Botond173
1hr ago
Unless we’re talking about a young single female member of some religious conservative subculture (in which case she’s scarcely relevant to this discussion) then developing agreeableness and submissiveness as personality traits is a completely countercultural step for a young woman in the current social reality. She’d have to assert iron will to remove herself from her social circle, basically sever contact with most of her friends, classmates, family members etc. and reject mainstream cultural messaging. This’d entail a level of human agency and anti-social traits most women don’t have. And we haven’t even addressed all the guidance and knowledge she’d need.
Decadent modern society normalizes and incentivizes unhealthy behaviors which erode women’s ability to stay slim: binge-watching streamed material, snacking, drinking, pigging out, being a couch potato etc.
The average women reaches peak fertility and thus attractiveness roughly between the ages of 19-23. It then plateaus out and enters an ever faster decline after the age of 27 or so. We’re talking about a few years only, and those go by fast. You’re not getting them back. Most women spend those years either in college or being newbie employees, usually in a situation where they are removed from the social circle they grew accustomed to as teenagers. The modern word buzzes and spins, the culture pulsates around you, offering a million distractions.
Botond173
20hr ago
Can the mainstream media portray female characters as repulsive? Using the Amelia meme as an example
There was a somewhat comical culture war development lately in the UK in that a new meme was accidentally born by an online game backfiring hard. The Know Your Meme article on it is already up.
The gist of the story is this (quotes from above – bolding done by me):
Amelia is a supporting character in the U.K. government-funded educational visual novel Pathways, a game developed by Shout Out UK to teach the youth about extremism and radicalization. In the game, Amelia is depicted as a far-right anti-immigration activist with purple hair, a pink dress, a purple sweater and a goth or e-girl appearance, who tries persuading the protagonist to join her cause.
In 2023, Shout Out UK, a company focused on spreading media literacy, political literacy and more via their training programs, released the visual novel "interactive learning package," Pathways. The game was funded by Prevent, a program of the British government's Home Office. In the game, players take on the role of a character named Charlie in six different scenarios dealing with online or in-person radicalization.
Scenario two features the character Amelia, a far-right, purple-haired goth girl with anti-immigration views who tries to recruit Charlie into joining anti-immigration groups and protesting against immigration.
Further information from the website of Prevent:
Pathways is a bespoke interactive learning package, developed by us and the East Riding of Yorkshire Council in partnership with Shout Out UK. It is part of the Prevent programme, funded by the Home Office.
The main page of the game is here.
(Supposedly the game was discontinued by the government after the scandal, and the University of Hull was somehow involved in its development. I didn’t find a source for either claim, although I wasn’t looking that hard either.)
Non-paywalled article on the mini-scandal by some news site calling itself GB News available here.
After a cursory search on Reddit I can say that many observers agree that the developers obviously made a simple mistake. They knew that the game is supposed to target the gullible white boys that are also the target audience of dissident right-wing toxic dudebros, and one staple of the latter is their hatred of purple-haired feminist ‘arthoes’. So they thought: ‘let’s make the antagonist in the game an angry purple-haired e-thot; I mean surely she won’t generate any sympathy among dudes who listen to alt-right vtuber bros, right?’. It does sound like a reasonable assumption at first, if we want to be honest.
Anyway, regarding the reasons why the whole thing ludicrously backfired, I don’t want to repeat the arguments you can read for yourself in the articles I linked to. Instead I want to ask a simple question: if your goal is to create a fictional right-wing character who’s a repulsive woman by normie standards, surely this task cannot be that hard, can it? I mean, maybe just make her an obese, frumpy, obnoxious chavette. Maybe also a single mother and a smoker to boot. There’s no way such a character will compel thirsty dudebros to create piles of fanart of her.
