blame anyone for going along with it out of fear.
And admittedly there's not all that much difference between high school and eternal damnation.
9144162
"(1) know they're fulla shit saying people will get diseased or that vaccines are evil or whatever, but they believe their doctrine is totally true. They only have to lie because the stupid heathens can't handle the truth."
Ah, thanks for the clarification.
"I may be a teeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeny bit cynical. "
:)
"Fact is (4) are really good at concealing their hypocrisy, so I can't tell how many are legit."
Aye.
"but a religion led only by (1)s would be unpopular and poorly marketed"
But what about one led by (3)s?
"or the church’s gonna be some dumpy unsanctioned hippie church that nobody ever hears about"
And those aren't necessarily safe from this either.
"That's... a little unfair to say, I think. People are not idiots for going along with it, because they suffer and die without what they get from the hollerers. Like seriously."
I think you may be reading out connotations I didn't put in? I mean... unless I'm misunderstanding you, I think we're talking about the same things there, or at least what you're talking about is a subset of what I'm talking about? After all, "things I will suffer and die without" that one gets from the community seem like incentives to at least think really hard before leaving.
"In the face of that kind of hostility, I don’t blame anyone for going along with it out of fear. "
Yeah.
"And admittedly there's not all that much difference between high school and eternal damnation. "
:D
After coming back to this story to find several new chapters I was initially happy, but after skimming a few I can say this story sadly isn't my cup of tea. An insane and/or evil twilight running about mind controlling people and turning them into ponies only to leave them to flail and starve and suffer because that is somehow accomplishing something good makes the story seem senseless.
9212208
Yeah, a story like that would be pretty terrible.
Sorry to hear. You wouldn't be the first not to favorite this story, though. I'm really writing it because it's what I enjoy reading, without really giving a fuck about writing what other people want. I'm not in a very... charitable time in my life, I guess. But thank you for suggestions on what not to write. I will be sure to take your advice to heart, and continue to follow it to the letter.
I have a bad feeling that people getting cured by becoming ponies will start a cult worship of Twilight.
9136404
Meadow can't remember the name because it was scrubbed from her memories, she's heard it a couple of times from her sister and Nick but never bothered to commit it to memory because Twilight really fucked up her head.
Try to imagine for a moment that your hair has always been blue since you were a baby. Suddenly you wake up and it's red and your memories of it are it being red, but everyone else says it was blue, and there are even pictures of you with blue hair.
There's a big disconnect for you at that level, because to you, your memory tells you it was red all along, and it's red now.
9851465
To be fair, it doesn't seem to have done any harm outside of making her think her name is Meadowsweet...?
Oh, I'm sure it had to have happened somewhere.
9848876
Mira is best sis, well maybe second only to Applejack.