Botond173
14hr ago
As far as I know, the social reality back then was not that hunters, trappers, soldiers – or miners, workers, cowboys, coolies etc. for that matter – cooked meals alone for their own personal consumption only. Instead they cooked and ate together, or at least in smaller groups, just as how they normally hunted/worked/fought and lived together for most of their time. Not even trapping was usually a completely solitary activity, was it? In those days, after reaching adult age but before getting married and forming a family, young men usually joined some sort of all-male social group that existed for a shared purpose (work, combat, hunting etc) and this was their venue of socialization, the community where they spent most of their time. The spectre of a single man living alone and looking after himself alone was not usual.
Botond173
14hr ago
As someone who’s largely ignorant of these matters I learned that overstaying one’s tourist visa and then simply disappearing into the void and finding black market work, presumably with the help of fellow nationals, is apparently the most popular method of Mexican illegal immigration to the US. On the other hand, many such immigrants are also crossing the distant desert regions of the border instead. I’m assuming these people are opting for this due to being so destitute that the former path is unavailable to them. Is this close to the truth?
Botond173
15hr ago
A new article about the cane phenomenon just dropped:
Botond173
15hr ago
I finally got around to watching Obsession (there was a discussion on it here). I’ll keep my opinion on it to myself for the time being, but I also began pondering a bit if a gender-swapped version of the movie would a) ever get made b) ever be successful as a relatable story.
I asked myself this question because I know that among feminism-adjacent normie women, especially young urban single women, it’s hugely popular to keep complaining about immature, clingy, icky, cringey, thirsty, creepy, boorish, deranged, potentially violent and even murderous manchildren, not to mention that mainstream society basically keeps egging such shrieking on. So on one hand, a movie like the one above but with the sexes reversed would obviously reinforce all these normie female prejudices and they would presumably lap it up. On the other hand it might end up cutting too close to the bone and come across as too uncomfortable and horrifying.
(I once heard the argument on the LPOTL podcast in the context of the Chicago Rippers that unlike the serial killers who have become really infamous in America, there are ones whose deeds were so horrendous and frightful that there were only scarce attempts to portray them in the media at all because they were bound to elicit extreme revulsion, disgust and anxiety, being unfit for normie exposure. I’m guessing something similar is in effect in this case. Or take the Handmaid’s Tale as another example: ‘fun horror-fiction for women who work in the American-style cubicle-world precisely because it’s so utterly unrelated to the miseries and terrors of their own lives’.)
And then it occurred to me that they whole story just…simply wouldn’t work with the sexes reversed. It would be neither plausible nor relatable. I just can't picture a woman acting and emoting plausibly like the male protagonist in the movie. What do you think?
Botond173
22hr ago
It’s curious if not comical that a Russian village that probably has no more than 200 inhabitants today and is located on a secluded island has an extensive Wikipedia page in Russian that also includes a section on the statue myth. On a different note, Cooper and his readers might find it interesting that Thomas More, the Italian Dominican friar, theologian and utopian theorist Tommaso Campanella, and English Protestant reformer and activist Gerrard Winstanley, leader of the so-called Diggers, among others, were indeed commemorated by the Bolsheviks on a repurposed Czarist obelisk near the Moscow Kremlin officially dedicated to ‘outstanding thinkers and personalities of the struggle for the liberation of workers’. I guess that is some potential fodder for anti-Protestant memes or something.
Regarding the Russian Civil War I would mention that the largest foreigner contingent (so to speak) on the side of the Reds consisted not of Latvians but of Hungarians. Of the about 400 thousand POWs of Hungarian origin that were still alive in Russian captivity at the time when the Czar was toppled, about 100 thousand joined the Red Army and the Cheka and basically none joined the opposing side. Mundane motivations were obviously in effect as well but were in this case rather different. The Latvian volunteers (correctly) assumed that the Whites opposed Latvian independence but the Reds were in favor of it (at least that was the situation then and in the foreseeable future). The Hungarians were mostly seeking a practical way to get home (in a Western direction) as soon as possible.
Botond173
1d ago
Since engineering is concerned I doubt there was that much intrasexual competition involved even after a female quota was enforced. I’m guessing what made her furious is her likely and also correct assumption that the normalization of female quotas results in the public perception that the average newly hired female engineer is more likely than not to be an underperforming DEI hire.
Botond173
1d ago
I think one big issue is that cooking hot meals only makes economic sense when it’s normally done for 3 or more people.
Botond173
1d ago
I guess it used to be self-evident that groceries as we know them operate either in the densely populated walkable urban core or in really small towns.
Botond173
1d ago
He's not suggesting blaming the female half of humanity collectively though.