But the problem is obvious, and this is probably where the developers felt trapped in a Kafkaesque manner. By adding such qualities to a female character whom you want normies to repulsed by, you are implicitly confirming that such qualities are repulsive to men in general. And that cuts too close to the bone. In this particular case, I’m sure they’d have easily gotten away with it. The only people making a fuss would be a marginal group of radical feminists unironically following their ideology to the letter, and they are essentially a minority within a minority. But that’d still mean taking a risk, and they didn’t want that.
Botond173
3d ago
Eugenics was popular much earlier than that, it was a popular ethos of secular progressives who were very much into Darwinism and espoused social Darwinism as a scientific way to rule nations.
I agree but as far as I know it was after the catastrophe of WW1 that the project of eugenics assumed a sense of urgency in the minds of its proponents.
Botond173
4d ago
Noted. My basic point is this: numerous Western nations practiced eugenics back then, including Germany. With the exception of the latter, these policies did not entail extermination or open racial discrimination anywhere. To address these two Nazi policies and then categorize them as ‘eugenics’ is thus biased and frankly propagandistic in my view.
For the Nazis, the individual was completely subordinated to the Volk.
Unfortunately or not, that applies to eugenics as a whole. At its core it’s a collectivist policy that subordinates the autonomy of the individual to the interests of ‘the people’, putting an obvious strict limit on reproductive freedom if it is deemed necessary.
I have only rather cursory knowledge of the history of eugenics but based on nothing but this I think some things need to be pointed out. Eugenics was ascendant in the specific historical context of the post-WW1 Western world as a response to the disruptive consequences of the war. Huge numbers of healthy and virile men were killed and wounded which was bound to result in long-term demographic decline. Traditional moral codes were collapsing, divorce rates skyrocketed, promiscuity was on the rise, cultural decadence was everywhere, as was alcoholism, drug addiction etc. The finances of most nations were in disarray, as was international trade.
As a result, proponents of eugenics were generally concerned that a) the birthrate of socially desirable elements will decline, both an absolute numbers and in relation to the birthrate of socially undesirable elements (the feeble-minded, people with hereditary mental illness and disabilities, alcoholics etc.) b) the foundering national economy was going to be burdened by the ever-rising social costs of feeble-minded, morally imbecile social groups growing in number.
It’s small wonder that positive and negative eugenics usually went hand in hand in every nation and federal state which adopted it. (Did it not?) Those who believed in eugenics wanted to curb two larger negative trends overall. It didn’t have that much to do with ideology. Eugenics was even popular in liberal democracies.
With respect to the Nazis I think there’s a politically motivated tendency to gloss over two aspects. One is that there was a secret state campaign to kill the mentally ill and people with hereditary diseases, as others have mentioned, generally called “Merciful death” (Gnadentod) – the expression “Aktion T4” was only invented after the war – specifically aimed at freeing up healthcare resources and diverting them to the war effort (the armed forces were going to need doctors, nurses and hospital beds), plus reducing state healthcare expenditures overall.
It thus had a practical (but of course wholly unethical) purpose and was unique in the world in the sense that it meant extermination and not only sterilization of socially undesirables (which was also a state policy enacted earlier). For this reason I’s argue that it cannot be considered an example of eugenics, which wasn’t even a word the Nazis used (“racial hygiene” was used instead). It has also become common to call this particular policy a case of “euthanasia” which is completely dishonest BS, of course. Another aspect of the Nazi policy of mandatory sterilization was that it specifically targeted people with black ancestry, which is not something that eugenics as such entailed in any other nation, as far as I know.
Botond173
5d ago
The Soviets didn't use Hungarian or Czech soldiers to put down the uprisings in those countries; they chose people not from those areas specifically because painting the people in those areas of the Soviet Empire as a simple adversary is more effective that way.
Although this is an issue largely unrelated to the one being discussed I'd like to mention that there was no such specific choice made. Deploying local units was Plan A from the beginning for the Soviets. See the period of martial law in Poland from 1981 as reference. When the situation escalated to the point where local units were insufficient or unsuited to repress the rebellion, Plan B was put into action.
Botond173
6d ago
Over the years I have often heard cosmopolitan liberals express a sentiment to the effect "the United States has no culture".
