JTarrou
4hr ago
I think you've gotten comfortable in an atheistic space being specifically bigoted against a group you have virtually no experience with. You have fantasies of what bad people they must be. Conspiracy theories. Imagined hatreds and evil intents.
But it's all just you.
JTarrou
17hr ago
This some ignorance right here. Just straight up ignorant bigotry.
My folks are super conservative, super religious. They were missionaries for years, my dad has been a lay preacher for longer than I've been alive, and was at Jan 6. Mom's best friend is gay, has been since before she met dad. He stayed in our home for a year or so back in the day getting back on his feet.
My dad thinks old guy is going to hell, so does mom for that matter. Doesn't make him not her best friend. You're projecting your own hatred onto people you don't know.
JTarrou
1d ago
When was the last really contested Democratic nomination? They've all been coronations since '08, and that one was close. No nomination in '12, in '16 they pay off the previous tiara-snatch from Hillary by making her the nominee. Then it's Obama's VP's turn, then his VP's turn. The past three Democratic nominees have been downstream of Obama upsetting the '08 coronation of Hillary, then co-opting it.
I think it's most likely the Dems turn the page and try to hold a contested primary. But that has not been how they've done things for the past twenty years or more. Many of those people are still in power, and you can never count inertia out of the game. In many ways, the next real, competitive DNC primary for president will shape the next several elections and set the tone for our new political divide. If they ever hold it.
JTarrou
1d ago
As a politician to the voters, yes absolutely. But that's not how you get the DNC nomination. Not saying Harris is a strong candidate, but she's much stronger in the party than she is with democratic voters, much less general election voters. And the party chooses the nominee, not the voters.
JTarrou
1d ago
The important part is that your personal beliefs don't have anything to do with the religion you belong to. You belong to a cultural identity associated with a religion, whether you believe in it or not.
JTarrou
1d ago
Religion has always been a part of political identity. Atheists have a hard time with the concept. I recall Hitchens telling an irish joke, the punchline of which was "Protestant atheist or catholic atheist?" He then waxed eloquent as only Hitchens could about what a ridiculous mental construct that was. But it never made any practical sense. The Irish don't hate Protestants, they hate the Scots-Irish. They don't like catholic or agnostic Scots-Irish any more than protestant ones. Religion isn't an a la carte thing, it's part of a cultural and often ethnic identity. Whatever your personal metaphysical beliefs are does not really move the needle for anyone but you.
JTarrou
1d ago
Not in the least! I would say that Iran can only hope the outcomes for their country are as mild as the US got away with.
JTarrou
2d ago
If you're going to fish in the shallow end of the gene pool, the catch may have tumors.
JTarrou
2d ago
This. You can date someone from the other political party if you both have a different religion. You can't date someone whose politics is religion, and is opposed to yours.
JTarrou
2d ago
My guess is that given a choice between an e-mail job in a climate controlled office and housewife, women take hte job. When given a choice between twelve-hour days hauling garbage and housewife, they take housewife. Times get hard, war, famine, economic collapse, and all feminism will wink out of existence until things improve.
JTarrou
2d ago
Possibly the white woman with the last name "Hajdini" didn't think of herself as white. I wonder what she put on her college application.
JTarrou
2d ago
If Iranian military capabilities are so feeble, why isn't the US winning the war?
The US is winning, and it's barely a war. The idea that the people missing half their government and their entire military are in some sense winning is bonkers.
Why are US strategic goals not achieved?
Neither of us knows what the actual strategic goals are, we're guessing. And sometimes wars take longer than a month or two?
Iran's already achieved their strategic goal, securing control of the straits of Hormuz.
Wat. Laying a few mines and boarding a couple merchant ships isn't "securing control", they don't "control" a single square inch of the Strait. Their navy has no ships left, nothing but speedboats. Their interdiction operations are basically the same as Somali pirates. They haven't done anything yet except spook the maritime insurance companies. This whole game is still in the first half, if not the first quarter.
