Canberra is infamous — among its inhabitants — for the aggression of its magpies.

We track ‘attacks’ and ‘warnings’ on a website. We trade grim stories, share desperate tips. In swooping season, cyclists change their commuting habits to avoid the ‘dangerous’ ‘hot spots’, and runners — acting out of some Skinner Box superstition, hoping to make themselves ‘familiar’ to the black-and-white demons — begin to run the same route, in the same outfit, at the same time, daily. Seasoned Canberrans issue stern warnings to New Arrivals. ‘Born Here’ locals treat statements of casual dismissal with the same admixture of horror and awe as they would any other kind of ‘Wage Wars Get Rich Die Handsome’ declaration. I swear: if you laugh and say “magpies aren’t that bad” in a crowd of Canberra locals, it’s like you just pulled up to the bar on a classic motorbike in a t-shirt and jeans with no helmet in sight. Peel off those sunglasses, bad boy. You can have any brew you want, as long as it’s a Corona.

When I first moved here, the Magpie Fear seemed bizarre. I figured it was some kind of collective paranoia or culture-bound low-grade seasonal mass hysteria. I’d lived around magpies all my life without trouble. This was, surely, the government bureaucrats’ equivalent of a dancing plague or a fear of penis-stealing witches. Just as culture-bound. Just as inexplicable.

Then Spring came, and I understood.

The thing is, Canberra’s magpies aren’t actually (as far as I know) any more dangerous than magpies anywhere else in Australia. We just have a lot more of them. Canberra is ‘The Bush Capital’: even our inner city suburbs are dense with trees (and hence dense with birds, including magpies). Per capita, per acre of public space, there are just more opportunities to encounter a magpie.

You write that

As the modern world of dating crashes into our shiny new language models, we’ll be right back at Meet hot babes in your local area! Maybe our chatbots will flirt with their chatbots and the dates they agree to will be smoothly integrated with our google calendars, and everyone will be perfectly sorted into their quiet, loving pairs.

All I think of is Žižek, describing ‘ideal’ sex in modernity:

The Guardian, the British newspaper, asked me, “Is romance still alive today?” And my idea, my answer to them was let’s imagine an ideal sexual situation today. Let’s say I meet a lady; we are attracted to each other; we say okay, you are — all the usual stuff — your place, my place, whatever we meet there. Then, what happens then? I come with, she comes with her plastic penis, electric dildo. I come with some horrible thing. I saw it. It’s called something like ‘stimulating training unit’, whatever. It’s basically a plastic vagina. A hole. But you can — it’s wonderful technologically — you can regulate everything. How much it squeezes you. How strongly it shakes and so on. So my idea of a perfect date is the following one. We meet. Then I put, she puts her plastic penis dildo into my ‘stamina training unit’ is the name of this product. Into my plastic vagina. We plug them in and the machines are doing it for us. They’re buzzing in the background and I’m free to do whatever I want and she. We have a nice talk; we have tea; we talk about movies. What can be — we paid our superego full tribute. Machines are doing — and now where would have been here a true romance. Let’s say I talk with a lady with the lady because we really like each other. And, you know, when I’m pouring her tea or she to me quite by chance our hands touch. We go on touching. Maybe we even end up in bed. But it’s not the usual oppressive sex where you worry about performance. No, all that is taken care of by the stupid machines. That would be ideal sex for me today.

How many people are putting themselves in relationships where they’re having sex in order to get hugs? How many people are terrified (not excited) precisely because they haven’t “paid [their] superego full tribute”?

It’s true, as you say, that “it takes strength to be gentle and kind”. Maybe this explains most of it, where by ‘it’ I mean ‘the pervasive, collective, death-drive, risk-taking irrationality’. But if this is true, is the median human getting less gentle & less kind? Or are there just more opportunities to encounter a risk?