And if you press them on this they'll probably go on to clarify that the US of A as a whole has no unified national culture transcending all class, racial and regional differences, which seems like a reasonable opinion. And they'll probably concede that Appalachians or Southern whites, Mormons, prairie ranchers, New Englanders etc. do have distinct cultures of their own, even if it carries the legacy of structural racism or something. This also has parallels in Europe. There's probably no leftist there who will deny that Bavarian identity exists or that the Bretons have a culture, for example. But this has the potential to open up further cans of forms. For example, can a Somali goat herder become a Southerner or an Appalachian hillbilly? Should he even? Can a Syrian farmer become a Saxon or a Swabian? Can a Senegalese become an Alsatian?
Botond173
7d ago
As far as I know, Kim Il Sung was absolutely willing to negotiate as early as 1951 because it was clear that his original war goals were out of reach. Continuing the war was not only pointless but also rather detrimental for North Korea. It was Stalin who insisted on continuing the war and supplying the Chinese to do so with Mao's acceptance because both of them decided to make the return of POWs a central issue in order to block any agreement (because there was no way the enemy was going to forcibly repatriate all North Korean and Chinese POWs) and thus prolong the war as long as possible as they apparently thought this'd harm American interests or something (or a case of commie 4D chess, maybe). It's no surprise that a ceasefire was only reached after Stalin's death. In fact, it's reasonable to assume that Kim was willing to negotiate a truce as soon as the winter of 1950 had MacArthur not insisted on continuing the UN offensive beyond all of its original aims.
Botond173
7d ago
Cubans are too lazy for revolution
Unfortunately for the US this did not seem to have been the case in 1959.
Botond173
7d ago
I have rather cursory knowledge of the pre-1979 Iranian monarchy but based on this I can say that whatever level of economic growth it was showing was not sustainable. It was rather uneven and had a distorting effect on multiple sectors. Also the Shah was mortally ill and had zero inclination to rule as a monarch and to raise his son to be his heir, and at the same time the monarchy was losing legitimacy overall. The population was being subjected to rapid cultural and economic change that it was unable to adapt to. (One American scholar likened it to trying to make people drink water from a fire hose.) Iran was not and was never going to be South Korea or any Asian Tiger.
'I'm not mad at you!', even better. Should go to the same list as 'Bless your heart' (LOL), 'i'm sorry that you feel this way' (the way Japanese prime ministers 'apologized' for war crimes, I guess?), 'I hope one day you'll be able to feel less hated and persecuted' (h/t darwin2500).
Botond173
8d ago
OP's point was specifically about scenarios where the Left goes too far, which is arguably what happened under Allende's rule. My critique regarding this is thus that "we" do have at least one example of an antidote.
Botond173
8d ago
This reminds me of Peterson’s complaint that we have a lot of antibodies for when the right goes too far but none for when the left goes too far.
Why does he discount the rather obvious examples of Pinochet and Franco, for example? Genuine question, as I'm not familiar with his work in detail.
Botond173
8d ago
In fact, the only major Marxist nation that was truly, terrifyingly totalitarian in the 1984 sense was East Germany.
Romania and Albania were definitely worse (Albania was never major by anyone's standards for sure, but the GDR was also not somehow more major than Romania). Anyway, since you brought up the issue of state capacity, I'd point out that since member states of the Soviet bloc were modeled alike, so their state security agencies had roughly the same capacity as well; it's that some of those regimes enforced a less rigid system of conformity than the others that made a difference.
ungovernable shitholes are there in the world in which criminals, gangs and others run riot, with the central government hopelessly weak, corrupt or otherwise powerless to stop them
The central government, sure. On the other hand, they are also characterized by vigilantism, militia building and the emergence of organic local power structures.
On a different note, I'm not sure what exactly your argument is - is it that more people suffer from tyranny than from anarchy in absolute numbers, or that anarchy is overall a bigger threat to individual human flourishing, or both?