Remember when Venezuela was going to chew up the Marine expeditionary units and we'd be in WW3 in the mountains of South America? And then that didn't happen?
JTarrou
2d ago
Gaza will fade soon enough. Go back in the flag Rolodex. In five years, you'll see a social media account with Ukraine and Palestinian flags and remember.....
JTarrou
2d ago
Any number of reasons, many of which will affect all your other areas of conversation too. This subject is likely to breed conflict with your partner in a relationship and in my opinion should generally be avoided. There's no reason you need to be discussing the dirty details of how the sexes differ in pursuit of the other in a context that makes gender conflict almost unavoidable.
Talking about "SMV" or whatever is what the internet is for, not your date.
JTarrou
2d ago
Sure. There's also the effect that when everyone is beautiful, no one is. Leads to a disconnect between what everyone says and what everyone knows. And there's plenty to be insecure about in the space between our perceptions there.
JTarrou
2d ago
The social norms have gone through many hundreds of "sexual revolutions" over the millenia. Give a country one good generation of relative peace and economic growth and the sexual mores go out the window. Then they fuck everything up and reinvent sexual morality from first principles and staple it onto the religion their grandparents stopped following.
All of this happened in ancient Greece and Sumeria, and no doubt much further back than all that. I'll lay dollars to donuts there's more monkey sex during times of peace and plenty.
JTarrou
3d ago
Eh, I think you'd find the same basic social patterns, just on a smaller scale. Same crab bucket, just a small one. The internet just means you can see the other four billion crabs.
As to the actual socio-sexual practices of early church christianity.....it was pretty far from what it became later, and wildly different over time. At one point, popes were having orgies with their half-sisters, at another monasteries held literal sex shows. I think you'll find that the actual state of mating at any given time was far more a product of secular trends than religious ones. These things move in cycles, religiosity and sexuality same as everything else.
JTarrou
3d ago
This is one of those things where they don't want an explanation or solution, they want to complain. Anything you say about male dating strategies from a male perspective will be taken as gender defensiveness and things will spiral from there.
What you're actually complaining about is that you can't talk to women the same way you talk to men.
JTarrou
3d ago
I would say that both men and women have a lot of parts of the "practical aspects of dating" that they'd prefer not to talk or even think about. Both sexes don't much like being held up to objective competitive standards, unless they're very confident of their position.
As to why you can't discuss looks productively with women, it's because attractiveness is core to female self image and requires immense kayfabe to avoid the crushing reality. To women, they have a social incentive to all claim all other women are beautiful, and to repeat it ad nauseum. They develop a literally insane view of female attractiveness and will be completely and totally unable to rationally discuss it under any circumstances. The male analogue is sexual success. You won't get guys to be any more honest about their sexual experience than you will get women to be honest about female sex appeal.
Men don't like being objectively and competitively ranked publicly by height, dick size, bank account, social media followers and number of sex partners. Women don't like being objectively and competitively ranked publicly by attractiveness, pleasantness, kindness and fertility.
To your larger question, all the stuff you're talking about is male-oriented models of the dating scene. These can be useful for men, but expecting women to be interested is a bit like expecting men to be into the framing model of intersectional feminism. If the model produces useful results for you in real life, who cares if women acknowledge it?
I think the recent historical record shows the Iranians can't fight any better than the Arabs. See the Iran/Iraq war. They too are a patrimonial clan-based society that can't coordinate at a national level. They also have a divided military, which has advantages for dispersion but disadvantages for coordination. They do have certain advantages in a separate ethnic identity similar to Turkey and Egypt. Iran is a more cohesive society than most arab nations, but this doesn't really translate to military capability. They've done well with unconventional guerrilla warfare using Sunni catspaws, but in a straight up shooting war they've not won shit in several hundred years.
JTarrou
3d ago
Exactly how does not being able to defend your own territory give you control over someone else's?
What they really hate is their parents.
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