FishFace

What rhyme? Only thing I can think that you mean is some things about "attercop" (old word for spider) that Tolkien writes.

I always heard it used for both and it confused me that they were two different things.

At best you can call people who do this as having a very mild form of unconscious bias; you can't infer bigotry which I would say really ought to be either a consciously-held opinion, or if not then a set of behaviours that has a practical negative outcome.

I think the kind of person you're thinking of is a stereotypical bigoted jock who hangs out with his jock-friends and makes homophobic jokes all the time. That person we're maybe not surprised that they are motivated to avoid doing stuff associated with those outside their gender.

But I don't think (and there's nothing here to suggest) that it is only that kind of person who is so affected. Do you think that someone respectful of gay people, but who grew up in a conservative family and whose father makes comments like that, might not be motivated along the same lines out of a desire to their father? Or is it bigoted to seek the approval of your dad if your dad is a bigot? Even if it's not done consciously?

Article talks about energy but not why they're using weapons grade plutonium for that purpose. Anyone got an informed reason?

Inasmuch as these people have a "fragile ego", you probably also have a fragile ego. Virtually everyone subconsciously adapts their behaviour to gain the approval of other people whom they value.

The difference between you and them is not that you have a strong ego and are confident in your masculinity, it's that you don't value the views of people who judge people on that basis. And that is certainly no bad thing, but it's a fundamental difference, and making this error makes it very hard to understand people who are different from you.

I think you're imagining this as a more conscious process than it actually is. The reason you need to go out and research this is because these men aren't going around saying, "yeah, I was going to put my pepsi can in the metal recycling but I was worried my bro would call me gay so I just put it in the general waste." Instead, sometimes men put pepsi cans in general waste, and sometimes men do things due to social perceptions, and sometimes those social perceptions are that certain things are "unmanly" and working out which things are related to each other is quite hard.

So there's no paradox here. All people are subject to social pressures, and the vast majority of people make some effort to conform to those pressures in order to fit in and to receive approval from the people they value. Conforming to fit in isn't "weak" or "insecure", it's the nature of being a social animal, and is done instinctively - if you think it's done "obsessively" then you're imposing the analytical mindset of someone studying the evidence on the subjects of the research, which is a fundamental error. It'd be like saying someone who subconsciously mirrors the mannerisms of someone they respect is "obsessed" with getting their approval, when they likely don't realise they're doing it.

Also, I feel like they’ve never considered that gay doesn’t necessarily mean effeminate. Or even that effeminate doesn’t necessarily mean weak/meek.

They almost certainly haven't because, again, if you're "considering" it, it's not the right concept. The concept that people are trying to avoid is the one that's labeled "gay" by their peers, which is really more of a gender thing than a sexuality thing; "what are you, gay?" isn't a question about someone's sexuality, it's a suggestion that someone is not conforming to the gender role expected of them. You can't successfully challenge that by saying "ackshually gay people can be v strong and they forget to put the pepsi can in the correct bin far more often than you might imagine." They'll just reply with, "OK bro sounds pretty gay," because you didn't challenge them on what they meant, only on what you thought they meant.

The challenge has to be more along the lines of creating a better awareness of societal expectations, tolerance of people who don't conform to them, and building up positive associations between behaviours we want to promote and conforming things people already value, to help them see things in a new light.

Yeah. I guess you can analyse it as:

1. Denying the antecedent: "showering every day prevents smelling bad, therefore if you don't shower every day, you will smell bad"
2. Confirmation & Selection bias: "that person smells bad, therefore they can't shower every day, making them an example of not showering every day leading to smelling bad"
3. Bias of anecdotal evidence, presumably - at least, I'm assuming that most such people really do smell bad to themselves after only a day, which is treated as a reliable indicator of everyone's condition.

It's quite interesting to me, because it clearly becomes a very emotive topic when the difference between waiting one, two or three days to bathe is pretty abstract. I have developed a hypothesis that it's the feeling of having a shower when one is feeling sticky and sweaty and dirty, and then coming out feeling nice and clean, that gets readily associated with bad odour. I then think that this link simply can't form easily if your feeling when coming out of the shower is not "nice and clean" but "disgusting ball of skin-flakes held together only by paraffin and artificial grease".

I have encountered this kind of attitude before but I was actually surprised to find it that prevalent here, because I expected more people to be sympathetic to conditions which require deviation from the norm.

Your jaw muscles force your jaws together. It's both jaws doing the biting.

Tylenol is paracetamol, aka acetaminophen, not aspirin.

Now this is the silliness I live for

Booooo, noone uses two of the blues like that. They were made up by wanky arseholes in the medieval period as a forced meme

This is sad, not humorous