Botond173
1d ago
I’m guessing most Karens are Boomer or GenX affluent/suburban white women who got used to a relatively high-trust, homogeneous, ordered and prosperous society in their youth. In a low-trust, heterogeneous, increasingly disordered, stagnant and dysfunctional society, they often angrily lash out at their environment in their frustration by acting like Karens.
Botond173
1d ago
Hmmmm, I think your argument differs from @Botond173 in that so far they seem to imply a normie-women-demand-driven-policing of cultural output, while you are saying that ideologically-driven-supply-policing is going on.
I think it's basically both, as the changing preferences of those feminist-adjacent normie women are also ideologically driven.
Botond173
2d ago
I'm referring to the phenomenon I described i.e. unironic depictions of conventionally attractive, sexually alluring, non-girlboss female characters becoming taboo/unpalatable in the eyes of normie women. Women in committed relationships getting turned off by their men showing sexual interest in other women is a thing as old as time, so I doubt it explains the issue I mentioned which I think is relatively recent.
Botond173
2d ago
Dread game is the opposite of this actually - women dreading other women showing (elicited) sexual interest in their men.
Botond173
3d ago
But I doubt it explains the phenomenon I suspect is observable here, which I think is relatively recent.
Botond173
3d ago
I'd argue that recent Western/US male-oriented products (mainstream movies, TV series and video games that are marketed mostly to men) are made with fewer "conventionally attractive, sexually alluring, non-girlboss female characters" than before (before 2010 or so), as a reaction to the preferences of feminist-adjacent normie women, who find the presence of such content off-putting, repellent and cringe, and who want to police the cultural consumption of men (especially young single men) accordingly, similarly to the antics of the church ladies of the old days.
Botond173
3d ago
It should be added though that the two main heroic characters are decidedly anti-conservative in their temperament and actions.
Botond173
3d ago
I'd argue that if a female character has comically big boobs and/or a comically skimpy outfit then it's done for the comic effect.
Botond173
3d ago
I suppose that's a fair point, although I'd suggest treating the genre of reality TV, of which I scarcely know anything, as a wholly different matter. I'm assuming this sort of stuff is usually consumed by Boomer or GenX women and is, as you said, female-coded to begin with. On the other hand, my argument concerns younger women and products that are mainly male-oriented.
Botond173
4d ago
Why is there a groping scene in the show? For the male viewers to get their thrills.
I'm guessing the intent was to inject light humor into an otherwise heavy scene that depicts the reality of depression.
Botond173
4d ago
I was following with interest the recent discussion here on the degenerate nature of hardcore anime fandom and I find that there are aspects to this that nobody mentioned. In this comment I'd like to call attention to one of these. Namely:
I propose the argument that feminist ideology has reached a level of cultural influence in the West sometime around 2008-2012 where unironic* depictions of conventionally attractive, sexually alluring, non-girlboss female characters have become taboo in the eyes of normie women**.
*Unironic in the sense that it's by no means done for the purpose of ironically conveying some politicized message about the sad reality of the male gaze, societal sexism etc.
**That is, women that are either lipstick feminists or conform to the norms of the (surely present) lipstick feminist women in their social circle. In other words, the big majority of women, or at least of young urban women.
Since the Japanese anime industry does not abide by these cultural norms, the consequence of this is that anime as a whole is increasingly suspect in the eyes of normie/NPC women, which has at least two consequences of its own. One: the male partners and/or friends of these women, who are usually cucky and normie-oriented betas, evidently adopt the same view, which contribute to its spread. Two: this provides an incentive to notice, thematize and even embellish the off-putting manifestations of anime fandom.
I'd make two more related observations as potential food for thought from this very forum.
@urquan has made a somewhat similar point before: resolute (male) attempts to counter-signal against the taboo on sexual display in a workplace setting are intensely off-putting to normie women. (The difference here is between intensely off-putting and, well, merely off-putting.)
This comment by @WhiningCoil also caught my attention:
I managed to successfully drag my poor wife through Berserk, Last Exile, Akira and a handful of others. But the look she gives me in Evangelion when Shinji gets tangled up in a fresh out of the shower Rei and "accidentally" gropes her, it's hard to defend why that's in there. The sexposition in Game of Thrones was gratuitous (and kind of fun sometimes), but at least they were adults.
Considering that the Berserk franchise contains excessive amounts of brutal violence, horror and gore, and as does Game of Thrones, plus not only "sexposition" but also explicit sex, rape, incest etc., I find it telling that it was a groping scene (which, it should be mentioned, was unironically accidental) that finally crossed the line in her eyes.
And finally a general point: this entire phenomenon has no female counterpart. That is, we see no similar widespread disapproval of (more or less) goonerbait cultural material directed at women. In fact, it appears to me that there is a general push to normalize it.
I'm guessing most of them did not live alone, period. And if they did, it was usually for a short period. And even then they usually cooked or at least ate with other men. See another comment of mine in this thread.
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