Botond173
8d ago
The Khmer Rouge murder rate was something like 7,000 per 100,000 per year.
I don't what method you used to arrive at this figure but I'd mention that according to the Pol Pot biography by Philip Short, about 3/4 of all excess deaths in Cambodia attributed to the Khmer Rogue were due to malnutrition and disease, in turn caused by government negligence and incompetence, plus the wholesale collapse of state capacity after five years of brutal civil war during the US-aligned military dictatorship.
With regard to Somalia I won't disagree with your point outright but would mention that the repression during the last years of Barre's rule was pretty damn bad by anyone's standards: the wholesale slaughter of "treasonous" clans, indiscriminate aerial bombing, mass rapes, the destruction of water reservoirs and livestock.
Botond173
11d ago
Not to mention that there has been an ongoing arms race for a long time among suburbanite normies buying bigger and bigger, heavier and heavier vehicles, as DirtyWaterHotDog alluded to it below, because they all want more comfort and more protection from accidents.
Botond173
11d ago
Because it became normalised first in sexual relationships, when men started asking for what they saw in porn.
I think that's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. I suggest a different explanation which is connected to the concept of critical mass in the realm of social sciences, which I find plausible. If there's a certain human behavior that is considered abnormal but a minority of people start engaging in it more and more, there'll be a cascade effect once they reach 15 or so percent of the population (a critical mass). With increasing speed, it'll then become normalized. I guess this is what happened to casual sex.
We can assume there'll always be a subset of the female population willing to engage in casual sex (let's ignore prostitution for money as a phenomenon in this respect). In societies that are generally puritanical and restrictive, this subset is minuscule, which means men live with the assumption that casual sex is generally unavailable, even though most of them would be open to the opportunity one way or another. The most attractive ones will pursue it here and there to some extent, but it'll not be normalized throughout.
During the Sexual Revolution, due to a combination of of factors that we're mostly familiar with here, I think the subset of women open to casual sex reached a critical mass. When this started to have an effect on social norms, the idea took hold among men in general that initiating casual sex is largely OK from now on. And the cascade effect has been with us ever since. It was all downhill from there, if you disapprove of casual sex. Not only did women start competing with one another for the attention of got guys by engaging in casual sex, but they also did so by signaling their willingness to cater to the sexual preferences of those men. Hence the normalization of blowjobs. The commercialization of porn was an expression of this trend in the entertainment industry, but I doubt it was the driving force behind it.
Botond173
11d ago
It depends. Maybe OP is referring to committed relationships instead of serial monogamy and hookups, I don't know. Either way, this is just an expression of the typical male fantasy that I've mentioned here before: the gracious, modest woman who isn't a dirty slut with anyone in the world but you.
If you're an average man starting a hetero relationship in our time and the woman is swearing up and down that she's never going to give blowjobs because those are so degrading etc., you're well advised to be suspicious, because there's a real possibility that she's lying.
If your argument is that blowjobs should be moved out of the Overton window altogether or be confined to the realms of prostitution and marital relationships, I'm willing to hear you out.
Botond173
12d ago
What's the :) for?
To mark my comment as sexist humor. I'm looking at the thread and not finding the argument by @HereAndGone2 that you are referring to.
Botond173
12d ago
True. I'll point out though that, to refer back to the comment I quoted, were it fashion modeling that she set out to do instead of pop music, she's certainly tall and slim enough for it.
Botond173
12d ago
I was referring to women who do all of those things online i.e. in front of the camera, for money. I guess it wasn't worded clearly enough. The women who currently engage in this are, as far as I can tell, average women from average places; they may come from broken homes, but again, broken homes today are so frequent as to be close to average. Their activities are normal in the sense that nobody bats an eye even. There's no scandal, no outrage. Nobody can try generating outrage about this and at the same time retain a safe, mainstream status in society. Nobody cares.
Consider this please: picture Sarah Jessica Parker from the first season of SaTC. Now imagine her as a fatso redneck woman. Does it not make a difference?
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